Rome’s Foreign Artists: Balkan Bloc

Amerigo Tot started as a painter. He was born in the non-too-quiet Balkan year of 1909 and says he worked with pencil and color from the time memory starts and at 17 entered his home-town art school in Csurgo, Transdanubia.
From the time he was 19 until age of 29 he wandered through Europe, touching Germany, and was one of the first guests of a Nazi concentration camp.

ESCAPED

He escaped, slipped into Italy and in 1934 down to Rome, where he was given a three-year scholarship at the Hungarian Accademy. He has been here since save for a period when he fought with the Partisans in Tuscany and later the U.S. 5th Army's parachute division, making some excellent sketches of the hanged and executed.
In his upstairs studio at No. 7 Via Margutta, he sculpts, holding a water-worn pebblestone in one hand. It is, in a sense, his mental model. He says that is what he hopes tio arrive at the sculpture in which every reality has been caceled but in which the original shape always remains indelible.
Tot began using as a base an undulated curved oriental style which he has gradually modified to the point where it is conquered by a search for volume beyond the real form.