The breach with Xavier and the "Numero" period (1950-1955)

Following the stormy period of the "Pittori Moderni della Realtà", Antonio Bueno felt an urgent need to seek a new collocation within the cultural context of his time and to put an end to the unproductive state of isolation in which he had come to find himself. The most important novelty was that he intended to and did undertake this transition alone, that is, without the usual support of his brother Xavier; their relationship had begun to break down after ten years of almost absolute symbiosis, when the crisis that brought the group to an end came to a head.

The origins of this sudden disagreement between Xavier and Antonio Bueno are to be found, first of all, in the gradual growing apart of their artistic personalities, which after years of joint development, had begun to feel the natural urge to break free from each other. At a certain stage the younger brother in particular, felt the need to claim his independence; and in order to do so he had to enter into inevitable conflict with his brother, his one-time master of art and of life, the detainer of (real or presumed) authority that had to be challenged. This is why it is quite clear that the disagreement was not a matter of style alone, but also had other aspects of a more intimate and personal nature. Despite their many affinities, common preferences and their physical resemblance itself, the two brothers' characters were of a totally opposite temper: Xavier possessed a considerable measure of Spanish pride which permitted him to feel self-sufficient and avoid unpleasant company, while Antonio needed to be accepted and appreciated. Emblematic in this regard, because practically antithetical, the stories of their later Italianisation: Antonio went to great extremes to obtain Italian citizenship (which he finally received, after numerous vicissitudes, in 1970) and did all in his power to make his family a truly Italian one; Xavier, on the contrary, when his first attempt to obtain citizenship failed, never bothered to apply again and went on living in "splendid isolation", shut up in a kind of special enclave surrounded by a foreign land, not over-preoccupied by his lack of integration.

The most tangible sign of the separation between Xavier and Antonio was the latter's desertion of the "Il Pozzo" villa's "tribal community" (in 1949) and his transfer to his in-laws home, not too far away, in via di Camerata. After this, the collaboration between the brothers came to a gradual end. There was time for just one more exhibition, held in 1952 at the "Numero", a Florentine gallery ; the brothers did not exhibit together until sixteen years later. In 1953 the definitive breach occurred; definitive though not total and not of such a nature as to jeopardise reciprocal affection and family relations. By way of confirmation, it is sufficient to read the following lines from Antonio's diary (a page written in 1983) providing his last, reiterative judgement of his brother, whose memory he continued to cherish after his death:

I think about him constantly. I admire him a lot although I criticise the mistakes he made, which ruined his career and his life. Despite this criticism, however, which I too deserve in large part (besides, I have other faults he hadn't got) , I feel that after his death, I am less alive, as if I too, had died somewhat with him.

The years following 1949 represent a phase during which Antonio Bueno's pictorial research produced his most personal and distinctive traits. The first steps taken in that direction marked a total change, almost a rejection of all his previous experience : from 1950, in fact, the artist worked for the abstract art magazine "Numero", becoming editorial secretary. His collaboration with Fiamma Vigo, founder and inspirer of the magazine, as well as with many other exponents of Florentine abstractism, continued until about 1955; there were group exhibitions to which he contributed a number of geometrical compositions. The metamorphosis could not have been more radical or more rapid (although in this specific instance it may have been a case of the coexistence of two realities, the one within the other): Bueno passed from the most precise figurative to the abstract without going through any intermediate stages. The reason for such a sudden conversion, one must point out, was principally political: by means of a "purifying plunge" into abstractism, he hoped to offset the excesses of the preceding "Realist" period and thus succeed in undertaking reconciliation with the various cultural authorities which up to then had hampered his work. His brother Xavier, on the contrary, never attempted such a step; his only non-figurative effort (created as a joke or for amusement) was a tiny collage, comprising a series of colours he had to examine for a totally different purpose (a mural commissioned by Alitalia).

The artistic movement that grew up around the "Numero" magazine and gallery was an exception, an extravagance for the Florence of the Fifties ( and perhaps not only for Florence); it was a meeting-point for "non-aligned" intellectuals and artists, an extremely rare place where all new instances of art had free access. The magazine, in particular, published in several languages and distributed abroad, played a very important rôle, helping to make the work of painters such as Bertini, Pomodoro, Vedova, Capograossi known; among its other merits, it published the poetry of the young and then unknown Sanguineti.

The painting Bueno produced during the "Numero" period was not easy to place on the market, apart from the fact that this was not its purpose. Its chief aim, as stated above, was to appease the critics and emerge from isolation. Contemporaneously, the artist continued to work on commission, painting portraits, still lives and the other subjects which his old customers continued to order. His production continued for a considerable time along these two parallel lines: on the one hand, there were paintings which followed the development of his style and which were targeted towards exhibitions and publications, on the other, works designed to impress the general public. Many years were to pass before he found the way to please the critics and the public simultaneously.

Up until the end of the Fifties, more or less, Bueno's paintings had no real market. His only income (which was neither constant nor dependable) came from private sources, from the narrow circle of personal customers he and his elder brother had created towards the end of the war. His chief patrons were collectors from Lombardy (De Gasperis and Azzalin had replaced the Rubboli brothers, estranged due to a series of quarrels) and a number of aristocratic Florentine salons (the count and countess Rimbotti, the marquis and marchioness Gerini and Della Gherardesca3). The highest demand was, naturally, for portraits; one of the most time-consuming and committing kinds of painting.

This kind of activity was, due to its very nature, scarcely remunerative; the time it subtracted from the "Numero" and other similar initiatives, made Antonio Bueno's circumstances even more precarious. Not only did he feel the brunt of seeking alternative pictorial solutions; his energies were absorbed by his militant activitism, sleepless nights spent in writing articles, in discussions, drawing up plans and quarrelling. The Fifties were, for his family, years of serious economic hardship: he himself lived in a state of total improvidence, in an almost unreal dimension made of aesthetic theory alone. The move to via di Camerata, among other things, meant a reduction of space, that the artist had no proper studio: he and his family occupied the top floor of his in-laws' house and during the early years of this period they had to share this small apartment with two other lodgers (one of whom was mentally unstable), a situation which meant unspeakable distress. If one adds to this the long and serious lung ailment which affected his wife Evelina, one may draw up a fairly realistic picture of the difficulties encountered during those years.

During this adverse period, economic straits obliged him to leave Florence frequently for short periods. He spent the winter of 1951 in Holland with cousins of his mother's; his expenses were covered by the portraits he made for the relatives who hosted him. For other more or less lengthy periods he went to stay in Gryon, a small mountain village in the Vaud canton in Switzerland where his father's companion ran a boarding house for women. The periods spent there were never particularly pleasant, but he hoped that the mountain air might do Evelina good.

His career's slow progress, at times, made Bueno entertain pessimistic thoughts, and there were times when he even considered changing professions. Between 1955 and 1956, in particular, he thought of looking for a job with the Paris branch of Unesco: he felt that the knowledge of five languages and his cultural education (very profound despite his erratic academic history) might find him a post at directive or executive level, not unlike the job his father had once held. Fortunately his calculations proved wrong. One must point out that Xavier - who was going through a period of dire straits similar to Antonio's - never showed such signs of surrender: his faith in his profession was probably stronger, or, more realistically than his brother, he knew that he would never have been able to do anything but paint.

An efficacious (and, despite the topic, amusing) account of the material squalor experienced by the Bueno family in the Fifties is that offered by Mario Praz who, in his Filosofia dell'arredamento [ Philosophy of furnishing], immortalised the living-room in via di Camerata:

Antonio Bueno, a meticulously orderly and subtle painter, is capable of tolerating, in his own living-room a sofa and two enormous, shapeless, baggy armchairs, covered in worn-out, threadbare velvet, pretentiously edged with open-work embroidered brown arabesques, which remind me, together with the low coffee-table, with its glass top, at the centre, revealing the straw seat of a bentwood Viennese-style chair, of certain lower-class English boarding-houses, where the stale smell of cabbage mingles with that of a large dog, whose decrepit state no longer permits it to avail itself of the comfort of the bathroom. Not only does he tolerate them but he loves them, because they belonged to his parents and experienced times and transmigrations from which Bueno cannot free himself. (I do not think that in any case, Bueno attaches much importance to tidiness and cleanliness, except in his pictures, which he paints in a studio so full of tins, empty jars and all sorts of rickety odds and ends, that to call it rubbish is to be kind. His studio and the living-room look out on the hill of Fiesole, and Bueno probably does not even notice the contrast between the interior and the exterior of the place any more than Croce was disturbed during his meditations by the enchanting view he enjoyed from his windows when he took refuge in Sorrento, a view, to which, he held, habit had made him indifferent).