Photo By Gail

O. (Osvaldo) Louis Guglielmi (1906 – 1956) described Terror In Brooklyn (1941), one of his best known works, as “a premonition of war and tragedy.” On a desolate Brooklyn street, three nuns are shown entrapped by life-size bell jar; they seem to cower in the presence of a bandaged pelvis that hangs, like a crucifix or relic, from a nearby building.

Painted in a meticulous realist style, the scenes incongruous details — from the decapitated lamp post to the mirror reflection of the foreground scene in the background — invoke a disjunctive sense of reality, while wispy clouds streaking across the sky, like the wake of aircraft, recall the aerial blitz of London in 1940 — 41. Instead of explicitly depicting the war into which he would soon be conscripted, the artist envisioned a mysterious seen that conjures the period’s anxious, ominous atmosphere

Photographed in the Whitney Museum in NYC.