Painterly
Terence Maloon
An Artist's Life Pietro Annigoni (W.H. Allen 0.95)
Florence, that carapace of bygone vitality, was where he grew up and trained to be an artist during the time of Fascism's first stirrings. It seems a bleak beginning for a modern artist, but Annigoni has never felt oppressed by the monuments of Florence's former glories, nor has he hankered after the cultural centres of modern Europe. He sees no disadvantages in his origins, nor feels a need to compensate for them. And so he has remained largely untouched by the main intellectual currents of our time, has resisted the visual stimuli of metropolitan life, and has renounced the company of any of his more brilliant and stimulating contemporaries.
Annigoni sprang to fame as a portraitist in Britain under the umbrella of the Royal Academy in 1949. Already equipped with a complete professionalism in matters of craft, a wide range of references to Old Master devices, and a talent for flattering generalisation, his success as a society portrait-painter was a dead ringer from the start. The more noteworthy of these sitters are recalled in this autobiography, the anecdotes generally confirming our belief that the rich, titled and powerful are not a particularly interesting bunch on the whole.
In all fairness to the latter, there is no sign that Annigoni ever crossed the cordon of decorum between himself and his sitters. The exingencies of their silence, and immobility as they posed, and his preoccupation while he painted prevented any considerable intimacy and candour developing between them. The chit-chat is tame stuff, and Annigoni is invariably reserved and polite in the retelling. However he does show a positive dislike for Margot Fonteyn and a genuinely warm regard for the Queen. As one might have anticipated from the rather nerveless lines of his drawings, Annigoni is no witty or incisive raconteur, nor even a particularly perceptive one.
In his autobiography he says virtually nothing about the Old Masters he venerates so deeply, emulates so ostentatiously. Instead there are sustained rants against the Moderns whom he detests. For him David, Ingres and Delacroix are 'the last three giants of painting'; they are also the last painters who did not have to fate up to the challenges presented by photography. For Annigoni all subsequent painting conflates into a vast monolith of incomprehensible energies and garbled intelligence. Even the Impressionists come in for his wrath, but then they started it all didn't they?
In spite of the 'bohemian' spell of his youth, Annigoni retains to a great extent the parochialism of his pious, pettybourgeois upbringing. He considers his real audience to be composed of 'ordinary people', i.e. the petty-bourgeoisie, those who will be enthralled by slightly sentimental, idealised 'speaking-likenesses' of monarchs, tycoons, beautiful ladies, and so on. Much to Ann igoni's chagrin, 'ordinary people' evince no interest in his landscapes whatever.
Augmenting the 'ordinary people' with an unlikely trio (Sir Alfred Munnings R.A., the Shah of Iran, and Bernard Berenson — who, at the time of his acquaintance with Annigoni, was half-blind anyway), Annigoni musters whatever support he can get against this ungodly, incomprehensible Modernist epidemic. Although he professes to be an agnostic, his diatribes against Modernism have a distinctly scriptural ring. In these tracts of Annigoni's the word 'Lust' could be substituted for every mention of modern painting, and the invective would still make sense a good deal of the way. For me the choicest moment in the book was Annigoni's 'descent into Hell' in the Modern wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, 'with the vague knowledge that today a museum "ought to be like that". I left, stunned, around midday and took with me the persisting memory of young men and women with sheep-like faces, intent in front of an untranslatable hieroglyph by Jackson Pollock'.
It is in this pose I would choose to commemorate Annigoni, as a painter who sought to evade his contemporaneity, and whom history has left high and dry. For all his fame and material success, Annigoni cuts a lonely, bewildered and slightly ludicrous figure. I put down his book
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