In the 16th in a series of articles on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius interprets the works of Frank Baldacchino.

Frank Baldacchino’s (1924-2016) oeuvre of poetic landscapes secures his position as one of the important pioneers of Maltese modernism. He was also at the helm of the first artist group in the history of 20th-century Maltese art. The Bottega Group’s name was coined by Carmelo Mangion, the tutor of the four young artists, the original members of this group.

Frank Baldacchino

Baldacchino started his studies in 1940 at the Malta School of Art. This was the most inauspicious of times as World War II had just been declared and it interfered with his academic instruction. In 1942, he enlisted as a gunner to satisfy the duties of military service. This got in the way of the schedule of his evening classes at the school. One of his tutors there was the celebrated sculptor Vincent Apap whose strict academic theories were not lost on the young Baldacchino.

It was Mangion, one of the fathers of Maltese modernism and a tireless innovator, who encouraged the four young artists – Baldacchino himself, Salvatore Privitera, Joseph Muscat and Gerry Caruana – to form the Bottega group, which later accepted its fifth member, Frankie Buttigieg. There were no hierarchies in the group, its lack of official structure promoting a very democratic perspective as everyone was on an equal footing. They discussed art, aesthe­tics and even painted en plein air, enjoying the company of each other while they did so.

Mangion, although never part of this group or, indeed, any other subsequent artist group, continuously asked to be updated about the goings on of the group and constructively criticised the work they did, discussed aesthetics and suggested improvements. The young ar­tists wanted a break from the sterility of the strict academicism generally advocated by Edward Caruana Dingli and most of the tutors at the school of art.

Landscape in Turmoil

They had more than their fill with academia that promoted the imitating of old masters and dull exercises at perfecting technique. After school hours, they used to meet, discuss, paint and dream, away from the severity of the Malta School of Art’s curriculum.

Mangion had introduced etching as a dedicated class in 1934 at the school. He had mastered the technique during his New York interlude and enthusiastically imparted his knowledge of the medium to his Maltese students. Baldacchino embraced these teachings and became very proficient in the medium.

The death of Edward Caruana Dingli in 1950 and Emvin Cremona’s succession as head of the Malta School of Art refreshed the school’s curriculum and ethos. Forays into modernism were now encouraged and this motivated some members of the Bottega Group to exhibit collectively, with relative success, in November of that same year.

The group eventually disbanded as all its members, with the exception of Baldacchino, emigrated in search of a better future. It was years later, in 1966, that Baldacchino decided to try his luck away from these shores by emigrating for three years to Australia.

However, the Bottega Group is of pioneering relevance as it broke new ground and showed how a group of young artists could work together and exhibit as a unit, as had been the norm in other countries. It predated the three Maltese artist groups of the 1950s; however, these were more militant in their propagation of modernism. Baldacchino himself was to become a member and a very active protagonist within these groups.

Baldacchino was a published poet besides being an accomplished visual artist and engraver. Some of his poems featured in international publications. This eclecticism owes its origin to a cultural upbringing in the folds of a very artistic fami­ly that exposed the young budding artist to diverse sources of inspiration coming from a variety of art forms.

Landscape in Green

His mother had studied the piano as a young girl and orga­nised musical events at their home. His father was a sculptor who professed a love for theatre. This environment was conducive for Baldacchino to nurture an artistically sensitive temperament that was open to different art sources.

He acted like a medium, translating the tingling sensations emanating from the majesty of nature

Poetry and visual art enriched the artist in a holistic way. An idea or emotion could be thus expressed as his mood for either art form dictated. Art history boasts many examples of artists similarly endowed and who created multidisciplinary repertoires. Romantic poet, artist and engraver William Blake integrated the visual art form and poetry to arrive at a more emphatic and singular mode of expression.

Lithuanian Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, besides be­ing a musical prodigy, demon­strated a unique multidisciplinary quest for knowledge that found its way into his painfully sensitive Symbolist art and poetry.

Swedish expressionist playwright August Strindberg crea­ted very dramatic angst-ridden landscapes that mirrored the existential plague that tortured his soul. He could at times express intimate sentiments more pertinently visually than he was able to do so via his more famous expressionist work for the theatre.

Baldacchino landscapes dominate his entire oeuvre as a visual artist. They ooze poetry as he quested for an essential quality in the fabric of the Maltese landscape. The Maltese artist strived to reach into the layers of soil, the lattices in the grass, the plankton in the waves to extract their pure essence as the empirical building blocks of the land he called home.

Untitled

He acted like a medium, translating the tingling sensations emanating from the majesty of nature as striations and formations of pigment on the canvas. He sometimes abstracted, weaved textural tapestries and reduced characteristic topographical elements as factors of colour, composition and form. Rather reminiscent of the abstract work of Gerhard Richter, the colours merge and coalesce and gain a balanced musicality.

The landscape was, at times, abstracted through a vortex of turmoil; at other times, it was chromatically reduced into Nicolas de Stäel volumes of two colours, as in his minimalist landscape Untitled. The rough seas crash against a shore overwhelmed by a Strindbergian leaden sky mirroring the internal ferment of the romantic, pantheist poet. Two lonely pillboxes, The Two Pillboxes, narrate a story of monochromatic loneliness in the wake of an overcast wintry day. In Goethe’s words: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.”

Baldacchino was able to extract that spirit that was concealed in the landscape, filter off the unnecessary and come up with a visual poetic language of his own.

The three years in Australia were enlightening as demonstrated by the paintings that belong to this interlude. Victoria Station Melbourne shows a new-found love for urban life Down Under. His intrigue for street signage and vernacular architecture evoke early Stuart Davis’s (Aschan School) urban landscapes.

Portraying people wasn’t one of Baldacchino’s main preoccupations. An exception was his wife, Lela, who bore him three children, who was his model for a number of very intimate and sensual nudes that he was very reluctant to part with.

The Two Pillboxes

However, in Victoria Station Melbourne, L.S. Lowry-like matchstick people endow the painting with a human dimension, maybe a social comment on the stark differences between life in a modern metropolis and rural life in his Mediterranean island country. Malta was still in those days trying to fathom a way of life after gaining independence from the UK.

Baldacchino returned to Malta after three years with the intention to going back to Australia but he never did. He imme­diately resumed his friendship with sculptors Toni Pace and Josef Kalleya, one of the fathers of Maltese modernism. The latter introduced him to the young sculptor Joseph M. Genuis, who soon became a very close friend.

Baldacchino used to meet regu­larly with Kalleya and Genuis to discuss art. The early demise of the young sculptor on October 1970 shocked him to the core as it felt like losing a brother.

In October 2005, I visited him at his home in Buġibba. His lucid memory surprised me and he went at lengths discussing the origins of modernism in our country. Numerous landscapes and a handful of nudes were stacked in rows. A Genuis sculpture on the windowsill still elicited heartfelt emotion while he reminisced on a friendship that was so suddenly curtailed.

He struck me as a recluse, enjoying the silence and the solitude of his studio and not interested in any limelight. He savoured a poetic introspection that excluded most ambient noise, even that harking from the busy seaside town in which he lived.

In novelist Haruki Murakami’s words: “The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self.”

Baldacchino’s main contribution to Maltese modernism are these intensely poetic, silent and evanescent landscapes that the Japanese novelist’s words describe so eloquently. They are stirrings of the soul.