Description
It is fascinating to see, though incredibly difficult to analyse why, the vast majority of Maltese artists who are considered as the pioneers of Maltese Modern Art shared at the same time a reactionary and even feudal perception of reality and advances in contemporary society. In Fact any Baudelaire/Shopenhauer idea of the artist as the chosen Romantic ‘I’ leading the avant-garde was entirely absent in the Maltese art scene. As Peter Serracino Inglott asserts, in his introduction to Malta: Six Modern Artists, Maltese artists ‘sought to avoid the Romantic image of the artist…adopting an anti-bohemian stance…” Their “desire for social respectability, underpinned by a strong sense of Family responsibility” came into direct conflict with the modern paths being enshrined in European centres in which the most devastating and destructive artistic revolution was taking place. This is even more striking when one considers the fact that this concentrated group of Maltese artists, sometimes defined as a provincial renaissance of Maltese art, was exposed to all the modern European trends of the first half of the twentieth century. All of them went to Italy to further their studies, and some did in fact go further, to Paris, London and New York. They were stowaways amidst the turbulent ocean of the modern tempest raging in Europe. However, as if on Gercault’s Raft of Medusa, they chose Ulysses-like to bind themselves to the archaic wood mast of a sinking provincial-insular floating wreck.
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