Highlights from the Wisconsin Union Art Collection Catalog
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Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi (1906-1956)
House of the Dead, ca. 1939
gouache

Guglielmi was born in Cairo, Egypt to Italian parents. In 1914 he immigrated to the United States with his mother to join his father, a traveling musician. In New York Guglielmi studied at the National Academy of Design and Beaux Arts Institute. During the summer of 1928 he was guest artist at the Yaddo colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. In the 1930s Guglielmi developed his own voice as an artist, combining irrational shifts of space and form he learned from surrealism with an interest in social issues rendered in a realist, narrative manner. His work was included in important surveys of contemporary art during the 1940s, such as American Realists and Magic Realists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1943). In 1945 he was one of eleven artists commissioned to submit a painting on the theme of the Temptation of Saint Anthony for the Bel Ami International Competition, initiated by film director Albert Lewin. Although surrealist Max Ernst won the prize, the competition received a great deal of publicity and benefited all of the artists involved. Guglielmi taught at Louisiana State University and the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1950s. He died suddenly while traveling in Italy.

R.C.

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