I was a practising art critic for 35 years, and I have been a gallery-goer since my teens; I still am one, though more discriminating (I hope) than I was. By gallery going I do not mean simply making the rounds of current shows, but also long and often solitary hours spent in art museums many of them quite obscure and provincial. These last, in fact, are sometimes the most rewarding since they allow you to look at neglected or unfashionable works (particularly of the 19th century) and since they cannot afford expensive restorations, you can see certain paintings more or less in their original state, before the restorers get at them and ruin them for ever.
I have strong feelings about restoration. I know that in many cases it is simply essential maintenance, since paint and canvas are mortal like ourselves, but in general it has become little better than licensed vandalism. All over London, for instance, you can see pictures in the windows of art-dealers, which have been “skinned” and then coated with a nauseous kind of shiny plastic varnish. Many or most of these pictures date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries - landscapes, still lives, flower pieces, genre scenes etc. Some are utterly minor and conventional, but others are very good; however, pictures from these particular periods have become ultra-saleable, and the dealers know what the nouveau-riche buying public likes - paintings which superficially look new-minted and in a pale, bright tone with no depth. So what can you expect?
I grew up in a time when there was supposed to be no Irish painting of real value before Jack Yeats, who always stood alone and in most respects still does. That attitude has changed entirely, of course, and now Lavery, Orpen, John Butler Yeats, Osborne et alii have rocketed upwards in the auctions rooms. Scholarly reappraisal has gone hand in hand with this, so that there are good studies and biographies of these men to be had and read. The old idea that we were merely a provincial tributary of British art has been thoroughly discredited; in fact, as we know, Irish artists for several generations looked mainly to France. Roderic O’Conor, for instance, is essentially a French artist, and although there has been a tremendous cult of him in recent decades (launched originally by a few London dealers) I simply cannot believe that he is as good as they say he is, outside a handful of very good pictures. Whereas Nathaniel Hone (equally Frenchified, but he painted his own North Dublin estuary country) has somehow never been as well loved in Ireland as he deserves.
Probably this is largely a matter of his palette; we are not trained any longer to appreciate the nuances of low tones and earth colours, the area, which Hone particularly cultivated. At any rate, he remains a firm favourite of mine, along with the early Paul Henry who has made us see the West of Ireland through his eyes. There was a time when I admired W J Leech, but the big exhibition mounted at the National Gallery a few years ago showed that much or most of his late work was relatively academic and conventional. At his best Leech was very good, but not quite a major figure - he never quite got the Royal Academy out of his system.
However, all these names are slowly drifting more or less into the Old Master category. It is in our judgments of living people, after all, that we register ourselves either as competent critics or shortsighted asses. Blind spots are unavoidable, of course, but it is essential to be able to admit that we were wrong at times, and even quite often. At one time, for instance, I badly misjudged Patrick Collins, who admittedly was going through a bad patch and was producing too many of what my late colleague, Paddy Glendon of the Irish Independent, aptly called gin-and-tonic paintings. Collins was a genuine original, one of the central figures in Irish art since Jack Yeats (of whom, incidentally, he didn’t think a great deal). Today, he would certainly rank high on my list of home favourites.
Louis le Brocquy? I greatly admire his Táin drawings, the earlier tapestries and certain of his paintings, but I experience little gut-reaction before his art as a whole. William Scott? He is a really fine painter who looks better and stronger with time, but I have rarely hungered to own a Scott - not that I have had the option in any case. Tony O’Malley? There is an artist who has made his own language and is especially expressive in the lower ranges of colour. He is uneven, admittedly, but then he is enormously productive, and the range of his work; paintings, gouaches, and drawings, is beyond that of any of his Irish contemporaries. He goes easily to the top of my list.
Mary Swanzy, who had seemed by then to belong to past history, was rediscovered in this country with an exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1968. In retrospect it was not very well chosen, but it began her rehabilitation, and she was kind enough to write me a letter of thanks for my review in the Irish Times. I still have it, written in a firm though rather spidery hand, and in a slightly faded blue envelope. But much as I admire her idiosyncratic, ultra-personal imagination, I give first place to Nano Reid, another artist who, like Hone, has somehow not been taken to the public’s heart, as she should be. Those who still find her oil paintings too involuted and opaque, even muddy, should balance against them her marvellous watercolours, which are luminous and joyful. (Both of these women, by the way, owed a lot to the late Leo Smith and his long-vanished Dawson Gallery.)
The Northern Irish generation of Colin Middleton, Gerard Dillon, Dan O’Neill and George Campbell was a distinguished one, forming an essential segment of the now-defunct Irish Exhibition of Living Art. They created an important chapter in Irish art of the middle and later twentieth century, but their earlier work was generally much stronger and more individual than that they produced in their later years. Middleton might be excepted from this and he was always a dedicated craftsman, yet his output overall is oddly disparate and some of it now looks repetitive and almost mechanical. In general, William Scott has lasted better than any of these, and somehow his work has an international (in the better sense) dimension to it which theirs ultimately lacks.
Of all the Northerners, the one I respond to most is Basil Blackshaw. In fact, at times I have felt him to be the best painter in Ireland - North or South. Precociously gifted as a draughtsman, he was already painting like a veteran in his early twenties and got into public collections early. He could have put most academic artists here or in England to rout on their own pastures, but he refused to stand still and developed a style, which has something in common with the so-called New Image painting of the Eighties. Some years ago he suffered the loss of whole stacks of paintings and drawings in a studio fire, but he came back from that near-knockout blow and is now painting better than ever. He must surely be on anyone’s shortlist, not merely on mine.
By the late Fifties, and certainly by the early Sixties, it had become apparent that the Living Art Exhibition and the generation it represented, broadly speaking, were running out of juice. That vigorous wave of the Forties and the immediate post-war years seemed largely spent; some people were repeating themselves, others were casting round restlessly for a new style without finding one, others again started well but did not fulfil expectations. Individuals of genuine talent appeared, including Edward McGuire who became a portraitist of genius, Barrie Cooke whose glowing early work I still prefer to his late, Camille Souter with her poetic intimacy, Patrick Scott (rather older than these) with his elegant, quasi-minimal abstract style. In sculpture there was Gerda Fromel, though Ian Stuart petered out in middle age after a hugely promising beginning. But gifted though all these were, they did not constitute a group in any sense, or a major switch in taste and direction. And later in the Sixties, Irish art in general was almost submerged by a tidal wave of Americanism.
From this it ultimately emerged, and certain artists, such as Charles Tyrrell, were able to take American-style abstraction in their stride and even learn from it. Tyrell had a striking exhibition at the Project Arts Centre when he was only twenty-four, and he has built steadily on that achievement, climaxed by an important exhibition recently at the RHA Gallagher Gallery. He is a perfectionist worker who lets out of his studio nothing with which he is not wholly and absolutely satisfied. Attempts to import quintessentially New Yorker styles such as Pop and Photorealism turned out to be blind alleys, but Abstract Expressionism in a generalised sense could be absorbed and married to a “native” sensibility.
This proved particularly true of landscape painting, in which an outstanding figure was, and is, Sean McSweeney. Although a Dubliner born, almost from the first he proved himself in tune with the Irish countryside and its very special aura first in Wicklow, then in Sligo where he lives and paints. McSweeney is a man who has followed his own star, quietly and stubbornly, working in a relatively confined area of subject matter but mining it with considerable resource and a steady yield. He, too, goes on my shortlist.
The New Expressionism both in Europe and America - went up like a rocket and came down like a stick, as the saying goes, but at least it threw out plenty of sparks and cinders in its passage. In this country the three painters most associated with it are Patrick Graham, Michael Mulcahy and Brian Maguire three very different figures, in fact, and their later careers too have been very different. Graham did not accept the New Expressionist label and is closer to the “anti-form” trend of the Seventies though unlike most of the people associated with that rather inchoate phase, he largely bases his style in graphic elements and is a rarely gifted draughtsman. Mulcahy, by contrast, is a notable colourist and is drawn to primitive cultures in Africa, Australia and parts of the Orient; his recent work is more decorative than angry or intense, but he has always been a man with a rich flow of ideas. Maguire has ably represented Ireland at the Sao Paulo Biennale. At times, it seems to me, he becomes a little incoherent in the formal sense, but this seems to stem from having too much to say rather than too little; and his work has a very individual sense of emotional urgency and real guts.
Irish art since the Second World War has been fortunate in attracting talented people from abroad, and the trend luckily continues. (Probably it was Ireland and its landscape, rather than its relatively provincial art world, which was the real magnet.) Imogen Stuart, Gerda Fromel and Alexandra Wejchert in sculpture, Charles Brady, Barrie Cooke, Camille Souter, Hilda van Stockum and Veronica Bolay in painting, are all figures that come immediately to mind. All of them have, as it were, naturalised their art here and have widened our terms of reference. Another notable case is William Crozier, a Scot who has identified strongly with the Irish landscape, yet another is Stephen McKenna, who of course is Irish only a generation or so removed, but was originally perceived as being English. Both these distinguished painters have, of course, reputations extending well outside Ireland. And another again is Hughie O’Donoghue, born in Manchester of Irish blood, who has an international standing (he is much admired in Germany) and who now lives and works in Co Kilkenny.
However, all these have received their due, though in some cases belatedly. A figure that remains underrated, or it might be more accurate to say is too often merely taken for granted, is my sister-in-law, Nancy Wynne-Jones. Welsh-born, London-trained but largely shaped by study under Peter Lanyon in Cornwall, she has now lived and worked in Ireland for thirty years. She, like certain other painters of her generation, has absorbed the lessons of abstract art and has turned them skilfully to landscape, still life and figure painting - but to landscape above all. A considerable artist at her best, and never marking time over a long career, she qualifies for my final vote. And so, shall we agree to leave it at that? I am getting rather too old for arguments particularly arguments, which, by their very nature, can have no conclusion. n

Brian Fallon was born in 1933 at Cootehill, Co Cavan, the second son of the poet Padraic Fallon, and was educated at St Peter’s College, Wexford, and TCD. He served for many years on the staff of the Irish Times, of which he was also Literary Editor from 1977 to 1988.