The launch of a rather comprehensive book about the artists in Malta in between the war years and post-World War II has reignited comments and reflection on the need for Malta to have a fully-fledged museum of modern art and a museum of contemporary art.

Many seem to think the two terms are synonymous. They are not. As in other European capitals, a museum of modern art is taken to mean anything from the 19th century to World War I while a museum of contemporary art deals with the art that followed World War II.

The only museum that Malta has in this regard is the Museum of Fine Arts in South Street Valletta, the house that used to be the home of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces. It is a stately home that needs much restoration. It has a good collection of Maltese modern art together with art from the Baroque period and even before.

Its reserve collection is huge: There is simply no place to display all the paintings, and in fact the launch of the book was accompanied by a small exhibition of the best in Maltese art since World War II.

The museum has been steadily purchasing paintings as they come on the market and any artist who exhibits paintings at a Heritage Malta venue has to leave choice paintings for the reserve collection. Soon enough, Heritage Malta will run out of space for reserve collections, let alone have space where the paintings can be exhibited.

This is all a huge pity for it means that we as a nation continually lose out of a very important part of our heritage. For what is the use of keeping paintings by masters hidden away in reserve collections when we, when school children, when people interested in the arts, can never get a glimpse of them?

What we do not see, we have no idea that exists.

The second irony then is that we keep restoring old places, mostly fortifications, but then we can find no use for some of them. The Caraffa Stores in Vittoriosa are still, we understand, without a use, while the old power station at Floriana is a huge area awaiting a new use, as does its next door Magazino which is only used sporadically.

Many people seem to think that when Fort St Elmo is restored, there is enough space in there to house a museum of modern art and also a museum of contemporary art.

The problem, as usual, is to find adequate funding both for restoration but also for the maintenance to keep two such museums open and functioning. But that’s just it: As we have found funds to do something about City Gate and the Royal Opera House ruins, just as we have found funds to build a new hospital, it therefore follows that we must find funds to promote and improve our artistic patrimony. We must also find sufficient funds to have a real theatre and concert venue.

Over the past years, we have seen how the pattern of our national spending has been changed. Today, we no longer devote such a huge slice of our national expenditure to keeping the dockyard afloat, nor the huge subsidy we used to pay to keep a ramshackle bus service. So on and so forth. We must now consciously change our spending patterns again to reflect new priorities and among these new priorities there has to be more spending on arts. This is just a reflection, and a measure, of our improved status as a people just as we today spend more on education, and rightly so.

Now that Malta is attempting to be the European Capital of Culture in a few years’ time, here is one target which should be aimed at – that by the time that year comes around, Malta will have come round to provide itself and future generations with two good museums and a theatre.