Nová věcnost a Valori Plastici

The article looks for links between the Italian movement Valori Plastici and the German New Objectivity in the first half of the 1920s. The Valori Plastici movement was centred on a journal of the same name that was published in Rome in 1918–1922 and was a platform for metaphysical paintings and later a wider circle of classicist techniques. Members include painters Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Alberto Savinio, who in the periodical's first issues advanced a concept of metaphysical painting. German artists had the opportunity to get acquainted with the periodical at the art gallery and bookstore of Hans Goltz in Munich, and metaphysical painting was also often reported on in German journals such as Das Kunstblatt, Der Ararat, Der Cicerone and others. Confirmation of the interest in Italian art was the exhibition Das junge Italien, which was held in 1921 in Berlin, before it continued on to Hannover. These impulses did not fail to prompt a response in German art and we can find motifs inspired by metaphysical painting in the work of a number of artists (Ernst, Schlemmer, Grosz, Schrimpf, Darvinghausen, Mense, Kanoldt). The role of the Valori Plastici movement was assessed by Franz Roh in his book Nach-Expressionismus – Magischer Realismus – Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei from 1925. Not only did he acknowledge the importance of the Valori Plastici movement, but in his description of the new art of the 1920s he delineated principles similar to those set forth also by the authors of metaphysical painting. It appears that the relatedness or similarity of views between Valori Plastici and the New Objectivity, alternatively magical realism, should not be sought in the work itself, where it was more obvious, but in the theoretical reflections that characterised the new approaches to art in the early 1920s.