A Life in Line

The Sketched Journey of Josef Kalleya (1898–1998)

Nikki Petroni sketches out Kalleya’s theo-philosophical and artistic journey through four (non-linear) chapters orbiting the primordial gesture of drawing a line

Josef Kalleya (1898–1998) was one of Malta’s foremost modernist artists. The spiritual depth and aesthetic novelty of his artistic language meant that his life was fraught with challenges and misgivings.

It was only at age seventy-eight, in 1976, that the artist was granted his first large solo exhibition, preceded by two other smaller exhibitions in 1974 and 1975. Throughout his life, Kalleya mentored and conversed with past artists, writers, and thinkers in his works, but most especially in the thousands of sketches and drawings that have been unearthed in the past five or so years.

The sketchbooks must be perceived as Kalleya’s mind, body, and soul. From the break of dawn, he would begin to release thoughts, his internal ‘torment’, onto paper. These morning sessions would take place in a quiet household, since Kalleya’s studio was attached to the family home, before any of his children or his wife, Elsa, awoke. In the subsequent hours, he would resume work on his sculptures, creating and destroying at the speed of a sudden turn of the head. The sketchbooks would accompany Kalleya on his armchair and even in bed prior to his hours of sleep.

Dr Nikki Petroni completed a Ph.D. in Maltese modern art at the University of Malta under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci. Nikki is a visiting lecturer in modern and contemporary art at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Malta and is Education and Development Executive at Arts Council Malta. She is part of the curatorial committee of the APS Mdina Contemporary Art Biennale and was Coordinator of the Strada Stretta Concept and Project Manager for the 2022 Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The smaller sketchbooks would be his companions when exiting the house and his studio. A night would often provide more than enough time for him to fill each page, back and front, of the bound books. Kalleya would sketch swiftly and with immediacy, in a manner that demonstrated the urgency of his preoccupation with the spiritual, cosmological, and existential. The ideas would be well-formed in his head prior to being translated into the sketches. These were nevertheless thoughts filled with ‘uncertainty’,1 as the artist himself expressed it.

Studies on Kalleya’s work have gradually surfaced across the past two decades. However, the profundity of his artistic-philosophical-mystical world has only recently surfaced in art historical scholarship with the work of Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, who took up the gargantuan task of deciphering the artist’s incomprehensible symbolical-hieroglyphical lines and marks. Within Schembri Bonaci’s volumes on Kalleya are multi-layers of thought that not only befit Kalleya’s strength, but also participate in the poetic aesthetic dialogue pursued by the Maltese artist. Kalleya engaged with the thoughts and doubts of his predecessors, his chosen four Grandi Pensatori—Origen, Dante Alighieri, John Milton, and Giovanni Papini—in a way that not only kept their memory alive, but which also continued to add to and debate a repository of knowledge (Fig. 2).

Thus, Schembri Bonaci enters as the next member of the infinite conversation, with his role being that of making the various threads in Kalleya’s tapestry perceptible to the reader by unravelling them only to once again weave an image with greater clarity and understanding. Due to this, one gets to experience Kalleya as well as know him. Such an achievement, amongst others, is the reason that Schembri Bonaci’s research has become inextricably bound to Kalleya’s own work.

Kalleya’s life is reminiscent of an epic journey replete with struggles, tests, riddles, evil detractors, maidens, spiritual enlightenment, and, most importantly, love. All of these are ‘documented’ in his sketchbooks. Hence, this article explores certain aspects of Kalleya’s work via Schembri Bonaci’s own thought and that of two of Kalleya’s contemporaries, whilst attempting to be a journey in and of it itself, travelling through four scenes: the artist’s studio, outer space, prehistoric caves, the afterlife, arriving back at his Blata l-Bajda studio.

Kalleya and Pasmore

Hear the sound of a magic tune caress the night, awake the moon.

[…]

Is this an effect of optical illusion or have you been elected king to awaken consciousness?

But man is absurd screams the poet; see him stand on the brink of nothing, a slave of Nature and dressed like a clown.

Layers of sketchbooks summited by an open album of artwork photographs, a glass bottle of Kinnie fizzing atop a silver tray, the latter the only object that appears incongruous in this unpresuming scene of creative giants enraptured by each other’s world. Josef Kalleya and Victor Pasmore, sitting ‘on the brink of nothing’ in the presence of art and nature with Kalleya’s Protezzjoni (1970) at the far left.

The scene described is witnessed by an early 1970s photograph of Kalleya and Pasmore caught in media res of a discussion recorded only, as far as we know, in this static visual format (Fig. 3). The two artists, who both dabbled in poetry and prose, shared an astute sensitivity for abstraction to encapsulate and make tangible that which transcends rationalisation. A quote by Pasmore reveals his definition of approaches to contemporary painting in the 1970s: ‘Today […] there are two forms of Painting—one still extraneous and representational and the other independent analogous not to literature, but Music, in which ideas are also intrinsic.’2 The autonomy of painting found in the latter form greatly alludes to Kalleya’s position on the role and purpose of art. For the Maltese artist, the struggle was to create that which is conceived by the intellect and felt by the soul, and not that which is readily perceptible in the material world. His statement against mimetic forms of art manifested Kalleya’s central aesthetic preoccupation, that which, in his own words, caused him great torment,3 the reason why Schembri Bonaci calls Kalleya’s sketches his line-asprayer works. He was adamantly against the principle of imitation, even within his own work, and his speed and unconscious way of working needed no form to copy.4 The idea emerged, flowing from mind to hand, created without a hierarchy of artforms in mind.

Kalleya’s artistic philosophy was one which fundamentally defied rationality and comprehensibility. He recognised that the truth should be sought within, and his sketches are the externalisation of his inner digging. Michael Baxandall argued that we create and perceive art using ‘a stock of patterns, categories and methods of inference; […] in a range of representational conventions’5 that are used to visualise things which are not fully known, and which create a standard of visual understanding. Truth of vision is troubling precisely because of the impossibility of it achieving certainty. The non-rationality of form, far removed from academic language and ordered norms of visualisation, engenders ‘illiteracy’, meaning that the viewer must discover a revised mode of seeing.6

Kalleya’s unreadability challenged such barriers in the attempt to perceive beyond the horizon line by the broadening or un-concealing of language through line and, thus, form. In the search for origins, Kalleya had to stretch his horizon beyond the parameters of standardised forms, formulating his own language and, hence, his own patterns. Although their aesthetic idioms were so different, Kalleya and Pasmore both understood that abstraction was a means by which to search for life’s essence, or at least to grapple with its many mysteries.

Kalleya, or Neptune the mystic

Kalleya’s path was a mystical one. In Gustav Holst’s The Planets (1914–1917), which gives sound or a ‘magic tune’ to seven planets in our solar system, Neptune is labelled as the mystic planet because it is a distant space shrouded in mystery and awe. As Raymond Head describes it: ‘Neptune signifies the moments when the mortal self seems to fall away and one is face to face with the eternal spirit. We are on our own. It is the mystic gaze, the land of devachan.’7 Holst’s aural poetry captures the majesty of such unknown places, or rather, places unexperienced physically by man, and hence which are far from understood. It is also the most unusual of the movements as the music for Neptune follows an irregular compositional approach. This lack of regularity parallels the need to untangle language and form to begin to attempt to get closer to truth.

Holst’s Planets takes the listener on a cosmic journey, as do Kalleya’s sketches. The artist’s mysticism and his hopes of reaching heaven upon his demise—which he believed to be the status of unending beauty—appear in his scratches, in the chaos of his aesthetic world. Kalleya, like some modernists, believed that cosmic forces could be captured with line. Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and the De Stijl artists, and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), disciples of Madame Blavatskaya (1831–1891), are two such examples. The title ‘Neptune, the mystic’ was taken from Alan Leo’s (1860–1917) The Art of Synthesis (1912), the British astrologist who was also a theosophist and a member of Blavatskaya’s London circle. Kalleya ‘challenged modernism’s distancing of art from the idea of Being by infusing his own work with mystery and archetypal meaning of Being with a modernist language.’8

The link between the cosmic and composition was beautifully underlined by the Maltese composer Charles

Camilleri who, during a time of personal change, was learning to re-structure music: What I had previously thought to be irrational and illogical started to have real meaning to me […] I realised all of a sudden why I have always been fascinated and haunted by the stars—their apparent disorganisation gradually was making me realise that infact [sic] this is the very essence of their unity.’9

Camilleri’s realisation is testimony to the symbiotic relationship between aesthetic form and the cosmic force of creativity. For Kalleya, the line was a tool for engaging with the dialectics of materiality and the cosmic, the necessity of giving intangibility form, hence made perceptible through form. Kalleya recognised that the finite and the infinite, albeit oxymoronic, are self-dependent.

Kalleya and the cave-womb

As God created humankind through the manipulation of clay and divine spit, thus scratches were created in the womb history of the human species.

Etching the petrified walls of our ancestors, Josef Kalleya invites us back to this cave existence after passing through Platonic light.

The line, for Kalleya, was the moment when ‘one communicates with simple gestures.’10 Kalleya’s own intellectual and artistic travels through the cosmos in search of Being led Schembri Bonaci to an earthsoiled cave, where the journey started with a line. In his publication on Kalleya’s sketches, Scratches and God, and Some Lines, Schembri Bonaci reached back to prehistoric art, to cosmological theories of existence, to Origen, Dante, Milton, St Augustine, and several other influences, some declared by Kalleya himself, and others identified by Schembri Bonaci. Kalleya’s own lifelong search for truth transcended neat categorisation, and also transcended the status of a Christian—making him rather strongly antiChristian, as argued by the author.11 The un-concealing of Kalleya’s sketches in search of an understanding of his visual language hence expands the horizon of ideas to see farther and more profoundly.

Via Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) (1913) and the ‘memory of line’, Schembri Bonaci focussed on the horizon as a line delineating space, time, and experience. In Schembri Bonaci’s own words: ‘Kalleya’s scratches and lines are as it were his Prehistoric twinning of an extreme conscious dematerialisation of the object’s image brought and drawn out into its most extreme contour “nakedness” with his idea of cosmic spirituality.’12

Line, and the accumulation of lines to form an image, are the marks or scratches of these coexistences, archaic yet ever-present, and relentlessly searching for time beyond the known. The origin of the word ‘line’, etymologically from the Latin linum, is itself derived from the material: from fibres used to weave and create ad infinitum. It is in the line that the artist’s struggle is made material. The art historian Alois Riegl elucidated this point:

All art history manifests itself as a continual struggle with material. Not the tool or technique has precedence in this struggle, but the creative artistic thought […], which wishes to widen its field of creation […] and intensify its formative power.13

What this means is that the problem of how to render an idea remains restricted by the material culture of society in a given historical period. Kalleya exploited every opportunity to mark or scratch the line on paper, canvas, and into clay. The line is the result of his primitive act to discover his, and thus man’s, relationship with the world.

Kalleya and Dante

‘In Dante’s hands, poetry, as in ancient Greece, regains its domineering spiritual and ritualist role. In a similar stunning way, Kalleya proposes his own, what I call, lineas-prayer, by which line becomes poetics. In Kalleya, philosophy and line re-find and redefine themselves into a religious ritual.’14 In this comparison between poetry and line, Schembri Bonaci unlocked one of the most important doors to discovering Kalleya’s art. With Kalleya, the role of line was re-ignited as a form of communication between the earth and the unknown.

Further to Scratches and God, Schembri Bonaci pursed profound studies of Josef Kalleya’s engagement with Dante’s masterpiece, the Divina Commedia, which takes the reader through a philosophical and intellectual cosmic journey Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, a journey discovered, analysed, and debated by the scholar. The artist’s self-insertion into his visual responses to Dante, and Schembri Bonaci’s recognition of the Maltese artist’s genius, has carved out a novel epistemological path for the study of Kalleya’s works.

The reader is guided by the author himself who leads us along Kalleya’s tormented visual dialogue with Dante’s poem, from Inferno, to Purgatorio, and concluding with Paradiso. Kalleya’s mythic force is expounded in the artist’s own fragmented visual translation-interpretations of the Commedia, creating works which are in perennial conversation with Dante’s universe by traversing through every single canto of the Commedia. The thousands of drawings and sketches studied were previously uncategorised and jumbled, and the author has structured Kalleya’s drawings and sketches according to Dante’s own narrative development from the depths of Hell to the summit of the Empyrean.

Schembri Bonaci bridges a 700-year gap between Medieval Florence and Modern Malta, rendering Dante unto the present, and Kalleya beyond his years and into our twenty-first century. This is one of the pillars upon which Schembri Bonaci’s entire series rests—a crosstemporal dialogue that positions varying degrees of the past onto one Benjaminian constellation of concurrent and tangible arguments which we can recognise in our contemporary time.

In the realms of timeless space, linear chronology loses its purpose and rationale, an approach which repudiates the political tenets and logic of the linear evolution of time. And it is with such temporal fluidity that we are brought back to Kalleya’s studio, where the two artists, Pasmore and Kalleya, jointly wrestle with ideas that have propagated further scratches, lines, thoughts, doubts, and confusion.

Notes

1 Caesar Attard, ‘Mid-debris tas-seklu l-ieħor: Kalleya, l-artist tallum’, Illum (May 1976), 14.

2 Pasmore’s quote was included in a conference paper written by Giuliana Fenech, ‘Pasmore at Play, with Poetry’. Paper presented at the 2022 CounterText conference at Cambridge University, originally presented at the Victor Pasmore Gallery, Valletta, on 21 March 2017, as part of a series on talks on Victor Pasmore, and which will form the basis of a forthcoming publication by FPM.

3 Dennis Vella, Television Interview with Josef Kalleya (Malta: Television Malta and Department of Education, 11 July 1989), 01’57’’–03’08’’.

4 Our Art Critic, ‘Josef Kalleya: An artist of eternal vigour,’ Times of Malta (15 April 1978), 15.

5 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A primer in the social history of pictorial style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 32.

6 Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci has often discussed the question of vision as a political act, with reference to authors such as Baxandall, John Berger and T.J. Clark. See: Shostakovich, Britten, Stravinsky and the Painters in Between: 1936 (Malta: Horizons, 2014).

7 Raymond Head, ‘Holst—Astrology and Modernism in “The Planets”’, Tempo, No. 187 (December 1993), 15-12, here at 21.

8 Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, ‘Scratches as “Aletheia”: Poetising the emerging process of Being: Josef Kalleya’s alternative to Modernism’s aesthetics,’ in Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and Nikki Petroni, eds, Peripheral Alternatives to Rodin in Modern European Sculpture: Critical Essays (Malta: Horizons, 2018), 93-111, here at 94. This essay was originally presented in an international conference dedicated to the development of modern sculpture in Europe, with special attention given to Kalleya’s work, ‘Peripheral Alternatives to Rodin in Modern European Sculpture’, 15 December 2015, University of Malta Valletta Campus, Malta.

9 Charles Camilleri, Note for ‘Morphogenesis’, kept by Victor Pasmore in one of the drawers at his Gudja home. I would like to thank Giulia Privitelli for kindly informing me of Camilleri’s note, as well as for her astute insight into certain points presented in this article.

10 Stated by Kalleya in a newspaper interview. Our Art Critic, ‘Josef Kalleya: An artist of eternal vigour,’ Times of Malta (15 April 1978), 15.

11 Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, Scratches and God, and Some Lines (Malta: Horizons, 2021), 103.

12 Ibid., 119.

13 Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1992), 70.

14 Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, Josef Kalleya: A Child’s Tormented Soul in Paradise, Vol. 1 (Malta: Horizons, 2021), 42.