In the 23rd article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius details the artistic journey of Anton Agius.

A spate of commissions for public monuments in the last decades of the 20th century has unjustly compartmentalised Anton Agius (1933-2008) as an artist syno­nymous with sculpture in public spaces.

Anton Agius

Some of these works have many times drawn on them a volley of criticism, especially in the cases of Vittoriosa’s Freedom Day Monument and the Workers’ Monument, in Msida, where his artistic freedom was at times rumoured to be curtailed by commissions that strictly dictated composition and theme and which stifled most artistic licence.

Sculpture wasn’t Agius’s first artistic calling; as a young boy, music was his first love. However, his mother wasn’t too happy with this choice and the young budding artist had to reconsider his musical inclinations.

Sculptor Samuel Bugeja, his older cousin, was his first tutor in drawing. Agius got apprenticed in his early teens with fellow Rabat sculptor Joseph Galea who delivered to him an academic and disciplined grounding in the medium. Between 1951 and 1953, he continued his studies under Ignatio Cefai at the Malta Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Thereafter, he enrolled at the Malta School of Arts for another four years and was tutored by Emvin Cremona, Vincent Apap and George Borg. The latter two, renowned as severe disciplinarians favouring tradition, instilled in the young sculptor an admiration for the art of previous centuries. These lessons were not lost and helped Agius in his artistic development concerning figuration.

Cremona, meanwhile, was more open to new directions and this helped Agius to widen his perspectives towards modernism during these years in which many young and not-so-young Maltese artists were advocating modernist aesthetics, grouping in artist groups and paying attention to artistic developments in Europe and the US.

Shoal of Fish

Rome and London were Agius’s next academic ports of call. At London’s St Martin’s School of Art, the celebrated minimalist sculptor Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2013) was one of his tutors. The artistic sculptural scene in Great Britain was enjoying its heydays in breaking new ground, amid a scenario that included big names like Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Lynn Chadwick and Kenneth Armitage, all of whom were exploring abstraction.

Public monumental sculpture provided him with exposure and fame but entailed a compromise in concepts and compositions that satisfied the political requisites of the times

Caro had been Moore’s assistant between 1951 and 1952. Caro’s meeting with American sculptor David Smith introduced him to a new sculptural technique of assemblages which also promoted the use of colour as an integral compositional element. The British sculptor experimented with assemblages of materials and proposed, just as Smith did, that sculptures could be constructed instead of chiselled, carved or moulded. Sculptor Philip King, also one of Caro’s students at the institution, was one of the converts to this new way technique.

Dance for Peace

Agius was not the only Maltese student of Caro, as Toni Pace was also tutored by the famous British sculptor in a subsequent year. Pace, who had started out as an expressionist painter, employed these new constructivist techniques but was hesitant to exhibit these sculptures publicly in Malta for years, fearful of a critical backlash.

Agius returned to Malta in 1961 as an accomplished abstract sculptor, ready to engage his knowledge and abilities. However, the lukewarm appreciation from the Maltese art-loving public progressively discouraged him and, by the early 1970s, he had vouched to abandon abstraction. He gave vent to his disappointment by scapegoating and ridiculing Caro’s teachings and pouring scorn on the oeuvre of his former tutor.

Nature proved to be a saving grace of sorts for Agius in those early years of disenchantment with abstraction as he found inspiration in rock formations, fossils and trees.

Shoal of Fish

In his series of Alberi (trees), Giuseppe Penone, one of the leaders of the Arte Povera movement in Italy, employed tree trunks as sculptural elements in their own right, without sculpting away to reveal hidden forms. He gently removed layers of bark along the outer growth rings of mature timber to expose the ‘memory’ of the sapling at the core of the trunk. Penone questioned the essence and property of sculpture, integrating the whole process within the Arte Povera conceptual ethos.

For Agius, unlike Penone, gnarled trunks, roots and branches, especially those of olive trees, provided him with sculptural possibilities, deciphering elusive forms that he could ease out with hammer and chisel.

Ballerina

As Michelangelo had remarked back in the Renaissance: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there; I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” These words must have struck a deep chord in Agius. Human figures, animals and biomorphic shapes were trapped within the fabric of the raw virginal wood, waiting for him to work away and release them from their concealment. He delivered them from their non-representational and the abstract prison and breathed some figuration into them, at times evoking the tight compositions of German expressionist sculptor Ernst Barlach. These works, straddling the boundary between abstract and representational, could be seen as portraying Agius’s hesitant state of mind, indicating that abstraction was still much after his heart, despite everything.

The intrinsic shape of the log, branch, bough or root inspired him towards a specific theme in an organic way. There was a measure of freedom as accident and improvisation, through the successive chipping away of wood layers, provided the artist with possibilities regarding both composition and theme.

One is reminded of the words of British sculptor and land artist, Andy Goldsworthy: “A sculpture in the mind is safe and secure − the actual work rarely behaves as intended.”

The remnant of the tree, a found object, was the springboard for the creative process, its inherent shape and idiosyncrasies antagonising the artist’s train of thought, sowing doubt in the process of the establishment of a specific theme which would eventually define it. The crea­tive process meandered between abstraction and figuration, got dammed and flourished in bursts of creative energy, dictated by the distinctive empirical properties of the medium itself.

A cursory look at the late oeuvre of Agius, while excluding his classicist work, shows a romantic reference to his origins in abstraction. A 2004 sculpture beckons casually to Lucio Fontana’s abstract works in Spazialismo while a 1994 sculpture is evocative of the horse-and-rider oeuvre of Marino Marini. The ‘homages’ further demonstrate the dichotomy, this introspective conversation between figuration and abstraction that intrigued the Maltese sculptor. 

Abstract 1

The Maltese 1960s art-loving audience’s indifference towards abstraction, coupled with Agius’s search for the limelight, precipitated an artistic existential crisis that he could overcome through a public affirmation and celebration as a figurative artist. Public monumental sculpture provided him with exposure and fame but entailed a compromise in concepts and compositions that satisfied the politi­cal requisites of the times.

His last years were marred by personal tragedy. He lost his son in tragic circumstances, and Agius, who was well known for his sense of humour, was shocked to his very core. He lost his joy to live, notwithstanding that sculpture must have offered some reprieve from his unspeakable grief.