By Renato Guttuso
Located in Roma, IT
Wonderful Renato Guttuso drawing of the Venus de Milo
A sensual evocation of antiquity: the classical Muse in Guttuso’s mature period
A fine original drawing on paper by the painter Renato Guttuso (1911–1987), probably created in the 1970s, a period in which the artist produced numerous drawings on paper inspired by the female figure and classical sculpture, with an expressionist approach.
Mixed media: ink and tempera.
The work is enhanced by an Empire-style frame in gilded wood with gold leaf.
The black line is bold and vigorous, typical of Guttuso’s drawings, whilst the colouring is fluid, expressive and non-realistic.
Signed lower right "Guttuso"
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Dimensions are frame included
The painting is also protected by glass
Aldo Renato Guttuso (26 December 1911 – 18 January 1987) was a very important Italian painter
He is considered to be among the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and is among the key figures of Italian expressionism.
His best-known works include Flight from Etna (1938–39), Crucifixion (1941), and La Vucciria (1974). Guttuso also designed for the theatre (including sets and costumes for Histoire du Soldat, Rome, 1940) and did illustrations for books.
Those for Elizabeth David’s Italian Food (1954),introduced him to many in the English-speaking world.
A fierce anti-Fascist, "he developed out of expressionism and the harsh light of his native land to paint landscapes and social commentary".
Guttuso was born on 26 December, 1911 in Bagheria, near Palermo.
He was the son of Gioacchino Guttuso, land surveyor and amateur watercolorist, and Giuseppina d'Amico. Guttuso's birth date is often incorrectly listed as January 2, 1912, as this is when Giuseppina reported his birth to the registry office.
Guttuso began signing and dating his works at the age of thirteen.
They were mostly copies of nineteenth-century Sicilian landscape painters as well as French painters such as Millet and contemporary artists such as Carrà, but there were also original portraits.
In 1928 he participated in his first collective exhibition in Palermo.
Guttuso lived close to a house amongst the Valguarnera villas and Palagonia, which he would soon represent in paintings inspired by the cliffs of Aspra.
In Palermo and Bagheria Guttuso observed the dereliction of 18th-century villas previously belonging to the nobility, abandoned to decay as a consequence of political infighting within the municipal chambers.
At the same time, his family suffered a period of economic stress because of the hostility shown by Fascists and the clergy towards his father.
Guttuso finished the Umberto I classical high school in Palermo and continued his studies at the University of Palermo, where his development was modelled according to the European figurative trends of the day, from Courbet to Van Gogh and to Picasso. In the early 1930s Guttuso was a frequent visitor to the studio of one of the most prolific futuristic painters, Pippo Rizzo.
In 1929 he began contributing to newspapers and periodicals and in 1933 his first article on Picasso was targeted by Fascist censorship and caused the suspension of his contribution to the Palermo newspaper L’ora.
In 1931 two of his paintings were accepted by the jury of the Quadriennale di Roma and were included in a collective exhibition of six Sicilian painters at the Galleria del Milione, Milan, which aroused great interest among the Milanese artistic milieu.
The paintings were acclaimed by critic Franco Grasso as a "disclosure, a Sicilian affirmation".
Back in Palermo Guttuso opened a studio in Pisani street and together with painter Lia Pasqualino and sculptors Barbera and Nino Franchina formed the Gruppo dei Quattro (The Group of Four).
In 1937 Guttuso moved to Rome and opened his first studio in Piazza Melozzo.
Due to his exuberant lifestyle, his friend Marino Mazzacurati nicknamed him "Unbridled Guttuso".
He lived close to significant artists of the time: Mario Mafai, Corrado Cagli, Antonello Trombadori, also keeping in contact with the group from Milan of Giacomo Manzù and Aligi Sassu.
Having rejected every academic canon, Guttuso joined the Corrente movement and wrote for Corrente di Vita in Milan.
The movement was characterized by its strong opposition to Fascist rule and its influence on culture.
Here he developed his "social" art, with his political attitudes evident in paintings such as Fucilazione in Campagna (1938) and Escape from Etna, the former dedicated to the poet Federico García Lorca, who had been shot by Franco's supporters during the Spanish Civil War.
Guttuso continued painting during World War II, with his work ranging from landscape glimpses of the Gulf of Palermo to a collection of drawings entitled Massacri ("Massacres"), which implicitly denounced slaughters such as the Adreatine massacre.
In 1940 he joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party and briefly took refuge in Genova, later returning to Rome.
Crocifissione ("Crucifixion"), painted in 1940, is the painting for which he is best remembered and which earned him the second prize in the fourth Bergamo Prize in 1942.
At the time it was derided by the clergy, who labelled Guttuso a "pictor diabolicus" ("devilish painter").
The Fascists also denounced it for depicting the horrors of war through the lens of religion. Guttuso wrote in his diary: "this is a time of war. I wish to paint the torment of Christ as a contemporary scene... as a symbol of all those who, because of their ideas, endure outrage, imprisonment and torment".
He became an active participant in the partisan struggle in 1943.
After the war, in 1945, Guttuso, along with artists Birolli, Marchiori, Vedova and others, founded the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (New Arts Front) as a vessel for the promotion of the work of those artists who had previously been bound by Fascist rule.
He also collaborated on the magazine Il Calendario del Popolo, established the same year.
During this time he also met and befriended Pablo Picasso.
Their friendship would last until Picasso's death in 1973. Socio-political themes dominated Guttuso's work during this time, depicting the day-to-day lives of peasants and blue-collar workers.
Guttuso finished Muratori in riposo ("Builders resting"), an artwork in china ink and watercolour that he had started during the war, a symbol of rebirth of which Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in 1962:
The shapes of ten workers
emerge white over white masonry
the noon is that of the summer.
But the humiliated flesh
projects a shadow; is the disarranged order
of the white colors, that is faithfully followed
by the black ones. The noon is a peaceful one.
In the following years Guttuso painted Contadino che zappa (1947) and Contadini di Sicilia (ten drawings published in Rome in 1951), in which his pictorial language became clear and free of all superfluous elements.
Guttuso wrote that these were preparatory sketches for his 1949...
Category
1970s Modern Henry Mayo Bateman Art
MaterialsWatercolor, Pencil, Paper, Ink
