Stitching modernity: the textile work of Fortunato Depero

Abstract

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) was a Futurist artist who worked in a variety of artistic mediums, from painting and graphic design to furniture and textiles. His work in textiles, created and produced in close collaboration with his wife, Rosetta Amadori, can be considered the most important development in his artistic career, as it comprised a large portion of his creative production. Yet this work has been largely overlooked. Many reasons explain this oversight, including categorizing inconsistencies – for example, his textiles have been described as embroidery, needlework, tapestry, patchwork, and cloth mosaic – and the persistent relegation of textiles to the realm of crafts and domestic arts rather than art, which has meant that his work in textiles has not been a priority for scholars and conservators of Futurism. This paper places Depero's textiles within the context of early-twentieth-century modernist artistic activities, and demonstrates the centrality of his textile work to his artistic oeuvre.

Keywords::

• Fortunato Depero
• Futurism
• cloth intarsia
• textiles
• tapestry
• collage
• Ballets Russes
• Casa d'Arte

Acknowledgements

This paper is a version of a presentation delivered for a symposium on Fortunato Depero at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York, February 2014. I am grateful to Laura Mattioli, President, and Heather Ewing, Executive Director, for their support.

Notes

¹ One of the reasons why textiles are often overlooked in historical accounts is due to inconsistencies in properly understanding and categorizing techniques. A tapestry is a weaving of warp and weft threads using a loom; Depero's ‘tapestries’ are made from pieced and stitched fabric similar to appliqué and patchwork.

² Depero worked with Picasso on the sets for Diaghilev's staging of Parade (1917). From 1914 to 1929, Diaghilev travelled the major cities of Europe commissioning avant-garde artists to design costumes and sets to accompany his ballet stagings (see Bellow 2013, 187–202). The manifesto was originally published in Italian as a leaflet by Direzione del Movimento Futurista, on 11 March 1915, Milan.

³ The notion of using aggressive force to push Italian society into the modern age was put forth in F.T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto in 1909.

⁴ Choreographed by Leonide Massine, music by Igor Stravinsky.

⁵ Matisse eventually created the sets and costumes in 1919; Depero was recruited to create figures for Picasso's staging of Diaghilev's' Parade (1917; Depero 1947, 120). While in today's world, sewing skills are not widely taught, most girls and women of Depero's era, including Rosetta, were trained in many types of textile techniques. These included stitching techniques such as embroidery, lacemaking, and cross-stitch, as well as tailoring techniques involving pattern construction, cutting and piecing.

⁶ Sources cite differing accounts of the apprenticeship: with a stone mason, with a marble cutter, and, as Belli (1999) noted, with sculptor Pietro Canonica in Turin, all with approximate dates of circa 1910–13.

⁷ Felted cloth refers to moistened and matted fibre; fulled cloth refers to moistened and matted woven cloth.

⁸ Goncharova also designed costumes for Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes by 1915, and had met Depero in Rome in 1916 (Richardson, 2007, 16). See Troy (2006, 61–81) for a discussion of artistic collaborations within the context of textiles.

⁹ He notes in his memoir that he purchased a sewing machine in 1924 or early 1925; Belli (1999, 151) notes that he also bought a sewing machine while he was in New York in 1929.