Renato Guttuso

Renato Guttuso

Renato Guttuso (born December 26, 1911 in Bagheria (officially registered in Palermo on January 2, 1912), † January 18, 1987 in Rome ) was an Italian painter, draftsman, illustrator, set designer, art critic, essayist and politician. He represented a morally motivated realism that developed above all in dealing with historical and contemporary realisms and the work of Pablo Picasso .

Life

Childhood and youth

Guttuso was born in 1911 in Bagheria, Sicily, a villa suburb of Palermo. His parents were middle-class, liberal and artistically open-minded. Grandfather Ciro, as Garibaldin, had led the units of Bagheria in the conquest of Palermo. Guttuso's father, the surveyor and hobby watercolorist Gioacchino, encouraged the son to paint. Guttuso remained essentially self-taught. He discovered his love for painting as a child and learned how to use paint and brushes from a Sicilian cart painter in Bagheria. The first signed pictures - portraits and landscapes - were created around 1924, the first commissioned work followed around 1928. The futuristic painter Pippo Rizzo in Palermo helped him to have exhibition opportunities on the Italian mainland. From 1929 Guttuso published texts on art, mainly in the magazines Il Selvaggio , L'Ora and Emporium .

At his father's request, Guttuso began studying law after graduating from high school. In 1931 he broke off his studies and went to Rome, where two pictures of him were accepted at the First Quadriennale d'arte Italiana.

1930s: fascism and resistance

From 1935 to 1936 he did military service in Milan. He became friends with the artists Renato Birolli and Giacomo Manzù , the writers Elio Vittorini and Salvatore Quasimodo, and with the critics Raffaele de Grada and Giuseppe Pagano. It was the circle in which Guttuso took a clear anti-fascist stance against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War . In 1938 he settled permanently in Rome, where he met his future wife Mimise Dotti. In the same year he became an active member of the group of artists and writers around the magazine Corrente (initially Corrente di vita ), which was later dissolved by the fascists , which turned against the idealism of the “ Novecento Italiano ” promoted by fascist cultural policy . This group also included Renato Birolli, Mario Mafai, Raffaele de Grada, Lucio Fontana and Fausto Pirandello.

Around 1938 Guttuso received a postcard with a picture of Picasso's recently created century work Guernica , which he carried in his wallet from then on. For him, “Guernica” became a key work and a shining example of politically responsible art. In numerous of his own works, he dealt with its formal and content-related solutions, its symbolism and political clout. In 1945, immediately after the end of the war, Guttuso made the personal acquaintance of Picasso in Paris and became friends with him. In the same year Guttuso made his debut as a set designer, an activity that, like illustration and art writing, became an integral part of his oeuvre. In the following years he joined the anti-fascist resistance movement. In 1940 Guttuso joined the underground Communist Party.

the post war period

After the war ended, Guttuso founded the Nuova secessione artistica (later renamed Fronte Nuovo delle Arti ) together with Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Pericle Fazzini, Leoincilo, Ennio Morlotti, Armando Pizzinato, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato and Emilio Vedova . Together with this group, Guttuso exhibited his works in Milan and at the Venice Biennale in 1948 until they were split into abstract and figurative artists . Guttuso later became an important exponent of realism . In the post-war period, when the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome was confiscated by Italy, Guttuso worked in one of the villa's studios for almost ten years.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Guttuso's work and person found increasing interest in the USSR, where he became the spokesman for the debates on realism and abstraction. In 1951 Guttuso received the International Peace Prize of the World Peace Council in Warsaw, and a year later he received the same award in Moscow. He became a member of the Central Committee of the PCI. From the mid-1950s he spent the summer months in Velate near Varese, where his wife Mimise had inherited a house. Guttuso was regularly represented at the Venice Biennale until 1956, in 1960 with his own hall.

Guttuso: profile of a woman

1960s to 1980s

From 1966 to 1968 Guttuso was a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma . In 1968 he was visiting lecturer at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HfbK). From the beginning of the seventies he devoted himself increasingly to politics: He was elected to the city council of Palermo and from 1975 was senator for two legislative terms . In the major national daily newspapers such as Unità and Corriere della Sera he represented his view of realism and took part in cultural-political debates. With Vucciria , the mural of the legend of Cola Pesce and La notte di Gibellina , homages to Sicily were created. In 1987 the artist died in Rome. He was buried in the garden of Villa Cattolica in Bagheria. The sculptor Giacomo Manzù created the funerary monument. The year he died, he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Afterlife

A few days before his death, Guttuso donated a large part of his paintings to the Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna in Rome. His hometown Bagheria, on the other hand, received early works that have been exhibited there since 1986 in the Guttuso Museum in the Villa Cattolica, which is set up here. His adopted son, Fabio Carapezza-Guttuso, heads the Guttuso archives in the artist's last Roman studio in the Palazzo del Grillo above the Trajan's Forums.

Works

Guttuso's fame as a painter and draftsman is mainly based on a number of committed oil paintings and a cycle of drawings from the time of the Second World War . In addition, he created landscapes , nudes , portraits , still lifes , epic-allegorical representations and history pictures . Guttuso also made sets for performances on Italian stages and numerous book illustrations from the 1940s onwards.

Guttuso's first signed works were created around the age of 12; his early portraits and landscapes were initially influenced by post-impressionism. In the 1930s, his work showed influences from the “Novecento Italiano” and the compact, archaic style of Carlo Carrà; Examples are the paintings “Palinuro” (Palinurus) or “I naufraghi” (The Shipwrecked) from 1932. The Fucilazione in Campagna, related to the shooting of Federico García Lorca during the Spanish Civil War (shooting in the field, 1938, oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome) was Guttuso's first work that took a clear political position. In 1939 the Fuga dall'Etna was created (Escape from Etna, oil on canvas, ibid .; 3rd Prize of the Premio Bergamo 1940). Stylistically and thematically from Eugène Delacroix ' Freedom leads the people , but also influenced by Expressionism, the picture also took on motifs from Picasso's Guernica to thematize the occupation of fallow land by Sicilian farmers.

During the Second World War Guttuso painted a number of still lifes, including Interno con gabbia (Interior with Cage, 1939, oil on canvas), Un angolo dello studio a via Pompeo Magno (A corner of the studio in via Pompeo Magno, 1941, oil on Canvas) and Natura morta con drappo rosso (still life with red cloth, 1942, oil on canvas) - rooms filled with disturbing symbols in bold shades that address the intrusion of fascism into people's everyday lives. The "Crocifissione" (oil on canvas, ibid.) From 1940 with the naked mourner under the cross of Christ and a still life made of instruments of torture was taken as a provocation in fascist and clerical circles. “The crucifixion,” says Werner Haftmann , “had an extraordinary effect. In 1942 she received the renowned 'Premio Bergamo'. And that brought the bourgeois world and the church on the scene, which revolted over the naked Magdalena and the unconventional representation and denounced the painter as a 'Pictor diabolicus'. But the young intellectual Italy understood very well that this place of execution did not actually mean the sacrifice of the Son of God, but a representative solemn 'imago' for malice and suffering of the contemporary world shaken in its crises. "

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Exhibitions

Villa Cattolica in Bagheria

Guttuso's works were exhibited seven times at the Venice Biennale from 1948 and at documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 . After his death, an extensive museum was set up in the Villa Cattolica in Bagheria .

Selection of further solo exhibitions

• 2011: Renato Guttuso - Centenario Della Nascita , Galleria Guastalla Centro Arte, Livorno
• 2010: Guttuso. Passione e Realtà , Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma
• 2005: Renato Guttuso. Opere della Fondazione Francesco Pellin , Chiostro del Bramante, Rome
• 2004: Renato Guttuso - Dipinti, tecniche miste, disegni, opere grafiche 1938 - 1985 , Galleria Guastalla Centro Arte, Livorno
• 2002: Antologica. Renato Guttuso , Galleria Biasutti & Biasutti Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin
• 1996: Guttuso , Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, FE
• 1992: Guttuso , Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg
• 1991: Renato Guttuso - paintings and drawings , Kunsthalle Tübingen , Tübingen
• 1989: Renato Guttuso - oil paintings and drawings, large-format etchings , Galerie Michael Schultz, Berlin
• Renato: Guttuso "Opere 1975 - 1985" , Galleria La Fenice, Sassari
• 1987: Renato Guttuso - Palazzo Forti , Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Verona
• 1986: RENATO GUTTUSO "Interni ed esterni" , Galleria La Fenice, Sassari
• 1985: Renato Guttuso - Studio d'Arte Raffaelli , Palazzo Wolkenstein, Trento
• 1978: Renato Guttuso. Målningar 1934–1977 , Moderna Museet, Stockholm
• 1977: Renato Guttuso - paintings and hand drawings , Museum Ludwig , Cologne
• 1976: Renato Guttuso - I Tetti di Sicilia - Galleria Anna D'Ascanio , Rome
• 1974: Renato Guttuso - The Banquet - Frankfurter Kunstverein , Frankfurt / Main
• 1972: Renato Guttuso - New Society for Fine Arts (NGBK) , Berlin

literature

• Monica Biasiolo: "Il rosso di Guttuso:" Realtà di una lotta, speranza, vittoria, pietà " ", in: Intellettuali italiani del secondo Novecento , ed. by A. Barwig and Th. Stauder, Frankfurt a. M .: Oldenbourg 2007, pp. 380-408.
• Eva Gründel, Heinz Tomek: Sicily. 5th updated edition. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-7701-3476-1 .
• Renato Guttuso, Mauricio Calvesi: Renato Guttuso. Paintings and drawings , catalog publication appeared on the occasion of the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Tübingen , the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf , the Kunstverein in Hamburg . Stuttgart: Hatje 1991, ISBN 3775703519
• Richard Hiepe: Guttuso (= contemporary artists. Vol. 21, ZDB -ID 845168-0 ). Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1961.

Web links

Commons : Renato Guttuso  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Renato Guttuso in the catalog of the German National Library
• Materials by and about Renato Guttuso in the documenta archive
• Biographical information in the Guttuso archive

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Fabio Carapezza Guttuso (ed.): Renato Guttuso. Biografia per immagini. = Biography through images. Città aperta, Troina (Enna) 2009, ISBN 978-88-8137-416-8 , p. 16.
2. ^ Costanzo Costantini: Ritratto di Renato Guttuso. Camunia, Brescia 1985.
3. ↑ Fabio Carapezza Guttuso (ed.): Guttuso e il teatro musicale. Charter, Milan 1997, ISBN 88-8158-144-2 (exhibition catalog, Palermo, Teatro Massimo 1997-1998).
4. ↑ Honorary Members: Renato Guttuso. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 11, 2019 . 
5. ↑ In the essay by Lara Pucci: Fighting fascism in the Kitchen: The Domestic Context in Visconti's Ossessione and Guttuso's Still Life Series. In: Immediations. Vol. 3, 2006, ISSN  1742-7444 , pp. 61–77, the author also sheds light on the connections between Guttuso's still life and Visconti's film “Ossessione”.
6. ↑ Werner Haftmann : Renato Guttuso - man and work. In: Renato Guttuso. Paintings and drawings. Hatje, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-7757-0351-9 , pp. 9-19, here p. 15.