In the first of a series of articles about 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius looks at the life and career of Antoine Camilleri

Wild Horses

Purple. A colour that has, since the dawn of history, belonged to the sacred and the mystical. The neutral colour is produced when cool blue and hot red are mixed together. It is the colour that helps us understand the artist considered to be Maltese art-modernism personified.

Antoine Camilleri (1922-2005) commands a huge presence in the history and development of Maltese modernism. Maybe no other Maltese artist of the 20th century has captured the spirit of the times as he has. His self-portraits are his autobiography; they visually document his progress as an artist and his gradual ascent into old age.

In-Nannu

He began his artistic studies under Dwardu Zammit, after which he went to the School of Art; Vincent Apap (1909-2003) and Edward Caruana Dingli (1876-1950) were his tutors there.

He left Malta for Paris in 1948, which was an obvious choice as his mother was of French descent. His tutor was Prof. Unterstaller, an expert on stained glass and who inspired in the young artist a love for the medium. Impressionism, though already decades old, enthralled him and one could notice its influence in his Parisian paintings.

While in the French capital, he came across the masterpieces of the two European artists who were to be his main muse – sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Bernard Buffet (1928-1999). Buffet held his first show in Paris in 1946 where he exhibited a seminal self-portrait. These two artists and, to a lesser extent, Egon Schiele (1890-1918), were to be major influences on Camilleri’s self- portraiture, the major genre in his output.

Atelier Balzan

The Visitation

The artist nurtured a special relationship with his mother. The paintings in which his mother was the central theme always held pride of place at his studio; works that he would never part with as they were so painfully personal. His mother pried him away from the many lures of Paris and he settled down in Malta and married his fiancée Tereża in 1954 – just a few days after he had lost his mum.

Camilleri made a living by working at his father’s drapery store in Valletta. It was not really his calling but he had to make ends meet until he got a steady teaching job with the government in 1956.

This drapery store became a meeting place for the young pioneers of modernism. The Modern Art Circle was born in this inauspicious location.

The young artists were very vociferous in their arguments and must have scared many of the shop’s customers away. I remember Antoine laughing in his inimitable way when he reminisced on this.

Camilleri’s self-portraits are intimate psychological and autobiographical studies of an artist who changed like the seasons

They used to continue their conversations and arguments on art at Malata, so one can say that a drapery store and a cafeteria acted as a backdrop to the birth of one of the most important art groups in the history of Maltese modernism.

Prisoner of Art

Camilleri’s friendship with fellow artist Frank Portelli (1922-2004) ran very deep. Both were born in the same year, lived to a ripe old age and practically died in the same year. And they were the two founding members of the Modern Art Circle.

Without their steadfastness and stubbornness, the three Maltese artist groups of the 1950s, which also include Modern Art Group and Atelier ’56, would not have come into being.

Both Camilleri and Portelli exhibited in the Venice Biennale of 1958.

However, the Maltese artist that Camilleri held in highest regard was Giorgio Preca (1909-1984). Camilleri was very supportive of his artist friend, whom he considered to be a mentor and whose notorious crucifixion wasn’t well received by the Church authorities. The Preca masterpiece still languishes in a Żejtun wayside chapel up to the present day. When Camilleri got married, Preca gifted him with an important study of this crucifixion.

Camilleri continued his studies, together with Esprit Barthet (1919-1999), at the Bath Accademy. His palette changed – greys, blacks and white became predominant, replacing his vibrant Mediterranean one. His compositions became more geometric; the teachings of Victor Pasmore (1908-1998), and those of the father of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), were in the Bath art school’s curriculum. Like Barthet, Camilleri returned to Malta as a mature artist and developed into one of the most influential artists of Maltese modernism.

Valletta

Camilleri’s self-portraits are intimate psychological and autobiographical studies of an artist who changed like the seasons. His self-portraits on incised clay surely count among the masterpieces of Maltese 20th-century art. He ‘transfigured’ his ascetic looks, long beard, the furrows of his skin and his expressive hands into the image of Jesus Christ.

One is sometimes disconcerted and at a loss to ascertain whether a work is indeed a self-portrait of Camilleri or, otherwise, an episode in the life of Jesus Christ.

Camilleri regarded the cracks in the clay as cracks in his skin. He maintained that a piece ‘breathed’ through its cracks and pores.

After the Bypass

Family photographs, his crockery, his breakfast, sheaves of wheat and medical discharge letters got incorporated into his paintings.

The scalpel knife, the one that his cardiac surgeon used during a surgical procedure, features in his most personal work, his 1996 After the Bypass. This self-portrait resembles the Christ-figure in the shroud of Turin and represents the artist as an Ecce Homo: nude, old, decrepit, fragile, impotent, a sacrificial lamb. A gaping wound, still weeping, surrounds the scalpel blade. 

The first time I went to his studio, accompanied by another artist, Gabriel Caruana, I was struck by Antoine’s humility, his loud chuckle, his love of purple and his deep philosophical statements.

On the way there, Gabriel commented on the fact that I was coincidentally wearing a purple shirt, Antoine’s favourite colour.

Antoine behaved like a truculent kid one evening when he realised that we were driving him back home after a dinner with friends. The night was still young and he felt like socialising at a jazz club in Paceville. 

Reluctantly, his voice broken with more than a hint of disappointment, he bade us goodnight as he stepped out of the car to his Floriana apartment. Antoine was always young at heart and that made him more endearing.