MY FATHER, BUENO 

Of Antonio Bueno's three children, I am the last, the youngest. When he died in 1984, I was not yet twenty; therefore I think I really knew only the latter part of his life, that is the phase when his fame was secure and well-established. I learnt about his eventful younger days, the trouble-ridden pathway he had to follow before reaching artistic and personal maturity, all those events which probably comprise the more fascinating pages of his biography, mainly from his own accounts.later, when I felt the urge to go into the question more deeply, I was able to avail myself of the treasure trove of documents left by my father, above all his writings, his memoirs and diaries. 

The origins of Antonio Bueno's family are of such a novel and atypical character that it is almost impossible not to refer to them. His father, a Spanish journalist and writer of a certain fame, was undoubtedly a restless and "troublesome" character, so much so that ten years before the Franco regime came to power he was obliged to leave Spain for political reasons. His mother, more or less a voluntary exile like her husband, was a Polish Jew. Bueno's childhood and early youth comprised an endless series of journeys and changes of abode. He was born in Berlin in 1918, but almost immediately his family took him for shorter or longer periods to live in Spain, France, Switzerland and England. Between 1925 and 1938 he lived in Geneva where his father worked as an executive at the League of Nations. 

At home the family spoke three languages: Spanish, their father's native tongue; German, spotted with Yiddish terms, as spoken by their mother, and French, the language of the official world and of study. Although his artistic passion nipped his academic career in the bud, Bueno never suffered from any kind of cultural drawback, thanks both to his innate, omnivorous love of reading and an inclination to carry out in-depth investigations and increase his knowledge, a gift he inherited from his father the latter too, in his way, an irregular and self-taught intellectual. The family environment, cosmopolitan and open-minded, provided as good a training-ground as any of the universities Antonio Bueno ever attended. 

A talent for painting first manifested itself in his brother Xavier, two years his senior and in many ways his only true teacher. Extremely precocious, from their adolescence the two brothers formed an artistic, creative and material alliance so great that it brought them to interact and at times even mix their brush-strokes on the same canvas. Rather than devote time to following academic dicta, they decided to trace figurative art back to its origins on their own behalf, visiting museums and studying in art book reproductions of the great Italian, Spanish and Flemish masters of the past. Thus they succeeded in summing up and reviving for a time a painting technique, which in the twentieth century seemed extinct.

The two young artists settled first in Paris, renting a studio. Their subsequent transfer to Italy in 1940 was due mostly to chance. Originally their trip was meant to be the classical voyage en Italie that every European artist must undertake sooner or later;instaed they were destined never to leave Florence and to spend the rest of their lives there. The Tuscan capital was to be, in theory, simply the first stage in their journey of discovery until that drôle de guerre which prevented them from returning to Paris came to an end, but when a few months later Italy too entered the war, their plans had to be changed. Similarly, their first Italian exhibitions were also a matter of chance, unplanned. At the time the two artists painted to practice, to fill up by painting from life the gaps they judged their academic training tohave left. They were not remotely thinking of painting for a public. They corrected, erased, and to save material, occasionally painted over already finished pictures. Therefore, the success of their first personal exhibitions came as an authentic surprise to them. 

But why Florence? This is a question that the Bueno brothers were obliged to ask themselves many times afterwards. The provincialism of the environment did not offer particularly promising career prospects and it probably did not appear very stimulating to the two young painters who had lived in Paris and who were imbibed with cosmopolitan culture. Yet for the kind of solitary and highly personal research they had in mind, perhaps the Tuscan capital was a more fitting place for them than Paris. By 1945 they felt tied to Florence, mostly for practical reasons: here, they had established themselves as portrait-painters, they had set up a consistent upper-bourgeois clientele, and both had families and children.

Life in Florence was always hard for Antonio Bueno , especially in the period following his definitive "divorce" from his brother Xavier (1949); but the difficulties were principally the conseguences of his own precise choice. Had he wanted he might have enjoyed a solid local fame continuing, for example, to paint portraits. He preferred, however, to isolate himself in eccentric positions, making choices which at times looked forward, at others looked back. His constant quest for originality was rewarded only towards the end of his life and at a very high price. In the Forties Bueno undertook work of refined and incomparable realism, which proved, however, not devoid of risk: the critics, ignoring the "pauperist" intent of his still lives, accused him of reaction. Between 1952 and 1959 came the period of the "pipes" : in the paintings of this period, which strove to achieve a compromise between abstract and figurative art, all human or "natural" presences were replaced by objects with a metaphysical significance -clay pipes which, in fact, Antonio and Xavier smoked when they were students in Geneva, egg-shells, pencils, paint-brushes. Bueno's activity reached its apex during the Sixties, when he became, for all practical purposes, the coordinator of the Florentine avant-garde, giving rise to exhibitions and initiatives of all kinds and, at the same time, devoting himself to rather provocative forms of art - monochromatic painting, "technological" and multimedial art, visual poetry, painting by the yard, audio-painting, more or less explicit references to the world of pop-art.  

The Fifties and Sixties, except for the occasional, short parentheses, were times of great difficulty and worry for the artist and his family. Bueno's pictures were hard to place on the market; what is more, they seemed to win greater favour in Milan than in Florence, abroad than in Italy (his first truly successful exhibition was held in New York in 1959). Besides the constant torment of economic difficulties during these two stormy decades Bueno had to fight against both personal and artistic isolation, the result of his position as an exile: he was finally granted Italian citizenship in 1970, after two refusals and various bureaucratic vicissitudes. It is possible to interpret his participation in the various avant-garde movements and currents during that period ("Gruppo '70", "Nuova Figurazione, etc.) as an attempt to win the esteem of critics and colleagues.

The Antonio Bueno I knew led a life quite different from that narrated so far. Towards the end of the Seventies he had accomplished his definitive separation from the avant-garde : the artist who had never denied the pre-eminence of figuration, however, returned to a declaredly "neo-pastist" kind of painting - , or to use his own ironic labels "neo-kitsch" and "pompierist". The season of struggles, experimentation, clamorous and iconoclastic alliances was over. During the last decade of his life he very rarely,quite exceptionally one can say, took part in collective exhibitions. His friendships became fewer as did his frequentation of mundane events, his travels and his absences from home in general. This brusque change of mood was due to two causes: his change of residence ( the family moved to a house in the woods about twenty kilometres from Florence) and above all the sudden deterioration of his health: Bueno suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, due, most likely, to continuous contact with the harmful substances contained in the paints and solvents he used.

During his latter years he devoted every moment and all his energies, without pauses or holidays, to his work, exploiting even those extra wakeful hours which insomnia imposed on him. He never forsook the strict rule underlying his drawing technique, his boundless care for accuracy and subtlety. Having reintroduced the techniques and modalities of the great art of the past, he seemed doomed to remain faithful to them forever. He was never able to taste the superior recklessness of a famous master, or live on his signature alone: every painting, even the tiniest, cost him several days'of work, up to the last. To keep the paint fresh from one day to the next and thus go on working, he mixed his colours with a solution of oil and petrol. Another useful expedient consisted in putting the paintings in the fridge during pauses between sessions. To absorb the surplus oil, he alternated between brushes and newspaper, opportunely ironed. He often used his bare finger-tips as tampons, a habit no doctor could make him give up.

His devotion to the easel naturally reduced the possibility of doing anything else, or even taking a break. That left him very little time to devote to his family. Apart from painting, he always showed a keen interest in music as the many Concertino paintings of his later years reveal. In his youth he had studied the violin for nine years, now music was a source of comfort rather than anything else, the sound track to his endless pictorial labour. Someone, usually my mother, had to help by turning the record on his old gramophone: if he did so himself he invariably left two or three coloured fingerprints on the records. He was able to dedicate himself to reading at night (again 'thanks' to his insomnia) : that way, in 1981 or 1982, he was able to reread the whole of Proust's Recherche at enormous speed.

His last important commitment, which required an great tour de force on his part, was preparing for the 1984 edition of the Venice Biennale, a few months before his death. For that occasion he wanted to paint a series of unusually large-scale d'aprés. He had begun to take an interest in d'aprés, (re-elaborations of more or less famous works by celebrated artists of the past) towards the end of the Seventies. Over the years this kind of painting had become the most advanced and personal aspect of his research. During the months he devoted to the work for the Biennale he was visibly ill and weak, but his enthusiasm for the paintings he had planned and the need to meet the commitment evidently gave him the strength to go on. He collapsed, in fact, a few days after the inauguration, at the beginning of June.

From the point of view of humanity and character, my father was undoubtedly an original kind of person, even if not quite so eccentric as one believes an artist of respect should be. He was impetuous, disorderly, at times irascible. His most characteristic trait was his forgetfulness which was capable of reaching unbelievable extremes. His constant absentmindedness obliged him to waste precious time, practically every day, searching for things that for him were essential (the things he mislaid were always the same, i. e. his glasses, his beret, the little book where he kept his telephone numbers). These quests were often desperate, endless, involving everybody and every room in the house. It was the same with his paint brushes, except for the fact that he had given them proper names which he used when searching for them as if the brushes were people ( one that I can remember was called Filippo).

Among other things he was a fascinating, torrential conversationalist capable of prolonging a telephone conversation beyond all reasonable bounds for no reason other than the pleasure of talking. During his last years, due to the lack of worthy interlocutors, he took to writing and delighted in putting down - with a great deal of grace, one must say - interesting pages of autobiographical material. 

By way of a strange kind of compensation, the character of his painting appeared remote from his own was quite the opposite, in fact. The neatness and precision that he reserved for his paintings were totally foreign to his own temperament and were in contrast with his disorderly life-style : visitors to his studio were amazed by the chaos and dirt that prevailed there. He himself wore only threadbare jackets and baggy trousers, all stained with paint. The everyday man was always exuberant and expansive, while when he painted he became reticent and malicious. He scorned all forms of rhetoric and exhibitionism, content to make allusive remarks, to coin subtle metaphors.  

I believe that this is an essential consideration for those who seek to interpret his art: those vacant faces, bewildered and amazed (amazed perhaps by the absurdity of life), betray almost no thought or feeling because they are so intent on keeping them "inside". His is the art of implication, never as simple or superficial as it tries to appear.