Antoine Camilleri

Biography

More than eighty self-portraits: that is how many are documented for Antoine Camilleri, and on that count he is regarded as Malta’s most revered self-portraitist. In one of them he showed himself as the risen Christ displaying the stigmata. For Maltese art of the mid-twentieth century this was a bold step, and the artist, it seems, took it deliberately.

Camilleri was born on 5 February 1922 in Valletta, the sixth of eleven children. His father was Maltese, a successful clothing merchant with a shop in St John’s Square; his mother came from a French family in Algeria. His father realised early on that his son wanted to be an artist and supported him throughout his life.

He began to draw seriously at the age of ten under Dwardu Zammit, who introduced him to oil painting. In 1936 Camilleri entered the Malta Government School of Art, where his teachers were Vincent Apap, Edward Caruana Dingli, Carmelo Mangion and Carmel Attard Cassar. The war interrupted his studies only briefly: he was conscripted into the 2nd Regiment of the King’s Own Malta Regiment, but he went to lessons whenever he could and continued at the school until 1947.

In 1948, with his father’s money and help, he went to Paris to study at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. His teacher there was Nicolas Untersteller, an artist from Alsace who was director of the school from 1939 to 1945; he specialised in stained glass, a technique Camilleri would return to in his own experiments later. In Paris he saw modern painting and the work of the Impressionists at close range for the first time, painted many landscapes in the open air, but loved most of all drawing and painting from live models. His developing manner is already visible in these studies: a flowing, economical line and elongated figures.

In May 1954 his mother died, and the loss left a deep mark on him: many years later, in 1982, he made a work titled “Gieħ lil Ommi” (“Homage to My Mother”). In June of the same year he married Tereza Tanti; they had five children, and the family appears in many of his works.

From 1956 to 1979 Camilleri taught at various institutions, among them the Foundation Course in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Malta.

He worked in a range of materials: oil, lino print, clay and found objects. His most characteristic device involved food: real bread, cheese and wine were sealed for good under a film of resin, so that an ordinary table became a still life and then the work itself. The things from his studio and home he did not rearrange or reinterpret, but fixed as an extension of himself and his memory. The Maltese scholar Joseph Paul Cassar argues that with these experiments Camilleri anticipated the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri and his “snare pictures” (tableaux pièges), in which the remains of a meal, crockery and glasses were fixed to a vertical surface. According to Cassar, he put this claim to major art institutions and none of them refuted it. I find the priority hard to check, but the parallel looks serious. Camilleri later became best known for his “pictures in clay”: he worked the clay itself, let it dry and used its cracked texture.

In 1958 he was among the first Maltese artists to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, in the country’s first national pavilion. He was also a holder of the Maltese national order of merit (MQR).

He died on 23 November 2005.