His artistic apprenticeship, between Geneva and Paris (1934-1939)

It was during the Geneva period too that Antonio was introduced to politics. Between 1934 and 1936, with his brother Xavier, he frequented a Communist Party cell, presented by their friend Maurice Pianzola (later director of Geneva's Modern Art Gallery). Their Communist militancy was quite short-lived: it came to a brusque end in 1939, because of bitter disappointment at the Molotov-Ribbertrop pact for the division of Poland. Even before that, their ideological orthodoxy had always vacillated, so much so, that the Genevan Communist cell had accused them vaguely of "Trotskyism".

It was during this period, more or less, that the Bueno family's "relative stability" came to a sudden end. The head of the family, Javier, became sentimentally involved with a young Swiss woman, and, in keeping with his anti-conformist morality, he decided to reserve to this new relationship (from which a daughter was born) the same rights he had attributed to the previous one. At first he even tried to live with both women, establishing a curious ménage à trois; later, however, he decided to separate from his wife. From that moment on, the family fell apart, and took up its old vagrant ways; the three sons, one after the other, in order to accompany their mother into exile, left Switzerland, while their father remained there with his new family. In 1935 Antonio went to England with Xavier and the following year visited Paris for the first time; between journeys he returned to the Maison de Verre, but only on increasingly shorter visits.

In 1938 he settled in Paris, joining Xavier who had already been working there for two years, leading a veritable bohemian life. From then on, for a period of ten years, the two brothers formed an artistic and material alliance, so great that their separate existences can hardly be distinguished and may be summed up in a sole biography ; this not only because of the physical closeness between them, born of a ten-year cohabitation in France and Italy. Of greater importance was the way they influenced each other and how their reciprocal relationship developed their styles, giving rise to a close artistic collaboration, making them interact and, at times, mix their brush-strokes on the same canvas.

In Paris, having set publicity graphics aside, Antonio, attended the lessons of Professor Guérin at the École des Beaux-Arts, which - judging by the early samples he left us - were of a strong Cézannien bias. His best teacher, however, was his brother Xavier, especially as far as technique and accuracy of drawing and design are concerned. Both of the Buenos found inspiration in the great masters of the past (Italian, Spanish, Flemish) whom they considered their ideal; rather than devote themselves to academic dicta and before measuring their efforts with the more up-to-date École de Paris, they decided to trace figurative art back to its origins on their own behalf, visiting museums and studying reproductions in art books (of which their father's library was full). Thus, avoiding all influences they felt might contaminate their intent, the two artists succeeded in summing up and recovering, provisionally, a painting technique which, in the twentieth century, seems to have died out definitively.

The early works of the two Buenos show an evident family resemblance, a convergence of taste and style. For an entire decade (that is, until 1949 at least) their works reveal the stamp of their common programmatic and operative intent, so much so, that the critics have never been able to detect any truly noteworthy differences between the paintings of the two in that period. In actual fact, alongside the numerous analogies and similarities, at that time noticeable differences between the two were evident, the same which, in later years were destined to render their choices and manners so distinctive, even antithetic. Xavier's early works were large canvasses of an allegorical and instructive nature, of great emotional impact; these were the years of the Spanish Civil War and paintings like the Miliziano ferito [The Wounded Militian] referred quite explicitly to the tragic events of the day. These works met with immediate approval in Paris and Xavier, an exceptional feat for one so young, managed to exhibit his paintings in all the principal salons of the time, winning the unanimous consensus of the critics. Antonio's first efforts took a completely different direction: he did not share his brother's interest in "social themes", preferring recourse to more allusive, mediated and subtle forms of communication (it suffices to recall his only noteworthy social painting, La gamba dell'eroe [The Hero's Leg] painted in 1939, which is really a metaphysical work, completely centred on malicious associations between medals and artificial limbs). Furthermore, unlike Xavier, he was not totally insensitive to modern art; even from his Genevan days, he had shown a keen interest in the "metaphysical" De Chirico; another painter he admired was the Swiss François Barraud, who must have struck him in particular for his "anachronistic" objective discipline. In the field of literature, on the contrary, his favourite writers were the great "rebels": Villon, Rimbaud, Céline and the "pathaphysical" Jarry. Finally, perhaps the most important point, Antonio was totally alien to the dark, macabre, Spanish temper of his elder brother; on the contrary, from his earliest paintings it can be seen that he considered irony, allusive subtlety and quotation of greater efficacy.