Gulf of Naples

A small boat sits out on the water, barely more than a dark smudge with a wisp of smoke, and it is the only thing moving in the whole picture. Everything else holds still: the blue-grey headlands stacked along the horizon, the flat sheet of sea, the huddle of houses in the foreground painted in thick blocks of black, rust and olive. Renato Guttuso built this landscape the way a bricklayer works, laying down slabs of color side by side rather than blending them. Get close to the fields and you can see the greens are not really one green at all but stripes of yellow, emerald and near-black slapped over each other.

Guttuso (1911 to 1987) was a Sicilian who became the best known Italian painter of his generation, mostly for fierce political pictures made during and after the Second World War. He fought with the anti-fascist resistance, joined the Communist Party, and spent much of his career painting workers, street scenes and protest. Landscapes like this one were his other side, the painter returning to the southern coast he grew up near. The mood here is not sentimental, though. The village is painted as a dark mass of boxes with almost no detail, the kind of place seen from a passing road rather than lovingly described, while the light and air are saved for the sea and the distant islands.