Renato Guttuso

At a very young age, he frequented the workshop of a cart decorator. At the end of the 1920s he began training in the studio of the futurist Pippo Rizzo. In 1933 he settled in Rome, where he formed friendships with Mafai, Pirandello, Cagli and Ziveri, who influenced his painting in a “tonal” sense. In 1935 he participated in the II Quadrennial and in 1936 in the Venice Biennale. In 1942, at the Bergamo Prize, he obtained second prize with the Crucifixion, an open denunciation of the disasters caused by the Regime. In this period he studied the lively figurations of the post-cubist Picasso and accentuated his polemical streak towards social issues, playing a fundamental role in the “realist” evolution of Italian painting. Initially his action in favor of a committed painting takes place

within the fascist left headed by Giuseppe Bottai and the magazine “Primato”. During the war years, alongside Antonello Trombadori and other exponents of the Communist Party, he actively participated in the Resistance. In 1947 he joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti. From the 1950s he became the main exponent of a “realist” current

politically committed alongside the P.C.I., and often polemically in conflict with the “formalist” tendencies of much abstract art, such as those expressed by the Forma 1 group.