During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a budding rebellious Marxist-anarchist, I was active in all the contemporary major left-wing political movements. These included the Malta Labour Party, the Xirka Gustizzja Socjali, Grupp Kontra, Front Socjalista, Cellola Marxista, Azzjoni Marxista and the embryonic Communist Party. I fervently believed in a fundamental upheaval of society’s values, which I felt was long overdue. My energetic actions and reactions often created a rather enigmatic relationship with the already legendary leader of the Malta Labour Party, Prime Minister of Malta Dom Mintoff. For these reasons, I have long had a great interest in Malta’s international role – culturally, artistically and politically.

My involvement in Maltese politics was rooted in a lifelong tri-binary love for the arts, philosophy and law. Equipped with this Neptune’s trident, I was inevitably enthralled – during my activities within the Malta Labour Party – by Mintoff’s radical foreign policy to further Mediterranean unity, with tiny Malta playing a substantial role in the midst of international, and even national, criticism. Malta’s unique and historic position in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (the CSCE Helsinki process) has yet to be fully studied. The CSCE, after the signing of the Mediterranean ‘Magna Carta’, on Mintoff’s initiative in 1973, paved the way for a fresh look at the Mediterranean. I pursued this element of Maltese politics in all my artistic, legal and philosophical studies, discovering in the process Mintoff’s early post-war articles, which already envisioned a neutral Malta playing a central part in a move towards a new Mediterranean cohesion.

Concurrently with this activity, I was studying Malta’s revolutionary role in the United Nations at the time of its independence, and its acceptance in the organisation. Malta’s ambassador to the UN, Arvid Pardo, armed with Malta’s project for the re-organisation of the international legal system, particularly the Law of the Sea, created havoc in diplomatic circles. Like its Mediterranean project, the Law of the Sea proposals were initially decried by the superpowers, each mistakenly believing that Malta had its own covert motives and was in fact acting for the other counter-power. The Law of the Sea was eventually successfully finalised, and accepted by the international community, creating furthermore a tributary development in the Law of Space, Cultural Heritage and Climate. Likewise, the international community has now at last accepted the Mediterranean concept begot by Malta in the early 1970s; in fact it has been shrewdly co-opted by France, which has spearheaded this very idea in recent times. It is unfortunate that Malta does not seem to be able to sustain the grandeur of its concepts. The island seems to succumb to the weight of its own thought, either by allowing its ideas to be usurped by other powers, as in the case of Mediterranean unity, or else by aborting them itself, as in the pitiful case of the Law of the Sea.

This Mediterranean aspect has permeated all my studies in art, philosophy and law, and it has been a central feature in my activity, including my endeavours as an artist and an art historian. While studying the unsuccessful attempts of Antonio Sciortino (1879-1947) to expand the British Academy of Arts in Rome into a rather anachronistic British Empire Academy of Arts, I came upon an innovative modern project instigated by three internationally significant artists at almost precisely the same time: the two architects Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885-1989) from Amsterdam, Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) from Berlin, and the Cubist painter Amédéé Ozenfant (1886-1966) from Paris. This was the Académie Européene ‘Méditerranée’. Their idea arose out of Wijdeveld’s dream of a workers’ community. This eminent Dutch architect and stage designer dreamt of establishing an international art school in the form of an ‘een international werkgemeenschaap’, a community of artists.

This was a lyrical counterbalance to the pragmatic Nordic Bauhaus. An important article about the project was published in the journal Architectural History in 2002. This study, “An Artistic European Utopia at the Abyss of Time: The Mediterranean Academy Project, 1931-34” by Ita Heinze-Greenberg, provoked the present article and I aim to discuss some of its findings here.

Ozenfant and Mendelsohn travelled to Palestine, Greece, Italy, Corsica and the Côte d’Azur in the early 1930s. According to Heinze-Greenberg, they were both enthralled by the “so-called ‘Mediterranean thought’, the pensée midi of the French avant-garde”. This meridian thinking was defined as “the Mediterranean philosophy of harmony and measure, of oneness with nature, of southern light as the source of thinking, of the appeal to measure as the centre of existence, of the inner stability of the Mediterranean world as the cradle of form”. In 1932, Wijdeveld and Mendelsohn travelled extensively together discussing the Mediterranean, and searching for a site for their Academy, whereby they could understand the nature of the Mediterranean coast. The names of their proposed tutorial staff make interesting reading: Paul Bonifas (1893-1967), a master of ceramics, engraving and goldsmiths’ work, was chosen to head the Ceramics Department. Pablo Gargallo (1881-1934), who was internationally recognised as the sculptor whose works ‘show a strong feeling for a lively Mediterranean corporeality’, was to head the Sculpture Department. The great modern composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) agreed to take on the Music Department. The Russian/Chechen-born British designer Serge Chermayeff (1900-1996) was to head the Interior Design Department and another British artist, Eric Gill (1882-1940), was to run the Typography Department. The founders of the Academy, Ozenfant, Mendelsohn and Wijdeveld, were to be heads of Painting, Architecture, and Theatre respectively. Furthermore, an advisory board headed by no less a figure than Albert Einstein was established. This board included an extraordinary list of outstanding artists, including Edward Gordon Craig, Max Reinhard, Paul Valéry, Leopold Stokovsky and Igor Stravinsky.

With the Academy’s Mediterranean philosophy in mind, Mendelsohn was collaborating with Mussolini’s architect Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960) on a new concept of Mediterranean classicism. While Mendelsohn wanted to integrate Fascist Italy into the Academy, even contemplating a location for it in Italy, the Italian archaeologist Luigi Maria Ugolini (1895-1936), who was then in Malta, defined the island as the ‘culla’ or ‘focolare’ of “Mediterranean civilisation in a prehistoric mare nostrum” (Nicholas C. Vella, Oliver Gilkes, The Lure of the Antique: Nationalism, Politics and Archaeology in British Malta (1800-1964) in Papers of the British School at Rome, V.69, Centr.Volume (2001), pp. 353-384).

Similar to the beliefs of Ugolini, the founders of the Academy believed that the Mediterranean was the “historic cradle and home of the principle of faith, law and form”. In parallel, Ozenfant’s controversial book Art (1928) formulated the ideas of Purism which, together with Le Corbusier’s belief in a “return to order”, formulated a lyricism that “was intended to integrate itself into a natural, universal cosmic order”. The Mediterranean was considered to be the intellectual and spiritual space where this new order could flourish, as the eternal creative force “which achieved the union of death and life in the timelessness of great art”. Together with Ozenfant’s Art, Mendelsohn’s Creative Meaning of the Crises (1932) provided the philosophical ideology for the Academy. These works underlined the need for modernism to search for a link with classicism. This idea was heavily indebted to Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, as well as other publications by him, in which this great French writer defined the Mediterranean as the spiritual centre of Europe. Valéry emphasised the fact that the fate of Europe was essentially and integrally dependent on the Mediterranean, “on the preservation of its original culture as developed by the Mediterranean”, a thesis upon which the Mintoff government of the early 1970s based its foreign policy initiatives. Valéry emphasised that “without its Mediterranean centre of creative forces, there is no chance of survival for Europe... and without this, Europe’s identity, integrity, and unity would fall apart”. Even this found reflection in Mintoff’s foreign policy dictum that “there cannot be any European security without Mediterranean security”.

In 1933, just as this remarkable utopian project was coming into being at the chosen site of Cavaliére in the south of France, it aborted itself. The building designed to house the Academy was dramatically destroyed when it burned down in a great fire that destroyed everything, making “the continuation of our academy project... impossible”. Meanwhile, Mendelsohn decided to settle in England after all. Wijdeveld interpreted both these events, together with the pre-war belligerent tensions, as a metaphysical warning that he should return to Holland, where he was to establish his Mediterranean dream on the Lage Vuursche near Hilversum, in the north of the country.

Interestingly, and sadly, although the development of modern art in the mid-20th century was integrally linked with non-European models, the Academy did not include any infrastructural element from the North African Mediterranean. On the contrary, it paradoxically seemed to underscore its exclusive European quality. I say paradoxically, because the link between Picasso and African art, and Matisse’s relationship with Maghreb art, for example, are well known. Kandinsky’s, and modern abstract art’s, spiritual link with Islamic art is also intriguing and even vital. All these elements were well known to, and debated by, the founders of the Academy, who were themselves important factors in the evolution of modern art. It is unfortunate that the Academy bypassed this potentially innovatory way of considering the Mediterranean as both European and North African.

However, the Maltese art scene, unfortunately, did not pick up on these Mediterranean developments. Sciortino was concentrating on trying to save the British Academy in Rome during a belligerent period, opting for an ‘Empire-Academy’. In Malta, artists were under the artistic dictatorship of a costrumbista artist, Edward Caruana Dingli (1876-1950), whose allegiance to the British regime irrevocably damaged Malta’s traditional historic ties with Italian culture and civilisation. This could not but have an adverse effect, effectively alienating Maltese artists from their natural Mediterraneanità. Yes, I am no longer a student radical, but I nevertheless retain some of the revolutionary ideals of my youth. I have a dream of the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta setting up an institute, which would integrate the study of North African art with that of Europe, thereby reviving the Académie Européene ‘Méditerranée’ and thus reviewing some of the most exciting artistic movements of the early 20th

century.