Which is fine and I’m glad people do that but I’d be more for taking the people from

Which is fine, and I’m glad people do that, but I’d be more for taking the people from London’s Burning and chaining ourselves to some bulldozers at Newbury. That seems to be one of the front lines.”Bragg left the Labour Party during the Gulf War – “I thought there was a better way of expressing support for our troops out there than just toeing the government and American line” – and remains unconvinced about the Blair Revolution. “New Labour won’t come out of the closet and tell us what they are: a democratic socialist party, a social democrat party, a Christian democrat party – they don’t seem to have decided.”The day before we met, Arthur Scargill relaunched his Socialist Labour Party. Presumably it was Bragg’s instinctive longing for certainties that made him say he could see “very good reason” for voting for it if proportional representation were introduced. In the meantime, pragmatism will win his vote for Labour, despite obvious reservations: “There’s no point in me climbing up to the top of the hill above the clouds and saying, ‘Oh yeah, I can see the New Jerusalem’, when from what New Labour is saying the New Jerusalem is something like parts of the Eighties .. I certainly wouldn’t vote for Harriet Harman. If we’re going to commit ourselves to a society which has equality in it, then the leaders of the party that bases its ideology on equality have to experience it.

It’s the limo syndrome.”It’s in the nature of protest singers to protest, even when their former allies achieve power. We can take it, then, that Billy Bragg, pop champion of Labour during its wilderness years and spokesman for a generation of battered socialists, will not be Minister for Music in a Blair government? “No, I don’t think so. I’m not much of a line-toer.”Billy Bragg’s new album will be out later this year.. All children of the old Communist Party (and there are many of us) will be saddened by Renato Guttuso’s paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery, for here is the art we were once instructed to admire – and it’s simply not good enough. I also doubt whether the show will be attractive to the bourgeoisie. Even in his still-lifes, the most conventional part of his work, Guttuso makes no attempt to please or ingratiate; and surely his figure-painting lacks point, unless of course you happen to share his somewhat ancient political perspectives. Yet Guttuso may well find supporters among those who believe in populist art.

Is not populism on the increase? Two months ago, in Glasgow, we saw the first new museum to be founded on the principle that most modern art is too remote from its proper audience. Both the British Council and the Tate Gallery have recently started to support the veteran realist Leon Kossoff Neo-conceptualists do not hold the field. Two of the most (financially) successful painters at the moment are Paula Rego and Peter Howson. They both practise a kind of lumpen realism with emblematic overtones, a style not far removed from Guttuso’s.
That’s because modern realism tends to be repetitious and self-satisfied. Guttuso himself didn’t change much in his long career, from the late Twenties to his death in 1987. Sicilian by birth, he understood the peasantry, but was of a class sufficiently elevated (his father was a land surveyor) to allow him a future as an artist. By the early Thirties he was in Milan, where he saw the poverty of industrial workers In 1939 he settled in Rome.

There he had friends among writers as well as artists (he was also a poet and a journalist), and he joined the Italian Communist Party.Henceforward the Party was Guttuso’s home, his inspiration and guide One cannot see that it helped his art. He was not made more eloquent by the common struggle against fascism. Even when painting a grand statesman he flinched from the epic This is the problem with The Crucifixion (1940- 41). Guttuso uses the Christian myth to make contemporary secular points. But the canvas is so unfree, fettered to centuries of previous Italian painting, littered with bits and pieces, passages that obviously come from studio props. The same is so of his pictures of an execution, filled with things derived from reproductions of Goya and Manet.Guttuso wanted to be a powerful, angry painter, but held back.

He also tended to put too many things into his paintings; thus they became untidy and lacked focus. So many pictures would have been better if they were more economical and if Guttuso had looked for a strong central image And he might then have been of more service to communism. If I were his party leader I would have asked Guttuso to strip everything down by making woodcuts. That would have put an end to his tendency to fuss over paintings. We might have had some direct, frank depictions of – let’s see – workers with a banner, or partisans, or Fausto Coppi. It’s a pity that Guttuso attempted no subjects of this sort.Some of the still-lifes (influenced by Van Gogh) are a sort of peasant painting Alas, Guttuso had difficulty with line. The Whitechapel’s small gallery at the top of the stairs holds his drawings.