(Bagheria/Palermo 1912–1987 Rome)
Muraglia cinese giallo-grigia,1972, signed Guttuso 72, signed and dated on the reverse, oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galleria La Tavolozza, Palermo (label and stamps on the reverse)
F. Pellin Collection, Varese
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Palermo, Renato Guttuso, Galleria La Tavolozza, February-March 1973, exh. cat. no. 10 with ill.
Milan, Renato Guttuso, Galleria Il Castello, 1973, exh.cat. no. 8
Geneva, Renato Guttuso, Galerie Jean Krugier, July 1974, exh. cat. no.6 with ill.
Busto Arsizio, Renato Guttuso, Italiana Arte, 13 October - 27 November 1977, exh. cat. with ill.
Venice, Renato Guttuso. Opere dal 1931 al 1981, Palazzo Grassi, 4 April-20 June 1982, exh. cat. p. 188, no. 97 with ill.
Milan-Rome, Renato Guttuso. Opere della Fondazione Francesco Pellin, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, 27 January-6 March 2005, Chiostro del Bramante, 16 March-5 June 2005, exh. cat. pp. 128-129, no. 34 with ill.

Literature:
Il Giornale di Sicilia, Palermo, 1 March 1973, p. 13 with ill. (detail) E. Crispolti, Catalogo ragionato generale dei dipinti di Renato Guttuso, vol. III, Mondadori & associati, Milan 1985, p. 156, no. 72/5 with ill.

In parallel to the cycle of paintings dedicated to the Colosseum is the Great Wall of China cycle, on which Guttuso worked in 1972-73. It is built around three large-scale paintings, which aim to represent the Wall in spring, autumn, and winter respectively. Our work is part of the variation dedicated to autumn, characterised by a dominant yellow, a more synthetic rendering of the landscape and a close-up view of the winding wall – a mythical and historical location – which, like a serpent, moves as a protagonist in its own right within a remote and evocative mountainous landscape.

Goffredo Parise was a close friend of Renato Guttuso’s from the years after the war until his death in 1986, shortly before Guttuso’s own. He was one of the writers, including Moravia, who very much appreciated Guttuso’s art. The latter also made a famous portrait that depicts him in a factory of red books in China. Also famous is the preface Parise wrote for the presentation of the Vucciria painting at Galleria Toninelli in 1974.

An anecdote concerning “Muraglia Cinese Grigio-gialla” is linked to the journey to China that Parise undertook in 1966 as an envoy of the Corriere della Sera newspaper. His task was to describe China after Mao’s Long March, and this resulted in a book with the title “Cara Cina” (Dear China).

Even more importantly, Parise took many photographs, including a few depicting the Great Wall, which was little known in the West at that time, and about which he wrote in his articles. His were black and white photographs, and Guttuso painted some of them imagining their colours when reading Goffredo Parise’s articles. In one case, he imagines a Wall with multicoloured flowers, in another one he reminisces about a passage from Parise’ book “Cara Cina” (p. 36 of the Italian edition):

“At the top of this large, humpbacked animal, on its vertebral crests, a sinuous wall winds its way for ten thousand kilometres. It is hard to explain why, but when one sees it all of a sudden, running as it does to the left and to the right, going up and down, always looking same, with its equidistant turrets, the eye first experiences a kind of suspension, a sort of immobile photographic calmness, then a slow narrowing of perspective, like a telescope, and finally a violent expansion, to the effect that the humps, mountains and stones become smaller and smaller, and the brown landscape, the grey wall, the blue sky, the yellow sun are like a drawing made by a child poet on ruled paper in a school notebook. There is also a little train that goes through the mountain with its line of smoke, reappears beyond the wall and disappears whistling among the yellow bends and yellow planes – it’s the Trans-Siberian train.”