Return to order

Return to Order (French: retour à l'ordre) was a European art movement and mood after the First World War, characterized by a return to more traditional, classical approaches in art and a rejection of the extreme avant-garde experiments of the previous decade. The catastrophe of the war provoked in many artists a longing for stability, clarity, order, harmony, and connection with the great artistic heritage of the past. Instead of the fragmentation of Cubism and the aggression of Futurism, artists turned to balanced composition, clear drawing, figuration, and classical subjects. A symbolic embodiment of this turn was Pablo Picasso's "neoclassical" period in the early 1920s, with its monumental, sculptural female figures. In Italy the Novecento group developed in parallel, and the French poet and artist Jean Cocteau was one of the theorists of this mood. Return to Order was not a single style but rather a common tendency that spread across various countries and influenced both modernists and official art of the interwar era, becoming an important episode in the history of twentieth-century art.