Art in Malta

Modern Artistic Sensibilities in Maltese Art – Volume I was awarded first prize in November 2011 at Book National Award Prize.

Photo by Bernardine Scicluna
	The publication itself is a scholarly work which identifies the pioneering artists, discusses and analyses their art and efforts within a historical, political, social and economic context.

	Joseph Paul Cassar is a practising artist, art historian, art critic, curator and educator. He was a decisively inspiring academic spearheading the formation of a generation of Maltese scholars, educators and professionals in the field before moving to University of Maryland University College where he is currently Professor of Art.
	He is also engaged in designing dynamic online art courses for the New York Times Knowledge Network. He is also Visiting Professor at various universities and colleges including John Hopkins University, Towson University, York College of Pennsylvania, Carroll Community College in Westminster, and Baltimore City Community College among others.

As explained at the launch both by Prof. Cassar himself, and also by the various speakers − Prof. Mario Buhagiar, artist Caesar Attard and Gabriel Pellegrini − the book covers roughly the first two thirds of last century. The works on display reflect, in different ways, the search for an authentic modern identity that became a central issue of modern artistic expression.
Photo by Hilary Spiteri  Dr. Joseph Paul Cassar during the tour for the exhibition that he curated for the book launch.	Professor Cassar’s second volume, which brings the history of contemporary art in Malta to the 1980s is ready too, he announced, and he is only waiting to find the right opportunity to publish it as well.
	As he did in his previous books, but even more so, Prof. Cassar’s chapters are based on interviews with the artists themselves, most of who have since died. To applause, Prof. Cassar announced that on the publication of the second volume, he would give all his copious prime material to the Museum of Fine Arts.

Last Light – Malta National Museum of Fine Arts Valletta – 22nd October – 20th November.

‘To kill death is to become him’

- Piers Anthony, On A Pale Horse

True to its apocalyptic title, Anthony Catania’s Last Light revisions its most inspiring sources by filtering them through its antithetical aesthetic radiating what Harry Levin calls “the blackness of whiteness”. Clearly not an exhibition of polarities, Last Light unleashes this darkling paleness to intensify in Bloomian terms its “anxiety of influence”. Consider, for instance, the ‘Mourning Light’ and ‘Shades of Stars’ pastel drawings whose subversive reworking of Böcklin’s Die Toteninsel (1880) and Van Gogh’s La Nuit Etoilée (1889) bleaches them to an astral dance of death. For Catania recasts Böcklin’s ferryman, skiff and isle from spectral stars whose pallid light, eerily evocative of Die Toteninsel’s looming white shroud, subverts any Böcklinian intimations of La Nuit Etoilée’s nocturnal chromatism in its Van Goghian stellar dynamics. Imbued with this Stygian gloom’s hueless hue, Böcklin and Van Gogh mutually dissolve into Catania’s intermeshing of their scattered souls. Significantly, not only does Van Gogh’s crescent moon mutate into a sickle-shaped Böcklinian barge of the dead, but it modulates its waxing yellowness to Böcklin’s isle’s achromatic metamorphosis into cypress clumps flaring in Van Goghian angst. Appropriating Van Gogh’s starry vision, Catania pales it to a waning darker than Böcklin’s.

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I am constantly looking for art by Maltese artists.   Maltese artists includes Pawl Carbonaro, Raymond Pitre, Anton Agius, George Fenech, Emvin Cremona, Gabriel Caruana and others.

Please send an email on mcaruana@gmail.com or else contact me on 9942 2663.

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