Catalan Noucentisme and Italian Novecento Facing the Paradoxes of Landscape around 1920

This article aims to revisit the critical debate on landscape painting in Europe around 1920 through a comparative analysis of Catalan Noucentisme and Italian Novecento. Art criticism, and in particular the work of Margherita Sarfatti in Milan and Eugeni d’Ors in Barcelona and Madrid, will first allow us to explore the critical fortunes of landscape painting. Their perspectives will resonate with the work of a small but impactful selection of Catalan and Italian painters, such as Ubaldo Oppi and Joaquim Sunyer, in order to examine the recurring visual and written tropes in the classicist representation of nature. The dialogue between text and image will prove to be a valuable starting point for questioning how the natural environment was narrated in the 1920s. In so doing, the article interrogates issues such as the constantly renegotiated legacy of classicism, the impact of the recent French and modernist tradition, the rise of nationalist movements, and the formation of local and national identities.