For my Italian language class today the instructor suggested that we look at a couple of pictures by Renato Guttuso. He’s a painter whose work I have admired for some time. (He earned my respect also for his open resistance to Fascism during the Second World War.) I had not noticed previously the importance of ambiguity in his work. My instructor asked me what one of his pictures was about. Is it about the chance meeting of a man and a woman, in the market, and our need to interpret their responses? Or, bearing in mind the fact that they are surrounded by symbols of life and death (the hanging meat and the eggs: the dead fish and the fruit) does it point us in the direction of a more metaphysical set of questions?
I had never been aware previously of the fact that many of his pictures lay themselves open to this kind of multi-layered reading. Looking through the book about his work that I acquired back in 2014, when the Estorick Collection put on a retrospective of his art, I was struck by the fact that his Crucifissione is amenable to two quite different readings. The first sees it as a response to the death of Jesus Christ. A few moments of pause, however, begin to reveal that perhaps it is actually a political statement. (The horse in the foreground, I’m sure, can only be read as a quotation from Picasso’s Guernica.) Bearing in mind the date at which it was painted (1940-42) I can see why he might have wanted to offer the viewer this choice of readings.
I like pictures of this kind, which require a “double-take” from the viewer. It’s something I aspire to in my own work.
*His Vucciria of 1974.