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Catalogo della mostra alla New School for Social Research di New York, 1948

FORTUNATO DEPERO
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH * MARCH 1-20

^{66 WEST 12 STREET, NEW YORK}

A Rimoldi devotamente F. Depero

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FORTUNATO DEPERO
Depero is a self-taught Italian painter who played an important part in the Futurist movement, contributing to it both works of art and origianl ideas. He is also a richly creative stage designer, having made himself known in ths field first by his work with Diaghileff's Ballet in Rome in 1916 and later by his exhibits at the Paris World Fair of 1925. He has been the subject of various books, the latest of which is an autobiography entitled "So I Think - So I Paint; Ideologies of an Italian Self-made Panter", printed in Italy, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and America, and this is his eighty-four exhibition.

His painting is inventive, dynamic and imaginative to the point of fantasy. His drawing is firm and strong and his palette ranges from the most delicate to the most violent tones. He has real plastic feeling and his very modern personal emotions are alternately elementary and complex, but always clearly expressed. Clarity, individuality and style are his aims.

Depero is a realist inasmuch as he is still a man of the mountains of the talan Trentino where he was born, a man who lives, eats, loves and works like other men. But because he has an artist's mind and heart and sensibility he sees reality through a prism of images, senstations, forms, taste and style, which are fundamentally unreal and abstract. It is Depero's view that we must reject neither reality nor abstraction. The pure realist does nothing more than reproduce what he sees; the pure abstractionist is arbitrary and without any tangible subject. The secret of all true art is to effect a happy fusion of these two tendencies, which are meant to complement one another.

Depero was shown for the first time in America in an official exhibition of Italian artists in 1926. He came himself to this country in 1929-30 and held seven shows of his own. His works are to be found in many European museums and private collections, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Baltimore owns a characteristic painting called "Elasticity of Cats".

During the recent war Depero retired to his mountains and devoted himself to his work. In 1946 he held an exhibition in Milan where eighteen out of fifty-one of the works shown were sold. He arrived in New York with seventeen packing-cases and after two months he tought he would have to go back to Europe because he could find no place to live. Then he came a miracle. In the center of New York's artists' quarter he found space for a studio. Now with renewed courage and the assistance of generous friends he has set himself up at 97 MacDougal Street. This latest chapter in his life is in perfect keeping with the rest of his hard-working but romantic career as a trail-blazing and productive artist, who is already something of a legend in Greenwich Village.

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PAINTINGS

1 Floral architecture A
2 Floral architecture B
3 Rustic jug (Synthesis of a village)
4 Vertical landscape
5 Still life
6 Bicycle tacer
7 Lion's head
8 Gust of wind
9 Rooster
10 Church in the Trentino region
11 Structural intoxication
12 Glories of the tavern
13 Cow
14 Speeding towers
15 After a few drinks
16 Lantern
17 Tavern squabble
18 Street vendor, downtown
19 Three alpine symbols
20 Gianni and the armadillo
21 Women of the tropics
22 Mediaeval head
23 Harlem mulatto
24 Merry teamsters
25 Snake-charmer
26 Train at dawn
27 Metropolitan synthesis
28 Noctural wanderer

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DRAWINGS

1 Mask of the metropolis (charcoal)
2 Noisy dock (pen)
3 A donkey goes by (charcoal)
4 Giola's toys
5 Heads and objects (pencil)
6 Tumbledown houses (charcoal)
7 Metropolitan synthesis
8 Venetian synthesis (watercolor)
9 Houses and costumes (pen)
10 A study of lanterns (pen)
11 Farm courtyard (charcoal)
12 Flowered costumes (charcaoal)
13 Speeding towers
14 Head of a child
15 Head and beams
16 Costumes (pen)
16 Moustache (charcoal)
18 Tavern ceremonial (pencil)
19 Sunlit shrine
20 Rustic squabble (charcoal)
21 - 35 – Miscellaneous sketches

LETTERE

Clicca sugli articoli che vuoi leggere

Cartolina da Firenze per Mario Rimoldi da Mario Sironi, 1950

Manoscritto di Depero a Rimoldi su carta intestata della Mostra, 1952

Lettera manoscritta di Filippo de Pisis a Mario Rimoldi, 1941

Cartolina di Filippo de Pisis, 1942

Lettera manoscritta di Filippo de Pisis a Mario Rimoldi, 1939

Lettera manoscritta di Gianni Dova a Mario Rimoldi, 1941

Catalogo della mostra alla New School for Social Research di New York, 1948