Interno con accessori di studio (damigiana, cesto e sedia)

Material

Oil and gouache on paper laid on canvas; 155.70 x 205.00 cm

Dating

1960

About the artist

Renato Guttuso, born Aldo Renato Guttuso (Bagheria, 26 December 1911 – Rome, 18 January 1987), was an Italian painter and politician improperly referred to as an exponent of socialist realism, a protagonist of Italian neo-realist painting that was expressed in the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti artists.

The son of Gioacchino, an amateur land surveyor and watercolourist, and Giuseppina d’Amico – who preferred to denounce his birth in Palermo on 2 January 1912 due to disagreements with the Bagheria municipal administration over the couple’s liberal ideas – little Renato manifested his predisposition for painting at an early age.

Influenced by his father’s hobby and by frequenting the studio of painter Domenico Quattrociocchi as well as the workshop of cart painter Emilio Murdolo, young Renato began to date and sign his own paintings as soon as he was thirteen. These were mostly copies (19th century Sicilian landscape painters but also French painters such as Millet or contemporary artists such as Carrà), but there was no lack of original portraits. During his adolescence, he also began to frequent the studio of the futurist painter Pippo Rizzo and artistic circles in Palermo. In 1928, at just seventeen years of age, he participated in his first group exhibition in Palermo.

His art, linked to expressionism, was also characterised by a strong social commitment, which also led him to political experience as a senator for the Italian Communist Party for two terms, during Enrico Berlinguer’s secretariat.