Page 35 - Studio International - December 1971

Irish Far away to the West, where the clouds are
higher in the sky, Ireland; a mixture of its own
commentary magical remoteness, its terrible realities, and its
new role as a sort of international media centre.
Tim Hilton The planes bring in the pressmen, public
relations men, art critics, television cameras;
and the boats take out the emigrants, as they
always have done. The 1971 international
version of the old cead mille failte seems to have
made the country into a huge hotel, a
stopping-off point somewhere between Europe
and America, and therefore less and less a place
in its own right. This paradox underlaid the
whole enterprise of the Rosc exhibitions held
in Dublin and regional centres throughout
Ireland this Autumn. For Ireland itself cannot
be accommodated into the smooth running of
international relations, and there are more
important things happening in Ireland than art
exhibitions; all the Rosc sculpture was held up
in the Dublin customs, and examined to make
sure that it could not be reassembled in the
form of artillery.
Few nations can have guns, the image of the
gunman, so deeply embedded in their culture,
their imagination. And why not; Ireland has
needed them. The national museum is full of
weapons, and the personalia of Republican
heroes there often have the added aura of
bulletholes. Nor is all this museum stuff, for
in Belfast the guns are for real and the art is
elsewhere. High above the city, on the fifth
floor of the sandbagged Ulster Museum, hung
high on the wall, is one superb Morris Louis
veil painting, the best modern picture in
Ireland, and below it is the fighting. The Ulster
Museum has been forced to postpone
indefinitely its projected contribution to the
Rosc exhibitions, a show of fifty years of
English painting selected by Sir John
Rothenstein and Charles Harrison. There is
little art to be seen in the city at all, and perhaps
little place for it. The one gallery still open is
Tom Caldwell Gallery, currently showing small
oils and stained glass by the religious artist
Patrick Pye, in Italian fresco colours and using
crucifix motifs. The Ulster Arts Council's
gallery shows artists of English repute mixed
with a few natives, generally established
artists like T. P. Flanagan and Colin
Middleton. As far as I could tell, young artists are
not producing very much, as though art could
wait until the shooting is over; or they've left.
I walked out of the Arts Council's gallery
straight into a bomb, looking rather like a tea
chest, in the foyer of the Europa Hotel; the first,
it seems, to have been directed specifically
against the press contingent who live there. It
Patrick Scott was therefore a relief not to be on English soil,
Gold Painting 42 1969 and one could look more calmly at the work in
Gold leaf and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in.
Dublin. The Irish Imagination 1959-71 filled
2 Jiri Kolar the Municipal Gallery (the only art gallery to
Portrait 1967 have a great poem written about it ?), and was
Collage, 38½. x 26¾ in.
devised by Brian O'Doherty. If this show had
3 Wayne Thiebaud any programmatic purpose, it seems to have
Nude Back View 1969 been to trace the disappearance of a national
72 X 48 in.
Oil on canvas mode. Such a thing was fleetingly apparent in