Help Center for Italian Modern Art to bring Depero Futurista back to life!

It appears as a curious accident that the object some consider the first artist book in the 20th century was in fact not much of a book per se. Depero Futurista (Depero the Futurist) was rather a series of printed sketches, typographic virtuosities and experimental graphic design the Italian artist Fortunato Depero put together to serve as his portable portfolio during his North American tour.

So what makes this incredible object a book? What gives it its “bookness”? Our best guess is that a collection of printed pages becomes something else when an extra action binds them together, and no pun intended, this is what literally happens in Depero Futurista. With practical lucidity and clever artistic intuition, Depero bounded the printed papers into a browsable object, one that is indeed a book and yet it carries the typical aura objects touched by artists tend to do.

Moreover, the action of binding these pages was highly significant not only for the very fact of binding them, but also because what glued them together was precisely not an invisible glue but a heavy duty steel industrial bolt. The jump from depicting the craved machines of the artist’s futuristic acceleration to the actual possibility of touching one of their parts in an artwork was accomplished by Depero. Mechanic accelerated industrialisation was not only an abstract thing to be seen in pictures, it could also be physically touched by the art lover.

With this spirit in mind, we can’t but praise the initiative of publishers Designers and Books who, in collaboration with The Centre for Italian Modern Art in New York, have decided to start a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to bring Depero Futurista back to life for the experience of a brand new audience. Since only a few of the original copies are still available, all of which preserved in private collections and public archives, the two organisations want to publish “a new facsimile edition, which will be the first exact copy of Depero Futurista ever produced since its original publication 90 years ago”.

As we argue elsewhere in our magazine, Depero might have come back to Italy after his American tour when he realised that breaking the status quo of old institutions – the very end himself and his Futurist friends were aiming to – was not so necessary in the United States as it was in their native country. But besides political positions and abandoned avant-gardist ideas, what should constitute Depero’s legacy in the United States and elsewhere is his exceptional artistic insight, his contribution to contemporary graphic design, his pioneering experiments in concrete poetry, his experimental use of commercial lingo.

This new publication of Depero’s masterpiece is consistent with the artistic rediscovery of overlooked Italian masters from the 20th century, which is the mission of the Centre for Italian Modern Art in New York under the guidance of prominent art historian Laura Mattioli. As she claims in the organisation’s statement, the proper way to appreciate and study art is to experience it in first person. In this regard, no experience of Depero Futurista should be called proper without concretely feeling the bolts that weigh down this great artist book.

November 25, 2020