‘Horrific Canvas’ By Pietro Annigoni

Press, Volume C, Issue 29499, 28 April 1961, Page 22

‘Horrific Canvas’ By Pietro Annigoni

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, April 26. Critics are wondering what to make of the showpiece of an exhibition by the Royal portrait painter, Pietro Annigoni, of paintings at a West End gallery. One describes it as a “gimmicky tongue in the cheek piece” and another as a “macabre, deliberately horrific canvas.” The picture is a vast allegorical painting. 17ft by 12ft, called “Life,” the centrepiece of which is a gruesome crucifixion scene showing a limp, sacklike figure representing suffering humanity tied to a broken cross and surrounded by figures of good and evil. Below the feet of the man lashed to the cross are grotesque skeletons. Over the cross is a labelupside down—reading “Cocoacola.” In the background is the skyline of New York. “I have a message for the world,” Annigoni told a “Daily Mail” reporter. “I believe the world is destroying itself. There is a lack of morals. We should go back

to Christianity. My quarrel is with the world. Coca Cola and the skyline are signs of the times—but 1 may paint them out when the picture is shown in New York.”

Annigoni said he had been working on the picture for three years. It was not commissioned. but “my very own.” It is for sale—he wanted £15.000 for it. Annigoni also made an explanation to the “Daily Herald.” “This picture is a symbol of derision,” he told a reporter from that paper. “It represents the uniformity and futility which besets man in the modern world. I picked on Coca Cola because of its universality." The “Daily Herald” reporter commented: “I wonder what the makers of America’s favourite drink will think of Annigoni’s little joke. So is Annigoni. His previous gimmicks—a selfportrait in his picture of the Queen and a mouse that went with Princess Margaret —were rather more harmless. But Annigoni seems able to get away with this sort of thing.”