Renato Guttuso .

Renato Guttuso (Bagheria, 1911 - Rome, 1987).
Untitled.
Mixed media on cardboard.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 48 x 38'5 cm.
Renato Guttuso is one of the main Italian exponents of expressionist painting. Son of the topographer and amateur watercolorist Gioacchino Guttuso, his early artistic inclination was favored by his progenitor and by diverse stays in the workshops of Domenico Quattrociocchi and Emilio Murdolo. When he was only about 13 years old, the artist began to sign his own paintings. During his adolescence he worked and continued his training with the futurist Pippo Rizzo, in Palermo, thus opening himself to the avant-garde world. Settled in Palermo, he would form together with the artists Lia Paqualino, Barbera and Nino Franchina the so-called "Gruppo dei Quattro". Together with these artists he would deepen in the expressionist way, rejecting the academic tradition, looking for the expressive and emotional sense of color. Later he would constitute the artistic movement "Corrente", opposed to the officialist culture but also to fascism. Guttuso would later spend three years in Milan, where he would develop an art with a strong social, political, anti-war message, to finally settle in Rome, where he would open a studio in via Margutta, frequenting artists such as Mario Mafai, Corrado Cagli, Trombadori, Aligi Sassu and others. His last years, marked by loneliness after the death of his wife, correspond to a certain approach to the Christian faith, but always from a humanist point of view, defending equality among men. The work we now present is a good example of his intensely expressionist style, marked by a strong, dark, dynamic and undulating line that draws the main elements of a composition where the human face is the protagonist, and by an emotional use of color.