In the 20th article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius details the evolution of sculptor Joseph M. Genuis.

Joseph Mary Genuis (1934-1970) was one of the 20th-century sculptors that Malta lost at a very young age. His oeuvre displays a very modernist approach that shows that he was very aware of the global art world, especially the European one.

His friendship with fellow sculptors Josef Kalleya − one of the two fathers of Maltese modernism − and Toni Pace and with painter Frank Baldacchino, coupled with their frequent discussions on art and literature, provided the young sculptor with ample thematic and stylistic direction.

Joseph M. Genuis

Attending primary school in the early years of World War II, Genuis was lucky to have Carmelo Mangion, the other father of Maltese modernism, as his teacher of drawing. Mangion’s renowned enthusiasm for propagating his knowledge of art, accumulated through his extensive studies in Rome, Paris and New York, must have intrigued the young boy and nurtured in him a love for art.  

Not showing the propensity for a formal academic education, his parents realised that their son’s aptitudes lay in a context which would allow his manual creativity to flourish. They had the foresight to apprentice him with a carpenter in Valletta, where the Genuis family lived, who introduced him to carpentry techniques. Thus, the young boy kindled his artistic inclinations and learned the techniques of carving wood and studied its idiosyncrasies as a sculptural medium.

In 1949, Genuis joined the Malta School of Art where he was tutored by Esprit Barthet and George Borg, among others. Borg, a confirmed traditionalist, taught him how to be disciplined by following classical sculptural perspectives. Barthet had not as yet embraced modernism wholeheartedly in those days but being a stickler for perspective and an accomplished portraitist must have helped the young student to mature as an accomplished sculptural portraitist in his own right. The national collection at MUŻA has a number of these outstanding works by Genuis and are usually on display in one of its halls.

Two Women

Genuis’s artistic studies were momentarily curtailed when he joined the Royal Navy,  which later stationed him at the Malta Drydocks as a gatekeeper, a job which he adamantly refused. This reluctance brought about his demotion to an unskilled labourer, which took its toll on his dignity and depressed him greatly. He was a member of many of the artist groups of the 1950s and 1960s, among which were The Modern Art Group, Atelier ’56 and the Artists’ Guild. This involvement in the early days of Maltese modernism shows that Genuis was deeply interested in being a protagonist and a contributor towards the transformation that Maltese art was going through in those heady years.

He married his fiancée, Carmen, in 1957 which brought a measure of balance in his personal life. She was to bear him seven children; the youngest was born after his untimely death.

Genuis continued his studies at the Malta School of Art between 1964 and 1966. The year 1967 saw his first-ever participation in an art exhibition, a collective at Palazzo De La Salle, with a sculpture Mother and Child.  

The following year was most fruitful for Genuis as he acquired the patronage of a British aristocrat, Lord Monckton, who invited him over to England after buying one of his sculptures exhibited at the Bank of Alderney Gallery, in Valletta. Monckton commissioned him to sculpt portraits of his own five children in England. Genuis was even featured in an article in a British publication while executing this commission for Lord Monckton.

The mid to late 1960s saw a stylistic evolution in his art. He embarked on an elongation of compositional elements, maybe even looking back to the elegant mannerism of Parmigianino and El Greco. The figures were also distorted, evoking Pablo Picasso’s signature contortions and Hungarian photographer André Kertész’s 1930s distortions of the female anatomy. Proportions were thrown out of the window to arrive at a poetically deformed unreality.

Kertész claimed that “every subject has a rhythm”, which Genuis successfully imbued in his sculptures of women. He enriched the feminine figures with a musicality in the undulating flow of their body parts. The Modiglianesque thin neck, small face and meagre breasts are contrasted by the dominant large hips and portly legs as the sculptor delved also into our island’s rich archaeological heritage to create the sinuous and characteristic Genuis feminine form.

Josef Kalleya, Frank Baldacchino and Toni Pace all contributed to his artistic evolution

During these years he regularly visited Kalleya at his studio. Kalleya, Frank Baldacchino and Pace all contributed to his artistic evolution. Kalleya’s theosophical approach embraced literature that he merged into his concept of Apokatastasis to arrive at a spiritual transcendence that is surely one of the most outstanding artistic statements of Malta’s 20th century art. 

Head of a Man

Baldacchino, a published poet besides a painter whom Genuis considered as his brother, had just returned from his interlude in Australia. A very particular penmanship defined Genuis as a strong writer on his own merit as well and he found his artistic soulmates in more than one sense amid this milieu. 

Pace’s artistic journey metamorphosed from being a painter of an expressionist disposition to becoming a constructivist sculptor, adopting the technique of assemblages after a one-year course in Bath studying sculpture. Pace’s sculptural style underwent a ‘reactionary’ path to a form of classicism after leaving Malta for Rome in 1973 to continue his studies under Emilio Greco.

These friendships matured Genuis and he produced a bevy of sculptures that show a transformation from his classical George Borg-inspired roots. This led to his participation in a number of collectives. The furrowed works of Medardo Rosso, the organic emaciated fragility of Alberto Giacometti and the eroded biomorphism of Germaine Richier could be considered as influences. He merged our archipelago’s richness of archaeological motifs and fat ladies into new narratives which predated Antoine Camilleri’s 1980s fertility-goddess-themed works on incised clay.

The spiral patterns in the altar that the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary of Balzan had commissioned for their chapel is further proof of Genuis’s interest in the Temple period motifs that adorn our Neolithic temples.

Woman

In his words: “I based my design on a prehistoric motif (the spiral pattern). It is in a simple clean line which mingles harmoniously with the interior decoration of the chapel.”

This further shows the holistic approach that he employed on the most basic conceptual level. He integrated a religious symbol of an ancient culture into the design of an artefact that is central to Roman Catholicism. It reflects on the universality of the sculptor’s take on spirituality and on religious cults of whatever denomination. Incidentally, the spiral is also central to Kalleya’s iconography, a Neoplatonist ideal in the spiral vortex rotating upwards, leading all matter back to God as the primordial source of everything.

Works like Reclining Nude demonstrate Genuis’s interest in our country’s archaeological legacy, evoking once again the Tarxien Temples’ fat lady, in some of its compositional elements.  It parallels Henry Moore’s interest in primitive art from different civilisations, elements of which Moore introduced into his reclining nudes. 

The archaeological motif in Two Women

The British artist was deeply interested in the human body as a landscape. According to sculptor Peter Randall-Page, “Moore’s direct carvings of reclining female figures represent the vision of a body as landscape and landscape as body at its most poetic”. 

It is a pity that, unlike Moore’s case, examples of such monumental work by Genuis haven’t been transposed to an outside setting to effectively demonstrate similar characteristics that are ascribed to Moore’s reclining nudes set amid the contours of the British landscape. 

Genuis’s Nativity emanates a totemic hierarchal monumentality that one comes across in Leon Underwood’s totemic sculptural output. The heavenward elongation of St Joseph’s neck offers a theological perspective that could have originated from deep philosophical discussions with Kalleya. 

There is a Romanesque stylisation in the disproportion of the three members of the Holy Family in this sculpture as well as a rigidity. The elegant composition and symmetry in the folds of St Joseph’s tunic also demonstrate a Gothic sensitivity. Just like Moore, Genuis appreciated the art of different eras and the spiritual relevance of different civilisations and merged them effectively into his artistic output. 

Genuis participated, in March 1970, with eight pieces in an exhibition with George Casha and Joseph Mallia. He considered this as the zenith of his career up to that point. He confidently felt that he had matured into a sculptor of considerable repute. However, this trajectory was to be abruptly curtailed later that same year.

On October 15, 1970, Maltese modernism lost one of its most promising protagonists at the young age of 36.

Genuis left behind him a sculptural legacy that certainly deserves much wider recognition as he was indeed a unique pioneer of Maltese 20th-century sculptural modernism.