(Rome, 1918-1922), a magazine published under the editorship of painter and collector Mario Broglio, turned initially to the dissemination of the aesthetic ideas of Metaphysical painting, with the collaboration of De Chirico, Savinio and Carrà, and then opened up to the currents of the European Avant-Garde by publishing for the first time in Italy writings on Chagall, Derain, Kandinsky. Enriched by a French edition, it is concerned with the relationship between Italian tradition and European modernity and, beginning in 1920, ends up in polemic with avant-garde trends. In tune with the “neoclassical” climate then prevailing in Europe, he thus moves decisively toward a return to order that exalts the Italian figurative culture of the 14th and 15th centuries, considered from an exclusively formal point of view.
The Plastic Values Fund is divided into the following sections: Correspondence, which collects letters sent to Mario Broglio by numerous correspondents and the latter’s minute letters in response to many, if not all, of his epistolary interlocutors. These include Carrà, Cecchi, De Ridder, Longhi, Martini, Morandi, and Prampolini; Manuscripts , in which writings by Cecchi, De Chirico, Salmi, Fiocco, Ortolani, Longhi, and Galassi have converged alongside the autographs of Broglio and his wife Edita; Miscellaneous, which preserves notes, press clippings, and drawings of both Broglio and his wife; Library, which preserves three texts from Plastic Values Editions, two dedicated to art and the third in memory of Edita Broglio.
