CARLO LEVI
Turin, 1902 - Rome, 1975

Flowers
Oil on canvas, 50 x 66 cm
Signed and n° archive on the back: C. Levi, 6017

BIOGRAPHY: The uncle, the Honorable Claudio Treves, is a prominent figure in the Socialist Party. Around 1922, the young Carlo became friends with Piero Gobetti, who invited him to collaborate with his magazine "La Revolution Liberale" and in 1923 he wrote the first article on his painting for "The New Order". Gobetti introduces him to the Casorati school, around which the young Turin avant-garde gravitates. Thus works were born (Self-portrait, 1923; Arcadia, 1923; Brother and sister, 1925) which are influenced by the stylistic lesson of the master, but which also demonstrate Levi's openness to the artists of the "new objectivity" (Kanoldt, Schad, Beckmann ). In these years Levi appears inserted in the cultural environment of Turin: he frequents Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Noventa, Antonio Gramsci, Luigi Einaudi and later Edoardo Persico, Lionello Venturi, Luigi Spazzapan. In 1923 he stayed for the first time in Paris and from 1924, the year in which he graduated in medicine, to 1927 he kept a studio there. Around 1927 his painting undergoes the first of several stylistic changes, initially influenced by the Fauves and the Paris school, then, between 1929 and 1930, by Modigliani.
At the end of 1928 he forms with Gigi Chessa, Nicola Galante, Francesco Menzio, Enrico Paulucci and Jessie Boswell the group of "Six of Turin", which with the support of Lionello Venturi and Edoardo Persico, exhibits in a series of exhibitions that follow one another until 1931 (Genoa, Milan, Rome, London, Paris). In 1930 he brought to fruition a dramatic expressionist style, which will characterize the portraits and landscapes of this decade. In the same year he travels through Great Britain with Nello Rosselli. In 1931 he joined the anti-fascist movement of "Justice and freedom", founded three years earlier by Carlo Rosselli. The same year he exhibited in Paris at Antonio Aniante's Galerie-Librarie Jeune Europe. In March 1934 he was arrested for suspected anti-fascist activity. Some artists resident in Paris (Signac, Derain, Léger, Chagall etc.) sign an appeal for his release. Between 1935 and 1936 he is in political confinement in Basilicata, an experience that will inspire him in the novel Christ stopped in Eboli (1945), his most famous literary work. Many paintings painted in confinement are exhibited in personal exhibitions at the Galleria del Milione (Milan 1936) and Galleria della Cometa (Rome 1937). In 1937 he was in New York and from 1939 to 1941 he stayed in Paris. During the war he participated in the Resistance in Italy. In 1947 he settled in Rome and took a stand in favor of realist painting, understood however in a strictly existential sense. Many pictorial subjects reflect his participation in the socio-economic problems of the South. In the 1960s, he gave a stylistic change to his painting and expanded his expressive values