The Uffizi Galleries announce the acquisition of a painting by the German artist Rudolf Levy, deported to Auschwitz

On January 27, the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust 2022, the new acquisition of the Uffizi Galleries, the portrait "Fiamma" by Rudolf Levy, is on view in Palatine Gallery of Pitti Palace.

Great German Jewish painter of the 20th century, Rudolf Levy (Szczecin 1875 - Auschwitz 1944), just one year before being deported to Auschwitz, executed in Florence the portrait of a young woman, "Fiamma": purchased by the museum, the work is now part of the Uffizi collections.

Levy spent the last years of his life in the Tuscan capital: having arrived in Florence in December 1940, he stayed and worked there until December 12, 1943, when he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. If Florence was the last place where Levy lived as a free man, his exile had begun years earlier, in 1933, in Rapallo (Liguria), then in Majorca (1934-36), Dalmatia, Ischia and Rome. The "Fiamma" portrait is part of his last phase: since 1938 Levy painted mainly still lifes, landscapes and portraits.
His works, inspired by Matisse and vibrant "fauve" colours, were labeled as "degenerate art" by Nazi propaganda. "Fiamma", Director Schmidt announced, is the first painting by Rudolf Levy to enter the Uffizi's collections, and will be part of the exhibition on the artist scheduled for 2023, the first monographic exhibition dedicated to him, which the Galleries have been preparing for some time together with the Museum and Documentation Centre of Deportation and Resistance in Prato.