Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism: Cultural politics in the era of Mussolini

This article explores the efforts of Marinetti's futurists, Sarfarti's Novecento movement, and the Tuscan circle that propounded strapaese to shape a cultural basis for Italian Fascism. The first two movements sought to become an official art for Fascism, while the third sought to produce a culture that would remain true to Fascism's origins in 1919, but all three were in different ways 'modernist' movements and they are therefore contextualized both in terms of the challenge presented by Fascism and those faced by their modernist counterparts elsewhere in Europe. It is argued that the three movements enjoyed some success in the 1920s but were effectively shut down by the rise of the intransigent Right in the 1930s. Yet it is also argued that they needed the regime because they were too weak by themselves to assert the principle of artistic autonomy in the face of an internationally ascendant commodity culture.