(Bagheria/Palermo 1912–1987 Rome)
L’atelier, 1975, signed and dated, signed and dated again on the reverse, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collezione F. Pellin (1936–2009), Varese
European private collection

Exhibited:
Todi, Opere scelte di Renato Guttuso, Palazzo del Popolo, 16 May–13 June 1976, exh. cat. p. 55, with ill.
Cologne, Renato Guttuso. Gemälde und Handzeichnungen, Kunsthalle, 4 June–24 July 1977, exh. cat. no. 50 with ill.
Rome, Guttuso, Toninelli Arte Moderna, 24 November– 4 December 1977
Stockholm, Renato Guttuso, Moderna Museet, 15 April–28 May 1978, exh. cat. no. 32, p. 37 with ill.
Teramo, Guttuso, Galleria d’Arte Rizziero, February 1978, exh. cat. with ill.
Saint-Etienne, Guttuso: Peintures, gouaches, dessins, Maison de la culture et des loisirs, 10 January–15 February 1979, exh. cat. with ill.
Venice, Guttuso. Opere dal 1931 al 1981, Centro di Cultura Palazzo Grassi, 4 April–20 June 1982, exh. cat. p. 196, no. 107 with ill. (label on the reverse)
Varese, Guttuso a Varese, Musei Civici, Villa Mirabello, 23 June–30 September 1984, exh. cat. no. 31 with ill.
Milan, Guttuso grandi opere, Palazzo Reale, 12 December 1984–24 February 1985, exh. cat. no. 31, pp. 14, 117 and 210 with ill.
Milan-Rome, Renato Guttuso. Opere della Fondazione Francesco Pellin, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, 27 January–6 March 2005, Chiostro del Bramante, 16 March–5 June 2005, exh. cat. pp. 146–147, no. 44 with ill.
Parma, Guttuso. Passione e Realtà, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, 11 September – 8 December 2010, cover ill. (label on the reverse)
Varese, Renato Guttuso a Varese, Musei Civici di Villa Mirabello, May 2019

Literature:
M. De Micheli, Guttuso, 1976, no.4 with ill.
Catalogo nazionale Bolaffi d’arte moderna, no. 14, vol. I, Giulio Bolaffi Editore, Turin 1978, no. 80, p. 60 with ill. “L’Europeo”, Milan, 19 April 1982, p. 152 with ill.
“Arte”, Year XII, no. 118, Milan, 19 April 1982, p. 56 with ill.
“Veneto Notizie”, no. 43, Venice, May 1982, p. 55 with ill. Graphis Arte 1982, pp. 152–153 with ill.
“La Repubblica”, Rome (Milan edition), 23 June 1984 with ill.
“Il Giorno”, Milan, 24 June 1984 with ill.
“L’Unita”, Rome, 23 July 1984, p. 8 with ill.
E. Crispolti, Catalogo ragionato generale dei dipinti di Renato Guttuso, vol. III, Mondadori & associati, Milan 1985, no. 75/3, p. 206 with ill.
C. Occhipinti (ed.), Guttuso tra segno e colore. Opere 1924–85, catalogue of the exhibition held at Convento dei Capuccini, Argenta in 1988, p.421 with ill.
E. Crispolti, Catalogo ragionato generale dei dipinti di Renato Guttuso, vol. IV, Mondadori & associati, Milan 1989, no. 75/3, p. 221 with ill.

There was actually a psychological space within the more or less cubic spatial compartment of Comizio di quartiere (General catalogue raisonné of paintings..., vol. III, 1985, no. 75/1). A tension that runs through the faces, through their expression, and through the very plurality of their “historical” layers. That crowd is not indistinct or anonymous as it was not in The Funeral of Togliatti (ibid., n. 72/10). It is a crowd of memorial influxes, of lived experience, personal and historical-cultural, and hence a reflection of collective experience. It thereby constitutes an imminent crowd. In the same year, Guttuso also made a large self-portrait in an entirely psychological key, which he entitled L'atelier (ibid., n. 75/3) in 1975 (an immediate precedent: ibid., n. 75/2), and which he exhibited the following year, in May–June, in the anthological exhibition in Lodi, and then in June–July 1977 in the important retrospective in Cologne.
In a forest of easels, the image of the painter appears twice: once at work and once in a pause with the inevitable cigarette (almost always present in his self-portraits since the 1930s, just as in his photographs since then). A psychological link runs through the images. A multiple portrayal of himself, no longer based on the traditional multiple mirror view, but in a mirroring of a memorial and above all psychological connection, exactly as if it were a question of different psychological moments within a concrete continuity of experience. All this, on the other hand, occurs within a concreteness that explicitly defends objectivity, causality, and every element of the articulated and very intense overall image, synthetic even in the chromatic fragmentation, which takes on rhythmic scanning references: like the perspective game of the various small canvases arranged on easels.
On two of these he appears intent on sketching verisimilarly landscapes, while a painting from the cycle dedicated to the Great Wall of China, appears verisimilarly 'finished' on the left.

Enrico Crispolti, Renato Guttuso “Opere della Fondazione Francesco Pellin”, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta