Two oils on canvas grasp collectively, strikingly comparable, within the first room of the Nationwide Gallery of Eire’s new present. Each titled Composition, they date from 1924 and 1925. They’re cubist nonetheless lifes, with the common, geometric patterns and contrasting color schemes favoured by many early Twentieth-century modernists, Marcel Duchamp and Juan Gris amongst them.
The work are clearly by the identical hand. Besides they’re not. The 1924 work, that includes what may be a fried egg, or may be an easel, is by Evie Hone; the piece from the next yr, centred on a chessboard, is by her finest pal, Mainie Jellett. These two girls, nearly unknown exterior their homeland, and never well-known even there, revolutionised artwork in Eire by introducing modernism.
Within the deeply conservative nation that it was on the time, that didn’t all the time meet a beneficial response. And but they soldiered on, buoyed up by each other throughout a number of many years, plying their craft, and turning their fingers to totally different types and art-forms.
So the exhibition feels very eclectic. Right here there’s cubism; there, abstraction; within the subsequent room, we’re again to figuration. In one other room landscapes, and elsewhere devotional non secular artwork. Most are work, however one room is full of the stained glass that Hone spent a part of her profession specializing in – she made commissions for public buildings and church buildings alike.
However there’s one factor that unites nearly all of the 90 artworks within the exhibition, and it’s color. Vibrant colors, main colors; wealthy colors, sturdy colors; clashing colors, harmonious colors: they sing out of each room, and with out figuring out anything concerning the girls who put them collectively, they let you know that this pair believed in life and believed in artwork.
They had been each born in Dublin, into well-to-do center class households. Whereas they met for the primary time in London throughout the first world struggle, this exhibition traces their story from the early Twenties, once they moved to Paris to coach below André Lhote, after which Albert Gleizes, whose work exploring abstraction they very a lot admired. He didn’t take college students, however the pair had made up their minds: he remained in contact with all of them their lives, and far is made within the present of the significance of his affect on their work. It was a two-way avenue – Gleizes acknowledged the significance of Hone and Jellett on his personal oeuvre – however artwork historical past in its inimitable manner has remembered him, and airbrushed them out.
For now, although, they’re again. The standard of the artwork is as eclectic because the types. The standout piece is Jellett’s Ornament (1923): fantastically nicely composed, immensely pleasing, this piece pays homage to the work of the Renaissance artists whose work each girls adored (they knew it principally by reproductions), painted in tempera on wooden with gold leaf to reference that interval of artwork historical past. But it surely’s greater than a homage: it’s a marrying collectively of previous and new, a beautiful summary depiction of the ages-old Madonna and Baby, contained throughout the form of a Trecento altarpiece, with a pointillist background.
Sheer genius, and regarded at this time to be the one most vital modernist portray in Irish historical past, it went down like a ton of bricks: author George “AE” Russell made the astonishing comment that there was nothing a lot to say about it. The next yr, 1924, Jellett and Hone had a joint present – the present present in Dublin is barely the second time their work has been proven collectively – which was met, once more, with a lot criticism.
The Irish Occasions used the phrase “freak photos” in a assessment, and Russell once more had a subject day, referring to their work as “inventive malaria”. All of it weighed closely on them each, a lot in order that it was nearly actually a think about Hone’s resolution to enter an Anglican convent in Cornwall in 1925, a lot to the horror of Jellett, who was left alone making an attempt to persuade the Irish artwork world of the significance of modernism.
Fortunately Hone’s life as a nun was short-lived, and simply over a yr later Jellett went to retrieve her and return her to her main vocation as an artist. However faith remained a central theme, for Hone – who later in her life turned a Catholic – and in addition for Jellett, whose different works proven right here embody a putting Deposition (1939) and an intense crucifixion titled The Ninth Hour (1941).
Hone, although, would principally pour her non secular emotions into her stained glass, utilizing her cubist coaching and love of sturdy color to nice impact in a sequence of home windows together with one often-seen on Irish TV, My 4 Inexperienced Fields, because it’s put in within the Division of the Taoiseach (having been made initially for the 1939 New York World’s Truthful) offering a backdrop to many a authorities assertion. The window, bringing the symbols of Eire’s 4 provinces – Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht – collectively, was one in every of her best triumphs.
However an much more magnificent instance of her stained glass is in England, and sadly behind closed doorways (excepting occasional public excursions of the faculty). It’s an enormous (nearly 1,300 sq ft) window in Eton School chapel, and it was commissioned to exchange a window destroyed by bombing throughout the second world struggle. The window, displaying the Final Supper within the decrease part and the crucifixion above, is thought to be one in every of Britain’s most interesting Twentieth-century examples of stained glass. In Dublin we get solely a glimpse of its splendour through a watercolour examine Hone made in 1950.
By then, Jellett had died, aged 46, of most cancers. Hone visited her within the nursing dwelling on her final night time. Neither girl had ever married; and whereas there isn’t a suggestion they had been a pair, they clearly crammed a job that may be referred to as a partnership in one another’s lives. Jellett had spent her last years a lot influenced by Chinese language artwork, after a go to to an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Hone, regardless of the legacy of childhood polio which affected her all through her life, continued to journey in France and Italy – as works right here attest – and painted the woods and panorama round her dwelling in Marlay within the Dublin hills.
By the tip of their careers, the ladies – whose work had been so comparable within the early days – had every discovered her personal model, with Hone’s intuitive, freer strategy contrasting with Jellett’s far more exact consideration to element. Convergence, divergence and a friendship that introduced the stirrings of the nice adjustments in Eire that proceed to play out to this present day.
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