Maurizio Valenzi
Maurizio Valenzi (Tunis 1909 - Naples 2009) began working as a painter attending for a few years the École des Beaux-Artsof Tunis directed by Armand Vergeaud. Influenced by Moses Levy, he adhered to the avant-garde tendencies with Antonio Corpora and Jules Lellouch. He exhibited his first works at the Salon tunisien then in Rome, Paris and in several Tunisian cities in group exhibitions with French and Tunisian painters. From 1930 to 1931 he had a studio in Rome, where he met Carlo Levi, Fausto Pirandello and Adriana Pincherle. In June 1932, back to Tunisia, he joined the Communist Party. He began his political activity in the south of the country, among the farm labourers of Sfax and Djerba, from which he brought drawings and paintings. In 1937 he stayed in Paris, where he wrote for the "Voce degli Italiani", directed by Giuseppe Di Vittorio. During this period he met several personalities of French culture, such as Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard and JRBloch and he had the possibility to study painting from the Impressionists tothe École de Paris, Modigliani, Cézanne, Goya, Matisse, the painters of the Roman School would have been his pictorial points of reference. Back inTunisia, in 1941 he was arrested, tortured and sentenced to life imprisonmentand hard labour by the fascist regime of Vichy, that was an extreme experience recorded by Valenzi on sheets of paper found by chance, then collected in theDrawnings of Lambèse. From July to November 1942 his wife Litza Cittanova was in prison as well. Liberated by the Allies in March 1943, the PCI (Italian Communist Party) sent him to Naples in order to prepare the arrival of Palmiro Togliatti. From 1953 to 1968 he was elected to the Senate for three terms. His activity as a painter, necessarily downsized by his political commitment, restarted after 1968 when, revisiting the figurative inclinations of his youth, he rethought about the memories of captivity. Among this period's works there are also Naples landscapes and both family and famous personalities portraits, such as Emilio Notte, Paolo Ricci and Eduardo De Filippo.

Renato Guttuso and Roberto Matta
Guttuso
The life and times of Renato Guttuso extend from Bagheria,1912, to Rome, 1987. He was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1912. Abandoning the idea of  a law degree, he instead decided to embark upon a career as a painter. His initial period ranges from his first paintings depicting the peasants of his native Sicily up to his famous Fuga dall'Etna of 1937 and the equally acclaimed Vuccirria, the working-class market in Palermo. From that time on, he adopted a purely figurative style counterbalanced by themes firmly rooted in the rural peasant world,  with a propensity towards social issues and overtly political topics. He subsequently moved to Rome and formed a group with fellow painters Birolli, Fontana and Persico. When the Second World War brokeout, he produced a series of paintings entitled Gott mit Uns - God with us -the motto engraved on German soldiers' belt-buckles. His polemic verve came powerfully to the fore. Guttuso was never to betray his personal "campaign of ideas", which culminated in  Ifunerali di Togliatti, a manifesto of antifascism. After the war, he modelled his style on Pablo Picasso's early so-called "Blue" period. In 1946 he founded the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti with Birolli, Vedova, Morlotti,Turcato. In 1968 his paintings reflected the situation in Europe, particularly in France. In Paris he painted the students in the first protest marches in what would be remembered as the Parisian May. From 1969 onwards he lived in Rome, in Via Margutta, the legendary street of painters, with his companion Marta Marzotto, the splendidc ountess former rice weeder then model. This was the beginning of his introspective period. He embarked upon a series of autobiographical paintings, including one of his greatest masterpieces, Strega Malinconica, painted in1982. Although Guttuso lived through a period marked by enormous social andcultural upheavals and played a leading role in all of them, his figurative style nonetheless remained remarkably consistent. Deep down, he was always inspired by his exuberant and luminous Sicily. His paintings express his humanity through a kind of tortuous plasticism. The human forms - tense, nervous yet always recognisable - that he compresses onto his canvasses embody all the suffering in the world.
Matta
Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta was an international figure whose worldview represented a synthesis of European, American, and Latin American cultures. As a member of the Surrealist movement and an early mentor to several Abstract Expressionists, Matta broke with both groups to pursue a highly personal artistic vision. His mature work blended abstraction, figuration, andmulti-dimensional spaces into complex, cosmic landscapes. Matta's long and prolific career was defined by a strong social conscience and an intense exploration of his internal and external worlds.

De Guttuso a Matta, la producción artística del siglo XX enla colección que fe de propiedad de Valenzi, militante antifascista, político, alcalde de Nápoles, artista e intelectual.
 
Maurizio Valenzi, fue un verdadero protagonista de la vita cultural de su época. Fue un artista y político, amigo de intelectuales y de estudiosos, protagonista de la vida cultural de Nápoles, supo unir y combinar su vocación artistica al compromiso político.
 
La colección presentada en Maschi Angioino representa el testimonio del compromiso del artista, además permite conocer y apreciar las obras de arte y los artistas del corto siglo.