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Attilio Salemme (1911-1955) was an American painter active between the 1930s and 1950s.

Early life and family
Salemme was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1911. To support his family after his father's death, Salemme left school and, falsifying his age, joined the United States Marine Corps in 1927. He was stationed for six months in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. After his discharged in 1928, he moved with his mother and sister to New York City. Here he bounced between menial jobs and took night courses, hoping to become a chemical engineer.

In 1943 Salemme married Lucia Autorino. Salemme's half-brother was the sculptor Antonio Salemme.

Political activity
Salemme was among the Trotskyists around James Cannon who were expelled from Socialist Party in the fall of 1937, the bulk of which went on to form the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. Salemme was not among them. In November 1937, Salemme was among several individuals or groups that challenged the official Trotskyist line on the Soviet Union. A "Salemme-Joerger Group" put forward a document describing the Soviet Union as "capitalist and fascist" and calling Trotsky a "juridical cretin" for his belief that a legal characteristic such as state-ownership defined the nature of the Soviet Union. Later that month, after a meeting at which Arne Swabeck told dissidents that they must "give up your anti-working class views regarding the workers' fatherland, the Soviet Union," which Swabeck said "must be defended," Salemme was among 12 militants to leave the official Trotskyists. Salemme's compatriot Joerger then went on to found the Revolutionary Marxist League. Salemme himself gave up on politics. He noted in an autobiographical writing that "I quit politics at the end of 1937, convinced that the second world war was around the corner and nothing could stop it. ... One day in the summer of 1938 I pawned a rifle which I had been saving for the revolution and bought a set of paints, determined to find out if painting was the thing I had been running away from all my life."

Legacy
His papers are held by the Archives of American Art.