The Malta Independent on Sunday
Making sense of non-sense
I recently came across a report carried out in 1932 by the British Government which reviewed all museums within the Commonwealth. With regards to the Fine Arts Section of the National Museum of Malta, which in 1974 became the National Museum of Fine Arts,
Up to today it is difficult to determine whether a local movement bearing stylistic, formal, iconographical or even ideological similarities ever existed. Primarily, it is nationality which justifies the collective framing of Maltese modern artists.
The idea of a national school suggests coherency, unity, common objectives. Malta’s twentieth-century artists were organisationally united. They formed groups and societies to build an infrastructure for the promotion and public display of their work. Yet their artistic and political ideas were far from united. They lacked commitment to a common social or political goal. This is evident in their collective as well as in their individual activities.
Maltese modern art is linguistically fragmented and inconsistent. Abstraction and figuration coexist, as do traditional and modernist approaches, together with a cocktail of influences from Italy, the UK, and France. Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci describes the evolution of Maltese modern art as erratic and eclectic. I will quote Schembri Bonaci at length for his eloquent description of Emvin Cremona’s schizophrenic artistic life, which is emblematic of the general situation; ‘Without passing through the turmoil of Courbet’s realism, confronted by Manet’s upheavals, or Monet’s colour revolution, Maltese art finds Cremona leaping into Duchamp’s Glass Series, Pasmore’s perspex pieces or Kandinsky’s abstract compositions. In other words, the Maltese art scene is determined by inter-alienated blocks of different artistic ‘masses’, which are manifestly estranged from the corresponding existing strata.’ (‘Apap, Cremona and St Paul’, 2009)
This begs the question of whether Malteseness is a coherent concept, whether identity stems from a single root and grows according to a correlating trajectory. This, however, cannot be true in a context wherein people communicate using a number of languages which only have a common history on our island. In a 1970s essay on the emergence of new styles and approaches in Maltese literature called ‘Maltese Literature Dichotomy’, Lino Spiteri said of novelist and dramatist Francis Ebejer; ‘The remarkable thing about Ebejer is the way he conveys the Maltese character, soil, sun, feeling, everything Maltese, through the medium of English.’ The Maltese mind is interiorly divided; thought and action are manifested in non-corresponding forms by individual subjects.
This condition is not exclusive to Malta and is found in other places, especially in cosmopolitan cities and in Commonwealth countries. Very similar to Spiteri’s description of Ebejer is that of Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who wrote that his generation of writers looked at the world with ‘black skins and blue eyes’. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, another leading twentieth-century Caribbean poet, constantly deals with the theme of fragmentation in his work to reflect the diversity of his region together with the influence of the colonial centre, London.
Consequently, artists could express themselves differently depending on their geographical position and cultural contexts. Whilst in Malta Cremona was decorating Ħamrun’s St. Cajetan and Floriana’s St. Publius with conventional representations of religious figures and narratives, in London he exhibited daring, high quality abstract paintings which spoke an all-together different language formally and conceptually. Figurative sacred art is culture-specific as it belongs to the European tradition. Abstraction’s modernist objective was that of universalising; universalising art and religion to create an individual and original language capable of conveying a collective spirituality.
Another case to consider is that of painter Willie Apap. Although Apap ‘was not interested in striving towards any kind of new artistic language’ (Schembri Bonaci, ‘Apap, Cremona and St Paul’), he did reflect on the modern world around him, particularly in his enigmatic and intimate window and balcony paintings. His rejection of modernist idioms was not a corre- sponding rejection of the modern world. Apap was evidently intrigued by his time, and this made him doubt the moral norms ingrained in him from birth. Maria Cassar, who is writing a master’s dissertation on Apap’s art, informed me that even though Apap was lonely in Rome, he felt that he could not express himself freely if he continued to live in Malta.
However, the twentieth-century is probably the first time in Maltese modern art history that artists augmented a string of borrowed languages with the tone of local experience. Those who did not treat modernism as formalism, as a mimetic stylistic process beholding the capacity to look modern yet being divorced from the raw experiences of everyday life, but searched for identity within the country’s past and its present, created a sphere of art which can be categorised as Maltese modernism. It was local, yet it communicated with the cultures of others. It broke away from the burden of insularity by overcoming the hegemonic need for creative obedience. Josef Kalleya, Carmelo Mangion, George Preca, and Gabriel Caruana all acted inappropriately. They were peaceful dissidents. They were not polemical yet they conspicuously transgressed the status quo.
Others tasked to achieve this but struggled to liberate themselves from the constraints of Malta’s genteel culture. Frank Portelli, Esprit Barthet, Cremona and Anton Agius exemplify this point. Portelli himself was aware of the troubled rapport between Maltese modern art and that of the dominant artistic world, the art centres of the Western world which held global power.
The centre-periphery relationship allowed Maltese artists to question their own culture objectively, to take a glance at Malta from a distance. Still, the dominance of the centre, or rather, centres (Rome, London, Paris, and also New York) too often acted as a constraining force. Those centres were the incubators for ‘bigger and better’ art. Malta, on the other hand, respired with the lungs of conformity contained by the body of the church.
Why then, when exposed to artistic and intellectual developments in cosmopolitan centres, did Maltese artists continue to shy away from directly participating in such historical events? Dr. Schembri Bonaci has been dealing with this question for years. There do exist plausible responses which many have provided, but they usually resort to Catholic apologetic excuses on the piety of sacrificing one’s creative life to support the family and to please others. Such limiting statements are self-incriminating. They negate individual will and concede to the decisions and worldviews of others.
With their art, the artists show us the experience of living in a young nation state which has a long cosmopolitan history. The results of this are fragmentation, inconsistency, eclecticism, confusion, plurality, complexity. These characteristics are what unite Maltese twentieth-century art. No artistic context is linear or logical, but some appear to make sense. The history of Maltese modern art doesn’t. It seems that the task of scholarship on this subject is to make sense out of non-sense.