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IThe career of Basil Blackshaw is a phenomenon for which it is hard to
find any obvious parallel in Irish art of the last half-century. Hardly
surprising in itself, perhaps, considering how individual, or even idiosyncratic,
his output has been and how unlike any of his Irish contemporaries he
has been almost from first to last. The precociously talented young man
whose painting The Field was bought by the Ulster Museum half a century
ago, went on to trace out a slightly zigzag development which had its
peaks and occasional troughs, but has recently culminated in a magnificent
‘third period’. As recently as a decade ago, we tended to think
of him as a highly gifted painter rather than as someone who was primus
inter pares. There was still, of course, an honoured elder generation
then; but O’Malley and Patrick Collins have since passed away and
only le Brocquy remains. Now Blackshaw, in turn, is in imminent danger
of becoming a Grand Old Man, perhaps even a Saoi of Aosdana.
In the opinion of many people – and in my own as well – he is
at present the outstanding painter in Ireland North or South, and a figure
of European significance. Yet he remains virtually unknown in England
even though he is a citizen of the UK, nor has any London gallery that
I know of shown a strong interest in his work. In that sense, his career
differs strongly from that of the late William Scott or, for that matter,
the sculptor F E McWilliam. Both these distinguished Ulstermen were quite
rapidly absorbed into the mainstream of British art while Blackshaw, though
his work has been seen sporadically both in America and the Continent,
has curiously little reputation outside Ireland.
This would seem to reflect badly on the rather closed and snobbish mentality
of the London art world, so ready as a rule to welcome fashionable names
from abroad, yet almost wholly oblivious of a major talent just across
the Irish Sea. Some of this relative neglect, however, is undoubtedly
due to the artist’s almost obsessively private personality, a factor
which no doubt has served him well in various respects but has tended
to dim his light under a bushel. Admittedly there has been a noticeable
flurry of interest in Blackshaw over the past few years, culminating in
a number of important exhibitions and the publication of a large book
on him (to which I happen to be one of the contributors). The dealers,
too, appear to be closing in and Blackshaw paintings are becoming quite
profitable pieces of Real Estate. All this, however, has taken place inside
a relatively restricted context.
Greater fame probably does not interest him much at this stage and would
hardly bring him much in the way of personal gratification. It is well
known that Blackshaw dislikes public occasions, finds even exhibition
openings an ordeal, and is quite happy inside the four walls of his studio
within sight of Lough Neagh, or busying himself with his beloved dogs
and horses. Fame in the banal sense of television and media exposure would
merely be an intrusion for him, even a nuisance. The plain fact remains
that Irish art at this moment urgently needs a major figure to project
abroad and stand erect among the senior figures of Europe and America.
The only living Irish painter who can legitimately claim to have an international
standing is Sean Scully, Irish by birth but English by upbringing and
training, and essentially a figure of the New York School. Scully fits
comfortably into the context of post-Rothko and post-Newman abstract painting,
while Blackshaw stands more or less alone, outside any contemporary school
or style.
Even in these days when conceptualism, photography and various well-stoked
personality cults (e.g. Damien Hirst or Cindy Sherman) largely dominate
the art world, I cannot see a major Blackshaw exhibition falling flat
in London, Cologne, Zurich or any other major European centre. New York,
of course, is something else again and Sean Scully apart, no contemporary
Irish artist has really cracked its defences in the way certain German
painters have managed to do – Gerhard Richter being the most obvious
case. Nevertheless there is always a first time, though in my opinion
such an exhibition should lay a heavy stress on Blackshaw’s late
style, rather than attempt to cover the twists and turns of his career
as a whole. As with Jack Yeats, the gulf between his early work and the
late is huge, though that early work has its own place in Irish art of
the 20th century and no doubt will continue to hold its own. It is not,
however, readily exportable.
When fire destroyed Blackshaw’s studio in the 80s, along with many
of his paintings and drawings and his four well-loved easels, it proved
to be a turning-point in his life. Out of the ashes, literally, of his
past work arose a new style, a new sensibility, above all a reborn colour
sense. Of course things do not go quite as neatly as that and with hindsight,
the roots of his late development can be traced back well into the 70s
or even the 60s. Some of the destroyed paintings, too, appear to have
represented a breakthrough in his own eyes – which must have made
it even harder for him to start all over again. But presumably the choice
was either to do that, or to admit terminal defeat and shut up shop for
good. In Kierkegaardian and existentialist terms, it was an Either/Or
situation.
A vestigial Expressionism has always existed in his work, and one of his
early influences was Munch; it seems, too, that at art college in Belfast
he tried for a time to paint like Kokoschka – ‘throwing the
paint around’ as he put it himself. Against that, he underwent the
strict training in draughtsmanship almost obligatory then in the British
Isles, which often went hand in hand with a distrust for liberated colour
and a tendency to work in rather low, restrained tones. To an extent this
may even have served as a necessary discipline to his natural ‘painterliness’
but it was also an inhibition which it took him years to throw off completely.
Blackshaw has never professed much interest in American painting and the
wave of Abstract Expressionism which swept over Europe from the late 50s
seems to have affected him only marginally. Abstraction, in any case,
has never been his metier; he is a man who seemingly needs a specific
subject to fire him up. Yet in spite of his relative isolation as an artist,
Blackshaw, like all born painters has antennae which are sensitised to
the Zeitgeist and he is fully aware of what is ‘happening’ in
contemporary painting. And from the late 70s onwards, one of the strongest
trends internationally was towards a new kind of figurative Expressionism,
or Neo-Expressionism as it was sometimes called. This was fuelled by various
sources — the work of Francis Bacon, the rediscovery of German Expressionism
(particularly in England), the reaction against the cul-de-sac of Minimalism,
etc. Above all, it was dictated by an almost universal need to slough
off the straitjacket of formalism which for decades a moribund Modernist
aesthetic had dogmatically imposed.
In many respects Post-Modernism turned out to be a broad, treacherous
morass out of which we still have to emerge and find solid ground, while
the cynical exploitativenesss it encouraged gave birth to a bewildering
mélange of pastiche styles. This does not alter the fact that the
overall trend towards painterly freedom and expressiveness was a salutary
and even necessary one. Blackshaw’s late work should be viewed against
this wider context, though of course it was also dictated by his own,
inner imperative.
The result is an astonishing flowering over the past decade, with an imaginative
freedom and daring which the bulk of his earlier paintings had scarcely
more than hinted at. And unlike his German contemporaries (though he admires
Georg Baselitz, or did at least) Blackshaw possesses humour and visual
wit which bubble up through the most diverse subject matter. From the
rather subdued, tonalist palette of his early days he has blossomed into
a brilliant, uninhibited and wholly original colourist – probably
Craigie Aitchison in Scotland is his only real rival in the British Isles.
This made it all the more difficult for many of us when we came to view
the exhibition of his recent pictures in the Ulster Museum a year ago.
Instead of the chromatic abundance we had come to expect, many of the
works were in an earthbound, almost monochrome tonality; instead of the
quasi-Baroque exuberance of his recent subject matter, the overall effect
was muted and almost sombre. Only in a few paintings, such as the striking
and rather sinister Night Rider, seemed a direct continuation of his work
of the 90s. At least the nudes, once again, were magisterial and the magnificent
double portrait Graham and Jude was a masterpiece by any standards. (The
couple represented, incidentally, are the gifted artist Graham Gingles
and Blackshaw’s regular model Jude Stevens, a striking personality
in her own right.)
I admit frankly that my immediate reaction was a feeling of anti-climax,
though the Ulster Museum is rather an unsympathetic venue. More recent
exposure to these works – including the bare, dusty-toned ‘Window’
series – has forced me to revise that original opinion and realise
that Blackshaw, once again, has been ahead of his critics. Instead of
a partial reversion to his early manner, these pictures mark an entirely
new phase and are among the finest and most original he has produced.
Many of them are in a large format — at least, by the modest scale
of Irish painting – and demonstrate that Blackshaw, almost uniquely
among recent or contemporary Irish artists, has the ability to work monumentally.
An interesting innovation was the introduction of lettering into several
canvases, a practice adopted by various artists today including Anselm
Kiefer.
So when will Ireland send Blackshaw to represent it at the Venice or São
Paolo Biennale? (Admittedly, no great distinction any more, since these
events have become as numbingly predictable as the Royal Academy and Beaux
Arts exhibitions was a century ago) When will it sponsor some major touring
exhibition of his work to England and the Continent? He was, of course,
included in the Rocs exhibitions of 1971 and 1980, and was also included
in group exhibitions which have travelled to London, various EEC countries,
and to America. Group exhibitions, however, tend to annul individual talents
in favour of a generalised impression which tends to fade with time; they
may prepare the ground but they do not conquer it. A major artist, such
as Blackshaw undoubtedly is, demands to be seen in strength and depth.
In spite of the localised milieu in which he has lived and worked, his
pictorial language is broadly based and – unlike the work of other
good Irish painters – makes an immediate impact without the need
of some preliminary cultural acclimatisation. The artist himself might
not thank us for it particularly, but it would still be a blow struck
for the prestige of Irish art.
Brian Fallon served for many years on the staff
of the Irish Times, of which he was also literary editor from 1977 to
1988.
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