The Red-Haired Girl (Head of a Woman with Red Hair)

In 1961 Turin marked a hundred years since Italian unification, when the city had become the first capital of the new kingdom, and it did so with a vast exhibition, Italia 61. The following year a city committee named for the anniversary, Torino '61, gave this small head to the GAM to mark the centenary. It came from a private collection, the Thompson collection, and it brought to Turin a picture by an Italian from Livorno who had worked in Paris since 1906.

He painted it there in 1915. It belongs to his anonymous heads, sitters with no recorded name, where trying out form mattered more to him than character. The museum's own description points to the warm range of colour, from browns to cinnabar red, the eyes left without iris or pupil, and the two eyes set at different heights. His signature is at the lower right.