The Hybrid Artistic Identity: Nicolay Diulgheroff and the Second Phase of the Italian Futurist Movement

Abstract

N. Diulgheroff (1901, Kyustendil - 1982, Turin) was an active participant in the Turin futurists group in the decade from 1928 to 1938.
Throughout his artistic career, Diulgheroff’s paintings, collages and drawings went hand in hand with his architectural projects, interior designs, design of everyday life objects, and advertisements. Diulgheroff considered the pragmatics of the object environment together with the autonomy of the picture. The abstract structures in his paintings and collages turn into design and architectural solutions.
At this unique moment and in this milieu, when the machine world, having enchanted the futurists with unseen perception of speed, light feelings and viewpoints, established a new layout of human everyday life, but the mass industrial production still did not totally dominate the object world, one can find the individual manifestation of N. Diulgheroff’s artistic view. In the hybrid version between the machine and craftsman’s production the artist has realized as a public value the individual consumption and the personal choice, something that he has insisted on in his articles, full of enthusiasm by the new calling of the human in the machine era.
After the WWII Diulgheroff continued to present himself as a futurist. The technical progress created monstrous killing machines, but the artist restrained his interest to the positive experience and accomplishments of the man in cosmic space. His vision of progress could not come up with the political implications. Diulgheroff strived at isolating and preserving the positive experience from his futurist decade before the WWII – experience, which is still valuable today.