Ubaldo Oppi Biography
Ubaldo Oppi (Bologna, 29 July 1889 – Vicenza, 25 October 1942) was an Italian painter, among the initiators of the twentieth century artistic movement in 1922 in Milan. He is also considered one of the greatest exponents of Magical Realism. Self-taught, he went to Vienna in 1906, attracted by the Secession group, and met Klimt there. From 1908 and 1909 he traveled from Germany to Russia. Having settled in Venice in 1910, he moved to Paris in 1911, where he met and frequented Severini and Modigliani and studied fifteenth-century Italian painting at the Louvre. In 1922 Oppi was among the founders of the Italian twentieth century gathered around Margherita Sarfatti together with Bucci, Dudreville, Funi, Malerba, Marussig, Sironi. It is important to remember that "il Novecento", a movement of which Oppi is part, in a position of absolute importance, is not an Italian invention, even if our local artists had a fundamental role in it, but corresponds to an orientation of international culture at the moment of the first crisis of the avant-garde. The twentieth century movement interprets a widespread feeling of art, anticipated in some aspects, between 1918 and 1921, by "Valori Plastici", and has in common with "Return to order", "New Objectivity" and "Classicism" the instances of revaluation of the figure of men and things, abstracting them and isolating them from the life around them.
