The essay revolves around the specific momenti in the career of Marino Marini, when the artist fled to Switzerland during WWII. Focusing on a group of work of the early 1940s, the essay aims to assess the importance of this moment both in the development of the artist's vision and the broader context of the artistic discussion at that time. The notion of "expressionism", as a category defining the intense expressiveness and a sort of synthetic and almost rough treatment of the surfaces and volumes of sculpture, proves to be essential to describe this group of works. As a notion widely discussed by critics after WWII to identify the moment and concern of many artists during the war, Expressionism helps understand better the sources which Marino looked at (ranging from Medieval sculpture to Donatello to Rodin) and ultimately his contribution to the reassessment of the tenets of sculpture in early postwar years.