Giuseppe Galea : designer and decorator in mid-twentieth-century Malta : a contextual and critical assessment of his drawings

Abstract

It has been noted that the Rabat-born designer, decorator and sculptor Giuseppe Galea (1911- 1993) “has unfortunately fallen to some degree of oblivion primarily due to the fact that on his return to Malta he came to exclusively devote himself to the little-studied field of the decorative arts”. Such a statement may sound strange and contradictory for an artist who led an impressively prolific career primarily as a designer and decorator, but also occasionally as a sculptor. Galea was the leading stuccoist in Malta in the immediate post-World War II period, who was responsible for some of the more enduring projects of this kind between the late 1930s and the 1960s, continuing on a tradition which had started in Malta at the turn of the twentieth century. Additionally, he was awarded numerous decorative arts commissions in both the ecclesiastical and domestic spheres, executed in a wide variety of materials. Galea has also gone down in history as the man who retrieved the works of Antonio Sciortino (1879–1947) from Rome shortly after the signing of the Sciortino Bequest on the 11th February 1947.