Party-Line Painter

Renato Guttuso is one of Italy's most talented artists. He is also a member of the central committee of the Italian Communist Party. And like all creative artists who submit to the authority of the party, Guttuso has had plenty of trouble fitting his artistic conscience into the tight jacket of Red discipline. Last week Rome's Pincio Gallery was staging an exhibition of seven oils and 16 drawings which showed Guttuso's latest efforts to bring his art and politics into line.

The results were still not up to the colorful semi-abstractions he painted before the party high command ordered a change to "socialist realism." But Guttuso had progressed a long way from his first tortured attempts to illustrate the party line (TIME, Oct. 2, 1950). "Of all those who participate in the neo-realistic current," wrote the critic of Fiera Letteraria, "Guttuso stands alone . . . with his singular and exemplary force of composition." The public liked Renato's new work, too; most of the pictures were sold in two weeks.

The subject matter was strictly from the Red handbook: miners, child laborers, peasants, and decadent rich folks sunning at Capri. But Guttuso managed to avoid the wooden lifelessness or shrill caricatures of his less talented comrades (see below). The hit of the show was The Dying Hero, an effectively gloomy oil of a man dying on a hospital bed. Although the central figure is realistically proletarian, Guttuso rose above the level of flat political posters with his geometric handling of pillow and sheets, skillfully done in shades of off-white against a violently contrasting red drapery.

Guttuso, a ruggedly handsome man of 41, concedes that his earlier neo-realistic work left a lot to be desired. But the pictures in the present show are "less rigid, most flexible ... I think my work is becoming less intentional and more natural."

Guttuso had even thought up an argument for mixing art and politics. Said he: "Art makes propaganda when it is truly art. After all, the Sistine Chapel was a work of propaganda."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.