Emvin Cremona

Biography

Emvin Cremona received his first serious commission after the death of a friend. In 1945 Anton Inglott died, with whom he had studied and with whom he had returned to Malta, and Cremona was asked to continue Inglott’s decoration of the church of St Joseph in Msida. That work, to my mind, set the course of everything that followed.

He was born in Valletta on 27 May 1919; his Christian names, Emanuel Vincent, were shortened to Emvin from birth. The family was practical rather than artistic, and his vocation met with resistance from those close to him and from society at large. Until 1936 he attended the Italian-language Scuola Umberto I, and from 1935 he studied at the Government School of Art in Msida. His classmates included Willie Apap, Anton Inglott, Esprit Barthet and Victor Diacono, and his teachers were Edward Caruana Dingli and Carmenu Mangion. In 1937 he competed for the government scholarship and came third, after Apap and Inglott.

From 1938 to 1940 Cremona studied at the Regia Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome under Carlo Siviero. He and Inglott left Italy before it entered the war and returned to Malta on the last boat to reach the island in peacetime; by other accounts the return was in 1941. During the war Cremona was called up and devised camouflage for defensive positions along the coast. In 1945 he won the Agnes Schembri Bequest, studied until 1947 at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean Dupas. He finally returned to Malta in 1948.

That same year Cremona replaced Caruana Dingli at the School of Art and taught there until 1960, when he left to concentrate on his own work. His house and studio stood near the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta.

After Msida came other churches: in Floriana, Mqabba, Ħamrun and Balzan, although he never finished the last. His work is also found in Paola, Burmarrad, the chapel of Malta International Airport and the parish church of St Cajetan in Ħamrun. The mosaics in the Ta’ Pinu sanctuary on Gozo were restored in 2006. Paintings by Cremona are held at the United Nations headquarters in New York and the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, and in 1970 his work was presented to Queen Elizabeth II. In the late 1960s he began painting abstract works in impasto with gravel, sand and plaster glass, and then made the “Broken Glass” collages. They were received in Malta with great success, and he acquired a reputation as one of the pioneers of Maltese modernism. In 1958 he represented his country in the first Maltese pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Stamps became a separate line of work. The set marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the award of the George Cross to Malta, issued in 1957, began his career in philately; by 1980 he had made 62 issues with more than 170 designs. Among them were the stamps of independent Malta in 1964, the issue for the 400th anniversary of the Great Siege, the definitive series of 1965 and sixteen Christmas issues. On the Christmas stamps of 1967 a triptych is set in a trapezoidal frame with a generous amount of gold. The British philatelist Kenneth Wood called him one of the best stamp designers in the world.

In 1968 he designed the Medal of Merit, which was awarded until 1971; he himself received it in 1971 from the Confederation of Civic Councils of Malta. His other honours include the Gold Medal of the Malta Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and the papal Order of St Sylvester. He was a member of the Council for Culture and the Arts of Malta.

In 1984 Cremona fell seriously ill and lost his right arm. He died in Valletta in January 1987. A garden in Attard is named after him, and in 2004 the exhibition “Maltese History on Stamps” at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta was built around his stamps. His son Marco became an artist and architect.