Elio Luxardo Biography
Elio Luxardo (Sorocaba, 1 August 1908 – Milan, 27 November 1969) was an Italian photographer. Luxardo has the great photographers of American cinema as a point of reference: Roberto Coburn, William Walling, Laszlo Willingere and Clarence Sinclair Bull. Even earlier it had been the second Futurism and the Novecento movement of Margherita Sarfatti, but the nudes of the mid-thirties are close to the sensual vitalism of Edward Weston. Precisely in those years he turned his attention to the Dionysian triumph of Leni Riefenstahl and in advertising - where "Vogue" and "Harper's Bazaar" were the models - to Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst. Luxardo collaborates with the most prestigious Italian magazines with fashion, furniture and cinema services; his photos are published in "Bellezza", "Cine Illustration", but also in "Moda", "Eva", "La Donna" and "Dea". With the advent of the Second World War his collaborations with these newspapers were reduced, both for economic and practical reasons dictated by the worsening of the conflict (graphics increasingly replaced photography and some magazines were suspended). In 1942 he met his wife Trude Kraus, then a German citizen, assigned as an interpreter to Marshal Kesselring's General Staff in Rome. They married a few days earlier on 8 September 1943 and together they fled from the capital towards Milan on the day the Anglo-Americans entered Rome, to follow the Xth MAS Flottiglia on 4 June 1944, where with the rank of lieutenant he became responsible for the sector photographic.
