Standard history/marginal history : comments on the narrative of twentieth-century Maltese art

Abstract

It is a common though not wholly unjustified misconception that Maltese twentieth-century art is backwards, anachronistic, and a softcopy of the Western avant-garde. The art of this period indeed resisted radical or even subtle modernist, aesthetic, and political developments, and there are seminal instances of direct engagement with the modernist project that lack an adequate discourse. Not only is such art hardly visible in the public sphere, but it has, furthermore, been historically undermined by an avoidance of critical and theoretical scrutiny. Studying art and its textual representation incited the realisation that the epistemological foundations of art-historical literature on Maltese modern art were debilitated by inconsistencies, passive narrative approaches, and, most perplexingly, unsatisfactory deductions posed as conclusive answers. Frankly, much material is repetitive and disengaged because of habitual preferences for biographical readings, prohibiting a thorough and contextualised understanding of images which could not be textually translated with the existing discourse.