Nineteen-nineteen (The veteran)

Ardengo Soffici 1929-1930

Audio description of the artwork

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The painting Nineteen-nineteen by Soffici introduces the visitor to the section dedicated to the School of Prato, of which he was undoubtedly the nominal father, and to the new “Tuscan” style of the following decades. The suffering figure of the veteran painted between 1929 and 1930, in which lyricism is tinged with drama, is a symbol of the search for the essential values which characterised the late Soffici’s “return to order”.

Technical information

Author: Ardengo Soffici
Title: Nineteen-nineteen (The veteran)
Date: 1929-1930
Material and technique: Oil on canvas
Size: 141x71 cm
Location: Palazzo Pretorio Museum
Third Floor

Ardengo Soffici emerges as the key artistic figure animating the first two decades of 20th-century Tuscany. He witnessed and took part with Amedeo Modigliani and Lorenzo Viani in the Paris avant-garde movements, and was a mediator between Futurist art and literature. He was one of the first champions of the return to traditional Italian (particularly Tuscan) painting, picking up the thread which connected Etruscan sculpture to Donatello’s, and rediscovering in painting the fascination of the early Renaissance “primitives”.

Nineteen-nineteen is a painting, but also a watershed year for the artist; it was the year he transferred to Poggio a Caiano, where the Soffici Museum remains today as a testimony to the most important period of his career. It was a kind of headquarters from which Soffici dictated the lines of a new poetic idea. His painting moved towards a compositional frugality which would restore harmony with nature and recuperate the sense of day-to-day life which had been extirpated by the war. Through the figure of the lacerated, faltering veteran, Soffici spoke for the thousands of Italian soldiers who had survived the First-World-War trenches, expressing their distress at the difficulty of leading civilian lives again.