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Oppi, Ubaldo
(b Bologna, 29 July 1889; d Vicenza, 25 Oct 1942). Italian painter and draughtsman. In 1906 Oppi abandoned the commercial training for which he had been sent from Vicenza to Vienna and attended a number of Gustav Klimt’s classes. He also studied anatomical drawing, before travelling through Germany and the Balkans (1908–9). The resulting Symbolist works were exhibited at the Ca’ Pesaro, Venice, in 1910. The following year he moved to Paris, where he studied the works of the Italian Old Masters at the Musée du Louvre and met Severini and Modigliani. An anxious social criticism characterized the works that he exhibited at the Galerie Paul Guillaume (e.g. Figures in a Bar, c. 1913; priv. col., see 1990 exh. cat., p. 31). During World War I Oppi was wounded, captured and imprisoned at Mauthausen, near Linz, where he produced such highly charged drawings as the Soldier’s Family (1918; priv. col., see 1990 exh. cat., p. 39). On returning to Paris, he exhibited crisply classical paintings at the Salon des Indépendants in 1921 (e.g. Portrait of the Artist with His Wife, 1920; priv. col., see 1990 exh. cat., p. 59), although many of his works remained disturbing. In Milan he joined the Sette Pittori del Novecento but ‘betrayed’ the group by showing independently at the Venice Biennale of 1924. The success there of his disquieting double portrait The Friends (1924; priv. col., see 1990 exh. cat., p. 75) coincided with a second prize at the Pittsburg International Competition (1924) in the USA. The disconcerting Ingresque purity of such subsequent works as the Three Surgeons (1926; Vicenza, Mus. Civ. A. & Stor.) encouraged comparisons with the paintings of German Neue Sachlichkeit artists. In 1928–32 Oppi painted frescoes of the Life of St Francis in the chapel of S Francesco in Il Santo, Padua, which anticipated much of the mural art of the 1930s. In 1930 he had a show of his early works at the Galleria Il Milione, Milan, and two years later returned to Vicenza, where for the rest of his career he painted more innocuous nudes and landscapes.
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