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©
VEGAP, Madrid
Renato Guttuso

Caffè Greco

1976
Acrylic on Lined cardboard.
186 x 243 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
573
(
1977.14
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop
View gigapixel
Discover some of the secrets and details invaluable to the human eye in this work.

After secretly belonging to the Italian Communist Party in the period when Mussolini was in power, during which he also opposed the neoclassicism advocated by the Fascists, Renato Guttuso became a key figure in the debate that emerged in post-war Italy between the politically engaged neo-realism encouraged by the Fronte nuovo delle arti and abstraction. His oeuvre gradually became influenced both by the new Art Informel trends and by the work of the Pop artists, which he saw for himself at the Venice Biennale of 1964. Furthermore, for a time he indentified with the existentialism of Giacometti and admired the new figuration of Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter. The Italian painter was always attracted by large compositions illustrating revolutions, disasters or social themes, such as his Execution by Firing Squad in the Countryside of 1938, which is related to the execution of the poet Federico García Lorca by the Falangists during the Spanish Civil War, and La notte di Gibellina of 1970, a work capturing the effects of the earthquake that devastated Messina in 1970.

In the mid-1960s, from his Autobiography cycle of 1966 onwards, memory began to play an essential role in Guttuso’s output. After moving into his new residence on the famous via Margutta in Rome, the painter started to incorporate into his works memories of his Sicilian childhood and life in Rome, which he recomposed and reworked with his own imagination, in some cases stripping them of any trace of veracity. These experiments, in which the restrictions of unity of time and place disappear, are executed with a narrative objectivity that pursues the immediacy of an unrepeatable instant and are close in spirit to the Pop trends and the so-called New Figuration. They continue in two large compositions from the 1970s representing fictional narratives: Funeral Banquet with Picasso, dated 1973, a tribute to Picasso, and Caffè Greco of 1976, dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico.

Caffè Greco belonging to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza collection is a huge cartoon for a larger work on canvas housed in Cologne. It shows the interior of this old café, which after opening in 1760 on Rome’s legendary via Condotti became the favourite meeting place of Roman society and of numerous writers and artists visiting the city, such as Keats, Goethe, Stendhal and Baudelaire. The scene depicted, which takes place in the so-called sala rossa, named after the red damask that lines its walls adorned with paintings, sculptures and various mirrors, conceals a sort of allegorical banquet, an impossible fable in which people are intertwined through time. Artists from all periods are shown, combined anachronistically with several Japanese tourists and a varied selection of people from his own day. “He wanted to give — even if only through a sign — the feeling of the café’s history; and so, while the characters are those of today — intellectuals, Swedish girls, the Japanese with the camera, ambiguous lesbian couples, I have sought to introduce a single link with its history, precisely Colonel William Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, who frequented the café when he was in Rome with his equestrian circus.”

The profile figure of Giorgio de Chirico, an artist whom Guttuso regarded as the last survivor among the great geniuses of the century, is shown seated on the left, gazing at the rest of the people. According to the artist, his presence acted as a “catalyst” of the scene, although he went on to explain that “the fascination with the place largely stemmed from the people who had passed through it, from Buffalo Bill to Gabriele d’Annunzio.”

Paloma Alarcó

20th Centurys. XX - Figuración en la posguerra europeaPaintingAcrylicLined cardboard
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Caffè Greco. Caffè Greco, 1976
Caffè Greco
Renato Guttuso

©

VEGAP, Madrid

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Caffè Greco. Caffè Greco, 1976
Caffè Greco
Renato Guttuso

©

VEGAP, Madrid

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