Antonio Bueno – Portrait of Pietro Annigoni

Portrait of the painter Pietro Annigoni • 1943

Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm

Signed and dated bottom left: A. Bueno 1943
Label on the back: A. Bueno, Galleria d’arte Firenze, Via Cavour 14, 1943

Bibliography: Saverio e Antonio Bueno, exh. cat. (Florence, Galleria d’Arte “Firenze”, 30 gennaio – 10 febbraio 1943). Not published but entered in list of works as number 42

The painting by Antonio Bueno (Berlin, 1918 – Fiesole, 1984) from the years of the Second World War, relates the close bond, dating from that period in Florence, between the painter Pietro Annigoni (Milan, 1910 – Florence 1988) and the Bueno brothers. Antonio and Xavier (Bera, 1915 – Fiesole, 1979) reached Italy in an improbably adventurous manner in 1940. Of Spanish origins, they grew up in Geneva due to their father being a war correspondent with a diplomatic position at the League of Nations. Both brothers nurtured a passion for art from an early age and decided to embark on a painter’s career. Towards the end of the thirties they moved to Paris, where Xavier received his first important critical acclaim with socially committed works denouncing the drama of the Spanish Civil War. The Militiaman of 1938 is a large scale painting marked by a crude realism clearly inspired by seventeenth century models of Spanish painting, notably Velázquez, but above all Zurbarán. During these years of training, Antonio would consider his older brother a point of reference to aim for and from which he would free himself during the following decade. The gathering of clouds over Europe in the autumn of ’39 had immediate consequences for their destinies. In the complex interplay among military alliances, the brothers, being Spanish citizens, lost the right to stay in France. Their declaredly anti-Franco position made a return to Spain dangerous, while a return to Switzerland was out of the question as it had closed its borders to those displaced by the war. In such feverish times, Italy, ally of Spain and not yet involved in the conflict, was the only viable solution. And indeed, the Bueno brothers reached Florence in January 1940, a city they viewed as affording a period to increase their cultural and artistic learning, but that was very soon transformed into a gilded cage when, Italy having entered the war, their passports were confiscated and they were obliged to remain in the Tuscan capital.
In his autobiography, Antonio recalls their routine and the initial Florentine encounters thus: «our days were now split in two. In the mornings we visited churches and museums, while the afternoons we spent in our studio at number 8, via degli Artisti. It was part of a sort of tenement on two floors, dating back to the close of the nineteenth century, entirely occupied by artists.» Here they met the sculptor Berto Lardera, with whom they struck a bond not least for their shared antifascist stances, and it was he who introduced the brothers to Pietro Annigoni. Antonio left a precise record of this first meeting: «Annigoni, who can’t have been more than thirty at the time, was big and tall, with dark sideburns on his full cheeks that give him the aspect not so much of a painter as of a baritone (of which he also had the voice); or better, he looked like a painter, certainly, but one out of a scene from La Bohème. A declared antifascist and not afraid of letting it be known, he was a great eater, great drinker and great worker, Annigoni was also a great expert of museums, and not only in Italy but all Europe, which he had travelled in length and breadth. We immediately became friends, although his painting did leave us somewhat perplexed. Perhaps it is wrong to say his pictures seemed painted in the nineteenth century, but they certainly didn’t look like the fruit of our century. For someone like me, who studied under teachers descended from Cézanne, as it were, and who then became interested in geometrism and Dada, the shock was severe. And yet, the friendliness emanating from the man and his obvious goodwill induced me to look for qualities in certain massive paintings crammed with figures adopting theatrical poses. […] Regardless, we continued seeing Annigoni very regularly, both because he offered to take us to see the frescoes in the churches of Florence, and because quite soon he got into the habit of coming to our studio every evening, where the conversation generally revolved around the political situation.»
It should be pointed out that Antonio Bueno only began to write his autobiography in 1981 and views on his first impressions of Annigoni’s painting were probably altered in part by the positions the artists assumed over the course of later decades. Although, as he himself relates, Antonio Bueno’s Swiss academic training was marked by figures with an eye to the inheritance of Cézanne, and he declared interests in “geometrism” and Dadaism, his early works were not in the spirit of these suggestions. Antonio demonstrated extraordinary technical ability that he nurtured obsessively, at the same time comparing himself with his brother, with whom in the war years he established a deep and inspired artistic symbiosis. From the outset his painting had figurative orientations and was mainly stimulated by a comparison with the mantle of the past. In particular, his forced stay in Florence led him to consider the legacy of the Renaissance, paradoxically becoming interested in the works of the Germans and Dutch present in the collections at the Uffizi. In this phase, the lenticular rendering of reality would be an objective sought with method, and in this sense the vision of the Adoration of the Shepherds by Hugo van der Goes would constitute a genuine revelation for him. In the late forties, this cultural background of obsequious respect for tradition combined with a rigorous approach towards the artist’s craft, would be the horizon on which the preconditions were created for the rise of the quixotic experiments of modern painters of reality whose belligerent manifesto, aimed at conformities and the excesses of the avant-garde, was endorsed by the Bueno brothers with Pietro Annigoni and Gregorio Sciltian, another painter with clearly anti-modernist positions. It should be stressed that Antonio was dragged into the very brief adventure, from 1947-1949, by his brother, and it had major consequences for them both, as their respective careers turned into “fifteen years of misery” when the resolute opposition made up of the critics of the time raged, lashing out against an unrealistic common front judged anachronistic and reactionary.
To return to the relationship with Pietro Annigoni in the war years, a significant episode occurred that justified on the one hand the bond of friendship and appreciation the brothers established with the painter and on the other represented the first stage of their taking root in the artistic context in Italy at the time. For it was Annigoni who curated the first exhibition of the two painters of Spanish origin, taking on the organisational and financial costs. The works of art produced by them during the period of confinement were, for the two artists, precious testimony of a phase of intense and inspired development but certainly conditioned by the complexity of the situation they were living through. Hence, their genesis was not motivated by the necessity for an exhibition that undoubtedly would have directed a distinctly motley group of works to a greater stylistic coherence. But the economic constraints of that delicate phase of their career imposed the choice, and thanks to Annigoni’s connections, the exhibition was set up “in absentia” at Galleria Ranzini in Milan, on the extremely central via Brera not far from the Pinacoteca, without the brothers able to be present: «Annigoni arranged everything. He had decided that we had to give an exhibition and so the exhibition would happen at any cost. Not only did he write the introduction, he personally edited the catalogue, printed at the works near his studio in Piazza Santa Croce, and also took it upon himself to dispatch the works of art, then going to Milan himself to open the crates and hang the paintings. From what he told us later, it was no small feat. The dealer’s warehouse was not far from the gallery but he had to cross the street on a day of high winds. Many of our larger canvases billowed like the sails of a boat, and were nearly swept away along with the carrier. Just as well that Annigoni, besides being very strong (something of which he was immensely proud), he already weighed over fifteen stone. He stayed in Milan for the full length of the show, and the public, seeing him sitting in the gallery with his beret and sideburns all the time, thought he was the artist. Even Vittorio De Sica, our first purchaser, made this mistake.»
The exhibition was a success, and besides the famous film director, father of neo-realism, various prominent collectors bought paintings, such as Kroff, Toninelli, Finazzi and the gallerist Virginio Ghiringhelli of Galleria il Milione, Milan, who also offered the brothers a contract for an exhibition to be held the following year. The success was repeated in 1943 in Florence at the gallery in via Cavour, the only significant gallery at the time in the city, an event that also brought them into contact with Giorgio de Chirico, who was based there during the war. De Chirico was deeply impressed by the Bueno brothers’ work, to the point of insisting on the presence of their paintings in any collective exhibitions he was invited to during the war. Moreover, we know that in his memoir, Pictor Optimus, he wrote of his strong appreciation for the Bueno brothers, in a passage never retracted in further editions, stating he considered them among the most talented painters he had met. Antonio Bueno’s portrait of Pietro Annigoni, exhibited for the first time at Galleria Cavour before being presented as a gift to the sitter, should therefore be understood as a tribute of sincere thanks to a friend and mentor, but at the same time it is a painting with which he expresses a shared view of research oriented to the rapport with figurative tradition and above all the relationship between painting and reality.
The painting is distinguished by sober measure in the choice of colour. Neutral tones of grey, brown and black dominate in controlled harmony, with a delicate shift away in the blue shirt collar and cuffs. Austere tones heightening the flesh show a precise reference to Spanish portraiture with obvious attention to the seventeenth century legacy of Velázquez. The composed and rigorous atmosphere is focussed on the plastic strength of the figure that stands out with vigour from the neutral background, highlighting the features of the face, rendered with naturalistic precision. Annigoni is seated, with an air of proud self-possession, crossing his legs, while his torso is slightly turned in the direction of the spectator, almost as if he in silent entente. His right hand is on the armrest, while held in the other are some sheets of paper or perhaps a rolled sketchbook of drawings, to suggest his nature of artist and intellectual, according to the iconographic tradition of Renaissance portraiture in which the objects included in the work of art indicate the subject’s occupation or social role. However, the portrayal’s simplicity is certainly modern; Annigoni appears unusually elegant, wearing jacket and tie, dark waistcoat and grey trousers in place of the much less formal attire he usually wore and above all without the ever-present painter’s beret or the mantle with which he encoded his image in his countless self-portraits, and in particular those in which he pictured himself in his atelier, hub of artistic communion and intellectual experiment fashioned on the model of the Renaissance workshop.
In this painting Antonio Bueno shows a certain proximity to the interest his brother Xavier manifested in that period towards the work of Manet, especially in his Spanish phase. The obvious model of influence to Antonio is the highly renowned Portrait of Émile Zola from 1868 conserved at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Absolute masterpiece in which artistic and intellectual elements interweave giving the sense of an unforgettable era in the history of taste and style, showing the great novelist sitting at his desk, and although in profile, in a similar pose to that chosen by Bueno for his friend Annigoni. Elegantly dressed in grey trousers and black jacket, and also crossing his right leg. It is common knowledge that this masterpiece was an act of gratitude from the painter to Zola, who had taken Manet’s side in an article criticising the jurists, not comprehending his greatness, who had excluded him from the Salons. The article caused great controversy at the time, to the extent that Zola was dismissed from the newspaper where he worked.
So Antonio Bueno chose a high-ranking and illustrious model to express his thanks and friendship for Pietro Annigoni, who incidentally responded in kind two years later with a small pen-and-ink drawing of Antonio’s key features, still owned by Bueno’s heirs. The work assumes a particular value in their respective biographies and is an extraordinary example of how artists identify with and mutually help each other in the most complicated and adverse contexts. Gratitude is an act of extreme humanity that in the stories of artists sometimes produces intense and precious works of art, like this fine portrait, which Pietro Annigoni kept all his life in his elegant and lavish Florentine home filled with memories and rich as a museum. A painting that renders his greatness not only as a painter but also as watchful intellectual and defender of the traditions and social dimension of the artist. The art historian Bernard Berenson, a great friend of the Milanese painter and naturalised Florentine, said: “Pietro Annigoni is not only the greatest painter of this century, but he can also compete on an equal footing with the greatest painters of all time. He will abide in the history of art as the challenger of a dark age.” This work signals the beginning of another artistic parabola, that of Antonio Bueno, whose art would make him highly appreciated by the collectors of his time. Once the war was over, and forced confinement ended, Florence became for Antonio and Xavier the city in which to express their vocation and be fulfilled as artists becoming among the most highly rated of their generation post war.

Stefano Sbarbaro