Fronte Nuovo delle Arti
Italian group of artists. It was founded by Renato Birolli in 1946 as the Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana and renamed in 1947. The manifesto of 1946 was signed by Giuseppe Santomaso, Bruno Cassinari, Antonio Corpora, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, Armando Pizzinato (b 1910), Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova and the sculptors Leonardo Leoncillo (1915–68) and Alberto Viani. During the first group exhibition, which was held at the Galleria della Spiga in Milan in 1947, Cassinari resigned,
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Fronte Nuovo delle Arti
Italian group of artists. It was founded by Renato Birolli in 1946 as the Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana and renamed in 1947. The manifesto of 1946 was signed by Giuseppe Santomaso, Bruno Cassinari, Antonio Corpora, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, Armando Pizzinato (b 1910), Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova and the sculptors Leonardo Leoncillo (1915–68) and Alberto Viani. During the first group exhibition, which was held at the Galleria della Spiga in Milan in 1947, Cassinari resigned, and the sculptors Pericle Fazzini and Nino Franchina (b 1912) joined. This was the vanguard of Italian painters and sculptors who, in the wake of the fear and stagnation brought on by World War II, endeavoured to revitalize Italian 20th-century art, which they felt had died with Futurism and Pittura Metafisica. Although the artists were stylistically very different, ranging from abstraction to naturalism, they were united by left-wing politics and by their wish, as stated in their manifesto, to give their ‘separate creations in the world of the imagination a basis of moral necessity’. While the group also shared an admiration for Picasso, the polarization of the abstract formalists and the realists became increasingly evident during the Venice Biennale of 1948. That year the Communist journal Rinascita published an article highly critical of works exhibited in Bologna by Fronte Nuovo members. The assumption that the Communists had no artistic preferences was shattered and this helped to destroy the group. Its stylistic diversity is indicated in a comparison of Guttuso’s powerfully figurative Mafia (1948; New York, MOMA) with Turcato’s Revolt (1948; Rome, G.N.A. Mod.); the latter evokes the resistance to German repression in near abstract forms derived from Picasso’s Guernica (Madrid, Prado). The group had disintegrated by 1952, when Birolli, Corpora, Turcato and Vedova were among the abstract painters gathered together in Lionello Venturi’s GRUPPO DEGLI OTTO PITTORI ITALIANI.
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