The references to the early Italian Quattrocento, from Piero della Francesca to Mantegna, show how Oppi affirmed his nationality in France, interpreted as an ideal return to popular roots.

Ubaldo Oppi’s lengthy stay in Paris, when he painted La fabrique au dimanche (The Factory on Sunday) purchased by Cerruti in 2000, is still little known. After moving to the French capital in 1911, the painter from Vicenza continued to exhibit in Italy at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, where he made his debut with Art Nouveau-style works. In Paris, where he lived a Bohemian lifestyle and experienced financial problems, the artist’s exhibitions culminated in a solo show at the Galerie Paul Guillaume in 1913. Oppi occupied a totally original position on the French art scene: more drawn to the elongated figures of Amedeo Modigliani than Cubist formulas, he produced an interesting interpretation of Picasso’s blue and pink period, which he knew through the engravings of the Saltimbaques published by Vollard in 1913, deriving a sharp drawing style from them and doing away with the bright colours of his previous production. The Great War marked a turning point in Oppi’s career, who was deployed to the front with the Alpine Corps and held prisoner for three months in Mauthausen. While on leave in Milan he was introduced into the circle of Margherita Sarfatti, and he saw Carlo Carrà’s metaphysical paintings and reestablished contact with the artists Tullio Garbari and Gigiotti Zanini. 

Oppi’s exhibition strategy in the postwar period followed the two Italian and Parisian fronts, with his introduction onto the lively Milanese scene on the one hand and his decisive establishment in Paris on the other.¹ In this respect it is important to remember his participation in the 31st Salon des Indépendants, from 19 March to 18 May 1920, where La fabrique au dimanche is mentioned for the first time. Oppi submitted another five paintings with it in 1919: La pauvreté sereine (Serene Poverty, 1919; fig. 1), Portrait de mon ordonnance (Portrait of My Orderly, now known as The Soldier, 1919), Roses au matin (Roses in the Morning, 1919) and two Paysages d’Italie (Italian Landscapes). A new primitivism in these works reveals his interest in Derain and Rousseau; he also adopted smoothed backgrounds that recall the ones used by the Metaphysicist Carrà. The references to the early Italian Quattrocento, from Piero della Francesca to Mantegna, show how Oppi affirmed his nationality in France, interpreted as an ideal return to popular roots. Albeit at the height of the Italian Biennio Rosso and worker occupations, the political significance of the factory at the centre of the painting in the Cerruti Collection is abstracted into a timeless “Sunday” within this style, in which even the architectural modernity of a viaduct or telegraph wires is reconciled with an archaic landscape reminiscent of Mantegna. 

The commercial success of this “Italien de Paris” persona is demonstrated by the fact that the work was purchased by Alfred Tumin. Perhaps identifiable as the eponymous chairman of the board of directors of the Fédération française des artists, Tumin purchased numerous works by the Italian painter in the early 1920s. A later allusion by Ojetti does not seem to refer to him, but to the precarious conditions of the pre-war period: “[Oppi in Paris, Ed.] had found a dealer who, at worst, purchased what he painted at best”.² On the Italian front too, La fabrique au dimanche proved to be an important work. In fact, a few months later it appeared as a full-page reproduction in the Milanese magazine Il Primato Artistico Italiano. Oppi took part in a number of exhibitions at the Bottega di Poesia, including a solo exhibition in May 1922, together with Zanini and Garbari, just a few months after his inclusion in the Sette Pittori del Novecento group, under the aegis of Sarfatti. 

In addition to forty drawings and paintings, the catalogue also includes reproductions of Paysage d’Italie (fig. 2), La pauvreté sereine and La fabrique au dimanche, indicating their ownership by Tumin and providing information about a print run of 200 numbered copies of these works for an edition by the Parisian antiquarian Hector Brahme. The theory that the three works, which had already been exhibited together at the Salon and were of the same size and shape, may form a sort of ideal triptych, therefore seems to be confirmed.³

Filippo Bosco

¹ Oppi held an important solo show at the Galerie Devambez from 5 to 13 November 1919, while his numerous participations are difficult to reconstruct: in 1920 in the collectives at the Galerie Devambez, the Galerie Cheron, the Galerie Bolâtre; he notably submitted some drawings to the Exposition de peinture moderne at the Galerie Guillaume, as well as the first posthumous retrospective of Modigliani and the works of de Chirico, Derain, Coubine, Picasso and Matisse. The artist from Vicenza also took part in the Salon des Indépendants in 1920 and 1921, and in the Salon d’Automne in 1922.

² Ojetti 1924, p. 778.

³ See Elena Pontiggia’s claim that the “sketches for the three works […] now in a private collection, were composed by the artist in a single triptych” (Mi-Fig. 2. U. Oppi, lan-Verona 2002-03, p. 40).