Peter Robb's sprawling book Street Fight In Naples (see this blog An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Street Fight In Naples) provides some wonderful insights into that city's amazing history, but his later Midnight In Sicily is more focused and even better.
The mafia, politics, violence and corruption loom large – it's about southern Italy after all – but, as with the previous book, there is also much about art.
And especially the remarkable Renato Guttuso, a maverick in the Picasso mould, whose life and – especially – death were bound up with those themes of politics, corruption and organised crime.
His relationship (both artistic and intimate) with his muse, Marta Marzotto, is love story, soap opera, scandal and tragedy, all wrapped up together, and Robb's interview with Marzotto herself is a wonderful piece of theatre.
Guttuso's passionate style managed to make La Vucciria (above), his 1974 study of Palermo's market, as much about hunger as about food. And his many erotic studies of Marta Marzotto (below) encompassed a furious desire as well as an appreciation of beauty.
No comments:
Post a Comment