The Italy of Nations

It was in the conservative climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the journey of modern art began in Sardinia. Within twenty years, Sardinian art began to acquire its specific physiognomy and to make individual artists recognizable who, convinced of the specific identity of the Sardinian people, became aware of the cultural value of their work.

While academic architecture expresses itself with historical styles (classicist, neo-Renaissance, neo-medieval), the modernist language (liberty and deco) paves the way for illustrators such as Giuseppe Biasi and Filippo Figari, in search of a more modern sign. Together with the sculptor Francesco Ciusa, they are the protagonists of that process that has rightly been critically defined as the “invention of Sardinian artistic identity”, aimed at reevaluating the ethnographic roots of island culture and art.

After the First World War, the attention of many artists focused on applied arts. The goal is always to renew artistic production by referring to local ethnographic traditions, reevaluating popular culture.

On the contrary, the centralism of the fascist cultural system aims to silence regionalist instances. In architecture, rationalist tendencies are established, with buildings sometimes of great formal and functional value, but in the figurative arts, academic styles are preferred again.
Integration into national culture pays dearly: regional culture, traditional ways of life and thought are reduced to pure folklore

Update

20/9/2023 - 11:32