Louis Toffoli

Louis Toffoli was a painter who was born in Trieste (Italy) in 1907 from an Italian father and a Slovenian mother. 

Due to changing borders and the rise of fascism in Italy he acquired Austro-Hungarian, Italian and French citizenship over his lifetime and was therefore European before the letter.

He signed his paintings neither Luigi nor Louis, but only Toffoli.

Louis Toffoli studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Trieste in 1924. In 1928 he exhibited his paintings in that city and was promptly condemned by Mussolini's fascist regime.

Two years later Toffoli emigrated to Paris and began regularly exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne, Salon des Independants, Salon des Peintres Temoins de leur Temps and elsewhere. With the outbreak of the Second World War (1939-1945) Louis Toffoli sought refuge in the countryside of Touraine and worked for the French Resistance. After the war he returned to Paris and received his French citizenship in 1947. 

Toffoli died in Paris, 1999.