Pietro Annigoni: The General's Coat, Pt. 1

"General Mark Clark" by Pietro Annigoni

"About ten years after the war, when I was painting Queen Elizabeth, I read an article in an American magazine which alleged that while working on the royal portrait at Buckingham Palace I was wearing a famous American general's coat. The allegation, which was made by the wife of General Mark Clark, was correct. The coat was her husband's. And, as you say in England, thereby hangs a tale, a war's-end tale.

It was 1945. Fighting had already finished in Italy and was rapidly drawing to a close in the rest of Europe. General Mark Clark, US military commander in Italy, had moved his headquarters to Vienna but made frequent visits to Florence, where he invariably stayed at the Excelsior Hotel. There one day, the manager of the hotel, who was a friend of mine, learned that the General's staff officers wished to present their chief with a portrait of himself and were looking for a suitable painter. My friend suggested they commission me, and they did. 

It was agreed that I would have to work from sketches and studies made at the hotel whenever the General was able to spare the time. In fact he spared little time for my sitter continued to work while he sat. We were repeatedly interrupted by the visits of messengers, aides, secretaries, and a stream of telephone calls from and to places all over the world.

It was always a relief to me when the General left the city for Vienna or elsewhere, for then I worked on the portrait in my own studio. Several times, after I had started the final painting, he came there to see how the work was progressing - and he was pleased with what he saw. When at last the painting was finished, it was arranged that it would be presented to him in my studio. Many other officers were already in the studio when Mark Clark and, it seemed to me, his entire general staff, arrived and filled the place. From the demeanour of his staff officers as well as from the expression on his face it was immediately evident that the General was in a terrible mood. He went straight to the easel, studied the portrait for only a moment and then snorted, 'I've never lost a battle in my life.' And with that, he stalked out of the studio like an angry prima donna, leaving us all speechless. No one could offer an explanation and no one tried. Soon I was alone, angry and humiliated." (To be continued) 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)  

 

Pietro Annigoni: The German Occupation

 

Drawings by Annigoni for "Destruzioni di Firenze"

"Like all Italian anti-fascists in the years immediately before the Second World War, I had watched with alarm Mussolini's toadying to Hitler, his involvement of our country in the Spanish Civil War and his annexation of Albania in emulation of the Führer's 'anschluss [connection]' in Austria. With each new madness came the hope that this time he had overreached himself, that disaster and his self-destruction must follow, that Italy would at last be free of Fascism and dictatorship. Such an act of madness came on 10th June 1940, when the country was thrown into the war alongside the Nazis.

I have called myself an anti-fascist but I was no hero. I did not 'go underground' and join the partisans. Indeed, I did no more than resolve to continue to evade military service by every honest or dishonest means it might require. In 1944 partisan activity was intensified all over the city, signalling the approach of the Allied army. Then one day at sunset, shells came whistling over the city and all of us were ordered to barricade ourselves in our homes. But instead of fear, there was jubilation in our hearts. At last the end of the terror was in sight. The possibility that either German or Allied shells might destroy us before that time arrived scarcely occurred to us.

With the arrival of British, American, and other Allied forces, Florence sighed with relief. The water supply was quickly restored to the parched city and work began almost immediately on the clearance of rubble from the streets. At the same time I was called to the Fine Arts Office and asked by a British officer if I would undertake to make a series of drawings recording the damage done to the city. Armed with permits which gave me access to places forbidden to other civilians, I set to work and, during September and October, produced twelve large and detailed drawings, most of them showing extensive areas of the city. Later they were exhibited at the Galleria Botti and published in lithographic reproduction under the title 'Distruzioni di Firenze.' Now they are in the Gabinetto di Studio of the Uffizi Gallery.

Unknown to us, Hitler had ordered the complete destruction of Florence, and the officer commanding the German troops in Fiesole was later shot for not carrying out that order. Even so, many great architectural masterpieces, including the Giotto Tower, were damaged and the whole areas on the edge of the old city were devastated." 

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)  

 

Pietro Annigoni: First Frescoes

Pietro Annigoni's fresco at the convent of San Marco

"The year 1937 was an important one for me. I began my first important work in fresco - and I decided to get married. I had begun to use fresco in a small way as early as 1934 but did not get the opportunity to paint an entire wall until 1936, when I made a large trompe l'oeil mural in a restaurant which my friends and I patronised and which, incidentally, was destroyed during the Second World War. All the work was done after dinner, by candlelight and with the aid of a flask of Chianti, starting at about ten o'clock and going on until the early hours of the morning.

Now, through an interest in transcendental philosophy, I had become very friendly with Monsignor Tanzella, who was a Professor of Philosophy in the Dominican Order and a man with a serious interest in painting. With his encouragement, I volunteered to paint a series of murals in the convent of San Marco, in Florence, my first ecclesiastical work in that medium, and the first of many that I was to undertake. I regard my frescoes as the most important things I have done, and, certainly, the works that have given me most satisfaction and pleasure. When painting portraits in my studio I have always felt a longing for the hours on the scaffolding, those lonely hours after the plasterer has done his job, and I am left entirely to my own thoughts. For many years now, portraiture has been only a minor part of my work and I have given more and more of my time and thoughts to religious frescoes. Ideas that I would like to realise in churches are going round in my head all the time.

I started the San Marco fresco with a 'Descent from the Cross', and, during the following four years added two groups of Dominican Saints and in two lunettes, 'Adam and Eve' and 'Cain and Abel'. For the first part of the work I decided that I must have a dead body as a model for the figure of Christ, so I consulted the Professor of Anatomy at a teaching hospital and was given permission to choose one from the refrigerator. I took the only one that could possibly serve my purpose and tried to hang it on a ladder, but it was far too stiff for me to do anything with it. In the end, I had to use a living model."

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)  

 

 

Pietro Annigoni: Oil Tempera

"Mrs. Woolfson" by Pietro Annigoni

"I confess that I was myself more concerned with my work than with the fate of Italy at that time. For the first time I had a group of paintings and drawings on show in my native city, Milan, which was gratifying. But at the same time I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with oil painting. The freer, 'impressionistic' brushwork that I employed failed to reproduce in the paintings the qualities I had in mind when I was making the preliminary drawings. For a while I gave up painting and devoted myself to etching Ia collection of 113 of my prints was published that year) and to a new study of the Renaissance masters, through which I hoped vaguely to discover some sort of secret by which they succeeded in carrying over, into their paintings, the power and vitality that informed their drawings.

Unwilling to accept that the secret lay entirely in their genius, I worked myself into a thoroughly depressed state. Then, as has so often happened to me during difficult periods of my life, a new friend came to my aid. His name was Lokoff. He was a Russian painter who for many years had been studying the technical methods of the Old Masters, the chemistry of their colours, and the nature of the mediums they used, and he was convinced he had discovered a secret medium used extensively by painters of the High Renaissance, especially the Venetians. This secret he imparted to me and I have made use of it ever since and given it to anyone else who wanted it. 

Briefly the medium is best described as oil tempera. It comprises various proportions of egg yolk, white of egg, standoil, and mastic varnish. In addition, a vinegary white wine is used for the mixing of the powdered paint. The discovery of this medium, which I learned to modify subtly for use with different colours and to produce different effects, sent me back to painting with new enthusiasm and excitement."

Formula for Oil-Tempera Medium

Egg (in the proportion of one whole egg to two yolks) 4 parts 

Mastic varnish - 1 part

Standoil - 1 part

Mix with an electric or hand egg-whisk. Store in refrigerator until required. I have learned to vary or modify this formula slightly for use with certain colours. I mix all my own colours from the basic ingredients, using a solution of white wine together with a little water.

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)  

 

Pietro Annigoni: Paris and Salzburg

St. Wolfgang Altarpiece by Michael Pacher

"In 1935 I had a very successful one-man show, my second, at the Galleria Botti. The critics mostly ignored it but people from all walks of life crowded into the gallery, and at the end nearly all the paintings and drawings had been sold, at prices far higher than I would have dreamed of asking. But that was not all. Included in the exhibition were several portraits of well-known men and women of Florence and these brought me commissions to paint more. Altogether my prospects looked rosy, so the idea of a trip to Paris immediately appealed to me.

Paris lived up to all its promises, and I and three of my friends lived every moment to the full. We walked backwards and forwards across the beautiful city to visit museums and galleries, passed hours in the cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse, sketching and making caricatures all the while, and at night dined boisterously in some small restaurant before collapsing.  

Then it was on to Salzburg for the Mozart festival and worshipped along with the other tourists at the house where the composer was born and at the museum devoted to his memory. But for me the outstanding attraction was the fifteenth-century altarpiece in a little chapel, the celebrated 10-year work of art by Michael Pacher which I had admired in reproductions but which in reality stunned me with its beauty and perfection. I went to see it every day and stood for hours trying to absorb its every detail. 

I had been drawn to the great German and other North European masters, Dürer, Holbein, Memling, the elder Breughel, and, later, Rembrandt and Callot, very early in my career, and, oddly my friends thought, they meant more to me than the Italian masters, until Renzo Simi and Mario Parri opened my eyes to the tremendous vitality and power of the great Florentines. Not without nostalgia the Pacher altarpiece recalled those earlier loves."

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)  

Pietro Annigoni: Critics and the Public

"Self-Portrait" by Pietro Annigoni

"In those early days I was a 'young man mad about drawing.' Indeed by 1950 I had made so many drawings that I realized that overproduction was reducing even the modest sums for which I was able to sell them. My studio was inundated with them, so one day I consigned more than two thousand sketches and studies to my studio stove. Many more followed later. In the previous year a group of my drawings had been shown in an exhibition at the Galleria Botti, but it was not until three years later, when I was twenty-two, that I was given my first one-man show, of paintings and drawings, at the Palazzo Ferroni in Florence. 

The response from the public and critics set a pattern for nearly all my future exhibitions. Most members of the public who came to the show were enthusiastic, most of the critics were not. Almost alone, the critic of the Corriere della Sera, Ugo Ojetti, gave a reasoned opinion and refrained from damning my work because it did not conform to current fashion. Right from the beginning of my career I have been sustained by the warmth of the public's feeling for my work and have learned not to overrate the importance of critical sneers. After all, if I had to choose between the admiration of the public or that of the critics I would always choose the first. It helped me, if I ever needed help, to stick to my guns and withstand the pressures to swim with the 'modernist' tide. Those pressures were very real and were exemplified by the Futurist artist and propagandist, Carol Carra, when, writing about me in 1936, said:

'No one expects to receive from this exhibition of Annigoni's any artistic impression of a modern character. It is a pity, a very great pity, that the young painter has taken up this stand, given the undoubted abilities which he possesses for figurative art. Let us hope that he will be aware of this in time, and that he will know how to make the effort necessary to abandon this mistaken path...' 

Ironically, when I met Carra thirty years later, he reminded me in a self-congratulatory manner that he had been one of the first critics to recognize me! But, if Carra's criticism ran true to form, Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico's did not. After paying me many flattering compliments in his memoirs he continued; 'Pietro Annigoni works seriously and goes straight on his road without heeding the chatter, the snobism, the intellectualism and the foolishness of this our unhappy period, and also without taking any notice of the spite which his work arouses.'"

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)  

 

Pietro Annigoni: Francesco Bartoli

Drawing by Pietro Annigoni

"In 1923 my father sent me to Milan's famous Calchi-Taeggi College, where I lived a sort of double life. On the one hand, a dreamy student, mad about art; on the other, a juvenile gangster resenting authority and conformity. The good side began when I was befriended by Professor Francesco Bartoli, who subsequently taught me Classics - and oh, so much more - for a whole year. On his desk during the examination was a large art book with an illustrated cover that attracted and held my attention. After the test was over he asked me why I was so interested in the book and I told him it was because I intended to be a painter. He said that he, too, loved painting, and from then on he did all he could to encourage me in my ambition. He believed that none of the arts should be exclusive and taught me to love and appreciate architecture, poetry, music, and great literature.

Bartoli was a leading light of a Milanese society called The Friends of Art, whose members were artisans, craftsmen, or just working men interested in the arts. On Sundays he conducted groups of these men around one of the city's many museums, art galleries, or treasure-filled churches. And he took me along with them. His son, who was about my age, came too. Then, one Sunday that I remember so well, we went to the Brera Museum to see the wonderful collection or paintings there. But I must confess that it was not the paintings that made that particular visit so memorable. The Professor's daughter, accompanied us and I was dazed by her beauty. She seemed to me to have stepped straight out of Leonardo's painting of Beatrice d'Este, a portrait that I had long been in love with.

It would be impossible for me to list all the enduring pleasures of this life that Francesco Bartoli opened up to me. They were not only cultural pleasures. He instilled in me a love of nature, of the open air and, particularly, of mountains. He was himself a mountaineer and spent all his summer holidays in the Dolomites where, tragically, his son died scaling a needle, which was later named after him. My own climbing experiences were not over-ambitious, but sketching expeditions in the smaller mountain ranges of North Italy, alone or with friends and sometimes lasting several weeks, brought me many unforgettable adventures."

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)