Portraits of Giorgio Borg Olivier

In the Borg Olivier Hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there hangs the Raymond Pitré portrait of Giorgio Borg Olivier (1911-1980), the 30th anniversary of whose death falls tomorrow. A posthumous portrait, dated 1994, it depicts Dr Borg Olivier at around his middle period as political leader. It is the face most of us are familiar with – unlike that of the Esprit Barthet portrait hanging at the Auberge de Castille, which depicts a Prime Minister so young, barely 40 in 1950/51, that we scarcely recognise him.

The Pitré portrait might seem the more authentic. For it depicts the iconic face of Dr Borg Olivier, sitting at his desk, immaculately dressed as always. And, yet, with some degree of probability, at least one of the details has been added by the artist himself. The navy blue tie has horizontal white stripes, a tie Dr Borg Olivier is unlikely to have worn. It would be interesting if he had. Such stripes on printed or woven silk were rare at the time, and, to go by the published photographs, Dr Borg Olivier seldom wore even diagonal stripes, at least on public occasions.

If Pitré did indeed decide to introduce the stripes, it may have been because he wanted more light to show up within his composition. He would not have been the first artist to complain about the dullness of navy blue in a sitter, nor the first to claim the licence to change the colour of a politician’s tie. Famously, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the last artist for whom Franklin D. Roosevelt sat, did both.

She complained when doing a first portrait, prompting Roosevelt to wrap himself in a glamorous cape to offset the “dullness”. For a second portrait, he wore a red tie but the painting was never completed as he died that same day, shortly after the sitting. When Shoumatoff came to paint that last portrait again, and this time to complete it, she chose to change the lively red into, yes, navy blue. The story of the now famous painting had become part of the portrait itself. One looked at Roosevelt and squinted to see where death was lurking. Maybe that is why Shoumatoff now saw the blue as more appropriate.

Whether such fictional details falsify a portrait or help a deeper truth emerge is one of those endlessly-argued-over questions in academe and critical circles: Are myth and fiction to be contrasted with truth? It may seem arcane to the rest of us. Not so its sister question, whose pertinence is more obvious: Does this portrait have any important element of myth or fiction animating it?

Portraits may be composed of words, as well. As Dr Borg Olivier is remembered over this long weekend – and over the coming year, as 2011 marks the centenary of his birth – we should repeatedly ask, first, whether the personal and social memory is animated by myth and, second, whether any myths there may be are friends or enemies of historical truth.

My own hunch is that Dr Borg Olivier has been, in social memory, a victim of his greatest achievement – leading the movement towards independence, a moment that represents such a culmination of national, party and personal history that anything else seems like an anticlimax. One sometimes has to pinch oneself to remember that 1964 fell almost in the middle of Dr Borg Olivier’s prime ministerial career.

Independence, and the run-up negotiations and cat-and-mouse games that preceded it, have so magnetised what we know – or rather what we think – of him, that it is as though a vacuum has been created around other aspects of his political life that a set of commonplaces have rushed in to fill. Many of them, on closer scrutiny, do not seem plausible.

One such commonplace, shared even by some historians, is that he was indecisive and often passive. It is true that it was part of his strategic repertoire to wait and wait, to wear his adversaries down, before taking a decision, but this was because he believed a good proportion of problems would thus either resolve themselves or come to simplify the decision. It is a view that Margaret Thatcher came round to and no one has ever accused her of indecision.

He has often been described as conservative. Yet, he was overheard describing his party as “liberal” to an enquiring foreigner. More importantly, at important moments of his party’s history – such as the 1947 Congress with the Nationalist Party fighting for its survival in the face of, among other things, the breakaway Democratic Action Party – he passionately declared the anti-conservative and social profile of the PN.

As Prime Minister, he insisted at successive UN General Assemblies – this at the height of the decolonisation period – that political independence had to be accompanied by economic independence. And in many of the institutional steps taken during his period – the founding of the Central Bank, the army, the Malta Development Corporation, the tourist industry, the Tal-Qroqq University campus (and abolition of tuition fees) and the Polytechnic, the signing of the association agreement with the EEC – we can see the genesis of some of the fundamental features of the Maltese state today.

Anti-imperialism and a concern for effective social redistribution through economic activity are a mark of 19th-century liberalism, although not so much of Italian liberals. It is one of the fascinating aspects of this enigmatic politician, by nature disinclined to philosophise his beliefs, Italianate by culture and proud to be called Giorgio (never George, not even when writing in English to the Queen), that he may have acquired some of his fundamental instincts from Gladstone.

Possible? Plausible? Let the historians begin.

ranierfsadni@europe.com