In the ninth article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius delves into the introspective world of Frank Portelli.

The history of art is peppered with examples of paintings that defined an epoch for various reasons, usually related to artistic breakthroughs or art-historical relevance.

Good Friday

In some cases, a single painting could be career-defining for an artist and could determine the path followed from that point onwards.

An example is Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe where the artist recontextualised a classical and mythological theme via the introduction of a female nude into the depiction of something as mundane as a picnic in the park. Manet thus revolutionised art-historical perspectives and heralded the birth of modernism.

Another example is Oskar Kokoschka’s The Bride of The Wind, also known as The Tempest, in which a life-defining episode, the artist’s break-up with his lover, Alma Mahler, triggered an emotional turmoil that sent Kokoschka into a spiral of despair. A stream of paintings was the Austrian artist’s catharsis and a cruel reality check that some loves, like his with Alma Mahler, are a blind alley and a recipe for self-destruction. 

La Vie

In this same vein, Frank Portelli’s seminal La Vie examines a pivotal episode in the Maltese artist’s life − the death of his father that was the epilogue of a botched-up surgical intervention. Finished in 1951, Portelli (1922-2004) ruminated painfully on an event that had occurred back in 1944. The pain still felt fresh and agonising, even though years had elapsed since his much-loved father’s passing. Time did little to mitigate the sense of loss that was menacing Portelli with pure despair.

La Vie can be acknowledged as Portelli’s attempt at an exorcism, a surgical excision of trauma by attributing fault and pointing fingers at the culprit − the surgeon whose hands are frozen in an act of ‘scrubbing’ away any fault that could be attributed to him through malpractice. A denial that is further compounded by his foot caught in the act of walking away from the aftermath of sorrow and the stitching-up by his colleagues of the lifeless corpse in anticipation of a coffin and burial. 

Frank Portelli

The autobiographical narrative of La Vie could lend itself to an alternative interpretation. The visual tour de force can be read as a soliloquy of gratitude by the artist to his father who had fully supported his dreams of becoming an artist.

Portelli had started his studies under the Caruana Dingli brothers at the Malta School of Art where he also studied etching techniques with Carmelo Mangion, who was a mentor and a tutor whom Portelli held in the highest regard. Between 1948 and 1950, the young artist continued his studies in England at various art institutions, including the Leicester College of Arts and London’s Slade Academy and Kennington College.

The surrealist composition of La Vie is roughly divided into three segments. To the left, the desperate child clings to the pregnant mother while two distant vultures expectantly look on, ready to pounce and help themselves to the carrion on the operating table. This contributes a Poe-esque grimness to the narrative. The mother, Portelli’s own, is a mater dolorosa at the foot of the crucifix. The treatment of this sorrow is reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period as darkness threatens the livelihood and the well-being of the mother and her children while a bleak future beckons.

La Vie (preliminary study)

Portelli’s seminal La Vie examines a pivotal episode in the Maltese artist’s life ­‒ the death of his father

Between 1947-1949, Barbara Hepworth worked on a series of 100 drawings known as The Surgical Series. These documented the British sculptor’s gratefulness for the orthopaedic surgeon and his team who had successfully treated one of her daughters. The two surgeons in La Vie’s central segment bear more than a fleeting resemblance to the protagonists of Hepworth’s series. The undivided attention that Hepworth’s surgeons devote to their task is mirrored in that which the two surgeons in Portelli’s painting religiously devote to stitching up the body on the operating table after the unsuccessful intervention that was no fault of their own.

The focus in Hepworth’s Surgical Series is on the surgeons and their team while the patient is shrouded in anonymity. Portelli contrastingly puts the patient, his father, as the focus of the whole composition.

Last of My Father

The tunnel, or birth canal, underneath the operating table contributes more to the surrealistic aura of this painting. A solitary and morose figure, probably representing the artist as a young boy, is delivered into a life that stinks of death, sorrow and misery.

The nature of the tunnel in La Vie suggests the tunnels of Henry Moore’s War Shelter Drawings. In much the same way as Moore, Portelli hoped that, despite everything, life still can blossom amid human tragedies.

The third section of the painting is devoted to the culprit of the personal tragedy in the loss of a father. The ruins of the arched architecture, the spoils of the universal devastation of World War II contributes to the message that worlds do collide, particularly at the direst of times. And lines between the strictly personal and the universal get blurred when one starts to lose hope. 

La Vie is Portelli’s supreme demonstration of a son’s love, as a diary, untainted by the relentless passing of years.  A diary of anecdotes that Portelli wished that his father could be able to read; one which documents the son’s artistic accomplishments as chapters compiled during his travels, studies and experiences of the preceding seven years or so. Years which the father had missed through his death and which the son had translated onto the 1.27m x 150m of canvas space. 

Silenzju

The solemn silent communication between the protagonists of Hepworth’s series evokes a similar mood found in Portelli’s 1951 Good Friday Series of the hooded chain-dragging men accompanying the dignified procession.

Good Friday and Silenzju (Silence) are highly-introspective works that convey a mood that is pregnant with a calm but menacing foreboding. The hooded characters, just as in Ben Shahn’s 1944 painting The Burial Society, are like an arcane brotherhood that finds strength in numbers and in anonymity. However, in Silenzju, the leader of the brotherhood has seemingly surrendered to a deep-seated torment as red tears of blood trickle and sully the white cloth of the habit he’s wearing. His admonishing forefinger demands silence.

Existential pain, such as the loss of a father, can be expressed only by pure and raw emotion; the white fabric is sullied by the tears of blood. Silence should never be sullied by the worthlessness of words especially at the most solemn and personally harrowing of times.

Last of My Father seems complimentary to Portelli’s Good Friday series of paintings and, ultimately, to La Vie itself. Amid an avenue of cypress trees and graves, a funerary horse-drawn carriage speedily delivers the coffin holding the remains of a much-loved father to its final resting place. The carriage is reminiscent of the ornate Good Friday processional ones in which the lifeless body of Christ rests for all to see, after suffering the indecency of death by crucifixion. The title of this poignant painting poetically delivers a message of resignation in the face of unspeakable grief and terminal separation. 

La Vie’s seminal importance as an icon of Maltese modernism has ironically overshadowed the vast legacy that such an important pioneer has left behind him. His contribution to our country’s 20th century art is not limited to just one career-defining and epoch-making masterpiece. It certainly transcends that. 

The second part of the article will be published next week.