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.)