Novecento Italiano
Novecento Italiano was founded in Milan in 1922 by seven painters and the critic Margherita Sarfatti, a writer on Mussolini's newspaper and his longtime mistress. Its very name - the 1900s - invoked the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, and the group's ambition was a return to order: solid, archaic-feeling Italian art against both the avant-garde and nineteenth-century verismo. Launched publicly at a 1923 Milan exhibition opened by Mussolini himself, it won official patronage but no precise artistic program, and drew in temperaments as different as Mario Sironi's monumental urban melancholy and Carlo Carrà's classicism. Rival pro-fascist tendencies like Futurism and Strapaese kept it contested, and the group's unity depended on Sarfatti; when she fell from favor in the late 1930s it faded, formally disbanding in 1943.
Defining characteristics
- Monumental, simplified figures and solid volumes with an archaic, return-to-order gravity
- Large-format history and subject painting revived from the Italian classical tradition
- Sober, earthy palette and matte, fresco-like surfaces instead of bright modernist color
- Static, frontal compositions with calm geometry rather than avant-garde fragmentation
- Modern urban subjects (Sironi's factory outskirts) staged with timeless, melancholy weight
Key figures
- Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961) — Critic and organizer who founded the movement and shaped its ties to the fascist regime
- Mario Sironi (1885-1961) — Painter of monumental factory outskirts and murals, the movement's strongest painter
- Achille Funi (1890-1972) — Fresco painter whose neoclassical modernism became a signature of the group
- Anselmo Bucci (1887-1955) — Painter among the movement's founding seven
- Leonardo Dudreville (1885-1975) — Painter among the movement's founding seven
Example works
- Urban Landscape (Paesaggio urbano) — Mario Sironi (1922)
- Dea Roma — Achille Funi (1941-1942)
Sources
- Novecento Italiano - Wikipedia encyclopedia