Dennis's final acquisition

The entire artistic community of Malta gathered at St Julians parish church last Thursday afternoon to pay tribute and say farewell to our friend Dennis Vella.

Philosophers, professors, polymaths, sculptors, installationists, historians, watercolourists, curators, aesthetes, vedutists, critics, museologists, collectors, ceramicists, and anyone remotely connected with the arts. Not enough has been said about this quiet gentleman who all his life was an artist without actually practising as one. What Dennis did not know about modern and contemporary art was not worth knowing; not only internationally but locally too. It was his dream to set up a museum of modern and contemporary art and, as fellow artist Isabelle Borg said, when it materialises, this museum should be named after him.

Malta owes it to its people and Dennis to get going on this project. Two hundred years of art are unaccounted for. I have been harping on the subject for years. I find it inconceivable that artists whom I knew, admired and loved, Guiseppe Arcidiacono, Esprit Barthet and Antoine Camilleri spring to mind instantly, have practically no representation in our museums. In fact, the last purchase Dennis made for the Fine Arts was Arcidiacono's Opera House, which, up till lately, was on display next to the Curator's Office.

Dated October 26, 1941, this gloriously fluid watercolour is possibly the final glimpse of the once iconically beautiful Barry Opera House of which we Maltese were once so proud of and which, perversely, has today become the object of scorn. I wonder why! This magnificent building was blitzed not long after Arcidiacono painted it and it was arbitrarily dismantled in the interests of safety. The intention then was that it would be rebuilt. However, after the General Workers' Union vetoed the plan for it to be built by German workers and Dom Mintoff scrapped the approved Bergonzi plans for it in 1971, as opera was then considered to be too elitist, this ruin has slapped us in the face like a wet lampuka for 67 years.

One would have thought that after all that time the government's priority when engaging an artist of Renzo Piano's genius to rehabilitate City Gate and the surrounding area would be to give the people back its high altar to the arts and not build a monument to their egoism. It is patently clear that while politicos have an inflated sense of their own importance they have realised their own transience in this pathetic attempt to immortalise themselves by creating a Parliament that could have been splendidly accommodated elsewhere at far less cost.

Pathetic when the collective achievement of Malta's artists has been largely ignored for 200 years!

Is it possible that they do not realise that establishing a concert hall for our homeless orchestra or organising a MOMA would more than ensure their place in history? Anyone who enters the Uffizi is immediately confronted by the full length portrait of Anna Maria Ludovica de Medici, the widowed and childless Electress Palatine, the last of the line of Lorenzo Il Magnifico. It was she who left the family's art treasures to the people of Florence thereby ensuring that these works of art would not ever be dispersed or be spirited off to Vienna by the Habsburgs who succeeded the Medici. This is what ensures fond and grateful remembrance in popular memory... even after three centuries!

The Parliament idea would have been just about palatable had the brief, written or unwritten, have given equal importance to the opera house site. But, no, the proposal is to have an open-air theatre in Valletta, which anyone with an ounce of common sense knows cannot be used for more than a month at most.

Let me put it in a nutshell. The arts in Malta can be compared to a family of six: mother, father, three sprogs and a dog. This family owns two cars: a vintage Fiat Balilla that is kept beautifully but cannot fit them all and a great big van without an engine that goes nowhere. So they opt for a third car and what do they get? A glam convertible sports car the top of which doesn't exist! Use your little grey cells, as Hercule Poirot says, and try to imagine the costs of maintaining this theatre that is perennially open to the elements in pristine condition for years and years and years!

If there is such a place as heaven I am sure that Dennis would have been met by old friends like Antoine Camilleri, Esprit Barthet, Emvin Cremona and Giuseppe Arcidiacono. Artists like Antonio Sciortino, whose works he did so much to promote, would have greeted Dennis with open arms and given him a new plaster cast for Speed. Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Emil Nolde would be exchanging knowing looks while the Guggenheims, both Solomon and Peggy, would know, instinctively, that they have gained a new sparring partner to discuss the arts in an arbour designed by Le Corbusier under a constellation of mobiles bearing golden stars, moons and planets by Alexander Calder.

kzt@onvol.net