Amerigo Tot Biography
Imre Tóth (1909 – 1984), Italianized Amerigo Tot, is a Hungarian sculptor and painter who lived mainly in Italy. He graduated from the Higher School of Applied Arts in Budapest, specializing in Graphics. He continued his studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau, with masters Klee, Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, and then at the Otto Dix school in Dresden. In 1933 he was arrested by the Nazis and interned in the Zwickau camp. Having managed to escape, he arrived in Rome, where he obtained funding from the Hungarian embassy to study at the Hungarian Academy in the city. In 1935 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in the capital and continued his artistic training. In Rome he became friends with other artists active at that time in Rome, including Mirko, Afro, Cagli. In 1943 he took part in the Italian Resistance. Once the war ended, he took part in some competitions and won prizes for sculpture. Until 1952 he managed a ceramic factory in the province of Salerno. The following year he completed his most famous creation, namely the pediment of the Roma Termini station. Until 1960 he lived in Rome in via Margutta: Tot's studio soon became a meeting point for intellectuals of various kinds. He participated three times in the Venice Biennale (1952, 1956, 1962). Private commissions gave him good visibility, a fame that culminated in the proclamation of artist of the Holy Year for the Vatican in 1975. In the Seventies his notoriety also grew in the South, especially in Puglia; in the same region, from 1970, and for about a decade, he held the role of professor of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari. He died in Rome in 1984.
