Project Description
Lia Sicher Dall’Oglio ( Venice 1893 – Rome 1976 ), The explorations of a balilla
Oil on panel cm 70 x 82 signed ( Lia Dall’Oglio Sicher ) and entitled on the back.
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«Dall’Oglio is Venetian, and it is already a great privilege for a modern painter; her curriculum is full of participations in the artistic life of yesterday and of the oldest past. The years of her training are the years when our art gets rid of the academy, senses and interprets the major achievements of European culture: the protagonists are well known; but here we can pick some to draw an approximate line in which Dall’Oglio has sunk its roots, that line that goes from Spadini to the Roman School, from Carena to Casorati, from Carrà to Tosi: a difficult season therefore, that in to which our painter has moved, developing her own sensitivity and pursuing her course with great firmness. The firmness with which Dall’Oglio has developed her artistic discourse open to all genres, experienced in the figure as in the landscape or in the still life, is of that kind all made of awareness, of sensitivity to what the culture of her own time wants to increase, along with her knowledge, her own gift.»
With these words Guglielmo Pietroni, in the text published in the catalog of the exhibition dedicated by the Sylvia gallery in Rome to Lia Sicher Dall’Oglio in 1969, attempted to as examples in the definition of her pictorial style.
The painting presented here, “The Explorations of a Balilla”, does not stop at the rhetoric and high celebration of the education imparted by the Fascist regime, but fits in that suspended, pastel, tense atmosphere, typical of some realism magic that evokes Casorati’s painting, not casually mentioned by Petroni in the essay dedicated to Dall’Oglio Sicher reported above. The work reminds us of the paintings “The pupils” by the Lombard master dated to 1927-28: the books and the globe, tools of knowledge for the young student, also come back to this composition by Dall’Oglio Sicher, where the window with the curtain shrouded guarantees a source of light that highlights the pink ruddiness of the little balilla.
Born in Venice, but resident in Rome for the rest of her life, self-taught or almost, Lia Dall’Oglio Sicher, in his early youth he first attended the studies of the painter Egisto Lancerotto and later of the master Antonio Barrera. Present at almost all of the exhibitions of the Lazio’s Fine Arts Association, many of the four years, at the “Portrait Contest” expositions in Sanremo, at the Riverside Museum in New York and at the Tiberina Academy, the painter obtains an honorable mention at the “Women’s Contest of the Portrait “in Sanremo in 1938 and a special prize at the International Art Exhibition in Rome set up at the Tiberina Academy in 1966.
