Morandi, Balla, de Chirico and Italian Painting 1920 - 1950

About

The group Italian Novecento was founded in 1922, in Milan. The group initially consisted of seven artists – Bucci, Dudreville, Funi, Malerba, Marussig, Oppi and Sironi. It was the art critic and journalist Margherita Sarfatti who conceived the idea of a movement of artists whose work displayed naturalistic features. The seven Novecento artists wanted to re-establish the simplicity and solemnity of discourse inspired by the Italian pictorial tradition, implicitly proposing certain values which, after World War I, were points of reference for a reordering of civil life. These values were the family, love for domestic and rural life, and respect for tradition: in other words, a sum of inward attitudes which guaranteed moral health and constituted a safeguard against the feared acceleration of progress.

The Sarfatti movement elaborated this poetic and ideology, particularly in the years following the first exhibition of 1923, with the organisation of a large exhibition in Milan in the spring of 1926.

Realizing that the movement had achieved considerable political recognition, many artists joined the initiative. The success of the Milan exhibition nourished the hope of constituting a grandiose movement of Italian art that possess original traits to distinguish itself within the European and world ambits and, at the same time, aligns itself with modern and cultivated trends of the international panorama.

The aspiration of the Novecento artists to be the top group of a new phase in figurative culture is testified too by the enthusiastic consensus that they met outside of Italy, and not in reactionary circles.

The affirmation of the Italian Novecento was consolidated by a series of exhibitions, which the movement held in various countries: ranging from France to Finland, from Germany to Argentina.

The interest provoked by the Novecento – which at this point in time included in its ranks more than one hundreds artists – was certainly due to that mixture of novelty and response to the expectations of the moment on which the fortune of very successful artistic experiments is usually founded.