Fortunato Depero Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Fortunato Depero (Fondo, 1892 - Rovereto, 1960) Attended the Royal Elizabethan school of technical and artistic orientation. In 1908 he dropped out of school to attempt the entrance exam to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but failed. Read the full biography

Fortunato Depero Biography

Fortunato Depero (Fondo, 1892 - Rovereto, 1960) Attended the Royal Elizabethan school of technical and artistic orientation. In 1908 he dropped out of school to attempt the entrance exam to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but failed. He then went to Turin where he was a decorator's boy at the 1910 International Exhibition, and where he met the sculptor L. Canonica. Returning to Rovereto, he worked for a year as an apprentice for the marble worker G. Sacanagatta. The first graphic and sculptural evidence shows the influence of Italian symbolist and academic culture. The drawings are characterized by an accentuated tendency towards allegory, oneirism, the grotesque, the latter understood as an expression of psychic states represented with merciless and hallucinated symbolic intentionality. In 1915 he signed the manifesto Futurist reconstruction of the universe together with Balla: the two artists proposed the creation of "dynamic plastic complexes", the "futurist toy", the "artificial landscape" and the "metallic animal". Also in 1915 he took part, together with the other futurists, in the interventionist demonstration in Piazza Venezia in Rome. During the period in which he worked for Diagilev he met G. Clavel, a Swiss poet and Egyptologist, with whom he went to Capri in 1917. The Capri stay marked a decisive return for the artist to figuration, proposed in the ways of synthetic cubism. Having returned to Rome at the end of 1917, D. kept in contact with Clavel, with whom he staged the Balli plastici, which were staged in April 1918 at the Teatro dei Piccoli (Palazzo Odescalchi), represented by the Gorno dell' marionette company. Water, with music by. A. Casella, GH Tyrwhitt-Wilson (Lord Berners), GF Malipiero, Chemenow (who Passamani, 1981, p. 294 n. 58 believes should be identified with B. Bartok). Upon returning to Rovereto, in 1918, the artist founded the "Depero House of Art", where he was able to concentrate multiple activities. In 1928 he left for the United States, where he remained until 1930, residing mostly in New York, working as an outfitter, illustrator and set designer: covers for Vogue (1929 ) and Vanity Fair; transformation of the interiors of the Zucca and Enrico and Paglieri restaurants in New York; costumes for the ballet American sketches and scenes for The new Babel (1929-30); the latter present notable similarities with F. Lang's sets of Metropolis. The ballet that D. wanted to stage at the Roxy Theater in New York together with L. Massine was never realized; some sketches for the scenes are preserved in the Depero Museum in Rovereto. In New York he opened a futurist art house ("Futurist House"). During his stay in the United States the image of the metropolis became part of the artist's fantastic world. In the city, an artificial jungle no longer observed with the enthusiastic eye of the futurists, but according to the obsessive expressionist perspective deformation, the image of man, forced into an almost primitive life by the ferocious laws it imposes, is modeled on that of wooden archaic idols: Black family in Elevated (1929), Cantiere sonoro (1929-30), New York Mulatto (1944), Capogiro (1946), Oriental composition (1949-50), all in the Depero Museum in Rovereto. Between 1941 and In 1942 D. was involved, as part of the works for the E42, in the execution of a mosaic depicting the professions and the arts on the external wall of the Palazzo delle Scienze (E42. ..., 1987). After a second stay in the United States (1948-49), during which he definitively abandoned all enthusiasm for the urban scene, preferring the countryside landscape and the culture of cowboys and redskins, D. returned to Rovereto. Here he dedicated the last years of his life to publicizing his image with exhibitions and with the foundation of the Depero Museum. In 1956 he completed the decoration of the council hall of the building of the Province of Trento.