In the second of a two-part article in a series on Maltese modernist artists, Joseph Agius takes a look at the oeuvre of Frank Portelli

Frank Portelli’s importance as one of the pioneers of Maltese modernism goes beyond his artistic output. He was one of the founders of the Modern Art Circle in 1952 (as its first secretary) and its two later rebrandings as the Modern Art Group and Atelier 56.

Contours CXIII

Together with artists like Antoine Camilleri, Joseph Borg Xuereb, Josef Kalleya, Giorgio Preca and Hugo Carbonaro, he shook the Maltese art scene’s mentality out of its torpor, besides its unhealthy dependence on patronage from the powerful Catholic Church and the high society. This group of young and not-so-young artists ushered modernism into our country and, thanks to their steadfastness and camaraderie, Malta now enjoys a legacy of 20th-century art of which we can be proud.

Portelli’s participation, together with six other colleagues, at the Venice Biennale of 1958, was a reward for this perseverance. This was Malta’s first participation in the international artworld’s most prestigious event. 

The early 1950s were very eventful years for him. Hindsight, as it usually does, offered much-needed perspective. He psychoanalysed important personal events and, by revisiting the sources of deeply-odged psychological pain, used artistic expression to arrive at a redemptive catharsis.

His new studio in Valletta offered the right sort of environment for his art to prosper and he participated in numerous exhibitions. His first solo was hosted at the entrance of the Royal Malta Library in Valletta.

In 1952, he married his fiancée, Rosa née Attard, who bore him three children.

His travels and studies abroad in the late 1940s exposed him to the numerous art movements and artistic breakthroughs that shook the foundations of international art. Malta was rather immune to all this excitement through its not-so-splendid isolation in terms of geography and mentality.

Portelli’s admiration for Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and other cubist artists like Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger led to the development of a highly-personalised style that he himself defined as “crystallised cubism”. 

Silent Church

Elements of futurism and vorticism were weaved into the fabric of his technique as well. The Maltese artist must have come across the early work of vorticist Wyndham Lewis during his days in London. Compositional elements of the British artist’s famous A Battery Shelled of 1919 are mirrored in Portelli’s Dream of a Coalman and A Silent Church. The blitzed terrain is the common legacy of two world wars − salient backdrops for these works by Lewis and Portelli, World War I for the former and World War II for the latter.

A strong surrealistic element permeates the Dream of a Coalman as Portelli integrates the evanescent dreamer into a dystopian Dali-esque dreamscape. Similarly, the futurist Aeropittura artist Alfredo Ambrosi integrated the Italian dictator in his 1930 Aeroritratto di Mussolini Aviatore. For Portelli, the hapless coalman can’t even find relief from hardship via his own dreams in a post-World War II ‘brave new world’. 

Lewis portrays the dehumanising component of war by the elimination of the corporality of the soldiers, thereby reducing them to anonymous marionette-like clones of each other amid the devastation. The British artist saves the three generals from the collective anonymity and thus delivers a more effective message of fatalism and detachment in the face of tragedy.

Portelli similarly dehumanises the row of 10 android-like identity-less coalmen, their back breaking under the heavy loads of coal. This polluting resource ironically is their only means of survival. However, it will most probably also spell their end.

Both Lewis and Portelli deliver messages of 20th-century futility − soldiers and coalmen are mere teeth in the cogwheels of a machinery that serves inhuman gods.

Entombment

Elements of futurism and vorticism

Portelli’s A Silent Church is a not-too-subtle reference to a Roman Catholic Church that is no longer vociferous and prefers to keep a safe distance even though the world around it is crumbling under the heavy artillery of warfare, famine, ideology and doubt. Portelli here evokes Picasso’s 1951 painting The Massacre in Korea in which the Spanish master commemorates the Korean Sinchon Massacre. American, North and South Korean troops collectively contributed to a bloodbath of innocents. By portraying helpless pregnant women and children in the summary execution by the anti-communist American forces, Picasso focuses on the wanton destruction of innocent lives as victims of the virility of war. Picasso reinterprets Francisco Goya’s Third of May,1808 in which a wretched group of captives is callously executed by Napoleonic troops. 

Contours XLIII

A Silent Church focuses on the aftermath of an execution, the only apparent sacrificial lamb being the dead cubist Christ-like corpse, thus establishing a connection with his seminal La Vie. Portelli makes use of the Christian iconography of the deposition and reconfigures the identity of the protagonists of the biblical episode, thus evoking a disorientating sense of ambiguity. In this way, he delivers a more universal and all-embracing message that defies specifics. Unlike Picasso and Goya, Portelli represents hope in the repentance of the genuflecting android-like executioner. War does produce victims but it can also produce converts to a just cause.

Portelli’s Dogfight elicits the Aeropittura of second-generation futurists Tullio Crali and Gerardo Dottori. The outbreak of World War II put on a break to his career and he was conscripted to the Royal Air Force. He served his duties at Luqa and Ta’ Kandja where these dogfights were the order of the day. Friendly and enemy aircraft engaged each other in deadly aerial duels for supremacy.

Portelli weaves futurist and vorticist elements into a spiral of energy that sucks in the frail insect-like agents of destruction towards a cyclical spiderweb of energy that will eventually devour them. Using David Bomberg’s technique of simple angular shapes and organic grids, Portelli claustrophobically focuses our attention to the heavens above as the three aircraft playfully chase each other into oblivion.

La Vie, Portelli’s masterpiece, can be regarded as a precursor to his later commissioned mural works. Hotels were sprouting all over the island thanks to the nascent tourism industry of the 1960s. One such mural, Maltese Crafts, is in Malta’s national collection at MUŻA. It used to adorn the foyer of the Mellieħa Bay Hotel. The composition harks at José Clement Orozco’s division of pictorial space, cubist sensibility and treatment of folkloristic elements. 

Dogfight

Portelli experimented with collage for a short while but gave up as cubism offered him more scope and vision. He also experimented with constructivism which, in the 1970s, resulted in a series of very interesting reliefs. One must not fail to mention that Portelli, together with fellow artist Emvin Cremona, was a pioneer of Maltese stamp design in the 1970s and 1980s.

His next breakthrough, the Contours Series, was a fresh start and a break from crystallised cubism. The springboard for this series was the memory of his temporary employment in the 1940s with the Air Ministry, which involved work on survey maps. The contour lines delineating the specific geographical characteristics and illustrating elevations of sites inspired Portelli 30 years later. In the later paintings of this series, he added a human dimension to the contours, evoking Pavel Tchelitchew’s Dancing Box paintings.

Portelli was delighted when the Maltese Church gave him free reign to design the interior of Birkirkara’s Sanctuary of St Theresa of Lisieux, which demonstrated his abilities in stained glass and other applied art forms. This wasn’t his first foray into interior design as he had been commissioned by Maltese hotels and other entities for interior decoration through his Inter Design Studio.

In the early 1990s, he was also commissioned to decorate the eight segments of the cupola of the Senglea Basilica.

It had been his dream since the early days of his career to gain patronage of the Maltese Church. His Entombment of 1951 demonstrates a striking artistic disposition for monumentality and pathos. It is such a pity that, probably, he had to water this down to accommodate the requirements of his patrons.

Recalling Vincent van Gogh’s words: “It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” 

And that was what Frank Portelli was all about.