12th Corporate Culture Week:
Renato Guttuso Goes on Show
The Pirelli Foundation is home to Scientific Research, a painting that Renato Guttuso made in 1961 as a cartoon for the mosaic of the same name. The mosaic itself was shown in the Pirelli pavilion at Expo 61 in Turin, which marked the centenary of the Unification of Italy. The Foundation devoted its participation in the 2013 Corporate Culture Week to the Sicilian master with the cartoon as its centrepiece.
At the traditional Museimpresa event, which once a year calls upon companies to open up their cultural heritage to the public, the Pirelli Foundation thus took the large, highly coloured painting on the theme of science as a means to introduce other works made by Renato Guttuso for Pirelli that had never previously been shown. In particular, these included a series of drawings inspired by the trip to Egypt that the painter went on in 1959 with his friend Giovanni Pirelli. Under the pseudonym of Franco Fellini, the name he used as a writer, Leopoldo’s brother then published the diary of their travels along the Nile in issues 1 and 2 of the 1959 Pirelli magazine, leaving to Guttuso’s pencil the task of illustrating the wonderful, variegated world along the banks of the African river.
