Renato Guttuso

Aldo Renato Guttuso (26 December 1911 – 18 January 1987) was an Italian painter and politician. He is considered one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and a key figure in Italian Expressionism. His art is characterized by strong social and political commentary, and as a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) he was twice elected Senator, serving from 1976 to 1983 during the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer.

Early years

Guttuso was born on 26 December 1911 in Bagheria, near Palermo. He was the son of Gioacchino Guttuso, a surveyor and amateur watercolor painter, and Giuseppina d'Amico. His date of birth is often mistakenly reported as 2 January 1912, since that was the day Giuseppina officially registered his birth with the municipality.

Early years

Guttuso began signing and dating his works at the age of thirteen. These were mainly copies of landscapes by 19th-century Sicilian painters, as well as French artists such as Millet and contemporary artists like Carrà, alongside original portraits. In 1928 he took part in his first group exhibition in Palermo.

Guttuso lived near the villas of Valguarnera and Palagonia, which he would soon depict in paintings inspired by the cliffs of Aspra. In Palermo and Bagheria, he witnessed the decline of 18th-century villas once owned by the aristocracy, abandoned due to political conflicts within municipal councils. At the same time, his family endured economic hardship caused by hostility from Fascists and the clergy toward his father.

Guttuso graduated from the Umberto I Classical High School in Palermo and continued his studies at the University of Palermo, where his artistic development followed the European figurative movements of the time, from Courbet to Van Gogh and Picasso. In the early 1930s he frequently visited the studio of one of the most prolific Futurist painters, Pippo Rizzo. In 1929 he began collaborating with newspapers and magazines, but in 1933 his first article on Picasso was censored by the Fascist regime, leading to the suspension of his contributions to the Palermo newspaper L’ora.

In 1931 two of his paintings were accepted by the jury of the Rome Quadriennale and included in a group exhibition of six Sicilian artists at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, attracting considerable interest in the Milanese art scene. Critic Franco Grasso described them as “a revelation, a Sicilian affirmation.”

Upon returning to Palermo, Guttuso opened a studio on Via Pisani and, together with painter Lia Pasqualino and sculptors Barbera and Nino Franchina, formed the “Group of Four” (Gruppo dei Quattro).

Social art and the Second World War

In 1937 Guttuso moved to Rome and opened his first studio in Piazza Melozzo.

Because of his flamboyant lifestyle, his friend Marino Mazzacurati nicknamed him “the Unbridled Guttuso.” He lived near prominent artists of the time, including Mario Mafai, Corrado Cagli, and Antonello Trombadori, and maintained close ties with the Milanese group of Giacomo Manzù and Aligi Sassu.

Rejecting academic conventions, Guttuso joined the “Corrente” movement and wrote for the Milanese journal “Corrente di Vita.” This movement was marked by strong opposition to Fascist rule and its cultural influence. Here he developed his “social” art, expressing political convictions in works such as “Flight in Campania” (1938) and “Escape from Etna,” the former dedicated to poet Federico García Lorca, executed by Franco’s supporters during the Spanish Civil War.

Guttuso continued painting during World War II, producing works ranging from landscapes of the Gulf of Palermo to a series of drawings entitled “Massacri” (“Massacres”), which indirectly condemned atrocities such as the Ardeatine massacre. In 1940 he joined the underground Italian Communist Party and lived for a time in Genoa before returning to Rome.

The painting “Crucifixion”

The painting “Crucifixion” (“Crocifissione”), completed in 1940, is the work for which he is best known and earned him second prize at the Fourth Bergamo Prize in 1942. At the time it was mocked by the clergy, who labeled Guttuso a “pictor diabolicus” (“diabolical painter”). Fascists also condemned it for portraying the horrors of war through a religious lens. Guttuso wrote in his diary: “This is a time of war. I want to depict Christ’s suffering as a contemporary scene… as a symbol of all those who, because of their ideas, endure humiliation, imprisonment, and torture.” In 1943 he became an active participant in the partisan resistance.

After the war, in 1945, Guttuso co-founded the “New Front of the Arts” (Fronte Nuovo delle Arti) together with artists such as Birolli, Marchiori, Vedova, and others, aiming to promote artists previously suppressed under Fascism. He also collaborated with the journal “Il Calendario del Popolo,” founded the same year. During this period he met and befriended Pablo Picasso, a friendship that lasted until Picasso’s death in 1973. Guttuso’s work at this time was dominated by socio-political themes depicting the everyday life of peasants and workers.

Later life and career

Guttuso completed “Resting Bricklayers” (“Muratori in riposo”), an ink and watercolor work begun during the war, a symbol of rebirth about which Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in 1962:

“The figures of ten workers stand white against the white masonry; noon is summer noon. But humbled flesh casts shadows; it is a disrupted order of whites rigorously followed by blacks. Noon is peaceful.”

In the following years, Guttuso painted “The Apprentice Who Sang” (1947) and “Sicilian Apprentices” (ten drawings published in Rome in 1951), in which his pictorial language became clear and stripped of all superfluous elements. He stated that these were preparatory studies for his 1949 painting “Occupation of Uncultivated Lands in Sicily,” exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1950.

“I believe this to be the legacy of my deepest and most distant inspiration: my childhood, my people, my peasants, my father the surveyor, the gardens of lemons and oranges, the gardens of a latitude I know and love, where I was born. Sicilian peasants hold the foremost place in my heart because I am one of them; their faces appear before me whatever I do, Sicilian peasants, so important in the history of Italy.”

In 1950 Guttuso participated in the Verzocchi Collection project (Forlì Municipal Art Gallery), presenting a self-portrait along with “Sicilian Worker,” “Bagheria on the Gulf of Palermo,” and “The Battle at the Admiral’s Bridge.” In the latter, he portrayed his grandfather Ciro as a Garibaldian soldier. He also produced series devoted to peasants’ land struggles, sulfur miners, cactus landscapes, and portraits of contemporary cultural figures such as Nino Garajo and Bruno Caruso.

In 1953 he took part in the First Trade Union Exhibition of the Rome Provincial Union at Via Margutta 54, alongside artists such as Antonio Vangelli, Carlo Levi, Pietro Cascella, Corrado Cagli, Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Domenico Purificato, and others. In 1956 Guttuso married Mimise Dotti, with poet Pablo Neruda as a witness. Mimise became his confidante and model.

Inspired by Dante, between 1959 and 1961 Guttuso created a series of colored drawings published in 1970 as “Dante Guttuso,” in which the characters of Hell are presented as exemplars of human history. From 1963 to 1964 his works were exhibited in the traveling show “Italian Paintings Today” in the Middle East and North Africa.

In the late 1960s and 1970s he completed a series devoted to the female figure, which became a dominant theme in his painting. Following “Donne stanze paesaggi, oggetti” (1967), he produced a series of portraits of Marta Marzotto, his muse for many years. Among the best-known works is “Cartolina,” a series of 37 mixed-media drawings published by Archinto as “Le Cartoline di Renato Guttuso.”

In 1971 he designed the banner for that year’s Palio di Siena. In 1972 he painted “The Funeral of Togliatti” (“I funerali di Togliatti”), now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. The painting allegorically depicts numerous communist figures to form an idealized collective image of 20th-century communist imagination.

His most famous “Palermo” painting is “The Market of Palermo” (“Vucciria di Palermo,” 1974), in which he expressed one of the many spirits of the Sicilian city through raw and visceral realism.

Political career

In 1950 he was awarded the World Peace Council Prize in Warsaw. In 1972 he received the Lenin Peace Prize.

In the general election of 20 June 1976, he was elected to the Senate of the Republic for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the Sciacca constituency, receiving 29,897 votes.

He was re-elected on 3 June 1979 for the Lucera constituency, receiving 29,418 votes.

Death

Mimise Dotti-Guttuso died on 6 October 1986. Shortly afterward, Guttuso followed her. Renato Guttuso died in Rome of lung cancer on 18 January 1987 at the age of 75. It was reported that on his deathbed he embraced Christianity, which he had criticized throughout his life. Marta Marzotto stated in interviews that Guttuso had always been an atheist. He donated many of his works to his hometown of Bagheria, now housed in the Villa Cattolica Museum. His tomb was designed by sculptor Giacomo Manzù.

After disputes regarding the ownership of his works, two prosecutors were appointed to resolve the conflict between Guttuso’s nephew, his adopted son Fabio Carapezza Guttuso, his longtime companion Marta Marzotto, the Rome Museum of Modern Art, and other claimants. Fabio Carapezza Guttuso was recognized as the sole heir to Guttuso’s works.

Painting gallery