UBaldo Opppi is one of the most representative exponents of “twentieth century”the group of seven painters promoted by Margherita Sarfatti. Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Leonardo Dudreville, Anselmo Bucci, Emilio Malerba, Pietro Marussig and Ubaldo Opppi, around the Pesaro Gallery in Milan, starting from 1922, inaugurated a general “return to order”, following the drunkenness of the avant -garde, futurism and Cubism.
Born in Bologna and long active in Milan and Vicenza, Opppi is perhaps the only teacher who can support the comparison, between the two wars, with the other twentieth century, Mario Sironi. Classic, monumental, solemn, but also curious together with deformities, characterizations, Opppi represents a singular synthesis of Nordic civilization and Mediterranean civilization, a sort of intersection between Antonio Donghi and Otto Dix, evident above all in color glazes on a drawing always composed and harmonious.
Italian champion at the Realismi exhibition at Beaubourg, represents the perfect parallel of the refined Antonio Donghi. Ubaldo Opppi soon chooses an individualistic way, almost the signal of a neurosis, of forced loneliness. The same that seems to characterize his hallucinated characters, always lonely even when they collect in groups preferentially made up of three people.
But loneliness looms over each of them as the famous and extraordinary shows Three surgeons (1926), a monument of a newly found and incorrotto classicism, as Ugo Ojetti had written to the Biennale in 1924: “Here is an art that starts from the truth, but dominates it, chooses it, orders it to look for something that is more durable and consoling of the fleeting reality”.
Three surgeons of Ubaldo Opppi (1926), Vicenza, Civic Museums – Palazzo Chiericati. (Photo by Cameraphoto Arte / Electa / Mondadori Portfolio Via Getty Images)
Cadorina girl It is from 1929and can be considered a manifesto of Cadore. A beautiful, elegant girl in traditional costumeposing for us spectators, languid and insinuating, is resting on a wooden balustrade, beyond which you can see green mountains, fir trees, paths. The girl makes the relationship between her costume and the mountains felt. It is the manifesto of a human conditionof a tradition, as if the girl introduces us, certain of her lovable sensuality, to the beauty of the Dolomites.
In 1925 Ubaldo Opppi, he made a similar procedure In the evening Romagna. In a girl the spirit of a place is mirrored. She is a girl who, in her overlooking frontality, introduces us to a land, To a very precise landscape, in this case Romagna. So a beautiful woman is imposed in front of us, who somehow anticipates the Fellinian figures and, on the other hand, reinterprets the female paintings by Guido Cagnacci, born in Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, so loved by Fellini himself, in a happy and virtuous temporal short circuit. There is nothing more about the decompositions of cubism, of fourth size, of futurism but, in full adhesion to “twentieth century”a woman explodes in her carnality, in her sensuality, in her beauty, returned to a wonderful painting.
The Romagna woman of Opppi is a new Gioconda, perfection of creation. But in place of the four elements that are perceived in the table of Leonardo, air, water, earth and fire, there is a hilly landscape, cultivated, fully Romagna, and, in the distance, the Apennines. As the girl Cadorina summarized the landscape and costume of Cadore, so the Romagna girl takes on the characters and nature of Romagna in itself. In the evening Romagna And Cadorina girl They indicate the return of an ancient statuary, but alive, talking, vibrant. Ubaldo Opppi sees female beauty as a sensual power, as a force of life, like the strength of nature, and the mountain.
In Cadorino landscapefrom 1923, the affinity of Ubaldo Opppi is captured with Mario Sironi. A feeling of the nature in which clouds, mountains, distant sky, traces of civilizations, conifers, snow, glaciers, acquires in an almost musical wave, a symphony of planes in perfect perspective. From the nearest, where the intervention of man is grasped in the geometric decomposition of crops on the sweetest hills, up to the Turnerian landscape mountain in the distance, in an overwhelming and dramatic progression. It is an absolutely unique figure, an interpretation of the mountain that records the painter’s personal emotionand transforms it into expressive necessity. There is nothing naturalistic: there are mountains, clouds, but there are other mountains and other clouds. They are his profound feeling of nature and the mountains.