Anton Agius has always baffled me. His art creates a disturbing equivocal feeling. His extensive talent and mediocrity are so organically intertwined that a study of his historically important works becomes a dangerous path to tread, dangerous because of his undoubted talent, which in my opinion was prematurely aborted because of artistic compromises he had chosen.
Thinking of Anton Agius, I cannot refrain from quoting Thomas Mann’s description of Hans Castorp’s masterpiece “The Magic Mountain”: “For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him – even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why – he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterised by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case... and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honourable sense of that word” (Magic Mountain p.37). No one can doubt Anton Agius’ robust vitality, but it was a vitality aborted by fatal compromises. One of his significant mistakes was that he believed that only figurative art was able to reflect the social and political changes that occurred during his turbulent times. He, unwarrantly, identified the deep social changes being ushered into the development of the Maltese nation with the philosophy of figurative social art. This problem becomes more tragically accentuated when one notices Agius’ sincere drive and yearning to grasp the roots of his nation-in-being and fabricate this very nation’s spiritual identity. Turbulent times unfolding previously unknown radical changes were violently mushrooming the birth of a new Malta.
Anton Agius’ earlier acclaimed abstract art according to Agius himself could not find its “functionality-ness” in such a radical new social configuration. As he said himself, echoing one of the most important dicta of socialist realism, “I want my art to be understood by the masses”. In 1968 he stated that he was “an abstractist, willingly and unashamedly” (Ben Ker, “Next on the List: Sculptor Anton Agius”, Malta News, 16 August 1968) while feeling that now he was “trying to move beyond...for something very much mine”.
The fact that his abstract art was not establishing roots in the masses tormented him. He believed that art is a message, and as a message it has to be comprehended, understood and easily identified by the masses. Already, in 1972, we can see how sands had shifted when he confessed “I still love modern art, but I must say that I have put it aside... I want my life to be understood through art... Abstract art proved inadequate” (Louis P Saliba, Anton Agius, Malta 2002, p.23). Opting for figurative art in order to be understood by the masses led to a total incomprehension of his entire corpus. Striving to combine both the abstract and the figurative proved to be an unsuccessful daring attempt, ending in what several critics according to Louis P. Saliba called an “embodiment of frustration”.
Anton Agius’ shift to figurative art so as to reflect the changes contemporary society was passing through is integrally linked to the eternal question concerning the relationship between the artist and his political commitment, something which was fundamental to Agius. One here may recall Picasso’s answer to this question: “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or nothing but muscles if he is a boxer? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter, or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it... No painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.” The Mexican Rivera and the Sicilian Guttuso, also Agius’ contemporaries, are other brilliant examples of socially and politically committed artists.
In the early 70s, Malta under the Malta Labour party government was passing through the most radical reforms ever. Visual artists started to feel ‘embryonically’ their new need to reflect a new Malta. Reforms included political, economic, social, educational, civil changes. Vast transformations ushered in Malta’s foreign policy, its independent policies, radical modifications from its previous relationships with London and Rome. According to Agius his early abstract stage was not sufficiently strong to reflect all these revolutionary tumults and changes. He wanted to align himself with the working class movement by creating a clear comprehensible message that could help the evolution of such new development in Maltese society.
Agius did not harbour any violent revolutionary ideology. His works were representing Malta’s struggle towards independence, recognition, and presence-in-being. His empathy with turmoil, with suffering, with the disabled and the vulnerable, together with his deep-rooted patriotism and his admiration of revolutionary fighters and the plight of the toiling masses, clearly brought him close to working class ideologies, not only in Malta, but also abroad. His creative praxis followed, one may say, pari passu with Malta’s birth as a modern state, with all its paradoxes, contradictions and tragedies. By co-opting the facade of socialist realism, without taking it to its logical conclusion, Agius introduces a radical art philosophy into the Malta art scene. His works do not call for some kind of socialist revolution as all socialist realist works were intended to do. His works reflected the nation’s fight against foreign occupation and interventions. His socialist realist works can be described more as being on the borderline between the philosophy of social realism and that of socialist realism within a structure both patriotic and spiritual. This hybrid of ideologies, class interests and social ideas afforded enough material to induce Agius to search and find artistic sources in the art world of socialist realism. Thus, his beautiful, and I believe his most important, monument “Manwel Dimech” (1976) is a direct artistic reflection of the Lenin monument at Smolny by V.V. Kozlov (1887-1940) unveiled in 1927. The close relationship existing between these works underlines the influence socialist realism was having on Agius during a particular period of his creative life. The Smolny monument became very famous throughout the Soviet Union and played an incredible role in the development of socialist art in all countries. The other Lenin monuments that could have also served as an important source for Agius’ Manwel Dimech include the Finland Railway Station “Lenin” created by S.A. Evseev, (V.V. Shchuko and V.G. Gelfrreich as architects) in 1926: and the more recent source is the Lenin monument in front of the House of Soviets, Moskovskaya Square in St Petersburg created by M.K. Anikushin (1917-1997) in 1970, for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death, (with V.A. Kamenski as its architect).
The Smolny monument has a very integral and historically justified reason for its erection precisely in front of the Smolny edifice. On October 25, 1917, the radically significant and revolutionary All-Russian Congress of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies was held in the Smolny. This was a historic event that in fact changed the whole evolution of history as we knew it at the time. The Congress established the Soviet government. This was, in fact, the world’s first (the second, if one recalls the ill-fated and short-lived 1871 Paris Commune) proletarian dictatorship Smolny was the strategic fighting centre from which V. I. Lenin exercised party and Soviet leadership. Lenin’s relationship to Smolny was also made famous by the I.I. Brodsky (1884-1939) painting ‘Lenin in Smolny’ (1930).
The other monument, the Evseev monument, also depicts another crucial historic event, an event that can even be interpreted as almost touching on the mystical. In early October 1917, V.I. Lenin, returned illegally, disguised and under a false name, to Russia hiding on the tender of a railway engine from Finland to Petrograd. The actual engine No. 293 was later presented to the Soviet Union by the Finnish government. Secretly, Lenin dictated the fateful resolution of the Party Central Committee of 10 October 1917 on the armed uprising, underlining that an armed uprising had become imminent. He vehemently called for immediate preparation for an instantaneous insurrection. The Revolutionary Committee was established precisely for the pressing and urgent preparation of the uprising.
Staying hidden in an apartment and learning on 24 October that government troops were about to cut communication by raising the Neva bridges, Lenin proclaimed the imminence of the moment: “...it is now absolutely clear that to delay the uprising would be fatal”.
The order did not go unheeded. The uprising took place on the very same night. The Russian revolution had begun.
These three Soviet monuments have a clear artistic relationship with Agius’ Manwel Dimech. However there are important differences. Although Agius appropriated Lenin’s formal imagery, yet he decided to de-monumentalise his Dimech. Agius’ work and its artistic architectural presentation underline the human aspect of the figure and his permanent struggle against all oppression. Here we are not witnessing a transcendental historic event by some form of human deity, as we see in the Soviet variations. On the contrary, we perceive a human struggle for liberation from enslavement. Furthermore, the journal in Dimech’s hand, which in realty was his real great weapon, also underlines the enlightenment factor in Dimech’s struggle: Enlightenment as the avant garde of all struggles.
Furthermore, and subject to more research, the Dimech monument does not depict a particular event, nor is it linked to a particular historical space tied with Dimech’s political fate. Even its architectural dimension and direction do not seem to carry any symbolical meaning, except for the fact that this monument is placed at a slight lateral tangent to the Auberge de Castille, previously the most important strategic political-military power centre and icon of British Rule in Malta.
Dr Schembri Bonaci is an artist and a lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Malta.