Guttuso, Renato

Guttuso, Renato (1912–1987). Italian painter, born at Bagheria, near Palermo, in Sicily. He was a forceful personality and Italy's leading exponent of Social Realism in the 20th century; although he never subordinated artistic quality to political propaganda, his art was often the direct expression of his hatred of injustice and the abuse of power. In 1931 he abandoned legal studies for painting, in which he was mainly self-taught. He settled in Rome in 1937 and in the following year became a founder member of the anti-Fascist association Corrente. Fascism was not his only target, however, for he also pilloried the Mafia and in 1943 published a series of drawings protesting against the massacres that took place under the German occupation of Italy. His most famous painting of this time is probably the Crucifixion (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, 1941), which caused a public outcry when it won an award at a competition in Bergamo in 1942. It was attacked by the Catholic Church because of its modernity and use of female nudity. After the war (in which he worked with the Resistance) Guttuso became a member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in 1946. His post-war works were often inspired by the struggles of the Sicilian peasantry, and his other subjects included the 1968 student riots in Paris, a city he often visited (he was widely travelled and his work was admired and influential in Eastern Europe). Many of his paintings were large, with allegorical overtones, typically painted in a vigorous Expressionist style. His interest in the history of art provided him with a major theme in his work, separate from his political and social concerns, and he introduced visual ‘quotations’ from Picasso and other artists into his own paintings. However, there was a completely different side to his work, for he also painted simple and direct still-lifes. Bernard Berenson, the famous connoisseur of Renaissance art, called Guttuso ‘the last painter in the great tradition of Italian art'.