In slightly over forty years of existence (founded 1962) the Contemporary Irish Art Society has managed to do much good work and some quite astute collecting. The show at IMMA, curated by Catherine Marshall and Campbell Bruce, includes both works which it donated over the years to Irish public institutions and other works from private collections. The result is a highly representative selection of Irish art over nearly half a century.

A glance down the list of artists will bear this out. Picking out names almost at random, they include (roughly in alphabetical order) Robert Ballagh, Basil Blackshaw, Charles Brady, Patrick Collins, Barrie Cooke, William Crozier, Gerard Dillon, Felim Egan, Conor Fallon, Micheal Farrell, Gerda Fromel, Paddy Graham, Hilary Heron, Nevill Johnson, Eithne Jordan, Oisín Kelly, Melanie le Brocquy, Anne Madden, Elizabeth Magill, Brian Maguire, Alice Maher, Norah McGuinness, Edward McGuire, James McKenna, Stephen McKenna, Seán McSweeney, F E McWilliam, Colin Middleton, Mick Mulcahy, Carolyn Mulholland, Janet Mullarney, Hughie O’Donoghue, Tony O’Malley, Nano Reid, Patrick and William Scott, Sean Scully, Noel Sheridan, John Shinnors, Camille Souter, Imogen Stuart, Charles Tyrrell and Nancy Wynne-Jones.

Without (I hope) undue chauvinism, you might claim that this is as impressive a roll-call as most European countries today could offer. A wide-ranging list, covering a whole spectrum of styles and personalities, though it doesn’t merely include ‘just about everybody’ and instead represents considered choice rather than mere coverage. I should venture the guess that at least twenty of those names will still be relevant in fifty years’ time. (Notice, too, that there is a fair representation of sculptors, which is not always the case.)

I shall venture to select a few – well, not necessarily obvious highlights, but individual works with which I feel some special affinity. Patrick Collins’ High Brasil (Fig 9) has hung in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (formerly known as the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art) for some years now and dates to 1962, a good period in his output. The rather fanciful and literary title straightaway summons up misty Celtic Twilight vistas, but then Collins was that kind of ‘poetic’ artist anyway, though in a mid-20th-century idiom. He was keenly aware of abstract painting and its capacities, but kept just on the side of figurativism, tending to suggest subject matter rather than to represent it. For me his pictures are a very special amalgam of the seen, the imagined and the remembered.

     

Gerda Fromel’s Marble Head (Fig 2) should serve as standing reminder of how good she was and how much we lost by her drowning while in her middle forties. Stylistically she was not an innovator – in fact she was rather eclectic, but her debts to Lehmbruck, Giacometti and others are cancelled by her perfect craftsmanship and her gift of poetic understatement. Fromel could carve as well as she could model, which is not always the case with talented sculptors. Nuance, rather than power or energy, was Gerda Fromel’s particular strong point.
We don’t usually think of Colin Harrison as a portraitist (at least I don’t), but he is here with a double portrait of Alan Tate and Tony Hickey (Fig 4), dating from 1978. Colin Harrison is, of course, no longer resident in Ireland but still shows regularly or semi-regularly at the much-respected Taylor Galleries and is also seen in the annual RHA shows, though sparsely. He is an artist entirely on his own – relatively traditional (though not academic) in style yet sharply modern in his sensibility. Over the years, he has never once disappointed his admirers, though so far the private collectors have recognised his worth more than the public bodies have. Is it not high time that somebody put together a decent retrospective of his work, going back forty-odd years? By now he fully deserves it.

For years I have regarded Melanie le Brocquy as one of our finest sculptors, though her smallness of scale and delicacy of modelling make her to some extent an acquired taste, or at least an artist who requires some thought and study. Father and Son Standing, in bronze, has all her quality of refined and subtle intimacy. Incidentally, it might be interesting to compare this with James McKenna’s white marble Duil. McKenna, while uneven, was a much-underrated artist who, at his best, rivals Gerda Fromel in sheer sensitivity.

A very different territory is entered in Stephen McKenna’s St John’s Point Lighthouse (Fig 8), one of his Donegal paintings from the 1980s. McKenna’s big retrospective in the RHA Gallery has pinpointed how significant a figure he is in the post-Modernist context, how versatile he is, both in style and subject matter, and how skilfully he synthesises the past and the present. (And yet there are people who prefer to think of him as a kind of neo-academic, rather than the ultra-sophisticated stylist he is in reality.) It is an interesting exercise in contrasts to move down from Donegal to the coast of neighbouring Sligo, the subject of Seán McSweeney’s warmly colourful Evening Shoreline (Fig 3). More romantic and free-flowing than McKenna, and also more indebted to Abstract Expressionism, he is equally conscious of the genius loci. (A quality he also shares with Nancy Wynne-Jones, as demonstrated in her smallish, intimate Near Moylan.)

John Shinnors has actually been painting for some decades, though it is only in the past decade that he has jumped to what, however much I hate the term, I can only call celebrity status. I didn’t greatly care for his most recent exhibition in the Taylor Galleries, but a genuine artist is always on the track of something new and the critics may sometimes have to catch up stylistically. His Trapeze Series (Fig 1), dates from the early 1990s, when he was still close to a kind of personal Surrealism and may come as a mild surprise to those who know only his very recent paintings. Shinnors is generally rather a ‘dark’ painter, a very taxing area to work in though the nuances of the lower colour ranges can be among the most rewarding. (How marvellously Tony O’Malley handled them, for instance!) He has a special feeling for greys and muffled whites, and he can also interject small, rusty-red touches of colour which ignite a whole canvas. Shinnors has been rather a slow ripener, admittedly, but the harvest has been well worth waiting for.

With – rather unusual for an Irish group exhibition – a relative wealth of good sculptors, Carolyn Mulholland should not be overlooked as she quite often is. Stylistically she is rather a maverick, though in a positive sense, and while so many sculptors of her generation went over to large abstract pieces in steel, she has stuck largely to intimate works in bronze (she is also, incidentally, a fine portraitist). In my experience, her work generally shows up best in a smallish room rather than in big empty (or crowded) spaces, but Night and Day is a fine piece and she usually repays a second or third look (Fig 6). Hughie O’Donoghue has proved himself a genuine heavweight and has by now an international reputation, though he lives and works by choice in his ancestral land (he is actually of English birth). He is one of the few painters in this country who seems totally at home working on a large scale, I might even say a grand scale, since his mind runs towards grandiosity. By this stage of his career, I suspect, he has gone as far as he can with the massive, emotionally powerful but sometimes repetitive
Crucifixion themes which have virtually obsessed him for the last fifteen years or so. (Perhaps he has also exhausted, for the moment anyhow, the theme of his soldier-father’s ordeal in France at the time when most of the BEF was fleeing for Dunkirk with the Panzers close behind. It has served him well, certainly.) His exhibit is entitled Srahnaplaia (Sraight of the Plague) which may relate to his West of Ireland family background or even to the Famine (Fig 7).

Rather an eclectic mixture of styles, then, taking the exhibition as a variegated whole? Granted, but this is a positive, not a negative, and such overall eclecticism happens to be the sum total of many contrasting individualities who chart their own way and refuse to fit obviously into schools, movements or trends. On the Continent, or in America, artists tend to emerge in waves — sometimes, indeed, in waves of shock-troops. By contrast, one of the distinguishing marks of Irish visual art (and of literature) is its individualism – or originality, as some people might put it. The typical Irish artist likes to till his own small holding, rather than merge into a co-operative. Perhaps the very smallness of Ireland encourages this, just as the vast spaces of America tends to drive artists together in New York? It is a thought on which some philosophically-minded art student might just consider basing a thesis. n

Brian Fallon is an art critic and a founder board member of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

SIAR 50 (looking back on the collection of CIAS) continues in the East and West ground floor galleries at IMMA until February 2006.