Anniversary of the death of Renato Guttuso

Thursday, January 18 at 10:30 a.m.

On Jan. 18, 1987, the master of 20th century pictorial art, Bagherese Renato Guttuso, died.
The city administration to celebrate this date and remember the exponent of expressionistic and social realism has arranged for the laying of a wreath at the monumental tomb created by master Giacomo Manzù at Villa Cattolica.
The administration will be present at the deposition with Mayor Filippo Maria Tripoli and Culture Councillor Daniele Vella. Appointment at 10:30 a.m. at Villa Cattolica, home of the Guttuso Museum.
Guttuso, by his own will, was buried in the Bagheria cemetery, in the family tomb. The master had already underscored his strong ties to his hometown with the donation, starting in 1973, of a large number of works that had enabled the founding of the Civic Gallery of Modern Art named after him, based precisely in the 18th-century Villa Cattolica.
Shortly thereafter, his late adopted son, Fabio Carapezza Guttuso, interpreting his father’s wish, commissioned the great sculptor Giacomo Manzù, a friend and admirer of Guttuso himself, to create a monumental tomb.
In 1989 Manzù made the monumental ark as a gift to the memory of his friend, proposing that it be placed in the very garden of the Villa Cattolica. The modern work is thus, since then, placed in the baroque context of the villa.
Today Guttuso thus rests in the villa, among the citrus groves and the blue sea of Aspra, in perpetual dialogue with his works preserved in the nearby 18th-century salons that make him a sanguine and passionate artist, capable of using the brush with the precision of a musket shot.
A series of events will be dedicated to the master and to the presentation of the museum’s second-floor layout, which will be announced with a specific press conference soon and with the announcement of the dates of some of the events.