Osvaldo Guglielmi (1906-1956) American, Oil on Canvas. Depicts a sorrowful figure keeping watch over many other sleeping figures in a darkly abstract space. Signed bottom left. Plaque on front of frame bottom middle with attribution. 

Overall Size: 22 x 18 in. 

Sight Size: 15 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. 

#2 #6286 . 

Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi was born in Cairo, Egypt on April 9th, 1906. As a child he lived in Milan and Geneva while his Italian father, a professional violinist, toured the world. In 1914 his parents brought him to the United States, where they lived in the East Harlem (then known as Italian Harlem) part of New York City. He was interested in sculpture at a young age and worked at a casting factory. During high school he attended night courses at the National Academy of Design, and began attending full-time from 1923 to 1926, when he became a naturalized citizen. The Great Depression brought financial hardship but a significant change to his work, inspiring him to capture scenes of stark social realism. From 1935 to 1939 he worked with the Federal Art Project, and spent many summers at the MacDowell Colony for artists in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Guglielmi had his first one-man show in 1938, inspired by the Spanish Civil War and depicting his fears of fascism spreading from Europe to America. Guglielmi was part of the 1943 “American Realists and Magic Realists” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He was with the Army Corps of Engineers in the war between 1943 and 1945, and in the 1950s he held positions at Louisiana State University, first as a visiting artist and then as an associate professor. Sadly, he died unexpectedly on September 3rd, 1956 of a heart attack in Amagansett, New York. Although he was well known in New York by this time he was soon forgotten after his death, as abstract expressionism came to overshadow artists like him. A retrospective on social and surrealist artists like him, Walter Quirt, and James Guy in the 1980s revived interest in his work, with his pieces now found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.