This book revisits the story of a group of abstract painters that came together in Florence and was called “Arte d’Oggi” (from 1947) and subsequently “Astrattismo Classico”, in keeping with a definition chosen by the philosopher Ermanno Migliorini for their 1950 Manifesto. Although the group centred primarily on Vinicio Berti, Bruno Brunetti, Alvaro Monnini, Gualtiero Nativi and Mario Nuti, the phenomenon impacted on the experience of other Tuscan artists and drew the Florentine artistic milieu into the national and international debate on abstract art in years of vital importance. From the early Post-Cubist days to the more rigorous geometric abstraction, the experience of these artists can be credited with having grasped fundamental aspects of that debate, not only as regards the political standing of abstract art in the Marxist sense but also in the development of an Italian stance on the topic of concretism and the quest to integrate the arts into architectural and urban space.
