Joseph McBrinn examines one of the most fascinating partnerships in Irish art history
When Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett first met, in London during the last days of World War I, they set out almost immediately for Paris. They moved into a cheap hotel on the rue Vavin in Montparnasse, the city’s artistic epicentre, surrounded by its legendary studios and cafés. They enrolled at André Lhote’s Académie, Montparnasse and began exploring the city, from its ancient monuments to its avant-garde galleries. While they admired Lhote (1885–1962) as an artist and a teacher, they wanted to work along the lines of the new abstract art, which did not interest him. They were in Paris for only a matter of months when they decided to approach the painter and theorist Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and ask for lessons. Gleizes was the acknowledged leader of the abstract artists associated with Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne. Although he had no pupils, he agreed to take them on. They would spend the next few years working intensely in his Paris studio and later at Moly-Sabata, the utopian artists’ colony that he set up in the Ardèche department of south-eastern France as ‘a community of kindred spirits’.
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