The early years (1918-1933)

Antonio Bueno was born on the 21st. of July 1918, in imperial Berlin during the final phases of the First World War. This fact, not particularly relevant in itself, was due to chance: his father Javier, a journalist and polemical pamphleteer, had been sent by the Madrid daily, "ABC", to the German capital as war correspondent and lived there with his family from 1915 until 1919, for the period of his appointment only, no longer. In fact when his task ended he returned to Spain, followed by his wife and children (three boys, the youngest of whom was, in fact, Antonio).

The Berlin sojourn was, for the Bueno family, little more than a parenthesis; but it should be pointed out that they were destined to experience parentheses of this kind in the future and that they had known them in the past. Javier Bueno had always led a vagrant type of life, from when - after his father's death when little more than a boy- he had run away from Spain (he was a native of Grenada in Andalusia) and hiked adventurously to Paris. During these early years of freedom he frequented the pre-war extremist intelligentsia, came into contact with French and Spanish anarchist circles, printed clandestine magazines and propaganda material until, finally, in 1910, he managed to find work as foreign correspondent to "ABC", a paper with monarchist- conservative leanings. In Paris, in 1912, he met and married a fugitive like himself, a minute, young Jewish secretary,. Hannah Rosianskaja Rosianskaja from a small town called Suwalky, then in Russia, now in Poland, not far from the Lithuanian border, the last of thirteen children, who had recently arrived in Paris in search of freedom and independence. 

Javier Bueno's journalistic profession never permitted the members of his family to settle anywhere; on the contrary, it obliged them to change abode and habits continuously. This circumstance, associated with the genetic heritage accruing from atypical marriages, produced a multilingual, cosmopolitan and culturally heterogeneous domestic tradition which continued into the successive generations. Emblematically, the couple's three children all saw the light in three different countries: Guy, the eldest, in France, in 1913; Xavier, who inherited - although spelt slightly differently - his father's name, in Spain, in 1915, and Antonio, as we have seen, in Germany.

Having returned to Spain after the war, the Bueno family lived for a few years in Madrid in rented apartments, changing address two or three times. However, when, in 1923, General Primo de Rivera, who virtually suppressed the parliamentary system and introduced measures against the freedom of the press, came to power, Javier Bueno's situation (with his past as an anarchist activist and the many irreverent opinions he professed in his articles) became impossible. Fortunately he enjoyed a certain fame as a political columnist; and it was thanks to this that he was invited to Geneva to direct the Spanish section of the BIT (Bureau International du Travail, an international trade-union organisation associated with the League of Nations).

Thus, in 1925, Javier Bueno left Spain definitively and moved to Switzerland to assume his prestigious post as international Executive; for his family this meant a period of relative stability and economic prosperity. The years that followed, the Genevan period, were to prove decisive in the education and development of the three Bueno brothers, years during which their constitutional cosmopolitanism seemed about to capitulate in the face of a preponderant French or, at any rate, French-speaking culture. Little by little, distance and absence desiccated and practically stifled their Spanish roots (which had had very little time to develop in any case); French soon became the official, academic and everyday language of their lives. As to the chance of returning to Spain, this came to an irrevocable end - both for the father and for the sons - after 1936, with the outbreak of the Civil War.

It was in Geneva that Antonio Bueno began to develop intellectually and culturally. What effective influence the few early years spent in Spain may have had is hard to say; in Madrid he barely managed to complete his first year at school, and for the rest of his life spoke a hybrid form of contaminated Spanish. At home the dominant figure, the one that for better or worse, had the greatest influence over him, was undoubtedly his father. Javier Bueno was a curious mélange of the "broad mindedness" of the progressive thinker and the pride of the self-made man, of the man who owed his fortune only to himself and his talent, a compound of the traits of the anti-conformist and those of the tyrant. An authoritative and authoritarian figure, he ruled his family with the intransigence of the absolute monarch, never allowing anyone to contradict him; yet, even his gravest faults were unable to eclipse the versatility of his numerous gifts. Among other things, he was a successful novelist and playwright, wrote political treatises and, was, to a certain extent, one of those who inspired the new Spanish constitution when the Republic was set up in 1931. Furthermore, he was an able amateur painter. Decked out in a smock and beret, and armed with palette and brush he must have cut a theatrical figure. It may have been his complacent holiday-time brushstrokes that fired his sons Xavier and Antonio, infecting them as it were, from early childhood, with the germs of artistic passion.

Antonio's father was (at best) an eccentric, an idealist whose belief in Socialist doctrine had urged him to wage war on all bourgeois convention; and his example was followed, in part, by his sons, who never developed the tendency - even as adults - to comply with the canons of convenience and always insisted on leading, as far as possible, a life of "rebellious genius". Some of the father's outrageous attitudes had a devastating effect on them (such as sending them to school in effeminate haircuts and Russian-style garb), and caused them to nourish an everlasting feeling of rancour towards him, a secret desire for rebellion, which never really came to a head. On the contrary their relationship with their mother was far more spontaneous and natural. She had a rather immature personality and was, in fact, the first victim of her husband's outlandish ethical rigour. The marriage was neither long nor happy and was destined - as we shall see later - to prove a bitter disappointment to her.

In Geneva, the Bueno family lived, at first, on Quai des Eaux Vives, a few metres from the lake; later they moved to an apartment in Le Courbusier's Maison de Verre, a building which deeply impressed Antonio Bueno and whose essential futuristic lines were destined to be reproduced in many of his paintings. A talent for painting first manifested itself in Xavier, two years his elder, who turned out to be a veritable infant prodigy and blazed a brilliant scholastic trail at Geneva's Fine Arts' Academy. Initially, Antonio's talent did not meet with similar acceptance; when, at the age of seventeen, he expressed the desire to attend the Academy his parents' reaction was, at best, lukewarm. There was a future painter in the family already and, although he reaped academic successes, his economic future, like that of all painters, was unsure. A compromise was reached: Antonio too would go to the École des Beaux-Arts, but to study publicity graphics, not to become a "pure" artist.

Alongside the study of the fine arts there was another art in the Bueno children's life: music. By paternal decree, a trio was set up (a sole concession, perhaps, to bourgeois pedagogical habits) with Guy on the piano, Xavier on the 'cello and Antonio on the violin. The not too sagacious (totally arbitrary) attribution of the instruments bore few fruits; in fact the trio never came to much. Antonio would have preferred the piano, which he taught himself later and he always recalled those nine years spent at the conservatory scraping his poor violin with a mixture of horror and pride. His love for chamber music manifested itself in another and more positive way in the many Concertino pictures he painted in later life. Similarly, his Marinaretto pictures probably recall his childhood when, in the twenties, it was the fashion to dress children in sailor suits.