ArtistItalianb.1911–d.1987
Renato Guttuso
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Renato Guttuso grew up in Bagheria, a coastal town outside Palermo where the light fell hard and the earth was contested. His father, a land surveyor and amateur watercolourist, pushed him toward law but Guttuso abandoned university in 1931 to paint full-time. That same year, two of his canvases were accepted by the Prima Quadriennale d'Arte Nazionale in Rome, where he encountered the work of Picasso and Velázquez for the first time. The collision between Sicilian light and Northern European modernism would define everything that followed.
By the late 1930s Guttuso had found his register: a dense, agitated oil painting that owed something to Expressionism and something to Baroque figuration, but was entirely his own. His 1938-39 canvas Fuga dall'Etna depicts villagers fleeing volcanic eruption with the compressed urgency of a Goya war scene. Two years later came Crocifissione, a sprawling, sexually charged Crucifixion that the Catholic Church condemned and that earned him the label pictor diabolicus from clergy while winning second prize at the Bergamo competition in 1942. The painting now hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.
Guttuso joined the banned Italian Communist Party in 1940 and spent parts of the war years in hiding. The experience deepened his commitment to painting as political witness. His post-war canvases turned toward the Sicilian peasantry with unflinching directness: Occupazione delle terre incolte di Sicilia (1949-50) shows a crowd of land workers surging forward in a tight horizontal frieze, painted in heavy impasto with ochres and reds that read as both earth and blood. I funerali di Togliatti (1972) is a monumental crowd scene honouring the Italian Communist Party leader, structured like a Renaissance altarpiece translated into street-level documentary.
His best-known single painting is La Vucciria (1974), a large oil depicting Palermo's market of the same name. Carcasses hang above wet stone, vegetables bleed colour, and the whole scene shimmers with a physical directness that sits somewhere between Chardin and Soutine. He donated it to the University of Palermo, where it remains in the Palazzo Steri. The same year he received the Lenin Peace Prize, one of several Soviet-bloc honours that reflected both his politics and his international standing. He served as a senator for the Communist Party from 1976 to 1983.
Guttuso's work appears regularly at Italian auction houses. On the Auctionist platform, his 21 catalogued lots have been handled primarily by Pandolfini Casa d'Aste and Wannenes Art Auctions. The highest recorded sale in our database was 50,000 EUR for a 1961 oil and collage on canvas, Finestra e tavolo da lavoro, followed by 35,000 EUR for an acrylic on paper, Uovo e drappo bianco (1981). His paintings consistently outperform works on paper at auction, and estimates for significant canvases in the Italian market typically begin in the low five figures.