Word: guttuso
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Togliatti was followed by another speaker, Renato Guttuso, who had a message of optimism on the cultural front for the comrades. The Communist Party, Guttuso declared, could save European culture from American commercialism. "America," he added, "is the great leveler of European culture. An American publishing house which could lay claim to distinction for having published Steinbeck, now, for purely commercial reasons, has debased itself by publishing Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a despicable book...
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...
More to Come. Then there was 37-year-old Communist Renato Guttuso. His painting of a peasant wood chopper being shot in the back gave a broad hint of why Guttuso's Italian fellow Communists now object to his work. The poster-bright colors and the shapes which looked as if they had been hacked out by a hoe were reminiscent of Comrade Picasso's art, but like Picasso's they deviated from the "realism" the party presently admires. At the opposite extreme was 52-year-old Antonio Donghi's meticulous The Hunter, which...
...daring assertion that, as Communists, they could hold opinions in conflict with the party line. As Italians waited to see what-if anything-happened to the rebels, Painter Guttuso went back to work, put the finishing touches on a new picture, Sulphur Miners, wooden thighs...