Paola Levi-Montalcini

Paola Levi-Montalcini (22 April 1909 – 29 September 2000) was an Italian painter.

Personal life

She was born in Turin, Italy to parents Amado Levi and Adele Montalcini who were Sephardi Jews. She was one of four children. Her fraternal twin sister was the neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 in medicine. She also had an older brother, Gino, an engineer and architect, and an older sister, Anna (Nina).

Relationships and influences

In the late 1920s she studied under Felice Casorati.

Giorgio de Chirico wrote the first monograph on Levi-Montalcini in 1939, noting "her preferences for solid construction, large surfaces . . . and tendency to draw attention to the fantastic aspect of reality". She studied engraving with Stanley William Hayter following World War II. Hayter also trained her in automatic writing and gestural abstraction.