"Modern Painters of the Reality" (1947 - 1949)

After 1945, once free circulation of ideas and people was permitted, Antonio Bueno was, according to his original plan, theoretically in a position, to return to France. But he could no longer take the idea seriously. In Italy, in fact, against his wildest hopes, he had begun to make himself a name as a painter, and, for the moment, the Italians were his only admirers and patrons; despite the fact that integration was still difficult and notwithstanding the fact that Florentine provincialism did not offer prospects of a brilliant career, there were material reasons, questions of survival, which prompted him to remain where he was.

One of the chief reasons for remaining in Florence was that Bueno's family situation had changed radically. In via di Camerata Antonio had got to know a girl, Evelina Hay, the daughter of a Scottish noble who had moved to Florence: first she became the model of several of his paintings and, a little later on (while war was still raging) he married her, without even waiting for her to finish her formal education. Antonio continued to live with his mother, his brother Xavier and his sister-in-law, Julia. As the family grew, it resembled, more and more, a kind of confused "tribal community" (to quote Julia Chamorel's definition): when the war ended, Xavier had already got two children, a boy and a girl, and Antonio's eldest, Francesco Saverio, had been born in the meanwhile. Previously, in about 1943, a new move had become necessary (probably for reasons of space); the choice fell on a villa, "Il Pozzo", on the slopes of the Fiesole hills. Here Antonio and his family spent the hardest of the war years, in dire straits, obliged to live side by side with the German occupation forces (who requisitioned the villa) and do their utmost to keep their mother's Jewish origins hidden from them. However, they came up against no serious problems, basically because their Spanish nationality guaranteed them against any truly significant risks.

When the war ended, both Antonio and Xavier had many reasons for considering Italy their new permanent abode. The family and the troubles they had been through made the brothers more aware of their responsibilities; neither of them felt like uprooting their families, dragging them all over Europe.

The post-war cultural scene obliged the Bueno brothers to make choices that were anything but easy. Once the frontiers were opened up, after twenty years of autarkic lethargy, Italian art, although it strove hard to do so, found it extremely difficult to recuperate the time lost; schools and movements of all kinds proliferated, all thirsty for novelty, all drawing inspiration from imported models. The Buenos, who had attended the École de Paris, did not feel the need for this kind of experience; within a context of overall renewal, however, it was only natural that they should begin to nourish doubts concerning their own painting (the same as they had entertained on the eve of their first Italian exhibition in 1942). Up until then, there had been no serious encounter either with the critics or with other painters; the press which had appraised their work had expressed banal, generic appreciation; in actual fact, most of the consensus consisted in the personal opinions of collectors and enthusiasts living in Lombardy (Kroff, Finazzi, Cesati, Toninelli), people whom Xavier and Antonio respected "above all for their pocketbooks". Now, however, the confrontation could no longer be postponed. It was imperative to find a collocation, take sides, and reveal the reasons behind certain choices. Xavier, on his part, tried to avoid the obstacle by proposing paintings like the ones which had drawn attention in Paris ten years previously, that is, art with a strong polemical bias which focussed on social commitment, on denouncement; Antonio, on the contrary, partly because he had no older manner to resume, went through a period of profound puzzlement. He felt that the efforts made up to then were not "modern" enough, but saw no alternative between an obtuse bourgeois conformist approach on the one hand and the nihilistic fragmentation of the avant-garde on the other. At times he even toyed with the idea of giving up painting and turning to architecture: inspired by Le Corbourier, whom he believed to be "the only one who had discovered a truly modern and new style".

Xavier presented his new works at a personal exhibition at Milan's "Il Camino" gallery in 1946, accompanied for the occasion by an extremely severe document against the avant-garde (which he defined en bloc "decadent post-impressionism"); even more severe was the reaction of the critics who totally censured his work. Disillusioned by this failure, he decided to adopt an even more radical and purist approach; believing that it was impossible to win the approval of the critics, he sought allies in order to stand up to them. His first and somewhat reluctant ally was, naturally, Antonio; then followed Pietro Annigoni and Gregorio Sciltian (whom the Buenos had met during the war). This was not a truly novel alliance, insofar as the four artists knew each other quite well already, having collaborated and exhibited jointly on a number of occasions previously; the true novelty lay in their common "brand mark" ("I Pittori Moderni della Realtà" Modern Painters of the Reality) and in their intention to harmonise, if you like, their practical and theoretical purposes. The only possible means of achieving this common goal, they believed, was by observing the "objective" reality, nature ("the prime and eternal source of painting") reproducing it, as faithfully as possible. This attitude contained explicitly polemical intents: confident of the support of the public, the group sought a direct confrontation with the critics, whom it saw as being hopelessly in the power of "the dictatorship of the various post-impressionist formalisms" of the period.

As it turned out later, this alliance did not make very much sense. In actual fact, Antonio who would have preferred to involve artists of a different temper (after 1945 he felt the problem of isolation more keenly than Xavier). He contacted the Barraud brothers whose painting he found closer to his own; there was also an exchange of correspondence, but - due to lack of direct acquaintance and the difficulty of creating a true relationship given the distance between Geneva and Florence - nothing came of it. Sciltian and Annigoni were the only interlocutors available for the moment and they endorsed Xavier's bellicose project without the least difficulty. Here is a summary of the programme of the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà" with its debatable and somewhat assertive tone, published on the occasion of their first official exhibition (held in Milan at the "L'Illustrazione Italiana" gallery in November 1947):

We, the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà", have formed a brotherly group to show our work to the public. The sympathy and the comprehension with which it has accompanied and supported our efforts, the certainty of being right while the others are wrong, have convinced us of the fitness and need of this exhibition. We feel ourselves as one in our efforts, beliefs, our ideals and our absolute reciprocal esteem.

In opposition to the École de Paris, born in France but representing a universally decadent trend, our art, born in Italy, represents an instance of hope and salvation for art and this work of ours aims at being a first effective contribution towards the endeavour which fires us.

We are neither interested in nor moved by so-called "abstract" or "pure" art, the offspring of a society in decline, devoid of all human content and , focussing on itself, bent on the vain hope of finding substance within itself.

We repudiate all contemporary painting from present-day post-impressionism onward, considering it the expression of an epoch of false progress and the reflection of the perilous threat looming over humanity.

We, on the contrary, refer to the spiritual and, more precisely, the moral values without which art would become the most sterile of activities. We yearn for a painting of great moral impact in essence, in style, a kind of painting which, in one of human history's most critical moments, should be full of that particular faith in destiny which made art great in past times.

We wish to proffer art as the eternal and ancient illusion of reality, the seed of the figurative arts.

We do not propose a return to the past, we simply endeavour to continue the mission of true art, the image of a universal feeling. We desire a kind of painting that all, and not simply a select few "refined" people may understand […]. Confronted with a new accademism or "pastism", made of leftovers from cubist formulae and from standardised sensual impressionism, we propose a genre of painting, which, unheeding of fashion and aesthetic theories, seeks to express our feelings through the language which each one of us has developed according to his temperament by observing the reality.

Between 1947 and 1949 the group held five exhibitions and gradually grew to include a maximum of nineteen members. Their success with the general public was considerable (the first Milanese exhibition, for example, was visited by twenty-thousand people) and the interest and external support of the collectors was, as usual, noteworthy. The critics, as might have been expected, reacted negatively; therefore, in a certain sense, the group succeeded in "creating a rumpus"; in all the most important newspapers the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà" were referred to as "photographers" "antiquarian painters", "museum copiers", and other disparaging epithets of the kind. To defend themselves from these attacks and oppose what they called "critical obstructionism", the four artists published their own magazine ("Arte", printed in Florence), of which Antonio was the legal editor.

With such a premise, it was inevitable that the group should not have an easy time of it. The chief problems, as soon became evident, stemmed from the lack of homogeneity among the members of the group. The "absolute reciprocal esteem" boasted of in the proclamation was in reality little more than nominal: the Bueno brothers sincerely respected Annigoni and Sciltian for their human qualities, but they entertained numerous reservations about their painting. In no way did they share the sinister humour, the histrionic bent of their two senior colleagues; on the contrary, in order to further their own documented, daily realism, they tried to avail themselves of much simpler and anti-rhetorical means. Even more serious was their ideological incompatibility: in particular that existing between the Buenos and Sciltian, the former ex-activists of the Communist party, the latter an anti- Bolshevik émigré (Sciltian was originally from Rostov on the river Don and had lived, an exile, in Italy since 1923). The work of the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà" was generally considered reactionary by the critics who did not, it seems, quite grasp the "pauperist" intentions underlying the still lives and other compositions by Antonio and Xavier Bueno; and the two brothers could not bear such a clamorous misunderstanding for very much longer. They looked to the past for practical not for ideological reasons; they wanted to paint the modern reality employing ancient instruments, but they had no intention of doing anything other than corroborate the technical dignity of their own art, mastering the "trade" of times gone by. Their only failing, when all is said and done, was that of equipping themselves with exuberant technical media in an epoch when such things were losing importance.

Other unpleasant misunderstandings, which proved fatal to the survival of the group, arose when the press tried to find its "leader", its strategist. In actual fact, the group had no hierarchy, but public opinion needed to simplify things in that sense. The first to be indicated was Giorgio De Chirico who, while he had never taken part in the exhibitions of the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà", was retained by many to be the group's occult mentor. One must point out that De Chirico had followed the artists and their work at close quarters - furthermore he had become a regular contributor to Arte", but when the others found that his presence had become overly preponderant, they distanced themselves without hesitation; to this end, in 1948, Antonio took it upon himself to write an open disclaimer, published in the "Europeo" magazine2. Another recurring suspect was Sciltian, perhaps because he was the eldest of the four founding members; the polemics that ensued were so bitter that he decided to resign.

In 1949, therefore, for all the above-mentioned reasons, the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà" group wound up. Its two-year balance proved substantially negative: the polemical questions it aroused had obtained no other result than getting the critics' backs up, and, in the end, the four artists found themselves more disliked and isolated than before they founded the group. Another harmful consequence of the experience was that the relationship between the Bueno brothers began to show signs of deterioration: for a long time, in fact, Antonio, was sceptical and disheartened about the experience with Annigoni, Sciltian and the other members of the group, and tended to exaggerate the consequences (later he claimed that this experience had brought on "twenty years of hardship") ; he blamed Xavier who, in actual fact, had a great influence over him, accusing him of involving him in a senseless and harmful "battle against windmills".