Toti Scialoja (1914-1998) was a painter (also a sculptor and engraver), poet, art director, art critic, film director, playwright, teacher, and Director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. He was one of the most important abstract painters of Italy after World War II, and many of his students - in various disciplines - and personal assistants of his private studio, have achieved national fame. In 1940 he had his first solo show in Genoa. Between 1955 and 1965 he travelled and lived in America and Paris, and he exhibited at Viviano Gallery in Manhattan, reaching international fame and notoriety and getting in touch with the other protagonists of ' abstract expressionism, befriending, among others, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. In 1991 he had a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art of Rome.