Pannocchia

A single ear of corn, stripped of its husk and lying on a table, gets the full weight of a painter's attention here. Renato Guttuso built the kernels from separate dabs of yellow, ochre and burnt orange, each one a visible stroke rather than a blended surface, so the cob reads almost like a mosaic. The peeled-back leaves fan out around it in pale cream and faded green, with a slash of red running along one edge, and behind them a length of blue cloth cuts across the dark ground. Everything is painted thickly and fast, the brush marks left exactly as they landed.

Guttuso was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1911, and became one of the central names in Italian realism after the war. He was a committed communist whose best known paintings deal with labour, politics and violence, but he returned again and again to still life: lemons, fish, bread, vegetables from the market. For him these humble subjects carried their own argument about what deserved to be painted. Corn, in particular, is peasant food, the raw material of polenta, and giving it this much colour and energy was its own kind of statement. His signature sits in the lower right corner, scratched into the wet paint.