In both Ireland and Malta the introduction of modern art was led by artists seeking to express their Christian faith through their art.
Marianne Hartigan, writing in When Time Began To Rant and Rage, says that Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone are often “credited with having introduced modernism into Irish art” and that there is “no doubt that their work, and particularly that of Mainie Jellettt, stretched the boundaries of Ireland’s perceptions of art.”
Under the tuition of Albert Gleizes, Jellett and Hone “created paintings that dispensed with subject matter and perspective and relied purely on line and color.” Mainie Jellett’s aim was:
“To delve deeply into the inner rhythms and construction of natural forms to create on their pattern, to make a work of art a natural creation complete in itself like a flower or any natural organism, based on the eternal laws of harmony, balance and ordered movement (rhythm). We sought the inner principle and not the outward appearance.”
“Jellett and Hone were swimming against the tide in exhibiting abstract works in an Ireland dominated, in the 1920s, by academic realism. A critic wrote of Mainie Jellett’s work exhibited in the Dublin Painter’s Exhibition in 1923: “I fear I did not in the least understand her two paintings. They are in squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colors. They may to the man who understands … modern art mean something but to me they presented an insoluble puzzle.””
From the mid 1930s onwards Hone’s “own inspiration took over and she abandoned the Cubist influence for a more personal interpretation of her subject matter” working, from 1933, in the Irish stained glass studios An Tur Gloine, where “her earlier abstract work helped her create a newly simplified style of stained glass where superfluous detail was removed and pure colors and shapes soared.”
“Mainie Jellett meanwhile remained dedicated to new principles in art and determined upon her methodical voyage of discovery. A deeply religious person, in the late 1920s and 1930s she introduced semi-abstract figures and strongly religious themes, moving away from the initial austerity of her earliest works by incorporating a wider range of color.”
“Slowly – partly prompted by Mainie Jellett’s endeavors to educate the wider public in modern art through lectures, exhibitions, radio broadcasts, and later by the establishment of the Irish exhibition of Living Art – the walls of prejudice against modern art in Ireland came down. In 1938 Evie Hone was commissioned to design windows for the Irish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair; later her designs for a new window at Eton College brought her international recognition. In 1938 and 1939 Mainie Jellett was asked to represent Ireland in the World’s Fairs in Glasgow and New York. Of these critical breakthroughs Thomas McGreevy, then Director of the National Gallery in Ireland, later wrote, “It would seem incontrovertible historical fact that Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett jointly were the first Irish artists not merely to study but fully to master and then to introduce into the practice of painting in Ireland the principle and idiom of the modern French approach to the painter’s problem …””
The late thirties also proved to be of extraordinary importance for Maltese painting. Peter Serracino Inglott has written, in both Malta: Six Modern Artists and Sacred Art in Malta 1890 – 1960, of the “galaxy of extremely talented young men”, including Anton Inglott, Willie Apap, Emvin Cremona, Giorgio Preca, Carmela Borg-Pisani, Esprit Barthet, Victor Diacono, and Josef Kalleya, who “first broke out, in their several different ways, of the provincial cocoon in which they were born and bred; and then how they contributed, again each in his own quite distinct way, to the construction of a new cultural context …”
Inglott considers Kalleya, “the most deeply religious, as well as perhaps the most original” of this group. Dominic Cutajar has written of the way in which Kalleya, on his return to Malta from study in Italy, threw himself whole-heartedly into organising art-groups and societies. The first was Accademia di Bella Arti which Kalleya believed “proved the germ-society (società mamma) for similar endeavours in the Maltese art-scene.” This group was later refounded as Studio Artistico Industriale Maltese d’Arte Sacra which ran “study sessions attended by most of the Maltese young artists of the time.”
“Actual recognition of his artistic pre-eminence came rather late to this innovative Maltese artist. His art began to be taken seriously and commented upon only from the 1950s onwards.” Cutajar argues that “Kalleya’s steadfast holding to his artistic vision, in spite of the unpopularity it entailed him, contributed in paving the way for the triumph of modern artistic sensibility in our country.” He asks how Kalleya grew up to be “an artistic ‘rebel’ in the intolerant Maltese setting of his time” and concludes that the “particularity of Kalleya’s vision had two independent sources”:
“The principal one is his own wide and generous spiritual experience, for his entire artistic personality stems from an inner hot, bubbling torrent of spirituality, without a clear insight of which no real understanding of Kalleya’s art is possible at all. The second source is his own experience of contemporary art, mostly gained in Rome in the years running from 1930 to 1934; in truth, it was neither vast nor even systematic, but it did prove an important determinative factor to the development of his art.”
In his old age, Kalleya had the satisfaction “of enjoying the esteem and respect of the younger generation of artists and art-critics”, all whom recognised the value of his lone struggle. In 1978 Kalleya received a Gold Medal for his services to Art from Prof. J. Acquilina, President of the Malta College of Arts Manufacture and Commerce and, in 1990, a Crucifix by Kalleya was presented by the President of Malta to Pope John Paul II during his visit to the island.
Among those who have also infused modernism with spirituality was Emvin Cremona who created “chromatic sprees and feasts for the eye” with his Church commissions. However, Inglott suggests that, while he “did not fail to display imagination and tact in artistic work ranging from abstractions in broken glass to postage stamps and street decorations, his numerous essays in church painting resulted in repeated compromises between his creative flair and popular taste, always bathed in an atmosphere of quasi pre-Raphaelite spirituality.”
Dennis Vella notes, in Antoine Camilleri: Pictures in Clay, that study abroad in Paris and Bath enabled Camilleri “to witness, at first hand, the latest developments in Continental and American art, which, together with his colleagues in the Modern Art Group, the Artist’s Guild and Atelier ’56, he would be instrumental in grafting into Maltese art.” As such, and as Emanuel Fiorentino writes, “much more than the average artist of his generation, Antoine Camilleri has given great attention to experimentation in his art” raising “the use of objets trouves almost to a cult.” A vital aspect in the art of Camilleri is an authentic religious spirit which dominates much of his work and which at times transforms objects, in their everyday context normally inconsequential, into purely Christian iconographic terms.” Inglott writes that “like Kalleya, despite the prophetic ardour with which he proclaims his Christian conviction of the triumph of life through the experience of suffering and compassion, there is a basic gentleness and a family feeling in his images …”
Frank Portelli, like Camilleri, was another who, after study abroad, returned to Malta and joined the Modern Art Group. He developed of form of cubism, first seen in the narrative painting La Vie, which he called ‘crystallised cubism.’ Kenneth Wain describes this as “a cubism of planes not volumes”; “prismatic effects which the artist sought to obtain through the subtle use of finely graded and translucent colour tones which produces a glazed effect.” The evolution of this technique owed something to Portelli’s “long enduring fascination with the optical and light effects of stained glass.” Wain notes that each of Portelli’s projects show painstaking research including the “extremely original” altar in 1984 for the parish church of Marsascala or “the interior design of virtually a whole church, as was the case with the sanctuary of St Theresa, in B’Kara.”
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