A Mediterranean history of modern art : tension between history and metahistory

Abstract

Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci’s latest publication, A Mediterranean History of Modern Art: Tension Between History and Metahistory (Volume 1), builds upon the author’s critical scholarship on modern art by focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth-century artistic developments of the Mediterranean region. His is the first study on Mediterranean modern art which analyses the region as a whole and that considers the multiple contradictions and complexities of the geographical space in question. Schembri Bonaci’s theoretical approach to the study of the arts is here further developed to analyse themes that are inextricable from the history of the Mediterranean, namely the tension between cosmopolitan and the periphery, the coloniser and the colonised, and how these defined the artistic character of the region. In A Mediterranean History of Modern Art, the author advocates for a horizontal approach to the study of Mediterranean art by dialectically juxtaposing and challenging vertical models that have sustained a hierarchy of artistic positions. Exploiting this innovative approach, Schembri Bonaci challenges the outdated methodological approaches that are still predominant in scholarship in 'peripheral' territories, including Malta. This innovative shift from the vertical to the horizontal, yet which combines both positions, reconsiders history through the ideas of the Marxist, the Frankfurt and other Post-Marxist Schools of thought, through the writings of Modern and Post-Modernist thinkers, and other contemporary schools of thought and, significantly, through the writings of non-European scholars, intellectuals and artists from the Mediterranean region, with the aim of challenging notions upheld by the colonial perspective, still dominant under various forms and robes in today's academia.