In the 22nd article in a series on 20th century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius delves into the world of Harry Alden.

La Pietà

Art history has provided us with numerous examples of artists who are defined by a preferred stylistic choice, sometimes trickling into a thematic disposition as well. One can mention Giorgio Morandi and his still lifes that exude musical silence and metaphysical properties, Carlo Mattioli and his ephemeral trees amid minimal landscapes and Mark Rothko and his exploration of the spiritual through the minimalistic reduction of elements. In Maltese modernism, Harry Alden (1929-2019) stands out as being exclusively and almost religiously devoted to the technique of hard-edge. 

Alden was interested in art from a very young age but football took precedence in those very early years. However, an injury while playing football meant that he had more time on his hands to devote to his other passion ‒ art. World War II saw the Alden family leaving Valletta for the rural safety of the village of Mġarr and a lifestyle change from the hectic reality and the wartime danger that pervaded the capital city and the harbour area.

After the war, the Alden family left the serene rurality of Mġarr for bustling Sliema. The memory of those halcyon village days lingered and was to supply future thematic material for his paintings ‒ the rubble walls delineating the fields, the larger-than-life dominant church, the lush produce of the land.

Harry Alden. Photo: artsmalta.org

Unlike many of his artist colleagues, Alden enrolled at the Malta School of Art at a not so young age, in 1953. Vincent Apap was his tutor for design while Emvin Cremona, Antoine Camilleri and Esprit Barthet followed each other as his tutors for painting. Such sources of didactic wealth must have directed the young artist towards discipline, colour, composition and design besides an aptitude for portraiture, painterly perspective, freedom and experimentation.

His last year of studies at the Malta School of Art was 1962, after which he won a four-year scholarship at the UK’s Croydon College of Arts in Surrey. A major protagonist of op art (optical art), Bridget Riley and the British pop artist Allen Jones were among his tutors at this college. Jones’s work, an explosion of vibrant colours and pop culture references, provided abundant inspiration.

Josef Albers and his philosophy of the ‘Interaction of Colour’ was gospel truth for Riley and other op art pioneers like Victor Vasarely. Albers, a stickler for discipline in composition, maintained that colours are governed by an internal and deceptive logic. Simple geometric shapes and pure colours could convey emotions and ideas. Such lessons were not lost on the young and receptive Maltese artist.  

Reclining Male

On his return to Malta in 1966, he embarked on a teaching career, lecturing on art and craft first at St Michael’s Teachers’ Training College and afterwards at the Malta School of Art, which was then located at the MCAST premises in Msida. Alden married his fiancée, Rose Pace in 1970, who bore him a son. His first solo exhibition took place in 1968, at the National Museum in Valletta. In the late 1980s, Alden held the position of principal of the Malta School of Art, until his retirement in 1990.

Unlike Barthet’s similarly themed work, TV aerials don’t feature in Alden’s rooftops

Seated

A strong design element, a contributing factor to his success in stamp design, is one of the defining characteristics of Alden’s work.

Alden favoured pure colour, strongly held within established and calculated confines, as the building blocks of the whole composition. There was no tolerance for the accidental or the improvisational, rigid discipline being the name of the game. 

The calculated separation of colours implied no chromatic merging or seepage. Shades were produced by the conscious juxtaposition of one colour over another. These fundamental properties of the hard-edge technique are also common for colour-field painting, op art and pop art. Although Riley is generally assumed as the most overwhelming of influences, Alden’s art emphatically defies this simplistic assumption. La Pietà, for instance, is an obvious homage to Andy Warhol’s repetition of motifs, via an icon entrenched in religious pop culture. Hence, by replacing the American pop icons of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or tins of Campbell Soup, Alden reinterpreted clichéd religious imagery to make the concept more relevant in a Maltese context.

Nude Man

The De Stijl output of Piet Mondrian and the Orphic Cubism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, mainstays in the curriculum of the Croydon College of Art, were other obvious reference points for Alden. His repeated geometrical compositions, besides the Orphic output of the two Delaunays, evoke the work of Kenneth Noland, Max Bill and, especially, Frank Stella.  The unorthodoxly shaped canvases of Stella have their counterparts in Alden’s oeuvre. Stella, Noland and Ellsworth Kelly transgressed the parameters of the rectangular canvas space and questioned the intrinsic properties of a painting as a self-evident stereotypical object.

They believed in its transcendence via the repudiation of its representative, subjective and pigeonholed qualities, such as its rectangular boundaries. This new re-evaluation of canvas space moreover blurred the lines between painting and sculpture; in fact, these unconventionally shaped works of art have at times been classified both as sculptures as well as paintings, thus occupying a Schrödinger cat-like reluctance to a facile categorisation to a medium. 

INRI

However, Alden might have been attracted more to the graphic possibilities offered by untraditional formats, rather than by novel concepts and semantics.

His new language and its stark poster-like quality must have jarred with the artistic sensitivities of the 1960s, in a decade which was still coming to terms with expressionism, cubism and abstraction. In a decade where accident, improvised experimentation and the unshackling of excess discipline were the order of the day, Alden’s regimented style stood out eloquently as an alternative way of expression and initially met with some diffidence, disapproval and suspicion. 

For Alden, the negative space surrounding a figure or an object demanded its enrichment with pure unadulterated colour. His nudes, emulating Matissean cut-outs, lack volume but still exhibit humanoid vitality.

He investigated the polarities inherent in motifs and the behaviour of incident light to create shadows and shades. He strived to integrate negative and positive elements of a composition into a seamless whole, despite his trademark hard-edge. Alden’s art is a quest for an almost photographic balance between light and dark, between the geometry of natural patterns and their chromatic rhythms; it is also a study of the interaction of the straight line and the curve.

Rooftops

Carmelo Mangion documented the change in the Maltese arcadian 20th century landscape as in his depiction of the two power station chimneys billowing smoke, the solitary car making its way through the elementary roads in the still pristine fields or the electricity pylons in these same fields, delivering power to households. Alden negates these portents of change by distilling out all of these pollutants to arrive at a prismatically dispersed chromatic purity of the Maltese landscape and urban habitats. Unlike Barthet’s similarly themed work, TV aerials don’t feature in Alden’s rooftops.

Alden’s legacy as an innovator and as a pioneer of Maltese modernism is undisputed. His art, though disciplined and calculated, provided new narratives, dialogues and alternative viewpoints. A staunch perseverance and adherence to a chosen aesthetic imparted guidance to a generation of younger artists, intrigued by the design possibilities of the medium.

Frank Stella’s views could be Alden’s own: “All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion… What you see is what you see.”