Word: guttuso
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Since those days, rank & file Communist Vespignani has supplanted Renato Guttuso as Italy's top Red artist. Guttuso (TIME, Oct. 2) had painted too abstractly to please the commissars, then switched and painted too posterishly to please the connoisseurs. For Vespignani, there has been "no need to change." In fact, he seems to regard Moscow as happily in step with Vespignani instead of vice versa. Says he: "I've always thought, and my own life has taught me, that art must have social content...
Best-known painter in the show was Rome's 38-year-old Renato Guttuso, who once painted abstractly and was spanked for it by the party (TIME, Jan. 24, 1949). A recent jaunt behind the Iron Curtain put his art on the left path. Guttuso's posterish picture of a woodcutter with a hatchet contemplating a sawed stump struck even Communist critics as being rather "too elementary." But it did win him a wood-burning stove...