Novecento Italiano

Novecento Italiano was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 to create an art based on the rhetoric of the Fascism of Mussolini.

Novecento Italiano was founded by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955), Leonardo Dudreville (1885–1975), Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba (1880–1926), Pietro Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi, and Mario Sironi. Motivated by a post-war "call to order", they were brought together by Lino Pesaro, a gallery owner interested in modern art, and Margherita Sarfatti, a writer and art critic who worked on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s newspaper, The People of Italy (Il Popolo d'Italia). Sarfatti was also Mussolini’s mistress.

The movement was officially launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, with Mussolini as one of the speakers. The group was represented at the Venice Biennale of 1924 in a gallery of its own, with the exception of Oppi, who exhibited in a separate gallery. Oppi's defection caused him to be ejected from the group, which subsequently split and was reformed. The new Novecento Italiano staged its first group exhibition in Milan in 1926.

Several of the artists were war veterans; Sarfatti had lost a son in the war. The group wished to take on the Italian establishment and create an art associated with the rhetoric of Fascism. The artists supported the Fascist regime and their work became associated with the state propaganda department, although Mussolini reprimanded Sarfatti for using his name and the name of Fascism to promote Novecento.

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