Renato Guttuso

Early life
Guttuso was born on 26 December, 1911 in Bagheria, near Palermo. He was the son of Gioacchino Guttuso, land surveyor and amateur watercolorist, and Giuseppina d'Amico. Guttuso's birth date is often incorrectly listed as January 2, 1912, as this is when Giuseppina reported his birth to the registry office.
Guttuso began signing and dating his works at the age of thirteen. They were mostly copies of nineteenth-century Sicilian landscape painters as well as French painters such as Millet and contemporary artists such as Carrà, but there were also original portraits. In 1928 he participated in his first collective exhibition in Palermo.
Guttuso lived close to a house amongst the Valguarnera villas and Palagonia, which he would soon represent in paintings inspired by the cliffs of Aspra. In Palermo and Bagheria Guttuso observed the dereliction of 18th-century villas previously belonging to the nobility, abandoned to decay as a consequence of political infighting within the municipal chambers. At the same time, his family suffered a period of economic stress because of the hostility shown by Fascists and the clergy towards his father.
Guttuso finished the Umberto I classical high school in Palermo and continued his studies at the University of Palermo, where his development was modelled according to the European figurative trends of the day, from Courbet to Van Gogh and to Picasso. In the early 1930s Guttuso was a frequent visitor to the studio of one of the most prolific futuristic painters, Pippo Rizzo. In 1929 he began contributing to newspapers and periodicals and in 1933 his first article on Picasso was targeted by Fascist censorship and caused the suspension of his contribution to the Palermo newspaper L’ora.
In 1931 two of his paintings were accepted by the…