Osvaldo Guglielmi was born on April 9, 1906 in Cairo, Egypt, into the family of Italian parents Talmiro and Domitilla (Secchi) Guglielmi. When he was eight his parents (his father was a musician) brought him to the United States. They settled in Harlem. In 1927 he became a naturalized US citizen.
Osvaldo attended the National Academy of Design in the evening beginning in 1920, while also attending high school, and attended full-time from 1923 to 1926.
Guglielmi's career developed during a very difficult time in the United States. The Great Depression brought financial hardship, but the difficult times inspired his artwork. During the Great Depression, the WPA and Public Works Administration employed him between 1934 and 1939, as he combined symbolism with manipulation of light, color, space, and scale.
In the 1930s Osvaldo spent many summers at the MacDowell Colony for artists in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Guglielmi had his first one-man show in 1938, exhibiting his new work Mental Geography. Inspired by the Spanish Civil War it was a warning that European fascism might spread. 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 did not paint. In the 1950s, he held positions at Louisiana State University, first as a visiting artist and then as an associate professor. The artist died in 1956 of a heart attack in Amagansett, New York.
O. Louis Guglielmi was highly famous for portraying ordinary people, especially the disadvantaged, showing them sitting in front of tenements, bored by the tedium of unemployment or forced onto welfare rolls, their dignity barely intact, including "Recurrent Theme in Red", "Relief Blues", and "The River."
The River
The Tenements
Town Square
Relief Blues
6 Works. Aerialist No. 4 and Others
Wedding
Obsessive Theme
Things of the Sea
Untitled
Skyscape
Brooklyn Piscatorial
Circus in White
City Windows
Mountain in New Hampshire
Women of Peterboro
Untitled (Two Women in Conservation)
Untitled
Recurrent Theme in Red
Portrait and Background
Houses and Street
Serenade
Martyr Hill
The Gallants
South Street Stoop
Tumblers
Circus in Yellow
Still Life with Mask
Aerial Descent
Connecticut Autumn
Mental Geography
Tumblers
The Photographer
One Third of a Nation
Subway Exit
There are elements of precisionism, surrealism, geometric abstraction, regionalism, and social realism in his work.
On May 22, 1939 Osvaldo married Ann de Maggio.
