In the 17th article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius delves into the life and times of Alfred Chircop
When one looks at the history of Maltese abstraction, its origins and its developments in relation to the early years of Maltese modernism, one artist stands out to deserve the title of the ‘father of Maltese abstraction’.
Alfred Chircop (1933-2015) started his studies at the Malta School of Arts when he was just 11 years old. Edward Caruana Dingli, Emvin Cremona and Carmelo Mangion were among his tutors. Caruana Dingli emphasised on a strong academic grounding while Cremona and Mangion were more open to a modern expression that was beginning to gain favour, especially after 1947, when Caruana Dingli was replaced as director of the school. Mangion instilled in Chircop a love for the graphic medium of which he would become a master as well.
His studies took him away from Maltese shores, first to Perugia’s Accademia Pietro Vannucci for two months in 1958. He finished his long years of study at the Malta School of Art in 1960.
Gerardo Dottori, one of the main protagonists of aeropittura and a signatory of its manifesto, The Perspectives of Flight, served as the Accademia’s director between 1940 and 1945. It is obvious that some of the manifesto’s philosophy were included in the Accademia’s curriculum. Dottori happened to be one of Chircop’s tutors at the same institution.
Alfred ChircopOne can surmise that the Italian artist’s teachings rubbed off on the young Chircop. The Italian master’s very early Esplosione di Rosso su Verde, dated 1910, is the abstract expression of a sensation − that of Dottori’s vivid visual experience in the interaction of a smattering of red poppies with the luscious green of the grass of a field. In Dottori’s own words: “Red, when it meets its complementary, green, becomes ultra-red and explodes... green, on the other hand, remains calm, silent and immobile.” This chromatic interaction is one of the main characteristics of Chircop’s abstract work and must have been one of the lessons thought to the young student by the Italian master.
St Paul Defending the Island (1960)Chircop’s St Paul Defending the Island, of 1960, shows close attention to Dottori’s teachings. The dynamics, aerial perspective and turmoil that overwhelm the composition have much in common with the Italian artist’s aeropittura. The manifesto of this movement affirmed that “the changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective” and that “painting from this new reality requires a profound contempt for detail and a need to synthesise and transfigure everything”. This work is an indication of the direction that Chircop would take, and eventually mature, towards total abstraction.
His first solo exhibition coincided with his last year of artistic studies in Malta after which he continued his studies in the UK (1960-61) at Corsham’s Bath Academy of Art, which Antoine Camilleri and Esprit Barthet had attended the previous year. The academy advocated the theories of Victor Pasmore and those of the ‘father of abstraction’, Wassily Kandinsky, and fostered a quest for a geometrical path towards abstraction. During these years, Chircop met his wife, Margaret, a fellow art student at the same academy.
Soon after, he won a scholarship to study at Rome’s Accademia delle Belle Arti for over three years (1961-1964) under the tutorship of the renowned Italian figurative artist Franco Gentilini (1909-1981). This must have sparked some internal dispute in Chircop as Gentilini’s aesthetic harked back to the Italian Renaissance. During these years as well, Italy was experiencing huge artistic upheaval that ran parallel to what was happening in France and the US.
Although its heydays were in the late 1940s and most of the subsequent decade, abstract expressionism had taken the world by storm and proclaimed New York as the art world capital, dethroning Paris. The drippings of Jackson Pollock and the expressive gestures of Wilhelm de Kooning and Frans Kline evolved into the emotional intensity of the compositions of the second generation abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell and the ‘mosaic’ works of her partner, Jean Paul Riopelle. In 1959, Mitchell left the US and embarked on a life-defining move to Paris, sharing a studio in the French capital with Riopelle.
Chircop’s abstracts have a strong personal, spiritual dimension. Being untitled, the works defy facile interpretation
French art critic Michel Tapié coined the umbrella term ‘art informel’, as a moniker for the loosely-bound art ‘movement’, which stood for a global reaction to abstract expressionism and to whatever was happening in the US. It embraced stylistic differences within its ranks belonging to a range of artists who, in Tapié’s own words, were “much rarer authentic individuals”.
These artists from all nationalities relied on an abstraction that was very gestural. They explored universal themes, like war and brutality, and more introspective ones such as death and angst. It included such artists as the French Jean Fautrier, Pierre Soulages and Henri Michaux, the American Joan Mitchell, the Canadian Jean Paul Riopelle, the German Wols, the CoBrA artists, the Chinese-French Zao Wou-Ki and the Italian artists of Arte Informale.
Arte Informale spoke a language much after Chircop’s heart during those formative years of study in Rome. Giulio Turcato and Tancredi Parmeggiani, besides Alberto Burri, Afro Basaldella and Emilio Vedova, were strong presences that the Maltese artist couldn’t ignore. Jean Fautrier’s death in 1964 deprived art informel of one of its leading lights; this coincided with Chircop’s last year of studies in Rome.
He celebrated his return to Malta with a solo exhibition of abstracts at the Bank of Alderney Gallery, in Valletta. This was a demonstration of lessons learnt from his years of studies away from the island. the year 1964 was auspicious for Chircop as he married his sweetheart from the Bath Academy’s student years, Margaret. In this same year, his teaching career took off.
Chircop’s abstracts have a strong personal, spiritual dimension that is multi-dimensional. Being non-representational and untitled, the works defy facile interpretation. One attempts to wean out the narrative relevance of the composition, through the nuances and colours and through the general rhythm and flow of each individual work.
“What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations,” abstract artist Hans Hofmann declared.
Chircop’s art communicates in the same gestural language as that of Mitchell, Riopelle and Zao Wou-Ki. He sought the opinion of former university rector, the late Fr Peter Serracino Inglott, as affirmation that he was on the right artistic track. Serracino Inglott was a foremost philosopher and an accomplished writer whom the artist consulted regularly on questions relating to cosmology, existentialism, spirituality, art and religion. He weaved elements of these into his gestural landscapes as oneiric extensions of his soul.
Being a bookworm, some of his abstracts germinated from literary sources. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was one of Chircop’s favourite literary works, one which provided a bleak existential perspective in the exposition of explosive turmoil that plagued Eliot’s genius. The Maltese artist probably empathised with this raw emotion as he tried to reconcile his deep religiosity with internal conflicts which were ‘confessed’ to Fr Peter.
Chircop’s abstracts are musical in rhythm, texture, structure, tempo and harmony. He was a fervent classical music aficionado who worked more productively while listening to musical pieces that probably set the mood for painterly composition. One can almost hear the crescendo, the adagio and the andante that merge and flow in the chromatic compositions as tension and release in the artist’s creative process.
Art critic François Jacob remarked about Zao Wou-Ki’s late-period works: “They present for us the birth of light, the origins of water and, beyond these turbulent upheavals of matter, a distant sense of the life energy coming into being in their midst.”
Chircop’s abstracts have this property of pulling the viewer into their folds. They are ruminating palimpsests of experience, documenting abstract concepts into some visible form.
Chircop’s brash exterior and his projection of a superiority complex probably concealed the vulnerability of a soul tormented by dualities and self-doubt. The history of Maltese modernism wouldn’t be complete without his valuable contribution, as well as that of others such as Gabriel Caruana, Emvin Cremona and Esprit Barthet, towards the first steps, development and propagation of the non-representational in the art of these islands.
For Chircop, just as for the German-born artist Josef Albers, “abstraction was real, probably more real than nature”. It was the only viable path worth following.