Carlo Levi Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

(Turin, 29 November 1902 – Rome, 4 January 1975). He was born into a wealthy Jewish family of the Turin bourgeoisie, on 29 November 1902. Read the full biography

Guide to Carlo Levi price quotations

Levi is associated with the Italian avant-garde movement known as "Magic Realism." His works often depicte rural southern Italian scenes with an ethereal and dreamlike quality. Levi painted in a post-Impressionist style influenced by Paul Cézanne and the French countryside school.

Levi's paintings began attracting more interest and higher prices from collectors in the 1980s and 1990s and following the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2002. His works, mainly oil paintings and drawings, have sold at auction for amounts ranging from €2,000 to over €10,000. The prices reflect Levi's dual importance as a writer and artist, the magical atmosphere of his paintings, and the relative scarcity of his art as he produced only around 300 paintings during his lifetime.

Carlo Levi Biography

(Turin, 29 November 1902 – Rome, 4 January 1975). He was born into a wealthy Jewish family of the Turin bourgeoisie, on 29 November 1902. Since he was a boy he dedicated much of his time to painting, an art form that he cultivated with great passion throughout his life, also achieving important successes. After finishing his secondary studies, he enrolled in the faculty of medicine at the University of Turin. During his university studies, through his uncle, the Honorable Claudio Treves (an important figure in the Socialist Party), he met Piero Gobetti, who invited him to collaborate on his magazine La Revolution Liberale and introduced him to the school of Felice Casorati, around the which gravitates the Turin pictorial avant-garde. In 1963, to give weight to his social investigations on the general degradation of the country, and moved by the desire to contribute to modifying a policy stratified on an inaction of conservation of certain rights acquired even illegally, he moved from theory to practice and, convinced by the top leaders of the communist party, begins to carry out active politics. Candidate for a senatorial seat, he was elected Senator of the Republic for two legislatures (the first time in the Civitavecchia constituency, in the second term in the Velletri constituency) as an independent of the Italian Communist Party. He died in Rome on 4 January 1975.