Raffaele Bedarida “Bombs Against the Skyscrapers”: Depero’s Strange Love Affair with New York, 1928–1949 Abstract: This study compares the activities of Fortunato Depero in New York to his fictional account of them. Depero’s first stay in New York in 1928–1930 was far from successful: in the midst of the Wall Street crash and its aftermath, his paintings failed to sell, and his commercial enterprise in the city, the ‘Futur- ist House’, did not survive longer than a couple of months. The artist, however, created a myth out of it when he returned to Italy. For more than ten years, he wrote extensively about his American experience and dedicated several works to New York, in a variety of media. These accounts ranged from extreme enthu- siasm about the city to antagonism and even anger at it. After the fall of Musso- lini’s régime, Depero returned to the ‘New Babel’ for two more years (1947–1949), which, again, proved a fiasco. Paradoxically for a Futurist, he was happy to leave the metropolis New York for a bucolic retreat in the suburbs of Connecticut. Depero’s ambivalent love affair with New York was part of the changing debate on Americanism in Italy during the 1930s and the reconstruction years after the Second World War. This was a major avenue for Italian artists to define and re-define their own modernity, and Depero – in his own, idiosyncratic way – played a central rôle in it. Keywords: Italian Americanism, advertising and art, autobiography, auto-ré- clame, Katherine Dreier and the Société Anonyme, Christian Brinton, Frederick Kiesler Introduction Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero1 published two versions of his autobiog- raphy: Fortunato Depero nelle opere e nella vita (Fortunato Depero in His Works 1 Research for this essay was conducted as part of my 2013–2014 fellowship at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York. I extend my gratitude to Laura Mattioli, Heather Ewing and Fabio Belloni, with whom I have shared my experience at CIMA. The essay derives from two shorter texts: a paper for the Study Day on Fortunato Depero, CIMA, on 21 February 2014; and an essay for Futurist Fortunato Depero, a catalogue for an exhibition at the Fundación Juan March, DOI 10.1515/futur–2016-0005 Bavarian Yearbook. Directory of Local, State and Federal Administration, Associations and Public Institutions. 95th Year 2016, edited by Günter Berghaus, De Gruyter, Inc., 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cooper/detail.action?docID=4533913. Created from cooper on 2020-12-24 12:33:33. Copyright © 2016. De Gruyter, Inc.. All rights reserved.