Art of the 20th Century
Renato
Guttuso
Renato Guttuso
(b Bagheria, nr Palermo, 2 Jan 1912; d Rome, 18 Jan 1987).
Italian painter. He gained his first practical experience of art in the form of Sicilian cart-painting in the bottega of a family friend Emilio Murdolo. The images of the exploits of the Normans in Sicily that adorned these carts instilled in Guttuso a strong and lasting preference for epic stories and vivacity of colour; similarly, the knowledge that he gained of the Sicilian countryside and peasantry through his father, a land-surveyor and committed socialist, had a marked effect on his work as a mature artist. While still at school in Palermo, he began to study painting in 1928 under Pippo Rizzo (b 1898), a minor Futurist who had extensive contacts with mainland Italy. He began studying law in 1930 at the University of Palermo but left the course soon after exhibiting at the Quadriennale in Rome in 1931.
