From Goya to Matisse at the Hilton
by a Correspondent
FIFTY artists and 15 countries will be represented at an exhibition entitled "Two Centuries of graphic Art inspired by Two Millennia of Literature, History and Tradition", which opens at the Hilton on Tuesday.
The exhibition, which lasts till November 15, will include original drawings, engravings, lithographs and prints.
Organised by art historian Dame Françoise Tempra, it represents an extended version of the one she held at the Cathedral Museum in Mdina in 1990.
The highlight of the show will be a nude drawing by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) dated 1919 and never shown to the public after 1931, when it was part of the artist's retrospective exhibition in Berlin.
It will also feature some original mixed media drawings by British artist Frank Hill (1937-1990), paying tribute to Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510), to Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) and also to Katsushita Hokusai (1760-1849), among others.
An original coloured drawing by Kasimir Kalevich (1878-1935) of around 1921 will enlighten viewers on Suprematism and its escape from the subservience to figurative representation, while another movement leader, Manuel Quintanilla (b. 1924), father of Essentialism, illustrates his theories both in original and lithographic versions.
Engravings by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) and 19th century prints by Gustave Doré (1832-1883) will ensure pictorial homages to history and the literary works of Cervantes, Chateaubriand, Münchausen, La Fontaine, as well as the Bible.
Salvador Dali's (1904-1989) lithographs illustrating Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Dante's Divina Commedia will be supplemented in this Columbus 500th anniversary year by his Discovery of America, where Gala's figure as Dali's Madonna emerges from the flag of the disembarking conquistadores.
Giacomo de Pass (b. 1938), who will be presenting in Paris, at the time of this exhibition, his joint work with Hervée Bazin, president of the Académie Goncourt, with his drawings and lithographs, opens a wide panorama on history (the Russian Revolution), on customs and traditions with his graphics on the Commedia dell'Arte, Les Virtuoses (music), Les Trotteurs (horse-racing), Amour en Echec (love, games and gambling) and other fascinating series such as the Félinités.
The whole spectrum of art history will be spanned by the Maltese team — from tradition, with the figurative recordings of naval feats and events by Edwin Galea, to avant-garde Surrealism with the cosmic universe of Arthur Rizzo, accompanied by a flight of fancy into the poetical lyricism of Raymond Pitrè.
But whether one finds an inclination for the orientalist landscapes of David Roberts (1796-1864), the traditions of the desert by Carl Haag (1820-1915), the African folklore drawings of Tomeu Pons (b. 1933; the original works of this exhibitor are part of the monographs on the artist published by the Barcelona Museum), the exotically flavoured creations of Jafar Islah (b. 1946), the Jewish traditions portrayed by Zoltan Perlmutter (b. 1922), the Paris of the 1930s by Lionello Fioravanti-Massa (b. 1911) or the social comments by Thanassis Akrivopoulos (b. 1940), one cannot but find open all the existing frontiers of the world through the miracle of art.
The Community Chest Fund will receive 10 per cent of all sales at this exhibition, while the Malta Hilton has generously provided the venue and helped with the mounting of the show.
[Captions: FRANK HILL: Homage to Velasquez, one of the paintings on show at the Hilton from Tuesday to November 15. RICHARD CONSTABLE (b. 1932): Falcons on a Rocky Coast. The background was inspired by a sketch by his great-uncle Captain Charles Constable, son of John Constable, in 1845, while charting the waters of the Arabian Gulf.]
