In 2007, the former curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts, the late Dennis Vella, curated an exhibition called 'Work in 20th Century Maltese Art' held at the Occupational Health and Safety Authority, Pieta'. As Vella underlined in the exhibition catalogue, Maltese twentieth-century artists focused on depicting traditional crafts, agriculture and fishing, but steered clear of depicting industrial occupations and white-collar work despite the strong presence of both in Maltese society. One of the inferences made by Vella on the absence of modern workforces in art was 'their lack of obvious pictorial appeal'. Many would agree with him. It is much more pleasant to look at an image of a farmer working in a rural environment than a Drydocks labourer surrounded by monumental steel structures.
However, as Vella pointed out toward the end of his text, there is a more profound issue which probably led to the omission of urban and industrial subject matter rather than superficial aesthetic concerns with innocuous visual pleasantries. This is the conscious decision, albeit not the willingness, of artists to not be involved in socio-political matters for fear of losing employment, and here I may even add social respectability. This fear is inherent to small communities in which anonymity is hard to come by, and in which disturbances to the normal order of things are far from welcomed.
I believe fear to be a dominant element that affected the development of Maltese modern art. But what caused this fear, and why did so many artists choose to ignore modern life by giving preference to traditional and academic modes of representation?
This issue was debated during a recent lecture on Maltese twentieth-century art by Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and his BA students. It is a point of contention for which no one straightforward answer may be provided and which has been addressed by many (and confounding all). The objective of my doctoral research is to analyse and interpret the development of Maltese modern art in relation to the local and international socio-political context, therefore the relationship between Malta's burgeoning industrial economy and visual culture is a central point of investigation.
The detachment of Maltese twentieth-century art from everyday experience is something that I have not seen in other European cultural contexts. I do not mean to imply that Malta is the only country marked by provinciality, quite the contrary. Our artistic development in the modern period defies logical historical structures dictated by the art historical canon, as does the art of many other communities, including those of the West that are falsely portrayed as unified and rational.
It is this defiance that makes the Maltese situation so interesting. A lack of something is just as significant as its presence, sometimes even more so.
The most obvious reason as to why industry and urban life were not given priority in art is the cultural hegemony of the local church and the prevalence of traditionalism. The church was the major patron of the arts throughout the twentieth century, and it was the ecclesiastical authorities who were the arbiters of good and bad art. This means that matters of aesthetic judgement were subordinate to religious doctrine as the church undoubtedly gave precedence to its own institutional affairs.
It also means that morality was a dominant criterion for maintaining artistic standards. The idea of the religious Maltese peasant who did not engage in urban activities, or the traditional craftsman who used non-mechanical tools evoked a sense of divinity, whereas the industrial worker who spent their days at the dry-docks was not thought of in the same manner. This perception caused many to 'look away' and to romanticise the past in their artworks, engendering a visual cult of nostalgia spearheaded by Edward Caruana Dingli.
Caruana Dingli revelled in modern life and was linked to the (progressive) British regime. Yet his idealised folklore scenes are to this day upheld as realist images of Maltese life. Schembri Bonaci has rightly stated that no farmer who toiled in the field from dusk till dawn would relate to the smiling, carefree peasants in Caruana Dingli's paintings. Even Caruana Dingli himself detached his art from his everyday life, except in some of his portraits of suggestive aristocratic women.
This idealisation of Maltese identity as pure, rural, pious, and unaffected by the hardships of modern cosmopolitan life was posed as a 'correct' definition. It was a myth depicted by several artists. Other artists chose to maintain academic standards that had been dismissed by the modernists precisely because academism promoted an exhausted language that said nothing about society and experience.
But maybe one must take a step back and ask whether the subject of artistic non-involvement has been approached from the wrong angle. Maybe we have been searching for the obvious and not realised that there were a number of socially-committed artists who expressed their relationship with the material world, thus redefining Maltese identity according to their experience of living in a changing nation.
Carmelo Mangion is always cited as the first Maltese artist to portray industrial Malta, and he did so using an idiom that borrowed from the Parisian and German avant-garde. He was arguably the only painter to have deeply thought about this subject matter and also devised a new formal mode of expression. Others who did address work and industry did not give it much attention.
Josef Kalleya never, to my knowledge, depicted industrial Malta. However, he created a new visual language that attests to the reality of radical social and economic upheaval. Industry and urban life are not only seen but, more importantly, felt, and Kalleya injected this energy into his entire artistic oeuvre. His process of producing art also greatly differed from academic practices, despite his knowledge and capacity to work using traditional media and techniques. The debate on art labour and its relationship with industry has not yet been studied, and cannot be separated from other occupations. Antoine Camilleri, Alfred Chircop, Gabriel Caruana and Emvin Cremona all challenged the conventions of artistic practice.
By shifting the focus from subject matter to the analysis of formal language and production methods, the theme of work in Maltese twentieth-century art may be perceived differently. Work, labour, is that which defines our quotidian existence and so cannot be simply represented in subject matter alone. It is actually embedded in how we express ourselves rather than in what, and with this in mind we are able to rethink the extent to which Maltese artists did or did not ignore the world around them.