Page 36 - Studio International - December 1971

Irish painting right up to the end of the fifties,
and still goes on in an enervated and
increasingly academic manner. Atmospheric
above all, gingerly painterly, and ineluctably
vague, in many ways this kind of work seems to
have compounded a change in Jack Yeats's
career earlier in the century, a change from the
firmness of the earlier work to the poeticism of
the later, with its emphasis on personal
symbolism and the operations of the memory,
most 'poetic' and least cognitive of the faculties.
This kind of painting, at worst, led to a dainty
thrashing around in many Irish artists, and it's
to the credit of the Municipal Gallery selection
that most of it has been excluded. Nano Reid,
for instance, has a strong and confident
painting there, as has Camille Souter ; and
T. P. Flanagan showed large watercolours with
more to them than the charmingness of his
medium usually allows him. Landscapes of
Clonmacnoise and Glendalough, by Arthur
Armstrong and George Campbell, both
artists of an older generation, showed that
Yeatsian mistiness could be used as an
inspiration and solidified into the definite.
The atmospheric mode was decisively broken
in the mid-sixties by younger Irish artists whose
outlook was international rather than provincial,
and whose rejection of landscape and figurative
sculpture gave them a distinct sense of artistic
ambition in an international rather than a
provincial scene.
To some extent this has been the case with
the work of Patrick Scott; but much more so
with the hard-edge painting of Michael Farrell
and Cecil King, some of whose best things look
as good as the 'international' work up the road
at the Royal Dublin Society.
This, however, is because the selection of the
international league artists is so pusillanimous.
All that money, all those facilities, and so many
duds, offhand works, also-rans and has-beens.
The general argument going on is that the Irish
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need some kind of gentle introduction to new
art, because they have to 'catch up'. So the last
Rosc show was ten years out of date, and this
one is only five years out of date, but with much
less good work in it. This is an inadequate
justification for what has happened, and it's
patronizing to Ireland. A goodish Johns, two
interesting Al Helds, two John Walkers, two
Stella protractors, do not make up for it. The
rest of the show was merely of artists showing
that they weren't inept, and sometimes they
were anyway. I preferred the provincial
dedication of the work in the Municipal Gallery,
and was most moved by a show by those
artists who didn't exhibit officially at all, the
Independent Artists at the Project Gallery,
holding meetings about the North, penniless
themselves, looking for nothing from the official
hierarchy of the Irish Arts Council, but right into
something about Ireland that none of the rest of
us were. Their political art wasn't all that good,
but it was real, and relevant to Ireland in a way
that nothing else on show could equal. []

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