The Paris and Milan exhibitions bookend the period of Guttuso’s most urgent political engagement with Guernica, when he most consistently cited Picasso in order to intervene in the circumstances of his time. This article will examine Guttuso’s sustained dialogue with Guernica, focusing on the period between its initial exhibition at the Paris World Fair in 1937, when he encountered it vicariously, and its display as part of a major retrospective of Picasso’s work in Milan in 1953, when Guttuso would at last see it in the flesh. Guttuso, accordingly, found in Guernica the language with which to confront the violence of the Italian mid-century, from fascism and the Nazi occupation to the era of Christian Democracy and the Cold War. Picasso’s rejection of partisan motifs in favour of a more universal iconography of suffering made Guernica readily applicable to contexts other than the one for which it was made. 3Īs art historian Christopher Green has argued: ‘ Guernica was the most ambitious modernist painting of the 1930s to marshal the weapons of attack honed in the interwar avant-gardes for an explicit political purpose, aimed against a specific target, the fascist Right.’ 4įor this reason, Picasso’s mural was seen as the archetypal resistance artwork by Guttuso and other members of Italy’s left-wing avant-garde seeking to oppose fascist oppression during the latter stages of the regime.įrom the late 1930s onwards, Guttuso made repeated reference to Guernica in his art and writing. Guernica was thus revered by Guttuso and his colleagues as a model of political engagement without stylistic compromise. In this most public of settings, Picasso applied the pictorial language he had developed through cubism and surrealism to an urgent political and humanitarian crisis. 2Ĭommissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris, Picasso’s mural-sized painting was designed to raise awareness of the plight of the Republican government in Spain’s ongoing civil war, in which the Nationalist rebels, aided by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, were gaining ground (fig.1). It was a view shared by one of Guttuso’s contemporaries, the critic Mario de Micheli, who would later recall making reproductions of Guernica at Milan’s Castello Sforzesco art library for distribution among his friends as badges of allegiance. It was sent to him in Rome from New York by the art historian and critic Cesare Brandi, and Guttuso carried it in his wallet until 1943, the year of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s fall, describing it as ‘an ideal membership card of an ideal party’. In 1940, the year he joined the underground Communist Party, the Sicilian artist Renato Guttuso received a postcard of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid). Rachel Scott, Helen Brett and Bronwyn Ormsby ‘Layers of Looking’: Changing Surfaces in the Paintings of Gary Hume Guttuso, Guernica, Gramsci: Art, History and the Symbolic Strategy of the Italian Communist Party Tamar Maor, Angelica Bartoletti and Bronwyn Ormsby Insights into Eva Hesse’s Working Practice: A Technical Study of Addendum 1967 Severance: Jessa Fairbrother’s Conversations with My Mother 2016 ‘No Mercenary Views’? Constable’s English Landscape Felicity MyroneĪrtist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy The Framing of John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows Adrian Moore ‘No Continuing City’: John Constable, John Britton and Views of Urban History Gothic Cathedrals from Romanticism to Modernism: Images and Ideas ‘Fire and Water’: Turner and Constable in the Royal Academy, 1831 John Constable and Paul Huet: Marsh and Flood
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