Max Ihlenfeldt, began his career as a journalist for Corriere della Sera, in Milan, where he frequented the futurist milieu of Boccioni and Carrà. He signs his futurist articles under the pseudonym Massimo Campigli. After the war he went to Paris, where in 1919 he began to paint as a self-taught. Thanks to his talent he was immediately successful and from 1927 he devoted himself only to painting.
He was very impressed by Etruscan art during a visit to the Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, so much so that he approached the pictorial technique to that of the fresco, preferring geometric figures in his subjects. The female figure is however characteristic of Campigli's works, so much so that he stated:
“I have started painting women and will continue to paint women. Nothing but women. This corresponds, if I want to speak only of painting, to the fact that the woman is the perfect subject, that in the art of the whole world there will always be the woman and the man is absolutely in the background. And I couldn't conceive of anything else "
He performed extensive wall decorations, in Geneva at the League of Nations, at the University of Padua, and mosaic decorations, as in Rome, at the Metropolitan Cinema. He spent the 1960s in Paris, Rome, Saint-Tropez and Milan, where in 1967 a large retrospective was set up at the Palazzo Reale, in which the artist himself collaborated. He died on May 31, 1971 of a heart attack.