“These portraits, studies of interiors and still lifes (or rather objects that characterise a place and time) combine the expressive qualities developed by Guttoso throughout his career. An artist who never ceased to create innovative forms, within the framework of the figurative”.

After a triumphant debut with Fuga dall’Etna (Escape from Etna) at the 2nd Bergamo Prize exhibition in 1940, when he was still in his twenties, Renato Guttuso established his reputation during World War II, becoming a dominant figure on the art scene in the post-war period. His being a member of the Italian Communist Party, his polemical spirit and his fondness for everyday subjects, made him the leading exponent of Realism until the late 1950s, when his painting began to show signs of renewal. In 1958 orange groves, views of Velate, people smoking, passersby and domestic interiors supplanted the ambitious canvases denouncing social injustice that had brought him international fame. Often executed by alternating areas of oil paint with large pieces of collage, the works were presented in February-March 1959 at the Galleria del Milione. “These portraits, studies of interiors and still lifes (or rather objects that characterise a place and time) combine the expressive qualities developed by Guttoso throughout his career. An artist who never ceased to create innovative forms, within the framework of the figurative”.¹ Franco Russoli’s introduction seems to herald the success of the solo exhibition in Milan. In fact, the reviews - unanimous for a change - spoke of the artist’s questioning Realism in these works by establishing a more relaxed dialogue with the Informel trend, after at least a decade of polemics.

Oggetti (Nello studio) (Objects [In the Studio]) was one of the twenty-eight paintings in the show. Turpentine, glasses, a roller, a bowl and a yellow cloth are piled on a worktable at Velate. A foreshortened view and the window and far wall depicted frontally, eliminate the spatial distance. The use of different materials adds variety to the whole. The can in the centre, painted in oils on paper mounted on canvas like the other tools used daily by the artist, has a felt stopper. Although partly concealed by colour, pages torn from magazines and catalogues suggest Guttuso’s reasons for executing the work, as does the date. In the bottom right corner, a short article in German announces the recent death of the painter Franz M. Jansen (“its am 21 Mai gestorben”), which limits the date of execution to between the end of May 1958 and the opening at the Milione on 19 February. A cutting with female nudes and other fragments from the same periodical, make reference to the Expressionist movement; mention is made of Oskar Kokoschka and Henri Cadiou, on whom Maximilien Gauthier wrote a monograph, published in 1958. On the untidy work surface, extracts from a reprinted article entitled “Mattia Preti (Critica figurativa pura)” by Roberto Longhi - perhaps motivated by the Mostra del Seicento Europeo held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, in 1956 - stand out, due to the pale colour of the paper. There are also parts of Preti’s Return of the Prodigal Son, held by Palazzo Reale, Naples, and featured in the Rome exhibition. In an essay originally published in the arts magazine La Voce of 9 October 1913, Longhi praised the “granite-like, atomic material” of the drapery held by the little girl in the foreground, and the torsion and billowing that make it resemble “one of the most noble draperies by Cézanne”.² Hence Guttuso deliberately seems to have painted the yellow cloth in the manner of the Aix-en-Provence master. 

He also isolates the opening of the article on Mattia Preti: along with the title we read the passage in which the author passes judgement on the defeat of the Tuscan Renaissance and on drawing as ars artium. After cancelling Caravaggio’s name, the artist inserts a cutting praising those who had “rejected abstractness [and] intellectualism”. Through Longhi’s words, Guttuso resumed a discourse he had begun over a year earlier in the scholar’s magazine Paragone. In January 1957, in fact, his article “Del realismo del presente e dell’altro” (On the Realism of Today and Other Things) he advocated a new kind of figuration, freed of social themes and open to the linguistic experimentation of the present. When Longhi presented Guttuso’s drawings at the Galleria Il Fiore, Florence, in March 1959, he confessed that he had not seen the solo exhibition at the Milione. Nevertheless, Oggetti seems to be dedicated to him. In a room that presented tributes to past models, like Gustave Courbet and Théodore Géricault, Guttuso’s collage appeared to be yet another homage to the “only art historian that enabled us to see the old masters with a contemporary eye”,³ to Cézanne and to their shared stylistic preferences. 

Five years after the Milione show, Oggetti reappeared at Guttuso’s oneman exhibition at the Galleria Gissi in Turin. At the beginning of the 1970s it belonged to the Galleria La Bussola, as indicated by the street and telephone number on the label on the back. Cerruti must have purchased it at the end of that decade, after the show of Italian Art in Busto Arsizio in the winter of 1977. 

Chiara Perin 

¹ F. Russoli, “Renato Guttuso”, in Milan 1959, n.p. 

² Longhi 1913, p. 1171. 

³ Guttuso 1962, p. 22.