PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN. THE DREAM OF THE TWENTY YEARS

Galleria dello Scudo Verona | Ubaldo Oppi, Le amiche, 1924. Collezione privata

Women, the twenties, the first post-war period

The feminine friendship, the dream, the double reflection in the mirror, the relationship between the painter and the model, women proud to the point of becoming feline, the nostalgia of lost paradises, but also the crudeness of reality, are the central themes of the exhibition .
Wonderful paintings, beautiful dresses, jewels, dreams of exoticism, travel desires and loves pervade the exhibition space, in beautiful dialogue with the architecture of the Palladian basilica. The effect will be magical, recalling those Twenties in which, as he wrote the first woman art criticism, the powerful Margherita Sarfatti, “painting appears to be the magic art par excellence”.

We are in the 1920s, and in Europe, which has just come out of the First World War, women are beginning to take on a role of their own: increasingly autonomous, seductive and modern. The hair becomes shorter like the length of the skirts, while their influence in society and culture becomes more and more intense. Coco Chanel changes fashion, Amelia Earhart flies across the Atlantic, the dances of Josephine Baker enchant Paris, Virginia Woolf writes her masterpieces.

Dreams of adventures, loves and success revolve around the existences of the artists who pass through those years as a journey full of expectations and desires, in a time that can also be complicated. Sensitive interpreters of changes and feelings, painters give life to new imaginations, from which portraits of women emerge standing out as protagonists with powerful personalities, exalted in their seductive energy.

Ubaldo Oppi

Of these ladies, they offer magnetic portraits to artists who are promoting the newest art in the name of a “modern classicism”. They have all been summoned to the show: Felice Casorati, Mario Sironi, Antonio Donghi, Achille Funi, Piero Marussig, Mario Cavaglieri, Guido Cadorin Massimo Campigli and, of course, Ubaldo Oppi. Oppi, who grew up in Vicenza but trained in Vienna, Venice and Paris, has immediate success in important exhibitions, including in Milan and Rome in the early 1920s, where he was “discovered” by Margherita Sarfatti and Ugo Ojetti. His paintings reveal the look through which a constellation of portraits of the greatest artists who were his friends and adversaries in amazing exhibitions, from the Salon d’Automne in Paris to the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh, from the Venice Biennale to the exhibition Modern Italian Art of New York.