Modern art dominates our country’s galleries, museums, exhibitions, and auction houses. Since the advent of photography and the birth of impressionism in the late 19th century, orthodox art has largely been relegated to the irrelevant.
In the name of progress, many late-19th- and 20th-century artists embraced the new, the individual, and the radical, often leaving centuries of art traditions behind.
By the late 1940s, as the world slowly recovered from the ravages of World War II, some elements of traditional art and culture were being eroded. The true, the good, and the beautiful of traditional art were in jeopardy.
During the late 1940s and 1950s, two art trends had emerged, according to art scholar Henri Dorra in “Art in Perspective: A Brief History”:
“On the one hand the period experienced a rebirth of abstraction, lyrical and restrained in Europe [with artists such as Roger Bissière (1886–1964) and], more exuberant and dynamic in the United States [with artists such as Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)]. On the other hand a new attachment to the human image, albeit crudely and often hauntingly distorted, was particularly evident in Europe [as seen in works by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Francis Bacon (1909–1992)].”
In 1946, American artist R.H. Ives Gammell published the “Twilight of Painting” in which he expressed modern painting’s impact on humanity for generations to come:
“The ultimate importance of Modern Painting in the history of art will be seen to lie in the fact that it discredited and virtually destroyed the great technical traditions of European painting, laboriously built up through the centuries by a long succession of men of genius. The loss of these traditions has deprived our potential painters of their rightful heritage, a heritage without which it will be impossible for them to give full scope to such talent as they may possess.”
Gammell wasn’t alone in his concerns. In November 1947, a group of European painters were so concerned about the moral decline of painting that they published a manifesto at their inaugural exhibition in Milan, Italy. Calling themselves “Pittori Moderni della Realtà” (Modern Painters of Reality), Italian Pietro Annigoni, Armenian Gregory Sciltian, and Spanish brothers Antonio and Xavier Bueno jointly declared: “Our art born in Italy represents an event of hope and salvation for art.”
Inhuman Art
The Modern Painters of Reality felt that modern art—so devoid of human content—came from a society in decay:“We disavow all contemporary painting from post-impressionism till today, regarding it as the expression of an age of false progress and a reflection of the dangerous threat that looms over mankind. On the contrary we reaffirm those spiritual and moral values without which painting would become the most fruitless exercise. … We recreate the art of illusion of reality, the eternal and primeval seed of figurative arts.”
The primeval seed of modern art wasn’t based on reality but on artistic expression. In “The Challenge of the Avant-Garde,” edited by Paul Wood, modernism is characterized by “(1) a preoccupation with form and (2) a stress on art’s independence or autonomy from other concerns of social life.” In contrast to traditional art’s universal appeal, modern artworks often can’t be interpreted without swathes of explanatory text.
The Eternal Appeal of Traditional Painting
The Modern Painters of Reality expanded to seven artists who exhibited together until 1949. Of the founding group, Sciltian and the Bueno brothers’ works aren’t well-known today. In the 1950s, Antonio Bueno succumbed to painting modern art. On the other hand, Annigoni’s legacy lives on as one of the best portrait painters of the 20th century.Annigoni proved the international relevancy of traditional art against the tsunami of modern art at the time. He painted popes, royals, and presidents, including Queen Elizabeth II (twice). Time magazine commissioned him to paint four front cover portraits, including Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Pope John XXIII.
He painted these portraits in “tempera grassa,” a mixture of egg yolks, pigment, and drying oils (such as nut, poppy, or linseed), used in the Renaissance.
He also painted church frescoes, for free, most notably those in Montecassino Abbey, 80 miles southeast of Rome, after it was bombed.
He knew his works would endure in churches and museums, just as great artworks of the past had. “The pictorial inventions that are so fashionable today are destined to end up in nothing, especially if they are made with glue, pieces of dry bread, strips of fabric,” he said, according to the La Fenice Art Collection website.
In their manifesto, the Modern Painters of Reality echoed the eternal essence of representational artists throughout the ages:
“We want painting to be moral in its most intimate essence, in its style itself, a painting that in one of the dimmest moments of human history should be filled with the same faith in man and his destiny, that had made the greatness of art in times past.”
