Introduction

In 2014, as I was completing the dissertation that forms the basis of the present study, Italian art historian and collector Laura Mattioli opened the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York, an exhibition space and research hub established with the declared goal: “to promote public appreciation and advance the study of modern and contemporary Italian art in the United States and internationally.” ¹ The inaugural show, dedicated to Futurist artist Fortunato Depero, was conceived as a comeback, or, as CIMA put it: “the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work in New York since Depero's residence in the city in the late 1920s.” ² CIMA, in other words, symbolically inaugurated its mission by evoking the 1929 Futurist House, founded by Depero in New York – namely, the first programmatic effort to promote Italian modernism in the United States-, while trying to make up for its failure at the same time (see Chapter 1). ³