“My Story” by Annigoni ( or how I found Annigoni Down Under)

December 13, 2013 Uncategorized Comments Off on “My Story” by Annigoni ( or how I found Annigoni Down Under) 695

“It is a story filled with beauty, happiness and tears, which every man and woman will be moved to read.”

While in Australia I had a couple of run-ins with Pietro Annigoni. Annigoni, for those who do not know, was the Italian oil and fresco painter who became famous after painting Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait in 1956. John Angel, my maestro in Florence was a student of Annigoni’s, so Annigoni is sort of my artistic grandfather.
While browsing the stacks at an used book store in Sydney I came across this:

It just seemed kind of random, this faded print in the cheap wood frame among  three floors of novels, bios, text books and art books. I had never seen an Annigoni print outside of Italy. I wondered who put it up. It seemed to have been there a while.
Earlier in the month, during the final days of my Tasmanian workshop, one of my models had purchased an old suitcase at the local market in Launceston. Inside were an number of magazines and among them I noticed this image:

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Inside was a centerfold of the portrait of Princess Margaret:

What I had overlooked however, was the story that went with the image. Titled “My Story”, Annigoni tells his life story. Here are the pages for you to read:

Unfortunately I have not yet found the next issue so we can not finish reading his story. Instead I leave you with this old clip on Annigoni and the  portrait of Princess Margaret.

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Thanks to Annigoni

April 11, 2010 Uncategorized Comments Off on Thanks to Annigoni 696

I have four paintings in an upcoming show, Annigoni’s Legacy, at the Villa Bardini in Florence in May. The occasion is the centenary of the birth of the painter Pietro Annigoni.

Annigoni kept alive the classic tradition in the dark days of 20th century painting. The painter I studied with, Micheal John Angel, studied with Annigoni in the 1960’s.

Below is Annigoni’s Manifesto of “Modern Painters of Reality”:

(Pittori moderni della realtà) Milan, Italy, November 1947

We, “The Modern Painters of Reality” are gathered in a brotherly group to show our works to the public.

The favor and understanding with which the public has accompanied and supported our efforts over the last few years, our certainty to be in the right and that the others are wrong, have convinced us of the advisability and necessity of this exhibition.

We stand united with our strength, our faith, our ideals and our absolute mutual esteem. As opposed to the Ecole de Paris, born in France, but representative of a universal tendency of decadence, our art born in Italy represents an event of hope and salvation for art and this exhibition is meant to be a first effective contribution to the fight that is about to blaze.

We are neither interested nor moved by the so-called “abstract” or “pure” painting, procreated by a decaying society, which is empty of any human contents and has retreated into itself, in the vain hope of finding a substance in itself.

We disavow all contemporary painting from post-impressionism till today, regarding it as the expression of an age of false progress and a reflection of the dangerous threat that looms over mankind. On the contrary we reaffirm those spiritual and moral values without which painting would become the most fruitless exercise.

We want painting to be moral in its most intimate essence, in its style itself, a painting that in one of the dimmest moments of human history should be filled with the same faith in man and his destiny, that had made the greatness of art in times past.

We recreate the art of illusion of reality, the eternal and primeval seed of figurative arts.

We do not lend ourselves to any comeback, we simply keep on with our mission of true painting, which is the image of a universal feeling, which we want to be understood by many, not just by few “sophisticated ones”.

Long before gathering, each one of us had deeply felt the need to research in nature the leading thread that would allow us to find our true nature in the labyrinth of schools that have multiplied over the last half a century.

Each one of us has spontaneously addressed himself to reality, the first and eternal source of painting, confident to find his own expression in it.

In the face of a new academism or conventionalism, made up of the remnants of cubist formulas and of a standardised impressionistic sensuality, we have exhibited a way of painting that, mindless of fashions or aesthetic theories, is striving to express our feelings through the language that each one of us, according to one’s temperament, has found by looking directly at reality.

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