Museo Guttuso

Few museums are gifts from the artist himself. In 1973 Renato Guttuso donated a large body of his work to Bagheria, his birthplace, and the municipality hung it on the noble floor of Villa Cattolica. Paintings, drawings, engravings and sculpture trace forty years of his career, joined by film posters, painted carts and his garden tomb.

Why it matters

The Museo Guttuso presents twentieth-century Sicilian realist painting in Bagheria, Guttuso's birthplace and the landscape of his early subjects. The core of the collection is the artist's 1973 donation to his hometown, extended over the following decades, so the rooms read as an autobiography in paint — from the 1930s beginnings to the late works of the 1980s. Around that nucleus the comune has gathered other twentieth-century names, an ethnographic section on the painted Sicilian cart, and a film-poster archive donated by the Lo Medico family that reaches from silent-era sheets to the Taviani brothers' Kaos. In the park outside, the sarcophagus designed by Giacomo Manzù holds the painter's remains, making the visit a circuit of art and memory rather than a gallery sequence alone.

What to notice

Large canvases include I funerali di Togliatti (1972) condenses Guttuso's political painting into a funeral crowd, and La Vucciria (1974) turns the Palermo market into a swirl of meat, fish, colours and blades ; other major works include the Autoritratto of 1975 and Donne, stanze, oggetti from 1967. The later landscapes of Velate, such as Sera a Velate (1980) and Peperoni e giardino di Velate (1985), show the quiet register of his final decades. The comune's page describes holdings that run from paintings to sculpture and from drawings to engravings, spanning the 1930s to the last works, with graphic cycles alongside the oils. Mario Schifano's Omaggio a Guttuso stands for the dialogue with younger, pop-inflected painting, while works by Cagli, Silvestre Cuffaro, Onofrio Tomaselli, Pina Calì, Quattrociocchi and Pellitteri widen the frame to the Sicilian and Italian twentieth century. The lower floors contain the carved and painted carts of the ethnographic section and the Lo Medico film-poster donation of over four hundred sheets, from 1927 to Kaos, are what make this a civic museum rather than a monograph.

Context and history

Renato Guttuso — the official pages name him a son of Bagheria, the town the comune calls his birthplace — became one of the defining Italian painters of the twentieth century through works of social and political commitment. The museum's foundation rests on his decision, recorded by the official pages, to donate many works to his native town in 1973; the municipality responded by installing the collection on the noble floor of Villa Cattolica, the 1736 estate it later bought outright in 1988, and the comune describes the museum as structured over three floors. Giacomo Manzù — the close friend whose own career ran parallel to Guttuso's in Italian public art — is the sculptor behind the monumental sarcophagus to which the town consigned the painter's remains in the park in 1990. The museum has also hosted temporary exhibitions, from photography to contemporary installations.