Irish Arts Review

Irish Women Artists from the 18th Century to the Present DayAuthor(s): Ciarán MacGonigalSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 67-68Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492013 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

EXHIBITIONS

Irish Women Artists from the 18th Century

to the Present Day As the first such exhibition, this exhib ition at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of

Modern Art and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, July 4th to August 16th, is of major consequence to artists and to the history of art itself.

The essays sit rather uneasily together in the splendid catalogue subsidized by the GPA Group. The catalogue is, in fact, a practical lesson on the absolute necessity to have an editor. The mis takes are many and various and I found

myself puzzling over a number of points made in both the essays and the indivi dual entries. An editor would also, one hopes, have amended the often eccen tric punctuation, the glaring grammati cal errors such as a sentence in the first essay where the verb does not agree

with the noun, and should have caught and corrected the numerous misprints.

The essay by Liz Sheridan on the Municipal Gallery does not fit very easily with the others. She tends to rely on the original catalogue for much of her information, when the primary source and the main secondary source, the Gallery's inventory, should have been consulted; moreover, she makes no reference to the catalogue produced by Patrick O'Connor in the late 1950s during his period of curatorship. Can didly, the other essays read like some thing the authors were intent on writing "in any event".

The catalogue layout is generally con fusing and becomes more so when the same painting by Anne Madden is shown in two different formats, once as a

horizontal work and the other time as a vertical work. Much of the photo graphy is very poor. Why, if the cata logue has quite a good picture of

Camille Souter's in colour, does the black and white one look so inferior? Just what does the remark mean in the index "featured artists appear in bold type"? It does not mean that they are necessarily 'featured', that is given an entry or illustrated, merely that in many cases they are referred to in the course of an essay.

Regrettably there is too great a variation in the standard of catalogue entries between the National Gallery

and the other two venues; while the National Gallery's are very full the others are merely lists with no attempt ed evaluation. In many cases the refer ences to the artists are uneven and inaccurate with dates being glossed over as being unknown or unavailable; and some of the references, especially those to an artist by first name, when the compiler could not possibly have known the artist concerned, are unprofessional.

The selection for the exhibition suffers from lack of corporate direction.

The early period is dominated by too many people who could hardly be call ed Irish and surely the number of peer esses and the like is almost absurd, in the light of the differing standards of their artistry. The middle period is wild ly uneven and resembles, in selection and hanging, at The National Gallery, a back room at a Mothers' Union Assem bly. The later period is where one strikes the iceberg. The selection is again very uneven and the hanging, in the cases of the National and Municipal

Galleries, a perfect example of what not to do with paintings. The Municipal

Gallery job is less awful, with the exception of the treatment of Norah

McGuinness. There are too many Nano Reids although they stand up quite well in the circumstances, but I felt it was an error of either taste or judgement to allow Camille Souter to have her own mini retrospective as the differences in styles and size did nothing for one of our best contemporary lyrical artists. The work of Anne Madden should have been separated from the others because of its nature. Even allowing for the space considerations of the Municipal

Gallery, with which I am all too famil iar, theirs was not a felicitous showing of these significant Irish artists.

The National Gallery should learn valuable lessons from their own display of more or less modern (as opposed to contemporary) art forms; and even within what is available to them, the lighting is terrible. If The National

Gallery is moving into a more modern period it will have to come to terms with (a) hanging and (b) pure taste as opposed to the requirements of acade mic notation. In the final analysis the work is VISUAL!

As to the artists in The National Gallery, no favours are granted to Margaret Clarke, nor for that matter to

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Mary Swanzy whose large 'Samoa' paint ing is difficult, and the greatest care should have been taken with it. Instead, the pictures are cluttered in the ex treme, reducing their pictorial value.

The Margaret Clarkes were, it would appear, chosen for literary and historical rather than aesthetic functions. The

Kathleen Fox examples are the least good of that most excellent artist's work whereas Sarah Purser, a very eclectic and uneven painter, is represented rather well with several of her best

works. Eileen Reid does not benefit from her

representation; her works were gentle but well composed but her work shown was not in this vein. May Guinness is rendered a real disservice and so is

Norah McGuinness, as are, for different reasons, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. These latter suffer from poor lighting and even worse hanging. Frances Kelly is a painter whose work has real charm and quite specific compositional qualit ies which are not evident in the work chosen here - apart from her very enig matic portrait of George Furlong. Estella Solomons is not well shown and the owners of her works should have been advised to reframe their pictures for this exhibition. Both Rosamond Praeger and Beatrice Glenavy could have been given a better showing; the selectors seem to have glided over Beatrice Glenavy's rather important period and the influences on her work, especially on her use of Staffordshire figures. Lady Antrim was a marvellous

modeller and little of that talent appears in the examples shown here. Grace

Henry, Lillian Davidson and Lady Dobbin emerge very well from this showing, despite the small size of their

works and the poor hanging. The Douglas Hyde Gallery comes off

rather better, not least because the work is more of a type and sits very well in the context of the gallery building itself.

As a large number of the artists shown there come from the North, it gives quite a distinct feel to the imagery of the exhibition. The showing benefits also because it has rather fewer works in number and so rather more justice can be done to them. It has to be said, however, that the work is very strident but characterized by its strength, which despite the differing directions, gives a sense of common purpose.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

EXHIBITIONS

How, or why, much of the work was selected remains a mystery. Where, for example, were the works of Lucie Charles, Muriel Brandt, Brid Rynne, Una Watters, Carolyn Mulholland, Anne Stafford-King-Harman and Gabrielle Hayes? And why not Cliodhna Cussen, Anna Kelly or Palm Skerrit? The answer is, I suspect, that the Exhibition, like

Topsy, "wasn't borned, it jest grewed. . ." - an opportunity lost. Perhaps for next Year's ROSC we might all do better.

Ciaran MacGonigal

L'Epoque, la Mode, la Morale, la Passion

Aspects de l'Art d'Aujord'hui

When Pierre Menard, a brilliant twent ieth century French writer, decided to compose another Quixote - so Jorje Luis Borges tells us - ".. . he never contemplated a mechanical transcript ion of the original.... His admirable intention was to produce a few pages

which would coincide - word for word and line for line, with those of Miguel de Cervantes".

Notwithstanding any considerations regarding the degree of probability - logical or otherwise - of such a possi bility, and assuming that the writer succeeds, Borges finds that a compari son between the text written by Pierre

Menard and that of Miguel Cervantes proves a revelation. Consider the latter's (part 1, chapter 9): ". . . . truth,

whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counsellor". Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history.

Menard, on the other hand, writes: ".... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds,

witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counsellor". History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding: Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin.1 Thus in a brilliant nutshell, Borges expounded the predicament of modern art and that of

its creators. Time and again, public, critics, art historians, artists too, are

faced with the same unanswerable quest ions brought about by exhibitions

which are trying to capture that elusive

zeitgeist, the fleeting 'here' and 'now'; the spirit of the Age as reflected in the art it engenders.

It happened with London's exhibition 'A New Spirit in Painting' in 1981, it happened with the even larger subse quent Berlin 'Zeitgeist' which followed suit and it happened again with the recent exhibition at the Centre Pompi dou, Paris, from May 14th to August 17th, 1987.

The wonderful title of the exhibition is taken from Charles Baudelaire's The

Painter of Modern Life: ". . . Beauty is made up, on the one hand of an ele ment that is eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult and on the other, of a relative circumstantial element, which we may call successively or at one and the same time contemp oraneity, fashion, morality, passion.

Without the second element, which is like the amusing, teasing appetite

whetting coating of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, tasteless, unadapted and inappropriate to human nature".2 And it was the purpose of this exhibition - or at least this is what was the intention of its three organizers - Bernard Blistene,

Catherine David, Alfred Pacquement - to capture precisely these elements.

The exhibition itself was presented as an anthology, spanning a decade of international artistic achievement which coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Centre Pompidou itself. It is hard to believe that only a decade ago the Piano Rodgers endeavour became one of the most - if not the most - provocative museum anywhere. And now that the dust has settled and the building properly institutionalized, it certainly provides some food for thought!

There were sixty artists in the exhibition, seventeen of whom are French, quite apart from a formidable list which reads like a Who's Who in video and cinema. The impressive cata logue, apart from the customary intro

ductory essays and relevant catalogue raisonne' sections, has taken the wel come initiative of including an an thology of critical texts, whose purpose

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is to stir up some good critical debates. To what extent it will succeed, any more than the exhibition itself can be said to fulfil its ambitious aim, is, in itself, a matter of debate.

Apart from the consistently high quality of the works on show, there were no surprises in store, none whatsoever. There were de Koonings, Malcolm Morley, Mario Merz, Julian Schnabel, Frank Stella, Georg Baselitz, all or most of whom, were to be found in both the London and Berlin exhibit ions. The 'newcomers' are not exactly unknown entities either, in the sense that they are already well established on the international firmament: Bazile

Bustamante, Gerard Garouste, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican . . . and this can only point to one overwhelming con clusion, the seal of official approval.

Perhaps the closest we come to an answer can be found in a delightful imaginary dialogue3 written by Thierry de Duve, between Achilles and the tortoise, this time not engaged in proving Zeno's fascinating paradox, but in a polemic about the very issues that face us all, but are in particular the responsibility of the art critic and art historian. The argument hinges on their agreement that Robert Ryman paints like Mondrian, with the difference that the former's 'Neoplasticist' formulae

were generated by the theosophical theories postulated in the circles of

Annie Besant, whilst Ryman incorpor ated in his painting all the conditions that render it impossible, such as photo graphy and reproductive processes, in a word, industry. The parallel to be drawn with Borges's hero speaks for itself.

Sanda Miller

NOTES

1. Jorje Luis Borges: Labyrinths: 'Pierre Menard Author of Quixote', pp. 67-70; Penguin Books, London, 1971.

2. Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings; 'The

Painter of Modern Life'; p. 392, Penguin Classics, London, 1972.

3. L'Epoque, la mode, la morale, la passion.

Aspects de l'art d'aujourd'hui, 1977-1987.

Catalogue of the exhibition organised at the

Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 1987.

Thierry De Duve: Au theatre ce soir. Drame en un acte et trois scenes. Pp. 25-43.

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