The last time I interviewed Michael Kane, prior to an exhibition of his at the Art Space Gallery in London, he was in a small quiet flat in Waterloo Road. The current premises are more than a trifle larger, so secluded that the taxi driver only had a vague notion as to where it was, and elegantly designed by his wife Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. The design includes a purpose-built studio, glowing with light.

It has two tall rows of architect-designed bookcases, lined in a neat orderly fashion with books on art and literature, including a shelf full of the American hard-backed magazine Horizon, Ezra Pound's poems, sheaves of Thames & Hudson paperbacks and so forth. The brushes and usual paraphernalia are in their own space on the floor like an installation with each item precisely located and his own paintings and prints are on some of the walls.
We sat in his livingroom, the rear view into the studio, the frontal view out over quiet playing fields. He is a tall, sturdy, broad-shouldered man who seems to shrink obligingly when he sits. The voice, which has an actor’s range without the theatricality, can swiftly quicken, in all senses, into passionate enthusiasm. He sits quietly, doesn’t fidget, and makes a herbal tea before we start.

Brian McAvera: John O’Regan once observed, apropos a 1990 Rubicon Gallery exhibition of yours, that although you were a skilled draughtsman, 'nothing is delicately observed, as if to avoid the risk of the work becoming agreeable or comfortable’. That seems to me to summon up one of your key qualities as an artist: an edginess, a prickliness, a determination not to accept Matisse’s armchair dictum of comfort. Do you agree?
Michael Kane: I do and I don’t. The end result is likely to give that impression. I can draw gracefully when I want to; when it’s necessary. When I was drawing from the TV during the Olympic Games, because of the nature of athletes’ movement, it turned out quite tastefully, but with a rough edge, which is commensurate with the nature of athletes. The aim in art is to achieve a form: one isn’t looking for graceful effects but for an overall configuration; something which satisfies an inner impulse, which is impossible to explain.
Around 1960 I had work in Living Art and a friend who was an architect remarked that my work was not ‘ingratiating’. I remember the word! I was somewhat taken aback. At the time I started, there were two schools of art in this country: the Living Art view or style, and the RHA academic style. Each falsified the nature of art and each tried to be as ingratiating as possible: the RHA with people who were likely to buy work and commission portraits, and the Living Art as an interpretation of Modernism as being ‘feminine’ in that it was dominated by women.
Modernism was seen as a nice slickly flowing line, or a playful one like that of Paul Klee. Everyone was trying to do what Picasso and Matisse and Klee were doing, and they were all making this kind of work from small postcard reproductions, and so were producing a misrepresentation of Modernism. People consider me to be a good draughtsman but I’m not naturally gifted like Charles Cullen or Brian Bourke, so ingratiation doesn’t come easily to me.

B McA: You were in your early twenties when you had an extended period of study and travel in Spain, Italy, and perhaps less exotically, in Britain. How formative was this period of your life in relation to both your art, and your art politics?
M K: Art politics? I was apolitical at the time. It was more of a growing up and maturing process. It was an opening-up experience. I hadn’t intended going to England. I was stranded on my way back from the continent! Spain, in 1958-59—that’s now a period which the Spanish look back on and call The Hunger! In pensiones you were constantly hungry. There wasn’t a great incentive to look for art, but I was looking for Modernism. I hadn’t come to terms with historical art. Visits to the Prado were not as rewarding as they ought to have been. I discovered Modernism in small basement galleries. A big favourite of younger painters was Bernard Buffet. Existentialism was the fashionable way of thinking. I’ve remained one ever since.
In Italy, it was a different matter. It was psychologically, not climatically sunnier. Spain is a very dark place: winter in Madrid! most of my exploration was with literature and philosophy. I bought a huge two-volume history of philosophy in Madrid: I’ve never got to the end of it. Darkness versus light. I prefer to see Goya outside the Prado. The Uffizi had a tremendous impact on me. Especially the Pre-Renaissance, from Duccio to Piero della Francesca. It wasn’t so much the figure, or the message, but the geometry: the ability to translate clean geometry into powerful expression. This has stayed with me and commentators on my work don’t seem to see it. When I saw my retrospective at the RHA it was the geometry that struck me.
The colour in Piero della Francesca is obviously extremely important. But Pre-Renaissance painting is either restored, or a faded version. I imagine that Renaissance, and Greek art, in their times, would be considered today as garish and vulgar. It’s the compositions and the line that appeal to me most. Funnily enough Venetian painters don’t appeal to the same extent. With the exception of Giovanni Bellini. He carries through the painting of form.

B McA: You have always worked figuratively and the seedbed for much of your art seems to have been second generation German Expressionism. After almost forty-five years of activity as a painter and printmaker, you have none-too-quietly ignored all non-figurative trends. So what is your opinion of non-figurative art, and what is it that emphatically drew you to second generation Expressionism?
M K: I have to say that that is not quite accurate. I’ve never absolutely abjured abstract art. There are a few great abstract artists like Serge Poliakoff who appeal to me greatly. His colour and geometry are deeply appealing and likewise those of Kandinsky and Klee. The other thing is that my earliest influence was Cézanne and the French School, and Rouault was an early love whom I didn’t quite reject but lost contact with until I saw an exhibition of his in Switzerland in the early eighties. Rouault as an Expressionist is comparable to the great Germans.The German Expressionists came to me at a late stage. Schmidt-Rottluff thought he was doing Matisse! I do agree that having travelled in central Europe a great deal, I did learn that there was a lot of the history of art which was ignored by the Anglo-American commentators.
People tell me that I’m like Beckmann. The daddy of them all is Kokoschka, who started as a wild expressionist and ended up something like the last great baroque practitioner. He’s a magnificent painter, with wonderful surfaces and colours, and a great humanity. There’s a quotation from his letters: ‘All art is abstract in any case but visual art has never been non-objective at any time in human history’. An epigraph I used for a catalogue of my work.

B McA: You’ve lived most of your life in Dublin, and its people as well as its various locales permeate your work. Likewise a blunt sexuality and an equally blunt violence infuses your art, not only in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of painterly attack. Does Dublin determine the sex and violence, or is it the other way around?
M K: It’s not specific at all. The world is a violent place and people are potentially violent creatures. A healthy way of expressing one’s savagery is through art. I’ve always loved Dublin (Figs 1,3 &5). We come back to the hard edge of geometry when we consider Baggot Street, an 18th-century architectural geometry which gives the streets an angular presence, mollified and mellowed by time and by the nature of the brick. This imparts to the city an allure that has never failed to please me. Having been familiar with the pubs of Dublin, one is familiar with real people: the pub is a democratic institution. Essentially artists aren’t political at all. It would be very hard to understand a right-wing artist, though there is a difference between right wing and conservative. The artist has to maintain a certain sort of conservatism. The left as an original force of liberation has betrayed true values in art. You see, a misinterpretation of liberal, social, and existential
values can lead to an anarchic narcissism in certain artists. It leads them into the trap of serving capitalism while imagining that they are freeing their creative energies and so it leads to Popular Art (especially so-called pop music which is commercial, not popular). The same thing happens in painting: a mindless manifestation of self-indulgence in every commercial gallery, serving only to make money for the big dealers. I’ve got to the stage now that if I go to see work, I don’t go into the contemporary art museums. As a youth that would have stimulated me and motivated me, but now I just get depressed. This is rather sad.

B McA: I remember looking at a number of ‘portraits’ that you exhibited at Art Space in London in 1990 and thinking that, rather like load-bearing columns, they both contained and dispersed the psychological stresses of survival within society. The accents of caricature had been relocated to expressive essentials, and the combination of sunny colour and caricatural humour allowed for a happy collision of buoyancy and depression. Does this make sense to you?
M K: The word caricature is perfectly accurate. Good caricature is close to being good art. Good cartooning is art. In every good portrait there has to be an element of distortion, exaggeration or caricature which lifts it above and beyond the greatest photograph. So whereas I wouldn’t consciously set out to make a caricature, an element is there, especially in the portrait drawing. I have done caricatures and cartoons : every artist has.
I wouldn’t choose to do portraits. I’m always surprised I’ve ever managed to pull it off (Figs 7 &13). I wouldn’t be able to do what Kokoschka did, making portraits of politicians and millionaires yet making great paintings at the same time. I was looking at a newspaper photograph in the New York Herald Tribune when I was on holiday. It was of a German woman politician in an interior with Kokoschka’s portrait of Konrad Adenauer in the background. I hadn’t realised that the head was so very much out of proportion. It was possible to see that it was a caricature to a certain extent, yet it was still a very great painting.

B McA: Perhaps because of my criticism of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, I’m intrigued by your criticisms of the Arts Council establishment in Dublin from the mid-1960s onwards. Can you tell us about this and how stimulating or debilitating was the struggle?
M K: From the early days of my first marriage, when things weren’t easy, one found that those being patronised and helped were not the people who deserved it. There was the famous instance of my going to see Mervyn Wall, who was secretary of the Arts Council then. One would sometimes be granted an audience and sometimes not.
I visited, and the receptionist told me that Mr Wall was busy, but before she could do anything I had opened the folding doors, went in, and suggested that they might buy some pictures, and he said ‘We can’t give to individuals, only to a group’, and I said’ I am a group. I’ve a wife and two kids’! At the same time they were spending a considerable amount of money, in terms of contemporary purchases, buying pictures by their friends: eighty per cent from one gallery, and twenty per cent from another one. Young artists were getting no support. This led to agitation which succeeded in the de-establishment of that particular Council, and in the expansion of the entire apparatus of the Council. I found it all stimulating, and depressing, at the same time. I much prefer to forget all about it now.

B McA: Can you outline your role in relation to Independent Artists, and assess its achievements, and failures?
M K: I came into the Independents in the second year. I was co-opted with John Kelly, John Behan and Brian Bourke. It was a platform for artists, often figurative modernists who didn’t fit into Living Art, so the Independents was a necessary institution, between the reactionary RHA, and Living Art. The White Stag Group was the precursor of Living Art, and its weakness led straight to it. The prime movers of the White Stag group were refugees, minor artists who felt vastly superior to modernists in Ireland. The Irish artists who joined the group and subsequently founded Living Art produced similar work by following the perusal of little books of reproductions of Surrealists and the like. They were pale and poor versions of Modernism and the reason they’re being resurrected is money. Somebody once referred to my generation as having produced an ‘alternative Modernism.’ Through the Independents we provided a means of exhibition for people who might not produce a great deal of work in a year, and for the rest of us, a regular exposure of our work.
On another level, it became a political platform: the annual catalogue could contain essays that set out the state of play in the arts, and suggested ways of altering things for the better. And thirdly, it was there for the newer generations and so provided for renewal. From 1960 onwards, up to the 1980s, several generations were coming through who went along with the ideals but produced their own sort of work. There’s nothing like that sort of freedom to set a young artist on the road to fulfilment. The other great thing that came out of the Independents was the creation of the Project Arts Centre, probably the greatest achievement at that time. If we hadn’t served on the Independents, we wouldn’t have known how to go about setting it up.

B McA: What is your opinion of the various Rosc exhibitions? And specifically, why did you feel it necessary to resign from the committee and go public, in relation to the 1984 Rosc?
M K: Rosc was the brainchild of Michael Scott. The general view of Scott, was that the Irish people were visually illiterate, so they brought in designers from Sweden with respect to furniture, commercial artists from Holland with respect to posters of things, and in terms of fine art, they brought in artists from all over the place because they believed everybody knew more about art than the Irish. Therefore Rosc was an international exhibition which excluded Irish artists. This was patently erroneous. In Ireland at the time, almost anyone was as good as most of the people in Rosc, and there was a hell of a lot of mediocrity amongst the international artists! When it came to the period when I came onto the selection committee, there had been notions of putting Irish artists into a separate place, pure apartheid! I did publish about this at the time but distorted versions appeared in the press. What happened was that we all went to three or four meetings and Scott was the chair. There was a certain amount of give and take. In the end it came down to a discussion between Scott and myself. He would give me a name and ask if I objected. I’d say ‘No’. Why should I object? So we drew up a complete list, mine of artists I wanted in and his, of his choice.
Without my knowledge, this list was rejected by some other committee, even though the final selection had officially been made. I was sent a letter saying that the decision was rescinded. For me this was not a democratic practice, and I therefore revealed to the press what had happened. I didn’t resign. The rest of the committee did! And then the selection was given to one particular architect. They didn’t want the people I had suggested, all of whom would now be considered to be leading Irish artists like Maguire, Cullen, James McKenna and others.

B McA: You studied etching with Patrick Hickey, and then worked as his assistant for a while. Now you’ve always worked as a printmaker, and perhaps Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a source of inspiration. What attracted you to the printmaking medium, and especially to woodcuts, and how do you view the current health of printmaking in Ireland?
M K: The feeling I have when I see a print exhibition is that the techniques of printmaking have taken precedence over expression. People who don’t have a great deal of talent can use the medium to make something which looks attractive but has nothing to say. There are more facilities now and the more the better.
We started out in the Graphic Studio in Upper Mount Street in a pioneering effort. It’s one of the best in these islands. What motivated us? There was a revival of printmaking which is generally referred to on the continent as graphics. There was a facility for lithography in the college but it was badly taught. Some students managed to overcome this, but we knew little about how to produce etchings or anything else! My generation would have been impressed by Rouault and by the etchings of Picasso. So when the studio opened and Patrick began to teach, we were enthusiastic. My devotion to the woodcut came about in a circuitous way. I was on the committee of the Graphic Studio in the late sixties and early seventies and the system of finance then was centred on patrons who were persuaded to contribute money and in return would receive prints. It seemed to me that the artists were getting little return; were getting less value than the patrons. It was a bee in my bonnet so I resigned and my eccentric quasi-Marxist interpretation of things meant that the artist was impelled to create his own means of production, and so I cut up bits of old furniture and made prints. And then I realised that the woodcut was suited to my temperament (Figs 8 & 9). It’s very hard work: exacting and physical. As one gets older, it’s a task that one would rather not have to face. I did begin to experiment with drypoint, another technique that suits me. There’s a direct sharp-edged quality there, that etching per se doesn’t have, but I haven’t been doing much of that recently. Another great source of inspiration was the etchings of Rembrandt which are extraordinarily modern in their expression and technique. I mustn’t forget Goya’s etchings. They transcend their epoch whereas those of Jacques Callot didn’t quite. In modern times I’m constantly referring to a man in Vienna called Alfred Hrdlicka. He’s very much in the central European tradition of Grosz, Klimpt and so on, but much more powerful. He’s the best sculptor in the world today and is deeply figurative and humane, and pretty explicitly political. His etchings are absolute knockouts, an ongoing inspiration to me since I came across him in the sixties. He was a friend of Kokoschka. I was astonished by both the sculpture and the etchings and subsequently in 1972 at the Saltzburg seminar, some glib participant referred to Austria as not having any talent for sculpture. I said ‘Have you heard of Alfred Hrdlicka?’ but this was dismissed. A German lady behind me asked if I would like to meet the artist and the next day four of us drove down to Vienna, had a drink in his studio, and saw the work at first hand. He had an exhibition in the Project over ten years ago and Fallon made a condescending review. It was probably one of the best exhibitions ever seen in Dublin, but it passed like a ship in the night.

B McA: You’re of a generation that included Brian Bourke, Alice Hanratty and Charles Cullen. From your point of view, who are the key contributors, at least to the first two thirds of the 20th century, and why?
M K: As in literature, there are very few people. Critics are expected to put lots of names into their publications. However, you’d have to include John and Jack Yeats. There were some good figurative paintings by Paul Henry in the early part of his career, but then he seemed to concentrate on those awful landscapes. A precursor of the 20th century was Nathaniel Hone.
And then there was Roderic O’Conor, Walter Osborne, Harry Kernoff. Gerard Dillon deserves to be there. At his best he was unique. In sculpture James McKenna is a towering figure and, of course, Andrew O’Connor and Jerome Connor.

B McA: You’ve been a socialist all of your life. How important has this been for your art?
M K: I was in so far as my father was a socialist, who voted for Labour, being a sort of liberal socialist pro-Brit who had been in the British Army and in the Metropolitan Police in Dublin. In most ways he had no influence on me. But as time went on, I found that one drifted to the left. Artists are not constrained by social position. Not having property or money makes you free-floating in society. Eventually it seemed that socialism made more sense: let’s call it democracy, or Existentialism. As one gets older one realises that it would be irrational to go in any other direction. My last exhibition at the Rubicon had some pictures inspired by photos of the village I was brought up in: snapshots collected from family and the public and published in a book. When I was looking at them I realised that country life, as I had experienced it, had nothing to do with agriculture or the land. It was a kind of playground for me. Father had a small shop but we didn’t own the house. All my cousins and aunts had been trades-people, labourers and servants. Father also had to be a mechanic, keeping the electricity going from a generator, so often seen with a spanner in his hand.
Next door to us was a garage: I’d be in and out of it and the mechanics would be in and out of our house (Fig 6). We lived on the main Wexford Road, so trucks and buses were passing all the time. It was an hour from Dublin in a beautiful landscape, but it wasn’t the romantic kind of country childhood. So when I painted the pictures, I worked on the theme of the farmer and his wife and child, but realised that I couldn’t identify with these peasants. So I changed the peasants to mechanics and the whole thing began to make sense. As Léger made manifest, we’re workers. I’m not saying this out of a spirit of condescension. As far as socialism is concerned, for me like Sartre, socialism and politics ought to be devoted to the welfare of individuals. Existentialism is about the development of potential in every individual who, in turn, contributes to the collective. That’s what politics should be.

Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.