Italian art between the wars: 1920-1945

Between the two world wars, the artistic landscape in Italy was multifaceted, with an extensive variety of voices and approaches: individual visions maneuvered between movements and trends, from eclecticism to a return to structure, from avant-garde to tradition, together with propaganda and more intimate perspectives.

The Novecento formed in 1922, a group of seven people in Milan including important artists and musicians alongside literary and political figures, gathering in the living room of art critic Margherita Sarfatti: Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi. They shared an aspiration for "modern classicism." The group disbanded in 1924, but the movement soon widened to become the Novecento Italiano, a vaster and more diverse array of people with different goals and frames of reference.

Sironi best embodied this movement, learning from the major contemporary European painters while embracing a visual language rich in archaisms, to promote the idea that art also has public and educational purposes, summarised in the Manifesto of Mural Painting in 1933, written together with Campigli and Funi.

Novecento Italiano – first displayed in 1926 and then in 1929 – delineated a vast perimeter including very different trends, such as Morandi and Sironi who, in a certain way, represented opposite positions: from a more intimate perspective to rigorous propaganda; the group of the Italiens de Paris was also important (de Chirico, Savinio, de Pisis and Campigli and all the Italian artists gravitating towards Paris) as well as Carrà, in his most archaic phase. Sarfatti identified a common factor among them: the rejection of the avant-garde.