The Blue Window

A straw-wrapped wine flask lies tipped on its side, its woven jacket unravelling into loops of yellow and ochre, while a second bottle stands behind it with a cord knotted around its neck. Beside them sits a pale blue ceramic jug, painted in loose vertical strokes that let the brush marks show. The orange cloth beneath everything is the loudest thing in the picture, a hot red-orange that pushes against the deep blue of the window panel and the green cushion on the right. Guttuso has not tidied anything up. Objects overlap, edges wobble, and the paint stays visibly wet-looking, applied fast and thick.

Renato Guttuso was born in Sicily in 1911 and became one of Italy's best known realist painters, famous for large political canvases made during and after the Fascist years, including a stark Crucifixion from 1941 that scandalised the Vatican. Alongside that public work he painted hundreds of still lifes of ordinary Italian kitchen things: lemons, fish, bread, and exactly these kinds of straw-covered flasks that once held cheap table wine. The objects here are humble, but the colour is not, and that tension between everyday subjects and almost reckless brushwork runs through much of his career. Worth noticing: the handle of the overturned flask, drawn as a single curling line of pale paint, which reads as both basketry and pure gesture.