In Maltese modern art, the representation of the female body was a frequently visited subject that has not yet been studied profoundly and critically. This does not mean that images of women have been excluded from research, far from it. However, the question of how they are portrayed remains unexplored, and this is the most important point of analysis as it investigates the visual manifestation of perceptual and ideological conceptions of Maltese women in the twentieth century.
The notion of female beauty underwent a cataclysmic revolution in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. The Realist and the Impressionist painters made it their prerogative to challenge the standards of modern bourgeois salon art that were generating a barrage of weak and derivative art. The absence of formal values and symbolic meaning in this art incited this pioneering generation to create new pictorial standards which had the ability to evoke the everyday experience of modernity as artistic expression.
Hence, one of the most iconic works was produced; Édouard Manet's Olympia. This 'vulgar' painting was an affront to conventional aesthetics by showing a 'non-representable' nude and provocatively gazing prostitute. Olympia's tangibility made her part of the earthly realm rather than the idealised mythological sphere which maintained a sterile spatio-temporal distance between the painting and the viewer. Manet completely revolutionised the portrayal of the female body and the reception of such imagery in the public sphere.
Maltese artists of the twentieth-century made similar proclamations which have gone somewhat unnoticed. I will here describe the work of three artists who each tackled the pictorialisation of women differently. There were those who innovatively rebelled against convention, and those who cleverly maintained both the artistic and societal status quo whilst devising new appearances for an old worldview.
The artist who comfortably belongs in the latter category is Edward Caruana Dingli, whose numerous portraits of high society women and naïve folklore scenes succeeded in rendering an idea of modern life based upon traditional social hierarchies. Last year, Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci delivered a talk which comparatively analysed the paintings of Caruana Dingli with the poetry of Dun Karm, focusing on how these two individuals diversely yet conversely attempted to elicit a return to the past.
As Schembri Bonaci argues, Caruana Dingli intelligently usurped the realist idiom without its radical philosophical roots. Thus, his paintings seem real yet quite strategically escape reality. By reality, I am not referring to the rendering of likeness or of actual garments worn by his female sitters, but to the formal manifestation of experience and how that is projected to us by the artist.
Caruana Dingli's cosmeticised women and staged carefree peasants share the same views of the idealised mythological nudes of the salon, expressed in more readily perceptible terms and, most importantly, with appealing familiarity. His paintings reaffirm the social role of women in the twentieth century as symbols of a standardised 'normal' beauty; poised, elegant and submissive to the male onlooker. This is why Schembri Bonaci claims that Caruana Dingli's art helped to sustain the aims of the dominant class.
In literature, Dun Karm dedicated a number of poems to describing his idea of the prototypical Maltese beauty. Dr. Immanuel Mifsud, whose doctoral thesis analysed the representation of the human body in Maltese poetry, identified the following in Dun Karm's work; 'The often graphic description of farm girls, with large breasts and broad hips, toiling barefoot with heads uncovered under the scorching sun, are somewhat identical to Caruana Dingli's Romantic images of country girls that have, since, become metaphors of a supposed Maltese femininity. Unlike Caruana Dingli, however, Dun Karm was extremely judgemental as regards to the urban female citizen whom he reproached for being artificially slim and heavily made up.'
However, it is Esprit Barthet's Mari tal-Bajd that gives visual form to Dun Karm's literary musings. Contrary to the academic convention of female grace and elegance, Barthet's Mari proclaimed the provincial, rural type as epitomising Maltese beauty. With this painting, the artist shifted beauty away from the superficial and instead defined it as the manifestation of virtuous existence. Barthet's democratic-moralising representation underlines the visible arduousness of physical labour and its effect on the human body. The labouring woman is transformed into a symbol of sublimity.
Barthet's painting is culturally-specific. It makes reference to national identity and declares to have discovered beauty in a time and place close to that of the artist's own life. It is clear that he empathises with the sitter and her meaning within local culture.
The main difference between this painting and Caruana Dingli's folk women is the former's negation of sentimentalism. Still, the latter's images were for a long time upheld, as Mifsud argues, as the dominant type of particularly Maltese femininity since Caruana Dingli cleverly combined rurality with a high art female sensibility.
In opposition, Carmelo Mangion's art intrinsically manifested the experience of modern society and this is explicitly identifiable in his paintings of and featuring women. Through a Cézannesque reading of nature, Mangion's Bathers series initiated a dialogue on the representation of the nude female body and the landscape that took its cue from the work of the French master. His anti-naturalism was a confrontation to Caruana Dingli's and Giuseppe Calì's romantic world of appearances. Mangion negated sentimentality and human emotive expression to focus on the female nude in spatial and formal terms, as objects that occupy an undefinable time and geographical place.
What appears to be a non-human approach to painting was, in actuality, precisely the opposite. The female figure is in this series not an embodiment of nationalist conceptions of womanhood or of a specific historical identity but a being-in-nature that is unrefined, uncivilised and universal. In other words, these nudes eliminate difference and show an art that no longer yearns for a superficial, idealised emblem of beauty that portrays womanhood as singular and fixed. This objective resonates today in the media debate between the culture of Photoshop-perfected women and the reality that human beauty is diversified and non-staged. Both Mangion and Barthet proposed alternatives to the saccharine sweetness of Caruana Dingli's peasant women.
Still, the romanticisation of the female image remained central in Maltese art as well as in literature well into the twentieth century. Mifsud writes that female portrayals in literature oscillated, 'between a saintly Madonna-like prettiness and a vicious beauty typical of the femme fatale and other daughters of Eve. The concept of beauty starts scrapping cliched depictions at the end of the twentieth century with the advent of the new generation of writers who had acquired a more critical and deconstructive outlook.'
The visual arts also underwent significant transformations in later years, particularly from the 1960s on. As noted by Mifsud, certain formal changes were influenced by the development of new media, namely television and cinema, and the globalisation of culture. However, it was the social and political empowerment of women in recent decades that really affected the arts. There were artists, such as Mangion, Antoine Camilleri, Willie Apap and George Preca, who attempted to challenge the status quo by rethinking the conventional representation of women in the arts, and consequently repudiating the idealising tendency that was predominant for several years.