Obstinate Contemporary Artists Who Succeeded By Following Tradition: Pietro Annigoni

In the latest of this occasional series, I feature the Italian artist Pietro Annigoni (1910-88), who studied in Florence in the early 20th century. As his Wikipedia page relates, he deliberately stood out against the mainstream and was the most well-known artist who signed a Manifesto of Realist Painters, along with six other Italians in 1947. 

Pietro Annigoni, self portrait.

Annigoni understood the Baroque style well but, like another radical featured in this series, John Singer Sargent, he seems to have been driven by aesthetic considerations, rather than a deep commitment to Christianity. He is best known for his portrait work, but did also receive commissions for large-scale Christian sacred art, and he demonstrates through this that he understood the different nature of these two branches of naturalistic art. He is unusual in this regard, in that I rarely see artists today in the US who differentiate between the stylistic elements of portraiture and sacred art in their work. I suggest that any Catholics who are studying classical naturalism in one of the many ateliers that are now, thankfully, springing up around the country should study the work of Annigoni for this reason.

Consider first this famous portrait, of a young Queen Elizabeth.

The portrait painter must produce a likeness that reveals the unique qualities of the person if he wants to sell his work. It is precisely for someone’s individual characteristics that we love someone above other people. We discern the uniqueness of the person naturally by examining the facial features. Furthermore, it is through the eyes especially (and to a lesser extent the mouth and body language, the gesture), that we determine also the psychology of the person, that is, their mood and feelings. This is why it is said that the eyes are the window to the soul. The portrait painter also must emphasize those aspects of the person that are good and beautiful, but while producing a likeness, for those these are the qualities that those who love the person see foremost. For all these reasons, the skilled portrait painter gives the greatest detail in the portrayal of the face, and does so in a way that portrays the person accurately, but in a positive light, so that those who love the Queen, or whoever the subject may be, feel that love through the portrait.

Portrait of Margaret Rawlings, actress, 1951

Contrast the works above with this painting of St Jerome. The focus is on the figure as a whole, and the face, relatively, is less prominent than in Annigoni’s portraits.

This is a difficult balance to strike. In sacred art the goal is not to highlight the unique characteristics of the person so much as those that are universal. We cannot hope to imitate those characteristics that are unique, only those human qualities that are common to us. Nevertheless, we always access the general through the particular, and the artist must supply enough individual detail so that we know this as the particular Saint in question. If you examine Baroque art from the greats of the classic period of the 17th century, you will see the same characteristics. Here is Ribera’s St Jerome from that period:

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Obstinate Artists Who Stood Out By Following Tradition - John Singer Sargent

The reason for my choice of John Singer Sargent in the latest of this series of artists who successfully followed tradition and by doing so went against the trends of their time may surprise some. Many will assume that his style of naturalism spoke for the mainstream in art around the turn of the last century. But as we will see, he went against the mainstream and made his style dominant. By the time of his death in 1925, he was one of the most famous artists of his day. After his death, however, his work quickly fell out of favor, because he was not progressive or modern enough. For example, one of his most famous series of paintings, the wall paintings in the Boston Public Library entitled The Triumph of Religion, completed in 1919, was neglected and almost destroyed. and it is only in the last 30 years or so that his reputation as a great artist of the past has waxed once again.

When an 18-year-old Sargent chose a studio in which to draw and paint in Paris in 1874, he did not select the French Academy, which favored a strongly classical influenced style. Nor did he choose to follow the style of the emerging Impressionists, whose first show took place the same year. Rather, he looked back to the Baroque style of the 17th-century Spanish school, epitomized by the great master Velazquez.

J Singer-Sargent: Portrait of Rockefeller

To the modern eye, accustomed to the brutalizing ugliness of modern styles, these three options seem similar. Each is naturalistic and requires a high level of drawing skill compared to what is needed to graduate from the art schools of our universities today. However, there are three distinct worldviews behind them, and when one style finally came to dominate the art world - the loose-focused style of the Impressionists - it quickly devolved into the artistic forms of modernity that are intended to undermine and speak against traditional Western values.

First, consider the clean-edged and brightly colored look of the Academy, reminiscent of Raphael from the High Renaissance. This style had dominated the French Academy since Davide, Napoleon’s favored artist of the Revolution, introduced it. It is intended to represent the anti-Christian rationalism of the Continental Enlightenment, and, rejecting the need for Revelation in the search for truth and justice, identified itself with pre-Christian classicism. It sought also to identify the State with the grandeur and power of Imperial Rome.

Jules Lefebvre: Allegory of Victory, late 19th century French

There are paintings by artists who worked in this style depicting Christian scenes, such as those by Bouguereau, but as with all painting in which the content conveys a message in a style that is not suited for it, the result is a forced sentimentalism. The modernist descendant of this style is photorealism, in which every detail in a painting is represented in precise focus, and creates an image that overloads the senses with detail.

There is a re-emergence of the teaching of Academic method in a number of art schools and studios around the country today, mostly outside the university system. While it is a good thing that such skill in drawing and painting is being taught once again, it is unfortunate that it is this particular style, often referred to as “classical realism”, that is generally adopted along with it. We are starting to see paintings in this style appear in Catholic churches, in the mistaken belief that they are re-establishing Christian traditions.

As a reaction against this style in the mid-19th century, you have the Impressionists, who were just beginning to become dominant in Singer’s time, and whose work is so familiar today. The Impressionists claimed to look at a scene with radical disinterest. They did not see people, the sky and cows in a field, for example, but simply colors and light manifested by a single extended substance consisting of atoms and molecules. They tried to represent scenes so as to communicate this even disinterest, and in contrast to the neo-classical style, their paintings had no focus at all. There is an absence of sharp edges. In practice, the Impressionists were poor at applying their own ethos because they could not escape the fact that they were highly trained artists who almost by instinct composed paintings well. So the Impressionists were popular for the beauty of their landscapes which was manifested despite, and not because of their ethos.

Claude Monet: The Grand Canal in Venice.

A dividing line between these styles, one which balances idealism and realism as Christian styles ought to (as Pius XII described in Mediator Dei, 70 years later), is that of the Baroque of the 17th century. This is why Benedict XVI describes this, and not neo-classicism, as an authentic liturgical Christian style.

This is the style that Sargent decided to paint in. It was not the dominant style of the period, but there were a few who sought to re-establish it, including Sargent’s teacher, Charles Durand, known as Carolus Duran.

The baroque grew out of a Christian understanding of the world, in which there is a hierarchy of beings. So for a Christian, a person is not simply a collection of atoms but an entity that is distinct from other beings. When we look at any scene, we have more interest in some parts and less in others, and this uneven interest usually reflects this hierarchy of being, which we observe instinctively. So we look at people before animals and animals before plants; this places people highest. Furthermore, when we look at people, we look at those aspects that reveal to us their souls, that is, the eyes and the facial expression, and perhaps also a gesture that tells us what the person is doing or thinking. A Christian representation of these things, therefore, balances sharp edges and blurred detail, in order to focus on those elements that are of greatest interest to us naturally. Through this subtle variation in focus, metaphysical truths are communicated by visible signs embedded into the painting.

If you look at this painting of the Crowning of the Virgin by Velazquez, at first impression it seems sharp and clear, but close inspection shows how loosely he paints those areas that are not the main focus, and that the face of the Virgin is rendered in the finest detail. This draws the eye naturally to the point that he wishes us to focus on primarily.

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J. Kirk Richards: Sacred Art in the Naturalistic Style

One heartening trend today is the growing number of young artists who are rejecting the ethos of our mainstream art schools, and choosing instead to learn to draw and paint in the classical naturalistic styles. We have moved from a situation 50 years ago in which there was barely anywhere still teaching traditional methods, to one today where there are many. In US cities today there are dozens - perhaps hundreds - of small independent ateliers offering training in what is called the academic method, which originated in the art academies of the High Renaissance period.

For Christians who are interested in contributing to an improvement in sacred art, the ability to draw and paint naturalistically with great skill is not enough. Christians must strike a balance between naturalism and idealism. They must modify naturalistic appearances by partial abstraction to reveal invisible truths. The Baroque masters, for example, used stylistic elements with great skill to suggest that a person has a soul, or that the beauty of creation points to a Creator.

Pope Pius XII summed up the necessary balance of naturalism and idealism in his 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei (195). He uses the words “realism” and “symbolism” to denote what I refer to as naturalism and idealism, respectively.

Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, should not be universally despised and rejected through prejudice. Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive “symbolism,” and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. Thus modern art will be able to join its voice to that wonderful choir of praise to which have contributed, in honor of the Catholic faith, the greatest artists throughout the centuries. 

It is not an easy task for artists to do this, even assuming they have the necessary drawing and painting skill. The tendency of those who try is to make the art too naturalistic on the one hand - which lacks a sense of the sacred; or to make it too abstract on the other - which creates bad expressionistic art.

Here is the approach to striking that balance taken by one contemporary art called J. Kirk Richards (h/t to reader Kathryn Cardenas, who is a highly skilled artist herself, for bringing his work to my notice).

First, here are examples of mundane art by the artist. His style in these reminds me of the work of Gustav Klimpt of the Vienna Successionist school from the turn of the last century.

Here are examples of his sacred art.

The Resurrection

The woman at the well

The commissioning of the women

The Nativity

Suffer the Children

Interestingly, Kirk is a Mormon. I do not know anything about the tradition of art in the Church of Latter-Day Saints and so cannot say if this is typical. Certainly, I think that Catholics should consider, at least, his approach. I am not suggesting necessarily that you adopt an identical form of idealization (I happen to like it very much), but I would say that you need some coherent departure from natural appearances if you are serious about creating sacred art for the Church today. 

The Catholic Art Guild Annual Conference in Chicago, November 4th, featuring Peter Kwasniewski

The Catholic Art Guild, a recently established organization devoted to the support of Catholic artists, and which is associated with St John Cantius church, is holding its 2nd Annual Conference, a fundraising gala, at the Drake Hotel in Chicago on November 4th. A talk by NLM’s own Dr Peter Kwasniewski is one of the highlights of the event!

The conference is entitled “Formed in Beauty”, and aside from Peter, it will feature Alexander Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary for Her Majesty the Queen in Scotland, Ethan Anthony, principal architect for Cram & Ferguson, and Juliette Aristides, who paints in the style of classical naturalism and has a teaching atelier.

The focus of each of the two artists featured on the roster on this occasion is neo-classical naturalism.

For more details, you can watch the promotional video below or go straight to their website, here. Tickets start at $200 and will be on sale until the end of October.

David Hume by Anthony Aristides