Oscar Ghiglia (1876 - 1945) Still Life, 1936-1937 Oil on cardboard 32.8 x 37.4 cm Signature: upper right, 'O. Ghiglia'. Bibliography: L. Ghiglia and S. Zampieri, eds., "Oscar Ghiglia. General catalogue", Cinisello Balsamo, 2022, p. 418, no. 723 Conservation status. Support: 95% Conservation status. Surface: 90% A pupil of Giovanni Fattori, a friend and associate of Llewelyn Lloyd and Amedeo Modigliani, and a contributor to Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini's 'Leonardo' magazine, Oscar Ghiglia is one of the major post-Macchiaioli artists. His constant bond with Ugo Ojetti and the collector Gustavo Sforni, who had contributed to the diffusion of Paul Cézanne's work in Italy, placed him in the sphere of a modernity far removed from the avant-garde, and in this capacity in the early post-war period he tackled the debate on the "return to order" and took part in 1921 in the exhibition "Arte Italiana contemporanea" curated by Ojetti at the Galleria Pesaro and in 1923 in Margherita Sarfatti's First Exhibition of the Novecento Italiano. The relationship with reality, investigated through landscape, portrait and still life, is the 'conditio sine qua non' of his production. An heir to the Macchiaioli tradition, in the introduction to the first monograph on Fattori, which he himself wrote, he states: 'painting is founded solely on the law of knowing how to find the right tone of a colour and constrain it in its right space' (Oscar Ghiglia, L'opera di Giovanni Fattori, Florence, 1913). He was echoed in 1920 by Ojetti: "painting is, in fact, for him not a way of inventing or dreaming, but a way of understanding, ordering, dominating, enjoying the real and making it precious, durable and desirable through art" (Ugo Ojetti, "Il pittore Oscar Ghiglia", in "Dedalo", I, 1920, 1, pp. 114-132, pp. 116-117). Gradually isolating himself with the advent of Fascism, around the mid-1930s "after years of close dialogue between object and background, he decided to 'emancipate'", in still lifes, "the object to make it the absolute interpreter of figuration" (Stefano Zampieri, "L'opera pittorica di Oscar Ghiglia", in Leonardo Ghiglia and Stefano Zampieri, eds. General Catalogue", cit., pp. 17-69, p. 58). In these works, often in a square format to better emphasise the object, which constitute a sort of rhythmic meditation on form, the background is reduced to bright cloths or two-tone blue walls and the objects are pushed into the foreground to encourage a close and photographic view, as in the case of these apples with a surface so shiny as to appear reflective. It is a "laborious attempt to make inner vision and real image coincide" (Leonardo Ghiglia, "'È musica la pittura... musica grande'. Fortuna e sfortuna critica di un elusivo compositore figurativo" in Leonardo Ghiglia and Stefano Zampieri, eds., "Oscar Ghiglia., cit., pp. 71-, p. 96) in which the theme gradually loses importance in favour of painting as a pure act. Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto