Renato Guttuso

Renato Guttuso was born on 26 December 1911 in Bagheria, Sicily, and died in Rome in 1987. He is one of the most internationally recognised Italian painters of the twentieth century: an artist who chose to stand on the side of reality, with all the force, colour, and contradiction that entails.

Trained between Palermo and Rome, Guttuso developed a figurative language of extraordinary intensity, shaped by the lesson of Picasso, by European Realism, and by a deeply civil vision of the world. Sicily — its markets, its light, its bodies — never left him. La Vucciria (1974), the famous Palermo market painted with an almost hallucinatory realism, may be the work in which all of this converges most powerfully.

But Guttuso is also the Crucifixion (1940–41), a manifesto against war painted in the midst of fascism. He is The funeral of Togliatti (1972), at once document and painting. He is the nudes, the portraits, the still lifes charged with life. A painter who never stopped believing that art must have something to say — and who always said it with painterly matter of rare quality.