Renato Guttuso

Renato Guttuso was born in Bagheria, in the province of Palermo, on December 26, 1911, although his birth was officially registered on January 2, 1912, and he died in Rome on January 18, 1987. “I left Sicily in January 1931 because two of my small paintings were accepted at the first Quadriennale. From then on, it was years of difficult and very difficult life in Rome, Perugia, and Milan. In 1941, the pioneer of Italian collecting, Engineer Alberto Della Ragione, offered me a contract that allowed me to live decently and work without worries. Then came the war and the resistance.”

The “realist poetics, or poetics of naturalness,” Guttuso stated, “is, in our opinion, the only possible poetics, that is, the one most consistent with the concept of creative freedom and most directly related to feeling. A poetics that excludes concerns for any refinement of form which may serve as a pretext for any logic of figuration. Indeed, there exists a world of poetry that is immutable because it is the immutable world of man, beyond which nothing else exists: the relationship between man and his society, man and woman, man and the elements, nature and destiny.”

The early 1940s were hard times, and people preferred to hang pleasant paintings on their walls rather than conceptual ones. For Guttuso, however, a painting had to tell what was happening. Thus began a long observation of real things, giving life to a dense gallery of still lifes that delineate the characteristics of his style. The still life became a testing ground for his explorations of form and color. Guttuso employed a certain distortion of volumes inspired by Cubism—clearly influenced by Picasso's Guernica, of which the artist kept a reproduction in his wallet—without touching upon the extreme outcomes of the avant-garde, enclosing his objects in forms that appeared closed and compact, despite their distortion.

His collected and everyday interiors overflow with objects of notable material consistency, almost tangible, thanks to his decisive and robust brushwork. His expressive potential is manifested in the strident contrast of pure tones: vibrant yellows, fiery reds, and intense blues. The perspectives are often constricted and the environments only vaguely hinted at, so that the attention focuses on the objects, piled on the table in disordered and random compositions, which Guttuso carefully assembled in his studio and then depicted in ever-different combinations. In The Blue Window, the red drapery, recurring in numerous paintings, emerges prominently, assuming the role of an ideological banner, becoming a red of hope rather than violence. The spiraled opaline bottle demonstrates contact with the compositions of Giorgio Morandi, with whom Guttuso acknowledged “a dialectical relationship,” despite his generation being critical of the master.

Beyond the Morandian reference, the two more popular wine flasks again point to the everyday dimension, to Guttuso's need to narrate life. Other beloved objects of Guttuso's figurative style appear in The White Cage and Leaves, where the motif of the cage returns, as always empty, and here significantly open, serving as a metaphor for escape or liberation. Among Guttuso's works, collector Giuseppe Iannaccone has chosen, in addition to still lifes, some exceptional portraits: that of his partner Mimise, that of Mario Alicata, and one of the most intense: that of Antonino Santangelo, depicted half-length, seated, with his torso bent forward and his arms resting on his lower limbs. The hands, almost disproportionate, are engaged in holding a book interrupted halfway, among whose pages one might glimpse the reason for that dark, worried face, almost resigned to his own thoughts. The resemblance to the subject is extraordinary, so much so that Roberto Longhi wrote in the obituary of the critic: “Whoever wishes to see him whole, in all his aspects, needs only to look at the portrait painted by Guttuso in 1942.”