The Struggle of Guttuso

"No matter what the modernists may think, Italy's women rice pickers are not 'rectangular objects with wooden thighs and faces like rotten cantaloupes.'" So ran an editorial in the Italian Communist magazine, Rinascita, which has caught the current Kremlin fever for art with a rosy-Red message (TIME, March 8). Last week, in a letter to Rinascita, 14 ill-indoctrinated party painters struck back. Among them was 37-year-old Renato Guttuso--one of the best Italian artists living. Art, said their letter, should concern itself with "the struggles of the working class [but] to these struggles it can be an incitement and spur only if it is really art."

It was a daring assertion that, as Communists, they could hold opinions in conflict with the party line. As Italians waited to see what--if anything--happened to the rebels, Painter Guttuso went back to work, put the finishing touches on a new picture, Sulphur Miners, wooden thighs and all.

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