The Art of Objects by Cottini Luca.;

Author:Cottini, Luca.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Chapter Seven

* * *

Toys, Clothes, Furniture, and the Aesthetic Power of Play

In the spring of 1919 the Futurist painter Fortunato Depero opened an art house (Casa d’Arte) in his native town of Rovereto, in the Northern region of Trentino, which had been incorporated into Italy after the end of the First World War. The nation was in tumult. In March of the same year Benito Mussolini launched his Fasci di combattimento (Combat League) with his speech in Milan’s Piazza Sansepolcro; in April Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando left the negotiation table in Versailles (before resigning in June); and in September D’Annunzio occupied the Istrian city of Fiume, in opposition to U.S. President Wilson (who had assigned it to Yugoslavia), to redeem Italy after the nation’s “mutilated victory.” In addition, an unprecedented wave of strikes and social unrest was agitating Italian industrial cities, fomenting a widespread fear of an incoming Soviet revolution in Italy – as reflected in the labelling of 1919 and 1920 as the “two red years” (biennio rosso). Within this context Depero’s move from Rome to the former Italian warfront marked a symbolical counter-itinerary in the spirit of post-war reconstruction, vis-à-vis the collective paths from the North to the capital that had been represented over the same years by the national caravan of the unknown soldier from Aquileia to Rome (1921)1 and by the Blackshirts’ March on Rome (1922). At the same time, Depero’s post-war attempt to “reconstruct” in his art house an aesthetic space for modern living (following Giacomo Balla’s model in Rome) aspired to give visible form to the ideals stated in his manifesto “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” co-authored with Giacomo Balla and published on 11 March 1915. Over the following years Depero’s Futurist house, born as a workshop for the production of art tapestries and later turned into a laboratory of decorative art (and a permanent gallery since the 1940s), would represent not only a unique platform for the evolution of new aesthetic forms but also the sole experiment of its kind “to have any real success with the public and to last over time” (De Guttry and Maino, “From Artist-Artisans” 49).

In the house in Rovereto, Depero first stored his handmade tapestries and the puppets of his theatrical show Balli plastici (Plastic Ballets), designed with the Swiss writer Gilbert Clavel and performed eleven times in Rome in the spring of 1918.2 Both ideas – of the plastic theatre and of the “quadri in stoffa” (paintings on cloth) – had come to him as unexpected evolutions of a failed project for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale), commissioned by the Russian producer Sergei Diaghilev in 1916 and later assigned to Henri Matisse. Diaghilev’s rejection of Depero’s costumes had left the artist with a large quantity of unused sketches, materials, and fabrics (Scudiero, Depero 15).

After his encounter with Clavel in Rome and his stay at the writer’s house in Anacapri in 1917, Depero converted some of the ideas for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.