Fiamma

Levy painted this portrait, called Fiamma, in 1942, in a rented room on Piazza Santo Spirito in Florence that he used as a studio. He had reached the city as a refugee, a German painter branded by the Nazis for being Jewish, and in those Florence years he turned out more than 50 works, mostly portraits and still lifes in the warm French color he had learned before the war. In December 1943 the SS arrested him in Florence. He was moved north and put on a deportation convoy, and he was killed at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. Fiamma stayed in private hands for decades. The Uffizi bought it and put it on show on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2022, the first painting by Levy to enter the gallery.