The Greatest Piece of Design You Can't Buy...in America

In 1932 Fortunato Depero, after a raft of black and white poster illustrations for Campari and joining the Futurist movement, designed the CampariSoda bottle as an inversion of the conical cocktail glass that appeared so often in his drawings. Today it virtually defines the aperitivo in Italy. If you ask for a Campari Soda in Italy and the bar doesn’t have the little Depero bottles they will claim not to have the drink at all! They may have Campari (“certo!”) and acqua frizzante (“naturalmente!”) but will only custom mix a Campari & Soda if you press them. The land of cappuccino, latte, macchiato, cortado, caffe corretto, lungo and even Americano (all made from variations on same three ingredients; coffee, water and milk) seems to have a blind spot when faced with a Campari and Soda.

That is because CampariSoda (as opposed to Campari & Soda) is a brand inseparable from its form factor and color. It is a precisely mixed, perfectly sized treat that even as I write this at 8:00 am seems tempting, right after my cappuccino.

In Italy, they cost about €1 each, in packages of 5 or 10, and are available in any grocery store.
Here the bottles are simply not available and virtually impossible to purchase online for shipment. Campari has decided not to export them to the US, where they would surely be a gigantic hit, for some inscrutable (read ‘Italian’) reason.

Depero’s 1927 Bolted Book, reprinted in an exquisite edition by Steve Kroeter of Designers and Books, is his other most renowned design. It is, of course, incredibly rare in its original edition and pretty rarified even in facsimiles (which fetch upwards of $1,000) making it precisely the opposite of the mass market CampariSoda bottle. And the bottle’s inclusion in MoMA’s design collection may have offended Depero’s Futurist ethos of radicalism (“We will destroy the museums…”) but likely not his sense of immortality. He was, in fact, all about his self promotion and immortality.

Depero’s first long visit to New York (and really, in those days of ocean liners every trip was longer than the 5 day jaunts we take now; his was 3 years) came at a rather unfortunate moment, arriving just a year before the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing depression.

He and his wife Rosetta brought the bolted book and thought they would take the nation by storm, spreading their Futurist entropy, saying “I will smash the Alps of the Atlantic, I will build machines made of light on top of the giant American parallelepipeds.” I am not sure exactly what or where the parallelepipeds were, but it all sounds rather self-possessed and Futurist. Bravo Depero!

There is a difficult divide in the minds of the self-possessed artist/designer; the art they make for others for a fee, “commissioned art”, is considered a less noble pursuit (a vulgar one) than the “pure art” they make on their own. No less a serious art historian than Sir Ernst Gombrich, in “On Pride and Prejudice in the Arts”, a talk he gave to the Art and Architecture Group in London, discusses this conundrum. It was made into a Pentagram Paper just after I arrived there, and Gombrich’s talk, prefaced by Kurt Schwitters’ claim that “I am an artist and when I spit it is art”, is about the heroic-rebel image of the artist rising above the vagaries of common society. It is, of course, a manufactured pose that seemingly increases the self-worth of an artist the more they are rejected by society. It’s a neat trick.

A neighbor, in the small upstate NY town I live in these days, is a retired architect who has taken up assembling rusted gears, farm implements, hardware and tools into welded sculpture. It simply does not live up to his work as an architect. Le Corbusier had the same dichotomous life, painting in the morning and ‘architecting’ the rest of the day. Again, his architecture far outstrips his painted work (charming though it may be, and attached to his architecture though it often was).

A Pentagram Design founder, graphic designer Alan Fletcher, spent his latter years making personal art based on his handwriting and collected ephemera. As a partner opined, Alan’s commercial work far exceeds his late artistic output. They couldn’t quite understand why Alan would eschew the best part of his talent (and oeuvre) for anything less. But as with many high-ego designers, graduating to fine art is the logical terminus of a life of commissioned art.

Depero is an important artist/designer for both ends of the spectrum, but he sorely wanted to be seen as an artist, not a designer. Yet his most significant and enduring output is a simple bottle for a beautifully red beverage. As near as I can figure, Campari has sold several billion (prob 5B) of these bottles. Billions! It has been recently ‘redesigned’ but really that just means the type on the glass has changed a bit and the cap is now white not red. The design is robust enough to absorb that change.

The bolted book is an amazing and rarified piece of art history, especially as a document of a moment of Italian Futurism. The CampariSoda bottle is an amazing piece of design history; enduring for 88 years and billions of bottles, while continuing to look thoroughly modern and absolutely gorgeous. And it costs about a dollar. In Italy. It is unavailable in the US (though I have ordered a few cases to see if the blockade is truly impenetrable).

A significant piece of design for under a dollar is virtually non-existent. Even the Coke bottle doesn’t quite embody the sense of modernity and purity that the CampariSoda bottle evokes. There are a lot of stationery store items that might qualify: Post it Notes, paperclips, Bic pen, pencils. And a few food items like the milk container tetra-pak, spork and tea bag. But a truly beautiful (and delicious) designed object, one you would proudly display on a mantle, for about $1 is a rarity.

Let me know what $1 designs you think are as good or better than Depero’s 1932 CampariSoda bottle and we’ll assemble a catalog of $1 Designs. Just in time for the holidays in the midst of economic chaos!