Guttuso: 'Faithful to the Earth?'
When English artists flocked to Paris in 1802 to see the Napoleonic plunder and the latest French paintings, most of them were horrified with David’s participation in the Revolution. His blood-stained hands and political commitment blinded them to his pictorial achievements. A hundred and fifty years later a similar attitude seems to persist. When a politically committed artist comes into their midst with a London exhibition (actually his third), most critics, whilst cosily patting Guttuso on the back for either colour or draughtsmanship, dismissed his work as popular journalism. But it is precisely in ‘popular’ terms that much of Guttuso’s work must be assessed. The world of spiritual abstraction is not his domain; he has grown out of the soil of a peasant Sicily.
We are not in Britain accustomed to violent energy or passion in realist painting. When a leading artist — now with British nationality — does express himself in such terms, namely Kokoschka, he is rewarded (or was, until very recently) by almost total neglect. A calmer, cooler temperament, such as Sickert’s or Steer’s, is closer to our taste. We seem able to tolerate passion in non-figurative works, in the calligraphic exuberances of Mathieu or the apparently uncontrolled energy of Pollock. Why, then, do we not like such rude excesses of energy in a portrait, a landscape or a still-life?
Guttuso is deeply involved in contemporary life: one could write the word with a capital L. Everything concerns him. Even in the illustrations published last year to I Promessi Sposi, one feels Guttuso is illustrating life today just as much as that of the novel. A fresh, invigorating interest in life and nature is clearly reflected in the extremely varied and constantly changing subject-matter of Guttuso’s paintings. He can organize with success the crowded scenes of a street or of a beach, sulphur-miners working or teenagers dancing. Sometimes these large paintings are violently polemical, such as The Occupation of Uncultivated Land in Sicily (1949). With equal vigour he can portray single figures, a beggar on a crutch, for example, a peasant eating spaghetti or a woman telephoning. And occasionally he paints portraits, of which two of the most penetrating include that of his wife (1947) and of the Provost of King’s College, Cambridge (1960). Nudes, also, are interpreted with the rich, earthy quality of Guttuso’s realism. Like Degas, his nudes are often not formally posed, but in a state of natural nakedness: women unable to dress fleeing from a volcanic eruption, youths and women preparing to swim or workers stripped for the heat of the sulphur-mines. But, like another great realist, Courbet, Guttuso also turns his eye to the study of sensuous nudes in the artist’s studio. They are often stretched, relaxed, on the floor apparently ungainly through lack of pose. But this very lack of pose — in an academic sense — gives these nudes a power and vitality stemming directly from life; their effect is not softened by couch and drapes.
Nature and the objects of everyday life, too, are painted and drawn with the same force: doves fluttering in the trees outside his villa at Varese, paintpots and baskets in his studio . . . everything. Throughout his career Guttuso has painted many still-lifes, and they are an important part of his work. In his youth he arranged objects on the table-top with great care, maintaining in the composition the firm structure of a Cézanne, and also employing this artist’s split perspective. The double viewpoint is often still evident in Guttuso’s stilllifes, but the tight structure has now given way to an apparent disorder of objects strewn on the floor or cluttered on shelves. His earlier realism (in both the paintings of people and of objects) was often cramped by formulas learnt from Picasso and Cézanne in particular. But now he has found greater freedom, painting a world of reality through his own eyes.
The two extremes of his work — the violent polemic on the one hand and the quietly contemplated still-life on the other — form such sharp contrasts that it was one of the questions I asked him when I first met him. His answer was disarmingly simple: both were ‘part of life’. But although a simple answer it was sincerely and passionately meant. The same point occurs again and again in the articles he has written during the last twenty years. He said quite categorically in a letter in Domus in 1947, that ‘I do not have metaphysical or transcendental problems. What is not real does not interest me.’ And a few years later he wrote that he firmly believed in ‘an understandable and human art, and that intellectual and modish speculation is repugnant to me’ (Tecnica dell’Arte, January 1956).
One of Guttuso’s most important articles in which he summarizes his views and aims was published in Nuovi Argomenti in 1953. He realizes that the ‘path of realism is bristling with difficulty, and that many painters of the realist school are not without faults:
‘Many defects and confusions of every kind accompany the step forward of realist art: a too schematic application of the exigency of the popular and more broadly human contents, a tiredness and repetition of themes of work, a summariness of drawing and use of colour, generally in zones, and an ugly chiaroscuro often obtained with black, are defects that can easily be found in our work. There is amongst us a tendency rather to choose peasant themes, and a reticence to face figuratively the working world, to express man in front of modern technology.’
The task before realist artists, argues Guttuso, is to ‘guard the world, nature and reality’:
‘In our countries of the West reality is made of many errors and injustices, work is often a curse and an endurance, beside which are the daily heroes, the works of human genius, electrical centres, steel foundries. Realist artists face these themes, and denounce where there are things to denounce, and exalt where there are things to exalt. Since denunciation is “more easy” and more urgent to us, many young artists insist on this aspect. Thus I wish to say that realism is not essentially denunciation . . .
‘For us today it is a matter of regaining possession of the means of figurative expression, to represent a reality recognizable and clear to all, and to express that reality in the most complete way . . .
‘The connection between art and Communism is not a relationship between two separate and opposite poles but a natural connection of art and society, with the most progressive ideas of that society.’
But this approach to painting does not simply mean illustration or pictorial sermons. Guttuso has been attacked on both accounts. His art transcends pure illustration or journalism. He has himself written:
‘Realist art does not necessarily represent a worker at the lathe, or Chinese armies crossing the Yellow River: if in the worker or in the Chinese army the artist does not succeed in expressing a conception of the world, a more total reality, a realistic and historical judgement. This is the first necessary element for a work of art. In this consists its modernity, its reality, its vital force.’ (Ulisse, Autumn 1953.)
The other charge of sermonizing can perhaps be best answered by again quoting Guttuso, in his high praise of Courbet. In the article just mentioned he refers to the French artist as ‘the greatest painter of modern times fully nurtured from real soil, socialism and materialism’. And in another article of the same year he wrote that Courbet’s work opened up ‘new roads towards a modern knowledge of reality; the whole movement of modern art in our countries of the West originate in his work.’ (Biennale di Venezia, 1953.) Some of Courbet’s work can be interpreted as ‘sermons’. But surely this should not be used as a term of abuse? An artist passionately concerned with the present and wishing to express himself in paintings instead of in a pulpit, is surely entitled to use paint for rhetoric? An artist’s statement of the world he sees can be calmly deliberated and carefully painted: Cézanne’s still-lifes have a tranquil beauty, that speaks quietly. But if the artist feels impelled to speak louder, if he is less withdrawn from contemporary events, this fervour must inevitably come through the picture. If the fervour also carries a ‘message’, why simply dismiss it as rhetorical sermonizing? Yet it is precisely on these grounds that some of Guttuso’s critics have dismissed his work.
It must be admitted that Guttuso is impetuous, moving from problem to problem before completely solving the last, and that he can also produce extremely didactic works, which are not completely successful in visual terms. His recent Discussion (1959-60), showing a heated political argument around a table, is a case in point, in which bold illusion is combined with, but not integrated with, flat collage. But hanging opposite it in the London exhibition was another ‘sermon’, smaller, simpler and completely successful. Entitled Rocco and Son (1960) and painted almost entirely in blues, it showed a man standing horrified at some impending disaster, gazing terrified out of the picture to the left, and clutching a small child cowering for protection.
It is because he is so deeply involved in contemporary life that Guttuso admires Picasso. He believes that Picasso’s painting and sculpture represents the only attempt in modern art ‘to account for a total reality’. His whole art is held together by ‘a scaffolding made by living man’. In the left-wing periodical Il Contemporaneo, Guttuso published in 1958 extracts from his diary about Algeria. He was himself at the time doing many studies of the atrocities in Algeria in preparation for a painting on the subject, and he was also making sketches inspired by Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. In the diary he praised Picasso because he was politically committed and involved in contemporary life as shown in his paintings of Guernica and Korea. But, he asks, ‘What does Algeria mean for our contemporary Manessier, for Dubuffet, for Bazaine?’
Guttuso sees the art of the realist school drawing deep inspiration in the present, but at the same time continuing a tradition going back to Courbet, and in fact beyond. He has been much inspired by the art of the past, and in his studios (in Rome and Varese) reproductions pinned on the walls include Antonello da Messina, Rembrandt, Delacroix and Cézanne. In conversations and in articles he has admired Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael and Michelangelo. Guttuso firmly believes that modern artists cannot be against the Renaissance achievement, or completely disregard it. It was, after all, he says, ‘a point of arrival’. And, it is worth noting, in 1955 he painted a large copy of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa.
In the Domus and Nuovi Argomenti articles (already quoted), Guttuso is forthright about the historical position and tradition of realism:
‘From the Egyptians to the Pompeians, to the Le Nains, they are today clearly called painters of reality because they painted peasants and ragamuffins; a figurative tradition based on peasants and poetry of nature and work of the fields is an old theme dear to the painters of every age and even to the Arcadians . . .
‘Our realism is determined by connection with the standards currently in force, by the possibility of conquering space, . . . by the way in which we feel in our epoch and the way in which it is propounded.’
It is some of Guttuso’s categorical, or dialectical, statements that annoy critics. He is as forthright in his opinions in print as he is in his statements in paint. But he sometimes fails in his articles to do his own work and intentions full justice. His constant emphasis on the validity of realism in art has tended to overshadow the important elements in his work that go beyond ‘realism’ (itself an unsatisfactory term, but useful in that it has a vague, general connotation), and he has often been labelled as a Social Realist. He has protested that he has been called a ‘Mexican’ by the most friendly, and a ‘Sovietic’ by those hostile, but ‘how and how much I have tried to work from reality and how different was and is my search from the flat and illustrative mannerism of the Soviets and of the so-called French realists, should have been obvious to everyone.’
A great friend of Picasso (whom he often visits), Guttuso’s realism has been partially influenced by Cubism. The questioning analysis of forms by Picasso and Braque between 1907 and 1914 — an analysis of momentous importance for art in the last forty-five years — has greatly impressed the younger Italian artist. And the Cubist influence is growing stronger, particularly in the studies done in the last two years of a man reading a newspaper. The paper’s crumpled sheets look back stylistically to early Cubism, but in intention those sheets belong very much to the present day because the studies were painted (as Guttuso told me) in the belief that the newspaper is ‘a part of our lives — an essential part, today’.
He also recognizes that his use of colour has an emotional impact which relates his work to the Expressionists. In conversation he mentions, for example, Nolde and Ensor. The strident colours of his native Sicily (and also, to a lesser extent, of Capri) give many of his paintings a shrill note which offends the more delicate sensibilities of some critics. But Sicily is really like that, and has been beautifully described by Guttuso’s friend, Carlo Levi, in one of his essays in Words are Stones. He looks out over the sea from Bagheria (where Guttuso was born in 1912) and sees:
‘The Palermo sea on one side and the Cefalù on the other, with a mountain dividing them, behind which mountain live the fishermen of Aspra and the boat-builders of Porticello; and to the right rise the purple Madonia mountains; and in front there is a brief expanse of plain covered with metallic green, almost black, orange groves, with isolated houses here and there, white, geometrical in design, with windowless walls and sharp, nervous structural angles. These sharp, nervous angles, these arid, violent colours, these relations of white and yellow and red, and of green and blue side by side (the colours of the carts), are the same as are to be found in the pictures of Guttuso, who was born here; and here (I thought to myself) one sees how true and faithful to the earth his painting is.’
Often the artist goes back to Sicily and drinks at the source of his emotional experience. But he finds the colour and life too intense to be able to draw and paint, so he returns north. There follows a series of paintings vibrating with energy, movement, life itself; paintings in which colour denotes emotion, and in which discords produce ‘il urto’, as Guttuso puts it: the shock or clash, not only of the colours themselves, but also the clashing forces which give life its vitality. What he paints springs from deep within himself: his expressionistic use of colour is the most important aspect of his subjectivity. As he himself has written, ‘I have always done what I have “felt”, . . . not in the sense of a picture abandoned without control. But exactly the opposite. I have made good things and bad things, but nothing has ever escaped from my hand. All that I have made I have wanted to make.’
Guttuso does not have a complete contempt for non-figurative art. He regards purely abstract and purely naturalistic positions as ‘both dead roads of the academy’. At the end of the war he was associated with a group of artists, the ‘Fronte nuovo delle arti’, which included young men now recognized as important Italian abstract painters, among them Birolli, Corpora, Vedova and Santomaso. Another artist of the same group, Morlotti (whose work tends towards abstraction), is still one of Guttuso’s friends, and has recently even shared an exhibition with him. In an article he published in 1957 in Paragone, Guttuso concluded by paying tribute to de Kooning, de Staël and Morlotti, because their paintings ‘profit from the present’. They are artists whose visions have grown out of reality, and gone towards non-figuration, but still recognizable in terms on the visible world around us. Thus, as already mentioned, Guttuso can share an exhibition with one of these artists, and also show in his paintings of the last couple of years the influence of another: de Staël. Guttuso’s pigment has grown much thicker, tending towards the Frenchman’s impasto. Within the last three years Guttuso has also shown an interest in collage in both small and large-scale works. Obviously still experimenting and inquiring, he has not yet completely mastered this relatively new means of expression. Yet again, an important Cubist discovery influences his work, and the most daring example in which he has used it, The Discussion (already mentioned), was an important picture amongst his works at last year’s Venice Biennale and also in his London exhibition. In it he has combined the bold illusionism of the men around the table with a flat area of diagonal collage across the whole picture. The area of collage splits the painting in two, and visually jars in its contrast with the figures. The picture is not a success, but can be admired for the bold courage with which he has tackled a difficult question.
Guttuso has absorbed the great realist tradition and fused it with both Cubism and Expressionism. His stature lies in this synthesis which enables him to portray a succession of vitally expressive images of the mid-twentieth century, imbued with all the vigour and colour of his native Sicily: coffee cups and Vespas included.
Page(s) 60-66
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The