The Discussion.
|
Title |
The Discussion. |
|
Translated Title |
La Discussione. |
|
Creator |
Guttuso, Renato (Italian painter and author, 1912-1987) |
|
Date |
1959-1960 |
|
Cultural Context |
Italian
European
Western European |
|
Subject |
Discussion
Debates
Politics & government
Political parties
Men
Artists
Suits (Clothing)
Coats
Eyeglasses
Cigarettes
Ashtrays
Smoking
Newspapers
Periodicals
Chairs |
|
Description |
"According to the artist this painting depicted an 'ideological discussion'. As such it evokes the stormy realist-abstraction debates, and allied political differences, among artists in Italy after the Second World War. Stylistically, the work skillfully weds the rhythms of Italian baroque art to the prewar modernist idioms of [Pablo] Picasso and Cubism." (Caption, p.13); "In France and Italy after the war, the emergence of strong Communist parties (initially invited to join coalition governments due to their roles in wartime resistance to Fascism) led to debates among artists concerning the competing claims of a socially oriented realism and those of self-expressive experimentalism. […] Postwar Italy was politically volatile, with frequent changes of government. The eventual triumph of the Christian Democrats was resented by increasingly marginalized Socialist and Communist groups, and artistic positions reflected passionate political convictions. Realist critics, working in the wake of an important movement in film exemplified by Roberto Rossellini's Resistance story, Rome, Open City of 1945, regularly clashed with abstractionists. There were lively exchanges between groups linked to the PCI (Partito Communista Italiano) such as the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (founded 1946) and pro-abstraction groups such as Forma (launched in 1947). The painter Renato Guttoso was attached to the former group until 1948 when it dissolved due to particularly inflexible policies on Realism on the part of the PCI. As an artist he combined elements of Picasso's post-Cubist vocabulary with stylistic and iconographic allusions to Italy's pictorial traditions in large-scale 'history paintings' addressed to matters of public concern. […] His commitment to a practice of painting embodying public or moral discourse is perhaps most directly expressed in the later work The Discussion of 1959-60." (Excerpt, pp.13-14) |
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Location Depicted |
Italy |
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Material |
Paint |
|
Technique |
Painting (image-making) |
|
Work Type |
Paintings |
|
Repository |
Tate Gallery (London, England, United Kingdom) |
|
Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.13, fig.4) |
|
Rights |
© Tate Gallery, London, 1999/DACS, 2000. |
|
Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
|
Format |
image/jpeg |
|
Digital File Name |
VRC 826-46.jpg |
|
Rating |
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