Taking stock of our heritage

Charlene Vella speaks to KENNETH ZAMMIT TABONA, the newly-elected president of Friends of the National Museum of Fine Arts, and discovers the eternal optimist within him.

Whoever follows the local art and culture scene must know who Kenneth Zammit Tabona is. A knowledgeable, restless and opinionated artist and music critic who continuously strives to improve the local art scene and to educate the public about our rich heritage.

This has led him to become president of the new Friends of the National Museum of Fine Arts, which was inaugurated last Sunday by Tourism Parliamentary Secretary Mario de Marco at the National Museum of Fine Arts.

What are the highlights of the National Museum of Fine Arts collection?

The highlight of our national collection is definitely the works of Mattia Preti that form the nucleus of the museum; the gorgeous Martyrdom of St Catherine in an oval lunette that hits you between the eyes after mounting that magnificent Andrea Belli double staircase.

To its left is my personal favourite – young St John with his lamb, who gazes so serenely out of his elaborate frame as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

Then of course there are the collections of Favrays downstairs; the lovely pair, husband and wife, the architect Grognet de Vasse and his wife Maria Amalia. A couple of evocative Riberas, the dramatic Valentin and the ethereally beautiful Christ embracing the cross by Guido Reni are also great favourites of mine. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The museum simply needs a major revamp from top to bottom. In the 40-odd years since its setting up, one must remember that this building was once Admiralty House; ways and means of displaying works of art have improved dramatically.

Therefore, a radical facelift is required. More room is needed to house an already crowded collection. The annexe in Old Mint Street will alleviate this and allow more works from the reserve collection to be shown to the public.

This is why the exercise must be undertaken with the precision of a military operation. As yet, it has not been decided whether to continue the present restoration process by which each section is tackled piecemeal, or have the national collection shifted to an alternative site; possibly a future Moma (Museum of Modern Art), till South Street can be tackled at full speed and with dispatch.

I favour the latter method, as what would result would be not only one restored museum but two, as the modern works, most of which are either in storage or lent out to ministries and embassies can be housed in the Moma.

This is a small part of the infrastructural improvements we must complete before 2018, when Valletta and the harbour area is designated European cultural capital. In these terms 2018 is just around the corner.

That is a very tall order for Heritage Malta and the curator to achieve without some support and help from an NGO like the Friends, which is where we come in.

Many museum collections worldwide are largely made up of artefacts that were generously donated by private individuals and families. Why is this not common in Malta?

This is a very prickly subject. Many collections in Malta owe their origin to when the French, and subsequently the British, held auction sales of the contents of houses like the Museum of Fine Arts that used to belong to a very wealthy Portuguese family of knights: the Sousa y de Silva.

The auberges too must have been full of the most wonderful items of furniture, pictures and artifacts. One must remember that the British looked upon Malta as a garrison and besides, most of the mostly sacred art was deemed to be highly unfashionable if not repugnant to the new rulers who were coming from Regency England with its Hogarths, Gainsboroughs and Reynolds.

Hence the sales; and why the great collections from the noble houses especially are full of religious pictures and relatively few landscapes or mythological scenes. There was also a time in our recent history when ‘confiscation’ Bolshevik style was a cause of great paranoia.

A rather warped idea of what socialism was supposed to mean led many collectors to either offload or hide their chefs d’oeuvres and it was only with the establishment of Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti under the inspired, if meticulous, direction of Maurice de Giorgio that the private collectors started lending their treasures for the occasional exhibition.

We are still very far from being in the happy situation wherein families and individuals either donate or loan works of art to our museum for a variety of reasons; the first and most important is that there is not commensurate tax incentive to do so, especially where succession duty is concerned.

We have had a precedent when Albert Ganado exchanged part of his map collection with the house he had on lease from the government and the Turner painting loan from HSBC, but that as far as I know is all.

Any collector also knows that at present a painting donated or loaned will probably be relegated to the reserve collection because of lack of space in the fine arts itself, which is why we need to have the annexe in ship shape so badly and where modern art is concerned - by which I mean art dating from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, there is just one crowded room to the right of the museum downstairs and the Caruana Dingli bequest to show for over 100 years of Maltese ­painting.

There is no way one can see a representation of Arcidiaconos, Caruana Dinglis, Barthets,Cremonas or Apaps under one roof unless a totally separate Museum of Modern Art is set up as soon as possible.

The Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts can foster heightened awareness and in future even smooth the wheels for such a set-up to be realised. The NGO can be the bridge between the public and Heritage Malta, with the aim of enriching our national collection a hundredfold.

Recruitment will take place during future activities organised by the museum. Membership is a €10 token a year.

For more information, e-mail the FNMFA committee at friends.nmfa @gmail.com, or find the Facebook group Friends of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Malta. Donations and payment for memberships can be effected by cheque payable to ‘Friends of the National Museum of Fine Arts’, and sent to the treasurer of the FNMFA, National Museum of Fine Arts, South Street, Valletta.