PIETRO ANNIGONI (1910-1988) RP


CASTELLO	HARVEST	NUDE BENDING FORWARD

‘Pietro Annigoni is not only the greatest artist of [the twentieth] century but is also able to compete on the level of the greatest artists of all time.’ (Bernard Berenson)

Pietro Annigoni was born in Milan on 7 June 1910, the son of a mechanical engineer. He was educated at a local primary school, the G Parini gymnasium and Clanche-Taeggi College. When he moved with his family to Florence, in 1925, he attended Padri Scolopi College. At the same time, he attended classes in life drawing at the Circolo degli Artisti and at the Accademia. In 1927, he entered the Accademia di Belle Arti as a full-time student, and took courses in painting, sculpture and engraving. He based his style on Italian old masters, and learned from their techniques, while also receiving advice on oil tempera from the Russian artist, Nikolai Lokoff.

Annigoni exhibited for the first time with two other artists, in 1930, at the Galleria Calvanesi e Botti. Two years later, he held his first solo show at the Bellini Gallery in the Palazzo Ferroni, and won the Trentacoste prize. A further exhibition at the Casa d’Artisti, in Milan, in 1936, brought him particular acclaim, and led to the important commission to produce frescoes in the Convent of San Marco, Florence. Christ Calming the Waves, included here, exemplifies his religious subjects of this period. At the same time, he travelled widely, finding inspiration in the paintings that he studied, and producing a series of landscape watercolours.

The open opposition of Annigoni to the fascism of Mussolini led to his ostracism from the cultural establishment within Italy until the end of the Second World War. But conditions so changed from 1945, that he was able to produce some of his greatest and most characteristic works. In 1947, he signed the ‘Manifesto of Modern Painters of Reality’ and, alone among the signatories, remained true both aesthetically and ethically to its opposition to abstraction.

Late in the 1940s, Annigoni decided that the British public would be particularly sympathetic to his approach to art; and indeed he paralleled such Neo-Romantic contemporaries as Michael Ayrton. He exhibited at the Royal Academy (from 1949) and held the first of several successful solo shows in London (at Wildenstein in 1950) which led to international fame. He received many commissions, particularly for portraits, and was the subject of solo shows in Paris, New York, San Francisco and, of course, Italy. In 1954, the Fishmongers Company requested a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and the result proved phenomenally popular when it was exhibited in 1955 at the Royal Academy. While a second version, painted for the National Portrait Gallery in 1969, was less well received, Annigoni remained a prominent artistic personality until his death in Florence on 28 October 1988. A major retrospective took place in Florence, at the Palazzo Strozzi, in 2000.

Further reading: Annigoni, Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2000