Pietro Annigoni: Return to London

"London" by Pietro Annigoni

"I was urged to go back to London and 'strike while the iron's hot'. People were still talking about my self-portrait which Sir Alfred Munnings, the President of the Royal Academy, had praised in a sensational speech at the Royal Academy banquet. I learned that, after having referred to me as 'an unknown Italian painter, who is really outstanding', he had launched into a diatribe against Picasso, during which, in an aside to Sir Winston Churchill, he said something like, 'Don't you think if we could meet him somewhere in the dark one night we should kick him in the pants?' Next morning, I am told, Churchill sent him a telegram in protest at having been involved, but by then much of the speech had been reported all over the world.

I left Florence by train on 9th June for London, full of high hopes and good spirits that were temporarily jarred in Prato, where my train stopped alongside a goods train that brought back grim memories. From just such trains I had heard the hopeless groans and agonised pleas of prisoners, locked in for transportation to German concentration camps. In London, Louis Israel and Mark du Mont had organised a party for me in du Mont's house, and I hung my despised London drawings on the walls. Among the guests were many art critics and art dealers, the latter including several of those to whom I had shown the drawings earlier in the year. The irony of the scene as they discussed the finer points of the drawings aroused in me an uncomfortable mixture of bitterness and pleasure. But the irony was not complete until the man from Wildensteins, who had looked at the photographs of my paintings in March and shown no interest in seeing the originals, booked me for my first one-man show in London (and my first outside Italy) to take place in 1950.

Now I heard that Munnings wanted to meet me and to see photographs of my work. The meeting took place at the Athenaeum Club. Du Mont and the art critic, Adrian Bury, were with us, and Bury later wrote: 'It was a great occasion. We all discussed the greatness of art and the hope that it would survive the present horrible decadence. Annigoni showed us some photographs of his works. We were tremendously impressed. One charming little touch was that Munnings took Annigoni's hand and studied it, as if to say, 'out of this hand so many wonderful works!'"

To be continued) 

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