Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci
As a young rebellious youth, a Marxist-anarchist during what were medieval times in Malta in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was deeply but confoundedly entranced when I, the first Maltese student to study in Moscow, saw the mystifying resemblance of Soviet socialist art to its arch-enemy, Fascist art. I even wrote a short story related to this question, Talba ta’ Qabel l-Irqad (Bed Time Prayer), published in an anthology in Malta in 1987.
A more peculiar situation arose when I was back in Malta in the 1980s, continuing my art studies. I was amazed to see the proximity of ecclesiastical baroque art to these two totalitarian art movements. This tripartite visual similarity, in spite of their very different motivations and political messages, continues to fascinate me up to the present day. How easily the 17th-centrury Spanish writer Francisco Pacheco’s ideas of Christian art seem to wedge themselves between Lenin’s dicta of “art for the masses” and Gorky’s truth “as seen from above”. I came to the conclusion that totalitarian forms of government give birth to parallel forms of art, independently of their concrete conflicting ideologies. My fascination with Cremona in fact started when I felt how his modernised ‘baroque’ art was in fact a symptom of these totalitarian forms of art.
Malta was and still is completely enmeshed in baroque and pseudo-baroque art, a style that has virtually monopolised the art scene for the last three centuries. This made it abundantly difficult for other art movements or philosophies of art to insert themselves into the Maltese situation. Emvin Cremona (1919-1987) was the first artist who, in my opinion, succeeded in introducing radical modern elements into the Maltese baroque.
In his quest to modernise Malta’s fossilised baroque art, Cremona fused baroque lavishness and its corresponding monumentality with a modern fluid decorative style. He subtly modernised baroque principles, ensuring his works were instantly accepted by the Church authorities. Since the Church was the exclusive patron and commissioner of works of art in Malta, one can understand how this helped him monopolise the art scene and the art market for a number of years. According to Mgr G. Azzopardi, the fact that Vincenzo Bonello, one of the important advisers to the Archbishop of Malta who in fact succeeded in aborting any other modernist attempts in Maltese art, admired Cremona’s ‘novel’ baroque, guaranteed his unchallenged monopoly.
In fact, as the late E. Fiorentino noted, “the services of Cremona were constantly sought by ecclesiastical sources, which included ... the Pauline Centenary, [the] Independence of Malta, and the commemorations of the International Eucharistic Congress in Malta, Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Malta and the anniversary of Lehen is-Sewwa”.
Besides such unchallenged monopoly, Cremona’s outstanding talent, juxtaposed with his conservative social-cultural baggage made him easily the strongest candidate for the post of artistic director for the 1960 XIX centenary celebrations of St Paul’s Shipwreck in Malta. Such festivities and celebrations were in fact, according to J.M. Pirotta, a “golden opportunity to marshal the faithful” in support of the Church of Malta against the radical reforms being propagated by the Labour movement, which culminated in the politico-religious struggle of the 1960s.
1960: the sad and grotesquely tragic beginnings of the politico-religious struggle in Malta. On 9th April 1960, the Maltese Catholic Church issued its ‘Interdett’, “... according to the canons 2291 and 2275”. An Interdett, a form of excommunication, is a penalty by which a Catholic is deprived of certain spiritual goods or rights. Recalling the Catholic Church’s predominant and monopolistic role in all aspects of Maltese life, one can understand the extraordinarily powerful force such a decree had on Maltese cultural and social structures. This decree, coupled with a mass of similar ecclesiastical actions, had an enormous legal and social impact. This particular decree’s applicability was extended to all who printed, wrote for, sold or read the Labour Party’s journal “The Struggle”. Such a decree defined these actions as mortal sins. The year 1961 saw the further harshening of the Church’s struggle against the Labour movement. The writing, reading and distribution of two other Labour journals, “Helsien” and “The Voice of Malta”, were all condemned. Voting Labour meant committing a mortal sin, the gravest action that can be made in context of one’s beliefs and spiritual allegiance to the Catholic Church. Knowing that Catholicism reigned in Malta, and that it was Catholicism that determined the character of social, political and intellectual life, the Geist of a nation, one can understand the depth of the ensuing tragedy.
The British as the colonial power became involved as always subtly and intelligently by importing on board the HMS Surprise, under Alexander Bingley, then Commander-in-Chief of the British Naval forces, ‘the miraculous’ relic of St Paul, thus adding still more to the tension between the Malta Labour Party and the Church. J.M. Pirotta in his brilliant studies records that on 4th March, HMS Forth brought to Malta the urn containing the relics of the body of St Teresa. The chain of St Paul and other Pauline relics were loaned for the event through British diplomatic channels. He even asserts that the British authorities also supported the proposed visit of the Pope to Malta ‘insofar as it might strengthen the hand of the Archbishop’. Pirotta continues that, “...there can be little doubt that these Pauline celebrations helped to generate a greater sense of Catholic belonging... this renewed fervour was immediately translated into strong outpourings of public support for both Church and Archbishop” in the growing confrontation between the Church and the Malta Labour Party. Performances at the Empire Stadium, military church parades with the ‘natural’ participation of Nato forces, the British Army, Navy and Air Forces, the Royal Malta Artillery, the Civil Defence Corps, complemented by the pilgrimage organised by the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, created a deeply Orwellian ritualistic
community.
In such an aura one finds Cremona’s magnificent standing St Paul, executed in 1960, and now in the Catholic Institute in Floriana, in all his brilliant militancy.
In this metallic-perspex structure, Cremona ingeniously created a belligerent St Paul in all his majesty by using a type of perspex overlaid with ‘ferrobattuto’ – iron rods that captivatingly act as a counterpoint to the basic design on the painted perspex. Cremona, with such a simple yet clever method, succeeded in creating the effect of stained and frosted glass.
If one ignores the biblical source of such a work, it can easily be seen as comparable with many public monuments and murals justifying dictatorial cultures. One is reminded of the artistic monumentality reflecting and propagating totalitarian regimes, such as Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. Such monumentality endeavours to convert recipients and integrate them into a ritualistic community, a function that the standing St Paul and the centenary celebrations, besides their religious-spiritual side, also had. The crucifix becomes the sword and the sword the crucifix, making this art an art of war (Koepnick, L.P., Fugo C.).
However, unlike the massively dense and inherently powerful materials, such as porphyry, marble, steel or concrete, deliberately used for ideological purposes by totalitarian states to reflect their solid supremacy, Cremona uses perspex, a light and fragile ‘tertuqa’ which could be said to reflect the Church’s weakness and vulnerability in its struggle against the progressive waves of the 1960s.
As Baxandall said, “painters cannot be social idiots”. And Cremona was no idiot. He joined the Gioventu Fascista in 1933, and only his love affair prevented him from accepting the Fascist state invitation to stay in pre-war Italy. His bizarre allegiance to Church and conservative policies in a feudal cultural system was a constant factor in his artistic life. I say bizarre because it seems Pirandello-esque ‘schizophrenic’ that at the very same time Cremona was in fact experimenting with his thoroughly fascinating modernist tendencies. It is difficult to understand how Cremona’s magnificent avant-garde “Broken Glass” series can be juxtaposed with his artistic and political allegiance to the feudal-anachronistic massive politics of the Catholic Church in the 1960s.
However, perhaps we should remember that later on, during the 1970s, when the conservative structure of Maltese society was at last being successfully attacked, Cremona “... unhesitatingly disowned his church art as serious works of art”, and defined them negatively as merely “decorative art”. Towards the end of his life, he even explicitly stated that he did not consider his popular church art as serious contributions. His St Paul masterpiece however does not form part of his popular church art. Paradoxically, this work of historical importance, which today is in dire need of urgent and expert restoration, must be seen as a deeply vital and monumental work, whatever one may think of its political or other overtones.
Dr Schembri Bonaci is an artist and lectures in the Department of History of Art, University of Malta and author of Apap, Cremona and St Paul (2009) published by Horizons. This is the third article published this newspaper. The other two relate to the Antonio Sciortino-Vasilii Perov relationship, and Anton Agius’ Manwel Dimech.