Carlo Levi (Turin 1912 - Rome 1975)

Carlo Levi (Turin 1912 – Rome 1975) earned his degree in Medicine, but showed a precocious interest in painting. He studied under Casorati, but the time spent at the Parisian artistic centre pushed him in a completely different direction from that taken by his master. In fact, in the complex artistic context that he found in Paris, he made some choices with a clear orientation: towards Modigliani and towards some examples of international expressionism, such as Soutine and Pascin.
Aesthetic and political orientations (he was soon involved in the clandestine activity of Giustizia and Libertà, animated by the Rosselli brothers) converged to make him a determined opponent of the “return to order” and the rhetoric of the regime. Together with Paulucci, Menzio, Chessa, Galante and Jessie Boswell, he was a member of the group known as the Six Painters of Turin, which in 1929 opened the way to the anti-19th century movement of young Italian artists.
From 1929 to 1935, when he was confined to Lucania for political reasons, Levi’s works were marked by a language in which expressionism and fauvism met in an original way. During his stay in Lucania and after, Levi moved towards a form of painting in which realism was pre-eminent.