In the 14th article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius takes a look at the works of Victor Diacono.

Modernism in art on many occasions required a surgical break from the past, an overcoming of restraints associated with the ‘shackles’ of tradition that restricted flight into uncharted territory. Such artists sought new paths and integrated unorthodox and novel techniques into their expression.

However, other artists followed a different path towards modernism and embraced tradition by delving into the body of art history and the isms of previous centuries, extracting relevance and reinterpreting it.

Victor Diacono (1915-2009) was one such artist who occupies an important position in the history of Maltese modernism despite his penchant for keeping to himself and at a safe distance from the exploits of his more progressive colleagues who were at the forefront of the three Maltese artist groups of the 1950s.

Diacono’s years of study in Rome, as the recipient of the scholarship for sculpture after placing first in the Malta School of Art examination in 1937, exposed him to the masterpieces in its museums, cathedrals and churches.

Together with Willie Apap, the recipient of the scholarship for painting for that same year, he began his studies at Rome’s Regia Accademia di Belle Arti. Sculptor Angelo Zanelli was his tutor.

Diacono later claimed that his friendship with fellow student Salvatore Battaglia provided him with direction and that he was indebted more to his Sicilian friend than to Zanelli for his artistic development.

The eight years (1929-1937) of rigid instruction and the tutorship of sculptor George Borg (1906-1983) at the Malta School of Art had paid their dividends. Borg, a classicist who abhorred modernist excesses, cherished the mindset of his student who seemed to share his  ideals.  The Maltese art student contingent in Rome became more numerous as Esprit Barthet, Emvin Cremona, Anton Inglott and Carmelo Borg Pisani joined the other two artists. Those pre-bellicose days were memorable for this group of young men in a number of ways. 

However, the imminent World War II cut short Diacono’s studies in the Italian capital. The works of the protagonists of the Novecento movement, especially those of Renato Guttuso, intrigued him. However, his discovery of the impressionist sculptures of Medardo Rosso proved to be most enlightening for the young Diacono.

T.S. Eliot remarked that “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”

The Italian Novecento movement sought inspiration from the superlative Italian Renaissance and mannerist tradition of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento. 

Such a rich legacy provided these Italian artists with a context that, notwithstanding the passage of time, still was a fresh source of inspiration; a philosophy which Diacono shared. After all, even a giant like Pablo Picasso, such a revolutionary innovator, studied the techniques of Renaissance master Piero della Francesca (1412-1492) whose breakthroughs in linear perspective and foreshortening provided the Spanish master and Georges Braque with the groundbreaking ingredients that found their way into Cubism. 

After the war, Diacono continued his studies away from our shores by enrolling in 1947 at the City and Guilds of London Art School. After this interlude, he returned to Malta, working as a part-time art teacher at the Lyceum for three years. Thereafter, he gained full-time employment as a receptionist and cashier at Valletta’s Hotel Phoenicia. In 1952, he  married  his fiancée Antoinette who bore him four children.

Rosso’s impressionist techniques played on the ephemeral and transient and his modelling straddled the border between realism and abstraction, a characteristic which has much in common with Diacono’s sculptural oeuvre. The Maltese sculptor attempted to dematerialise the human figure as a ghostly sensation in the visible world.

Like Josef Kalleya, he  exposed his sculptures to the natural elements on the roof of his house, thereby letting the sun and the rain to burnish his creations. Natural flow and flux modified the tactile modelling via his fingertips.

This added an atmospheric and poetic dimension, which together with the organic selective concealment of figures, defines Diacono’s sculptural output.

Besides Rosso and Michelangelo, the latter for him being the ultimate master of them all, he admired the stern realism of Giacomo Manzù and the sensual lines of the figurative Henry Moore.

The Maltese artist had an anthropocentric viewpoint and pure abstraction for him was never a path to be pursued; the human figure played a crucial and central role in all his work. He was a very religious family man who found fault and was cripplingly very self-critical as he demanded perfection in execution, composition and all other aspects of his creation.

The human figure played a crucial and central role in all his work

Unlike Rosso, who was reluctant to embark on preparatory sketch work, Diacono’s prolific stream of sketches demonstrate a willingness or necessity to document, as if in a diary, ideas and situations which he sometimes later developed into sculptures. 

His job at the Hotel Phoenicia proved to be a godsend as he got to meet people, among whom the famous British artist Victor Pasmore who at that time was attempting to settle in Malta. This stream of inspiration found its way into both his sculptures and paintings. The freshness and spontaneity of his sketch work was successfully translated into his paintings, evoking the colourful nonchalance of Raoul Dufy. 

The sacred and the folkloristic are prominent themes in Diacono’s sculptural output. However, a sensitive mastery and a pronounced aptitude at portraying the sincere likeliness and the intrinsic character of his models shine through in the non-commissioned busts of family members and friends. His  ability at observation was honed by years of watching life happening in the hotel’s foyer and outside, in the hotel’s immediate neighbourhood. 

The karozzin, the horse-drawn cab waiting for hotel clients to be taken to a tour around Valletta and its environs, was interpreted by Diacono numerous times. This rather folkloristic means of transport and its own microcosm of cab driver, colleagues, clients and obedient horse intrigued the ever-watchful Diacono. He represented this wedge of mundane daily life, and its combinations and permutations, in many thematically similar works in different formats – sometimes the anecdote is in three dimensions, at other times it is frieze-like, thus somehow contributing more to the narrative timelessness of the piece. 

A defining factor in Diacono’s work is his idealisation of female beauty in both sacred and profane contexts. He epitomises this in his graceful representations of mother and child, drawing on his admiration for the Renaissance perfection and the movement in repose of the Madonna and Child as interpreted by Raphael and Leonardo; this he merged with the sinuous elegance of the Modiglianesque female figure. The texture of these Diacono sculptures suggests that divine beauty can co-exist with terrestrial coarseness and strife.

Diacono’s love for Renaissance aesthetics finds further outlet in his portrayals of the Three Graces. In some cases, he recontextualised the three mythological goddesses as ones belonging to the 20th century with hats, bags, skirts and all associated paraphernalia. As an ironic gender-based statement, he derogatorily depicted the male of the species as generally devoid of the elegance that for him was strictly endemic to females  Diacono’s males pathetically wallow in corpulent and caricatural self-consciousness.  

His sculptures, rendered slightly inconspicuous as regards detail through his restrained and monochromatic palette, invite closer scrutiny to reveal the complexity of their narratives. This metaphorically describes Diacono himself who never craved the limelight and whose first solo exhibition at 82 years of age demonstrated his disinterest in fame as well a general disenchantment with the Maltese art scene. 

According to his son Andrew, who followed in his footsteps to become one of Malta’s foremost contemporary artists, the modesty, the love for solitude and the distance he maintained from his artist colleagues, all have their origins in a marked self-confidence and pride in his oeuvre.  This is an apparent contradiction but one should not forget that he was highly self-critical and being a perfectionist meant that he was nagged by unrelenting doubt.  

Many were those, including some of his colleagues, who misinterpreted this attitude as a lack of confidence in his own talents as a highly-accomplished artist. However, Victor Diacono, as classicist to his very core, was disdainful of the excesses of modernism at all costs and weary of wild and fanciful artistic statements.

Tradition was a cocoon in which he thrived as he discovered alternative and more introspective and humble paths towards modernism; an art that reached out to the past and Diacono was all for revisiting and learning from it. Thus, he was in agreement with Paul Cezanne’s words: “To my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.”

The series will continue next month.