Pietro Annigoni - Introduction.

PIETRO ANNIGONI

It is very difficult, in fact, in making a proper assessment of Annigoni, to separate the painter from the man, which is not always the case with other artists. This is possibly the reason why a lot of the great many things written about him have turned out to be so trivial and misleading.
One needs to remember, indeed, that while he chose painting as his most vital means of expression, and while he owes his fame ot this primary activity, Annigoni was also a sculptor, an engraver, an architect and writer, as well as being a great lover of music, theatre, philosophy and every other branch of what we think of as "the arts".
Nor was he content with making use of books, museums, galleries and whatever the increasingly sophisticated modern media could offer him, but he was also a tireless traveller, whether going on foot or using the various other means of transport, and he moved from one continent to another with an attitude that was never that of a tourist, but rather that of an explorer, driven by a thirst for knowledge and intent upon treating every journey as an opportunity for inner development and artistic enrichment.
It was "man" himself , in fact, with his triumphs and contradictions, his multiplicity of languages and cultures, and his sufferings, which was the mainspring of Annigoni’s inspiration. His own experiences as a man and as an artist were fused indissolubly in the concept of "man", which enabled him to preserve a difficult balance between a personal and emotional involvement in what was going on around him and the aristocratic aloofness of a detached observer.
Aside from the portraits, in which Annigoni’s interest in humanity and psychological analysis is directly evident, his output is also rich in nature and landscape subjects, which are hardly ever an end in themselves, but which convey, whether implicitly or explicitly, an anthropocentric suggestion.
Even in his religious subjects, which despite his fundamental scepticism fascinated him to the extent that the whole cycle of his frescoes is dedicated to them, the human element predominates over the divine. Or rather, what characterises these works especially is man’s struggle to transcend pain through the instrument of a faith which remains, in the end, unattainable.
Thus Annigoni was a cultivated man, always questing and eager for knowledge, eclectic, given to experimenting, impatient, inclined at times to overexercise his physical energy and intellectual powers, a natural revolutionary, but at the same time a firm exemplar of those values which he regarded as fundamental and in whose service he was always willing to subjects himself to an iron self-discipline. Annigoni derived his philosophical ideas from Benedetto Croce, whilst allowing himself the freedom to evolve. In politics he shared Croce’s repudiation of the Fascist regime and of Nazism, in social terms he inherited his concern for the underprivileged together with his indifference to worldly success, and above all, in the sphere of art, he took over Croce’s conception of the indissoluble link between aesthetics and ethics.
The fundamental reason why Annigoni chose the figurative mode and put drawing first - in spite of a supreme technical ability which would have allowed him to adopt any other style he wished - was the inner conviction that only in the figurative dimension can the artist take full responsibility for what he wants to say, without demanding an ideological commitment from the observer in addition to his attention (see Pietro Annigoni, "Saggio sul disegno", "Essay on drawing", ed. Il Fauno, Florence, 1972). But at this point I am happy to let Annigoni speak for himself, using the words he wrote in 1945, when he published his first catalogue at the age of little over 30. In this piece of writing he defined his position and expressed his commitment to a figurative style with a lucidity and a rigour to which he would always stay true, even though the price of such fidelity was a deep sense of isolation which success and the public limelight would never really mitigate.

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"… So, here I am, with pen in hand, but reluctantly so, since it is not really in words that I would want to give an account of myself, even though I am conscious that the fruits of my labour have so far not attained such a level as would render any account of them superfluous on the grounds that my various works could speak sufficiently for themselves. And then, assuming I must use words, it will be difficult for me to avoid sounding contentious and even impertinent if I am to deal with my work by setting it in the context of its time. It goes without saying that I feel vitally involved in what is happening; on the other hand I realise that my work, incomplete as it is, stands in such sharp contrast to the prevailing contemporary trends in art as to appear quite out of date. But while my work is informed by the reverent and "nostalgic" admiration I have for the tremendous skill of the old masters - that skill which enabled them to make the great statements we are all familiar with, and thereby to nourish and inspire my own work by their example - at the same time I still have my own personal need to communicate human stories and situations according to the dictates of my own life experience working through my imagination.
One should not simply imagine that I feel estranged and cut off from what is going on around me. On the contrary, I have followed and continue to follow with great interest all forms of contemporary art, both in Italy and abroad , and I am always, as it were, listening. There was a song that I could hear swelling strong in Piccio and through to Renoir, and then taking on a more discordant and ambiguous quality in Cézanne, the harbinger of a new academy, and I can still hear the echoes of that song today, fleetingly but unmistakably, in the restless moods of Carena, for example, or dissolving in the surreal atmosphere of De Chirico, or fading away into the pale silences of Soffici. Or again, while I can easily resist the sterile attempts that there have been to go back by convenient and undemanding routes to a misconceived primitivism, I can readily accept that there are certain rare utterances by Tosi, and Morandi, and De Pisis, which to the initiated can offer exquisite sensations and sometimes the distilled essences of pure poetry. To tell the truth, there have been times when I was intensely attracted by the full, free sound of these siren voices, except that what made me uneasy in the end was this unrestrained freedom of theirs, which absolved them from the need to abide by principles which now more than ever I hold to be absolute and ineluctable. My instinctive diffidence was reinforced by the suspicion that one had to look here for the source of something which, in the end, by proceeding unchecked, has the effect of stunting their development and confining them to a little world in which they go on imitating and, at the last, wearily repeating themselves.

A strange situation has come about, today, in the domain of art, and sometimes an embarrassing one also, as if, to use an analogy, they had decided to abolish the horse-drawn tram in its day without having the electric tram available to replace it. It would seem that the need for self-renewal, which never fails mankind, has played a nasty trick on us this time, by encouraging a few bold spirits to cast off the traditional baggage before venturing bravely into the unknown, driven not so much by a bright faith in their new cause, but more perhaps by a despairing reaction against the monotonous work of all those who were content to reduce the splendours achieved by the great masters to an empty and sometimes vulgar formalism.
In venturing on towards the unknown these brave new souls have blurred truth and falsehood in their disdain for the past and have neglected those hard won advances in method which ought to have sustained them and pushed them forward in their efforts.
As far as I am concerned, the only new experiences which are important to me, and which spur me on, are my feelings of joy or despair, the emotions and enthusiasms which occur in the life I have been granted, in the world I can call my own. But I am not sure that the word "new" can be applied to the commitment to follow one’s own instincts or, more fundamentally, to the sheer concentration always on drawing, in the effort to give a genuine reality to the parts and a logical harmony to the whole.
With this purpose, with this belief in the possibility of recapturing something of the wonder of our past tradition and of the sense of craftsmanship that has, unfortunately, been lost, I have worked hard and without compromise up to the present time, in the kind of isolation that usually frightens young artists. But the more I am able to master the practical techniques that a certain kind of poetic fervour seeks to discredit, the more clearly will I be able to express the vital certainty of my lyrical inner world.
I would add, in this connection, that I cannot help but smile whenever people criticise or praise me for having too much talent. Such people will not or cannot understand that there is another and greater kind of talent that I stand in need of, by which I mean the talent for using hand and eye. If talent is a thing to be understood in different ways, evidently the others do not realise that their more fashionable brushwork is much more talented than mine.
For the real human story that I want to tell I shall therefore renounce all choiceness of vocabulary in favour of a common language which can be understood by the majority, but which is not, I would argue, to be considered strained of deficient because of this.
So I can conclude, now that I have said too much in words. The things that are most dear to me I shall hope to be able to express more clearly, as clearly as I humanly can, using my pencil and brush" (Extract from Pietro Annigoni, Ed. Gonnelli, Florence, 1945)

Benedetto and Pietro Annigoni

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