Renato Guttuso (1911-1987) - Donne

Lithograph on paper - Hand-signed in the bottom right and numbered in the bottom left - 50x70 cm - year 1983 - Limited edition - author's proof sample (p.d'a.) that will be shipped with a certificate of guarantee - unframed - excellent condition - private collection - purchase and provenance: Italy - shipping via UPS - SDA - DHL - TNT - BRT
Biography
Bagheria (Pa), 1911 - Rome, 1987.
Renato Guttuso's existential and artistic journey unfolds during this period. He was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1912 (the same year as Aligi Sassu). His life evolved from a hypothetical law degree to a career as a painter. From his early paintings depicting his Sicilian peasants and fellow villagers, to the famous "Escape from Etna" of 1937, and the equally celebrated Vucciria, Palermo's popular market. From this point on, the painter pursued a purely figurative style, counterbalanced by richly textured themes rooted in the peasant, rural, and popular world: social themes or overtly political subjects. He then moved to Rome and formed a group with the painters Birolli, Fontana, and Persico.
With the outbreak of World War II, the artist painted a series of paintings titled "Gott mit Uns," or "God is with us," a motto engraved on the buckles of German soldiers. His polemical verve emerged forcefully. Guttuso never abandoned his personal "campaign of ideas," which reached its peak with "I funerali di Togliatti," a manifesto of anti-fascism.
In the postwar period, he stylistically followed Pablo Picasso's first period, the so-called "Blue" period. In 1946, he founded the New Arts Front with Birolli, Vedova, Morlotti, and Turcato.
In 1968, he painted paintings reflecting the European and French situation. He traveled to Paris, where he portrayed young people at the first protest marches in what would eventually become the legendary "French May." From 1969, he settled in Rome, on the legendary Via Margutta, the street of painters, with his partner Marta Marzotto, the beautiful countess, a former rice weeder and model. This was the artist's most intimate period, so to speak. He then began a series of purely autobiographical paintings, among which perhaps one of his masterpieces, "Witch Melancholy," from 1982, stands out.
Guttuso is a painter who, despite living in a time filled with social and cultural change, and experiencing it all as an absolute protagonist, hasn't changed his figurative style. Ultimately, he remains a painter illuminated by his lush, starry Sicily. His humanity is always depicted with a tortuous plasticity. In the human form—nervous and tense, yet always recognizable—which he concentrates on canvas, there is already all the pain in the world.
As a very young man he attended the workshop of a cart decorator. At the end of the 1920s, while completing his classical studies, he began to train in the studio of the futurist Pippo Rizzo. After exhibiting at the 1st Rome Quadrennial (1931) and in a group exhibition at the Galleria del Milione in Milan (1932), he abandoned his university studies and settled in Rome (1933). He formed friendships with Mafai, Pirandello, Cagli, and Ziveri, who influenced his painting in a "tonal" sense. In 1935 he participated in the 2nd Quadrennial and in 1936 in the Venice Biennale. In 1938 he created his first epic-popular painting, Escape from Etna.
In 1942, at the Bergamo Prize, he won second prize with Crucifixion, an open denunciation of the disasters wrought by the Regime. During this period, he studied and reinterpreted the lively figurations of post-Cubist Picasso and accentuated his polemical streak towards social issues, playing a fundamental role in the "realist" evolution of Italian painting. He also played a notable role as a link between the Roman and Milanese circles associated with the "Corrente." During the war years, alongside figures such as Trombadori and other exponents of the Communist Party, he actively participated in the Resistance. He began the Massacres series (collected in the book Gott mit uns). In 1947, he joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti. From the 1950s, he was the leading exponent of a "realist" movement, politically engaged alongside the PCI and often polemically engaged with the "formalist" tendencies of much abstract art.