As the world has just celebrated Museums and Cultural Landscapes month, Giulia Privitelli muses on the landscape values which British artist Victor Pasmore engaged with in Malta during his sojourn in Gudja

To put it simply, a cultural landscape is a landscape created by human culture. In the same way that a painting is the result of the painter’s vision realised onto the canvas. Likewise is the cultural landscape the result of man’s actions on the natural environment.

But, while a city like Valletta is an obvious choice to speak of cultural landscapes, what can be said of the artistic choices and experiments of artists such as Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) who, for a third of his life, lived on our island at a time of unprecedented change?

I would like to argue, here, that the rural countryside of Gudja is also a valuable part of Malta’s cultural landscape, despite not donning the crown fit for a Unesco World Heritage site.

The whole concept of having an ideal city planned on a particular stretch of land, for example, was essentially a decision based on the critical study of the surrounding environment in relation to the needs of its residents.

Valletta was given its iconic identity as a result of the several limitations imposed on it by its physical location and the ruling authority across the centuries. Valletta is what it is today, due to an ongoing dialogue maintained over the years between the activities of man and the surroundings. When that harmonious exchange was interrupted, by war for example, irreversible and irreparable damage to the cultural landscape was sustained.

In whatever way you look at it, placed under the two giant umbrellas of the figurative and the abstract, artistic expression, too, depends largely on the ability to critically observe and analyse our surroundings. Time, money and human effort is invested in the protection of the sanctity of art, because artistic ex-pression is the basis of human culture.

Meanwhile, both time and place are necessary for human culture to unfold and evolve. It is through this action, man’s interaction with the environment, that cultural landscapes are formed. But it is, fundamentally, a relationship that runs both ways – the natural world, which limits or inspires man to create; and man whose actions add to, or change, the natural world and its creations.

At the most basic level, Pasmore’s choice to take up a permanent residence in Gudja in 1966, in favour of the cosmopolitan and progressive centre of London, offers our rural areas a new and somewhat different cultural value. This is not to say that Pasmore’s works enable us to qualify the extent by which the rural surroundings had an impact on his work or artistic method, or to qualify the extent by which the rural surroundings have been degraded over time by unchecked growth and urbanisation.

Pitted wall, farmhouse architectural feature, Gudja residence.

The cultural value of the Maltese rural countryside lies in what led Pasmore to settle on Malta in the first place, in what led him to comment on Maltese buildings “as though one were looking at a cubist painting” when descending from above.

Inevitably, therefore, the rubble-wall-lined roads of Gudja are an intrinsic part of Malta’s mid-to-late 20th-century cultural landscape. In a way, this newly-found cultural value within the Maltese landscape provides our countryside with an inheritance that is worth conserving. It is an inheritance which has been handed down to us over centuries, which found different forms of expression over time, and which reveals something of what makes us human.

Therefore, the implied or symbolic landscape in an abstract work by Pasmore that was produced in Malta, gives the physical natural or man-made site an intrinsic quality that renders it equal in cultural worth or, at least, in conservational worth, to an actual museum piece.

In the UK, Peterlee New Town’s importance and recognition as a cultural landscape owes much to Pasmore’s legacy, as well as to the latter’s ability to experiment with architectural forms in his farmhouse in Gudja.

The cultural value of the Maltese rural countryside lies in what led Pasmore to settle on Malta in the first place

Were it not for Pasmore’s urban designs for Peterlee Town and, especially, the sculptural-architectural invention of the Apollo Pavilion (1967-1971), which re-shaped the face of Peterlee, this urban centre would have been lacking an irreplaceable cultural value.

The lack of such values would signify an unfortunate lacuna in the history of mankind, while a loss of such values would be irreversible. And that would be a nightmare. Ask any conservator, and each one will reply in the affirmative. But the loss of these values is different to the loss of ecological values, which, although not ideal, could be compensated for elsewhere or by other means.

The loss of landscapes which at some point inspired or contributed to the development of an artistic creation, implies the loss of cultural values which cannot be recreated elsewhere without losing something of their initial authenticity.

Cherishing cultural values which are embedded in nature may also reinforce and, perhaps, reinstate our ancestral and cultural awareness. In Pasmore’s own words: “In the past, religious paintings provided a link between the sensibility and mystery of God, but now the link is with nature.” If we are to attain any of the cohesion and unity the current state of the world craves for, we must first reconcile the world of man with that of nature. An increased awareness of our cultural inheritance can contribute to a shared, common identity, which is essentially one of the basic necessities for the proper running of a society – unity.

The development of such rural areas, therefore, does not simply have ecological and environmental implications, but artistic and creative ones too.

The Morning Star. The Birth of Psyche - Blue Symphony, 1982, Victor Pasmore Gallery. Credit: Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti

To conserve such areas is also to conserve their spirit – a spirit which led artists such as Pasmore to develop, to discover new possibilities of expression and ultimately, to leave a legacy which, despite its foreign roots, is inevitably fused to the eventual inheritance of future Maltese generations.

Efforts need to be likewise directed at conserving centuries-old and modern sources of inspiration, since they define an important part of our cultural and national identity.

They are what fuels the entire process of creation. What does this mean? It means that in caring for such environments we are addressing the future as much as we are addressing the past and present. The landscape values which Pasmore engaged with in the 1960s and throughout the rest of the 20th century are also potential values for the current and future generations – values for which there is no means for us to know the extent of their creative power.

During May, the worldwide community of museums (ICOM) celebrated International Museum Day, with the theme this year being Museums and Cultural Landscapes. The Victor Pasmore Gallery, next door to the Central Bank Annex in Valletta, is currently under the management of Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, and took part in this international event with special gallery talks on the theme. The gallery is open between Monday and Friday from 11am to 3pm. Admission is free.