Giuseppe Arcidiacono (1908-1997) : a critical assessment of his artistic output

Abstract

The process of identifying the artist’s work started with a survey of persons known by the author to be avid collectors of contemporary art and Melitensia. These contacts lead to a wider circle of people who own one or more of Arcidiacono’s paintings. In all, forty-three households were visited to view, photograph and measure these paintings. This also provided the opportunity to conduct a discreet enquiry into their provenance and to gather information about the artist from persons who knew him personally. This search was supplemented by visits to art galleries and auction houses to identify paintings by the artist that have passed through these institutions. An internet search revealed a couple of paintings by Arcidiacono that were being offered for sale. A visit to Burlington House in London provided information about the artist’s entry in 1981 for the Summer Exhibition organized annually by the Royal Academy in London. A search for paintings by Arcidiacono in public institutions was not too fruitful. Heritage Malta owns few paintings by Arcidiacono despite the fact that he had exhibited his work on several occasions in museums that are now managed by this organisation. Throughout this study, I make an attempt to identify the major influences that guided or inspired Arcidiacono during his long career. He inherited his artisan skills and his flair for furniture design from his father, Santo, who had settled in Malta in 1908 to open a furniture factory on the island. Robert Caruana Dingli was his favourite tutor at the Malta School of Art and the two artists developed a special bond that went beyond an ordinary relationship between student and teacher. There was a reversal of this role, fifty years later, when Arcidiacono tutored Caruana Dingli’s granddaughter, Debbie. Research into Arcidiacono’s early artistic formation revealed an appreciable amount of interaction between himself and his contemporaries, especially the artists who shared his enthusiasm for en plein air painting. On investigating possible foreign influences, it became evident that he rejected an academic approach to painting at an early stage of his career and his later work shows a certain affinity with French Post- Expressionism. The influence of the British School of watercolour painters on Arcidiacono may have been prompted by his encounters with visiting amateur artists such as Sir Alison Russell and his appreciation of the work of Sir William Russell Flint. In some of his paintings, he adopts a sparse, linear style that is reminiscent of Edward Lear’s sketches of Maltese landscape. Although the study is focussed on Arcidiacono as a watercolourist, it includes some of his paintings in oil and an account of the evolution of style in his furniture designs over the years. The Modern and Period Furniture Factory, run by the Arcidiacono family for almost seventy years, is now closed and its premises in Rue d’Argens, Msida are being used as a store for imported furniture. A search in the apartment above it, which served as Arcidiacono’s home since the late 1930s, revealed a surprisingly large number of furniture designs. The artist used to present his designs on large watercolour plates to individual clients before proceeding to the manufacture of custom-built furniture. The archives of the Arcidiacono family include a set of photographic albums kept by the artist as a visual record of his paintings. Visits to the Malta School of Art unearthed hitherto unknown specimens of his early work. Some of the images from these two souces have been used to supplement the paintings discovered in private collections to illustrate Arcidiacono’s work and to compare it with that of other artists. The plates presented at the end of the study are restricted to works by Arcidiacono and are meant to provide a selective catalogue of his broad artistic output.