Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks at 34 in 1908

Beatrice Romaine Goddard (1874-1970) was born while her mother was traveling in Rome. She was the newest addition to a wealthy but severely dysfunctional family from Philadelphia. Her maternal grandfather was the multimillionaire Isaac S. Waterman. Romaine's father abandoned the family shortly after her birth. Her mother left her infant daughter with a family laundress in the United States while she traveled throughout Europe with her other children. Romaine was finally allowed to join her mother in Europe when she was twelve years old. She was, however, educated in private girls' schools while her mother continued her travels. Later, Brooks referred to herself as having been a "child-martyr".

Romaine Brooks, Le Trajet, c. 1900

Brooks traveled to Rome in 1898 and began to take painting classes at the La Scuola Nazionale. During the following year, she continued to study painting at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Brook's mother died of diabetes in 1902. Much to her surprise, she inherited, at the age of twenty-eight, the entire family fortune. The same year, Brooks moved to London and agreed to a marriage of convenience with John Ellingham Brooks, an impoverished, but socially prominent, gay pianist. They quarrelled almost immediately when she cut her hair and ordered men's clothes for a planned walking tour of England; he refused to be seen in public with her dressed that way. They separated after three months, but Brooks continued to support him the rest of his life.

Romaine Brooks, The Huntress, 1920

Brooks reinvented her identity by dropping the feminine name Beatrice and keeping her married surname. She was now known by the androgynous name of Romaine Brooks. Brooks rented a studio in Chelsea across from the studio in which James McNeil Whistler had worked. Whistler's subdued palette would soon influence her work. By 1905, when she was thirty-one, Brooks resettled in Paris. She took an apartment in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, mingled in elite social circles, and painted portraits of wealthy and titled women, including her lover at the time, the Princess de Polignac. During 1910 Brooks began to paint the works for which she became renowned. Her first female nude was The Red Jacket, soon followed by an erotic odalisque entitled White Azaleas: 

 Romaine Brooks, White Azaleas, 1910

Brooks's first one-woman exhibition was shown in May of 1910 at the prestigious Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris. It was a breakthrough exhibition in which she exhibited thirteen portraits and nudes that made her lesbian identity public. She received critical acclaim from Robert de Montesquiou, the aristocratic dandy on whom Proust based the character of the homosexual Baron de Charlus in Remembrance of Things Past. He served as Brook's principal mentor, calling her "the thief of souls".

Romaine Brooks, Miss Natalie Barney, L'Amazone, 1920

In 1911, Brooks met Ida Rubenstein who performed with the Ballets Russes in Paris. Rubinstein was deeply in love with Brooks; she wanted to buy a farm in the country where they could live alone together- a mode of life in which Brooks had no interest. For Brooks, Rubinstein's "fragile and androgynous beauty" represented an aesthetic ideal. The dancer quickly became the subject of her most important early portraits.

Romaine Brooks, The Cross of France, 1914

Brooks soon earned a reputation as an accomplished portraitist. She first painted the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio in 1912. She also painted a portrait of Jean Cocteau (below) before his rise to fame. The Cross of France (above), a portrait of Ida Rubenstein with a resolute expression while Ypres burns in the distance behind her, was executed shortly after the beginning of World War I and exhibited in 1915 as part of a benefit that D'Annunzio and Brooks organized for the Red Cross. In 1920, Brooks received the Chevalier medal from the French Legion of Honor for this and other efforts on behalf of France.

Romaine Brooks, Jean Cocteau à l'époque de la grande rue, 1912

Brooks met the woman who would soon become most important in her life in 1915 when she was forty-one. Natalie Barney, an American expatriate writer who had moved to Paris in 1902, was thirty-nine when the two women met. Their relationship lasted for nearly fifty years. Brooks benefited from Barney's literary salons in that she painted many of the illustrious people who frequented them. Truman Capote, who toured Brooks's studio in the late 1940s, may have been exaggerating when he called it "the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts".

Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923

In 1923, Brooks painted her two most famous works. In Self-Portrait (above) she wears a top hat that is too large and equestrian attire, with the emblem of the Legion of Honor flashing on her lapel. She blatantly and subversively appears as an aristocratic male dandy.  Her Self-Portrait was followed in the same year by her portrait entitled Una, Lady Troubridge (below). Troubridge had recently left her husband for Radclyffe Hall, who was to become the author of the most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century, The Well of Loneliness (1928). Unas's pose and eye-piece offer a humorous commentary on gender roles and also alludes to a lesbian bar in Paris named L'Monocle.

Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1924

In 1924, Brooks built a house with Natalie Barney at Beauvallon, France, near St. Tropez. To preserve their independence, the structure consisted of two wings that were united by a dining room. They called it Villa Trait d'Union, the "hyphenated villa". Brooks's career reached its zenith in 1925 with three exhibitions of her work in Paris, London and New York. In 1936, Brooks moved to New York City where she rented a studio in Carnegie Hall. In 1939, as World War II began in Europe, Brooks returned to France to live with Barney in Villa Beauvallon. When the house burned in 1940, Brooks retreated to Italy, where she purchased a villa outside Florence.

Romaine Brooks, Emile d'Erlanger, 1924

After World War II, Brooks faded from public life. Her artistic output ceased and she lived in isolation. In 1967, Brooks left Italy and took a studio apartment in Nice. Two years later, Brooks and Barney separated. Having grown increasingly eccentric while living in isolation, Brooks died alone at the age of ninety-six on December 7, 1970. Natalie Barney died two years later in Paris, having also reached the age of ninety-six.

Grethe Jürgens

It appears to me to be a barbarian view of art not to consider it to be an obligation, but rather merely a means to greater comfort and greater pleasure. Art, a kind of intellectual whipped cream, is plopped onto the cultural pudding. Art is the coat one adorns and warms oneself with, or it is only a decorative splodge of color on the wall. In reality, one would gain much more if one could decide on a completely different view of art - namely taking an active part instead of only enjoying it. (Grethe Jürgens)

Grethe Jürgens, Self-Portrait, 1928

Grethe Jürgens (1899-1981), the daughter of a school teacher, was born in Holzhausen near Osnabrück in northern Germany and brought up in Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea. In 1919, she went to the Hannover School for Artisans and Crafts to study for three years. There, she and fellow-students Gerta Overbeck, Erich Wegner, Ernst Thoms and others formed a closely-knit, politically left-wing group. In this circle of like-minded artists, she began to capture her impressions of student life and the petty bourgeois milieu in quickly dashed off sketches. Jürgens was so impoverished that during her studies she lived in what she referred to as a "dog kennel" - before she moved in, her lodging housed purebred dogs.

Grethe Jürgens, Ill Girl, 1926

She once commented on these early years: "We worked, we painted. We were often together. I am not a woman of the world, I did not travel much. We sat in Hannover and did not feel like we were 'innovators', only that we were different than the Expressionists, who belonged to a 'higher art movement'. We were simple, we had almost no money, but we were together and rode our bicycles out into the countryside."

Grethe Jürgens, Drapery Dealers, 1932

For financial reasons, until the end of the 1920s Jürgens worked as a commercial artist at the Hacketal Wire and Cable Works in Hannover. This was not exactly what a painter dreamed of doing. It was during these years that she produced those paintings that would gain her notoriety: cool, realistic portraits of her fellow artists, stern depictions of the social environment and people from the "backyards of life". Her most well known work is People at the Unemployment Office: 

Grethe Jürgens, People at the Unemployment Office, 1929

In 1931, Jürgens, Overbeck, Thoms and Wegner founded the short-lived publication Der Wachsbogen (The Wax Sheet), on which Jürgens served as editor and distributor (mostly by bicycle). It was a forum not only for artists but for musicians, architects and writers to express their ideas concerning the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), in opposition to the prior or current trends of Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstraction.

Grethe Jürgens, Flower Girl, 1931

After 1961, Jürgen's works were included in most German shows featuring Neue Sachlichkeit. She remained in Hannover all her life.

Robert Capa

It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian. (Robert Capa) 

Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Segovia Front, Spain 1937

Robert Capa (1913-1946) was born as Endre Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary. Aged seventeen, because of his and Kati Horna's leftist student activities, Friedmann was arrested by the Hungarian secret police but released the following day on the condition that he leave Hungary after finishing the school year. In July of 1931, he moved to Berlin, where he enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism. Only a couple of months later, he learned that because his parents' dressmaking business had been badly hurt by the worldwide economic depression, they could no longer send him money for tuition, room, and board.

Robert Capa, Retreat of the International Brigades, Montblanch, near Barcelona, October 1938

In 1932, a friend helped him obtain a job as darkroom assistant at Dephot, the first cooperative photojournalist agency. The agency's director, Simon Guttmann, was a friend of Walter Benjamin, and, since 1928, also was the employer of Otto Umbehr (Umbo). Guttmann, recognized Capa's talent and, in December, sent him to Copenhagen to photograph Leon Trotsky delivering a lecture to Danish university students. Capa smuggled his inconspicuous Leica into the stadium, positioned himself near to where Trotsky was speaking, and clandestinely snapped a series of photographs that captured the energy of the drama of the moment, so much so that Berlin’s Der Weltspiegel devoted a full page to Capa's photographs. It was his first published story.

Robert Capa, Leon Trotsky lecturing on the Russian revolution, Copenhagen, 27 November 1932

After Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers in 1933, Capa fled Berlin for Paris, where he would struggle for several years before becoming a successful photojournalist. In 1934, Capa met Gerda Taro, a German Jewish refugee who became his lover and business manager. During this time, Friedman began calling himself Robert Capa. In August of 1936, he and Gerda Taro set out for Spain to document the two-week-old Spanish Civil War from the perspective of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Capa photographed in Barcelona and on the Aragon front, then went on to the Huesca front, until he finally arrived at Cordoba, where he took the picture that would be his most famous. It shows a  Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) Militiaman who had just been shot and is in the act of falling to his death:

Robert Capa, Falling Republican Militiaman, Spain 1936

It appeared in Vu, No. 447, on 23 September 1936. The picture occupied the upper left half of a double-page spread entitled La Guerre Civile en Espagne. Responsible for the layout was Alex Liberman, later art director of the American Vogue, who thus was the first to recognize the visual power of the photograph. In July of 1937, while Capa attended to business in Paris, Taro covered the fighting at Brunete, west of Madrid. During a confused retreat, she was fatally injured by a Loyalist tank. In September, Capa made his first trip to the United States, to visit his mother and brother Cornell in New York and to negotiate a contract with Life magazine. In 1938. Capa spent seven months in China with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens documenting Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion.

Robert Capa, Departure of Chiang Kai-shek's German military advisors. Hankow, 1938

In 1938, Capa covered the fall of Barcelona. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, in March, he photographed the defeated and exiled Republican soldiers in internment camps in France. He then worked on various stories in France. After the outbreak of World War II, he sailed for New York, where he began to work on miscellaneous stories for Life.  After the United States had entered the war, Capa crossed the Atlantic in a convoy carrying American planes to England, and worked on numerous stories about the Allied war effort in Britain. In 1943, Capa covered the Allied victories in Tunisia, the conquest of Sicily, and the liberation of Naples.

Anom., Robert Capa in Naples, 1943, with Contax II 

Capa's most famous work occurred on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) when he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach, armed with two Contax II cameras. He took 106 pictures in the first couple of hours of the invasion. However, a staff member at Life in London made a mistake in the darkroom, and only eleven frames were recovered. Capa never said a word to the London bureau chief about the loss of three and a half rolls of his D-Day landing film.

Robert Capa, Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment seek shelter from German machine-gun fire in shallow water behind "Czech hedgehog" beach obstacles, Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944

Capa then accompanied American and French troops until the liberation of Paris. In December of 1944, he covered the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. In 1945, Capa parachuted with American troops into Germany, and chronicled the Allied capture of Leipzig and Nuremberg. Some months later Capa became the lover of Ingrid Bergman, who was travelling in Europe entertaining American soldiers. In December 1945, Bergman tried to persuade him to marry her, but Capa didn't want to live in Hollywood, and their relationship ended in 1946.

Robert Capa, Spanish Civil War, Barcelona 1936. The boy is wearing a cap of the Steel Battalions, of the "Union de Hermans Proletarios" (Union of Proletarian Brothers), an anarchist militia.

After the war, Capa became an American citizen. In 1947, together with his friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, Capa founded Magnum, a photo agency run as a photographers' cooperative. He spent a month traveling in the Soviet Union with his friend John Steinbeck, and also visited Czechoslovakia and Budapest. Between 1948 and 1950, Capa made three trips to Israel. On the first, he photographed the declaration of Israel's independence and covered the fighting that followed. On the two subsequent trips, he concentrated on the plight of refugees arriving in the country. He also visited Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia and photographed the former concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Robert Capa, Ain Karin, a Transylvanian Jew who had spent nine years in Nazi concentration camps, arriving in Israel in 1949

From 1950, Capa lived in Paris and served as president of Magnum, devoting much time to the agency's business and to the recruitment and promotion of young photographers. Because of allegations that he had been a communist, the U.S. government suspended his passport for several months in 1953, during which time he was unable to travel on work assignments.

Robert Capa, Vietnam, 1954

In 1954, while travelling in Japan, Capa received a request from Life to fill in for its photographer in Indochina. He arrived in Hanoi early in May. From there he travelled to Luang Prabang, Laos, to photograph the wounded French soldiers who had been captured at Dien Bien Phu and released by the Vietminh. On May 25, he accompanied a French convoy whose mission was to evacuate two indefensible outposts in the Red River delta. While the convoy was halted at one point, Capa wandered with a detachment of soldiers into a field beside the road. He stepped on a landmine, and was killed with his camera in his hand. "This war is like an actress who is getting old. It is less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous", Capa had said before.

Vilho Lampi

 Vilho Lampi, Self-Portrait, 1932

Vilho Henrik Lampi (1898-1933) was born in Oulu, Finland, from where he moved with his family to Liminka a decade later. In 1921, Lampi went to Helsinki to study at the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Association. He soon was granted scholarships and won first prizes in competitions.

Vilho Lampi, Limingan joki [View of Liminka], 1934

After his art studies, in 1925, Lampi returned to the North to his home farm. In Liminka, Vilho painted still lifes, portraits and landscapes of familiar objects, models and landscapes from his home area. By the turn of the decade, he took part in domestic and international joint exhibitions. He also joined the Finnish Artists' Association.

Vilho Lampi, Yö Retuperällä, 1930

Lampi held the only solo exhibition during his lifetime in Oulu in 1931. Almost half of the works were sold. The same year, Lampi travelled to Paris for two months, financing his trip with a grant. In 1933, Lampi took part in both domestic and international exhibitions receiving recognition in the form of prizes and scholarships. His future looked bright. But, on March 17th, 1936, he threw himself into the River Oulujoki and drowned. His body was found later that spring.

Vilho Lampi, Hevoshuijarit, 1930

Today, The Vilho Lampi Society is active in Liminka, researching and promoting Lampi's legacy, and maintaining a museum dedicated to Lampi. In the course of past decades Vilho Lampi has become a significant part of Finnish art history. 

 Vilho Lampi, Self-Portrait, 1934

Sasha Stone

Drawing and colouring, for the painter, correspond to the violinist's production of sound; the photographer, like the pianist, has the advantage of a mechanical device that is subject to restrictive laws, while the violinist is under no such restraint. (Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography)

Sasha Stone, Untitled [Berlin girl], 1920s

Sasha Stone (1895-1940) was born Aleksander Serge Steinsapir in St. Petersburg, Russia, of Jewish parents.  He lived and worked in Europe and America between the wars and is best known for his portraits, nude studies, photographs of Berlin and for his photojournalism. Stone studied engineering in Warsaw, and then spent several years in New York, where he obtained American citizenship and chose the pseudonym Sasha Stone. After a sculptor and painter education in Paris and Berlin, Stone described himself as an expert in the fields of advertising, architecture, illustration, film, and stage design.

Sasha Stone, Erwin Piscator Entering the Nollendorf Theater, Berlin, 1929

Cami Stone (1898-1975) was born Wilhelmine Schammelhout in Belgium. After a stay in New York, where she founded an import-export company and, in 1918, married a wealthy banker (who disappeared without trace a few months later), she moved to Berlin and joined the circle around Sasha Stone. Influenced by the Bauhaus aesthetics and New Objectivity, both became pioneers of photo journalism and advertising photography.

Sasha Stone, Street Sweepers on Wittenberg Platz, Berlin 1929

In the 1920s, Sasha Stone worked as a professional photographer in Berlin, primarily for the illustrated magazines published by the Ullstein publishing house. He belonged to the circle around the constructivist periodical "G", which included Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky and Walter Benjamin. He created the photomontage for the original book jacket of Benjamin's famous Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street) - which is still used for the English Penguin edition:

In 1929, Stone published Berlin in Pictures, which is extremely difficult to find today. Both, his and his wife Cami's photographs were published in the German photography annual Das Deutsche Lichtbild. Threatened by the rising Fascism, they fled Germany in 1932 and moved to Brussels. Their studio was located at 18 rue de Naples until the German invasion of Belgium in 1940. Sasha Stone's nude work appeared in Les Femmes, and was published by Editions Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Paris, in 1933. His nudes are usually in poses that are quite modernist in sensibility, and the lighting emphasizes their sculptural shapes and angles.

Cami or Sasha Stone, Female Nude (Marie Louise Lebeau), 1933

 

The couple separated in 1939. Cami again assumed her maiden name. Sasha died in 1939 during his flight to the United States in Perpignan. 800 photos of the archive of Cami and Sasha Stone, lost until recently, were auctioned in Argenteuil, France, in 2009. Cami Stones nephew had rescued the archive during World War II and stored it until last year.

Alexander Kanoldt

 Alexander Kanoldt, Self-Portrait, 1930

Alexander Kanoldt (1881-1939) was born in Karlsruhe as the son of the classicistic landscape painter Edmund Friedrich Kanoldt. He began an apprenticeship as a decorative painter at the local "Kunstgewerbeschule" (Arts and Craft School) at the age of eighteen, but decided to join the Academy in 1901. He took drawing lessons with Ernst Schurth, and began a life-long friendship with the painter Adolf Erbslöh.

Alexander Kanoldt, Telegraph Wires, 1921

During this time Kanoldt closely studied Neo-Impressionist techniques, which inspired his technically sophisticated colour lithographs. In 1904, Kanoldt continued his studies in Friedrich Fehr's painting class and became his master student between 1906 and 1909. Kanoldt moved to Munich in 1908, where he founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung - a forerunner of the "Blauer Reiter" - together with Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin and others.

Alexander Kanoldt, Thr Red Belt, 1929

Kanoldt also took part in the first exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung at Heinrich Thannhauser's Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909. In 1913, Kanoldt became a member of the "Münchener Neue Sezession". His artistic career was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War - from 1914 to 1918, Kanoldt was drafted as an officer. After the war, he developed a close relationship with Georg Schrimpf. Both representeded the more romantic trends of the New Objectivity.

Alexander Kanoldt, Still-Life, 1920s

During a lengthy stay in Italy in 1924, Kanoldt produced multi-perspective architectural landscapes and serene interiors. These works marked a new beginning in Kanoldt's work and resulted in an invitation to exhibit works in the famous "Neue Sachlichkeit" (New Objectivity) exhibition in 1924 at the "Kunsthalle Mannheim". His was the second largest group of works after Max Beckmann.

Alexander Kanoldt, Olevano, 1927

In 1925, Oskar Moll invited him to teach at the "Breslau Kunstakademie", a post that he gave up in 1931. Together with Karl Hofer, Kanoldt was the founder of the "Badische Secession" in Freiburg in 1927. In 1931, he opened a private painting school in Garmisch-Patenkirchen. During this period Kanoldt mostly painted still-lives and Italian landscapes. Even though he was appointed professor at the Kunstakademie in Berlin in 1933, his works were labelled "degenerate" during the Nazi regime and confiscated in 1937. For health reasons he had been forced to give up his post in Berlin one year before. Alexander Kanoldt died of a heart disease on 24 January, 1939.

Fortunato Depero

 Fortunato Depero, Riso cinico, 1915

Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) was born in Fondo in Trentino when this northeast corner of Italy belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was never one of Futurism's leading members, but he was the most persistent, the man whose work embodied many of the movement's best inclinations (combining disparate art forms) and worst prejudices (glorifying Fascism). Following a traditional craftsman's training, Depero was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, ending up back in Fondo as a marble cutter's apprentice. And it's there that he might have settled, carving mausoleums for Austrians, had he not heard the distant call to "sing to the love of danger" (as the founding Futurist manifesto proclaimed) and create a genuinely new, militantly Italian culture.

Fortunato Depero, Il ciclista attraversa la città, 1945

After his mother's death in 1914, Depero moved to Rome, where he sought out one of Futurism's leading talents, Giacomo Balla, who immediately saw Depero's potential. It was with Balla in 1915 that he wrote the manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe). In 1919, Depero founded the Casa d'Arte Futurista (House of Futurist Art) in Rovereto, which specialised in producing toys, tapestries and furniture in the futurist style. In 1925, he represented the Italian futurists at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. The freedom with which he moved between media over the course of his five-decade career made him Futurism's common denominator. One of his masterpieces wouldn't be in painting but in architecture, specifically the pavilion for the 1927 Monza Biennale Internazionale delle Arti Decorative that had an immaculate white facade and larger-than-life block letters for walls:

Fortunato Depero, Pavilion for the Monza Biennale Internazionale delle Arti Decorative, 1927

As his pavilion proved, the erstwhile marble cutter had the brute ingenuity that Futurism prized as its most potent weapon against "passéist" complacency. Marinetti had recognized that from the day they met in 1915, inside Depero's studio on Rome's Via Cola di Rienzo. Depero showed Marinetti stacks of paintings, as well as machines built of cardboard. There were also his "abstract" poems written in colored inks on large polychrome sheets dangling from the ceiling. Marinetti read some of these aloud, recognizing his own influence: For several years, he'd been leading a revolt against adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, promoting what he called "words-in-freedom", a typographic onslaught to directly transcribe modern-world experience. For instance, he set the sounds of battle in verse with declamations such as zang-tooooomb-toomb-toomb and pacpacpicpampampac. By 1916, Depero had taken the concept to a new extreme with "onomalingua," a mechanical dialect (vroiii sioiii oiii) in which he claimed to converse directly with automobiles and trains.

Fortunato Depero, Grattacieli a tunnel, 1930

However, it was Depero's assemblages in cardboard - with geometric flowers stiff and artificial, such as might bloom in a robotic garden - that changed the course of his career. When he saw them, Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, declared Depero "the new Rousseau". Diaghilev commissioned him to create Futurist scenery and costumes for Stravinsky's ballet, Song of the Nightingale.  Decades ahead of their time, Depero's experiments in mechanized movement were never to reach the stage. Stravinsky's ballet was delayed and reworked and ultimately staged years later with a set by Henri Matisse.

Fortunato Depero, The Chair's Party (tapestry), 1927

In 1925, Depero produced a gruesome tapestry, War=Festival showing soldiers slaughtering one another against a backdrop resembling a jubilant pyrotechnic display. Though morally appalling, it was a magnificent example of artistic propaganda - visually alluring enough to win a gold medal at that year's Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. His Fascist political allegiance was duly forgiven by his countrymen following his vague post-war acknowledgment of "those human and justifiable mistakes committed in good faith."

Fortunato Depero, Martinetti, Patriotic Storm, 1924

Depero's compositional spareness led the way to the bold ads, posters and bottle designs he produced over the following decades for companies like Campari and San Pellegrino. In 1927, Depero published a personal portfolio, titled Depero Futurista (shown below). Bound with two large industrial bolts, the book included some of the potent graphics he had designed for Campari, interspersed with anarchic flights of typography that were essentially advertisements for himself.

Fortunato Depero, Campari Soda Bottle Design, 1932

In 1928, Depero moved to New York, where he produced costumes for stage productions and designed covers for magazines including Movie Maker, The New Yorker and Vogue. He also was active in interior working on two restaurants (which were later demolished to make way for the Rockefeller Center), did work for the New York Daily News and Macy's, and built a house on West 23rd Street. In 1930, Depero returned to Italy.

Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista, 1927

 In the 1930s and 40, due to futurism being linked with fascism, the movement started to wane. One of the projects Depero was involved in during this time was Dinamo magazine, which he founded and directed. After the end of the Second World War, Depero moved again to New York. One of his achievements on his second stay in the United States was the publication of So I Think, So I Paint, a translation of his autobiography initially released in 1940. Between 1947 and 1949 Depero lived in a cottage in New Milford, Connecticut, working on his long-standing plans to open a museum. His host was William Hillman, an associate of then President Harry S. Truman.

Fortunato Depero, Table and Chair, 1962

In 1949, Depero returned to Rovereto, where he died in 1960. In 1959, Galleria Museo Depero opened, fulfilling one of his long-term ambitions. It is a division of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy's only museum dedicated to the Futurist movement, containing more than 3.000 objects.