Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at IMMA

On Saturday 30^th April 2011, Carol and I made a trip out to IMMA to see an exhibition of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It was a hot day oppressive day with little wind, the galleries were crammed with tourists and there was not air conditioning in the galleries.  Carol was almost in tears as she viewed her heroines canvases. I had come with a sceptical mind, but even I had to admit Kahlo’s brilliance and originality. Her canvases and drawings had a rare almost crazy intensity. Rivera in comparison was a shocking let down. His paintings were weak and facile in comparison to his famous partner, but then his best work had been his murals in Mexico, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt.                                                   

  

The fate of Diego River’s socialist art and Freda Khalo’s autobiographical art mirrored the changes in society, where political life had become dubious and the personal had become both political and fetishized. We could no more understand River’s political idealism today than his time could appreciate Khalo’s self-involvement.                                                                                         

After looking around twice at the Kahlo and Rivera exhibition, we went over to the main galleries. In the ground floor galleries, I was surprised and delighted by Romuald Hazoumè’s exhibition of found petrol cans that he had slightly altered to look like African masks, his semi-abstract acrylic paintings mixed with mud and dung, his evocative black and white photographs of Benin men festooned with petrol cans and his sculptures made of found petrol cans.        

It was amazing to see how much one could achieve with humble materials and a bit of imagination. We loved Romuald Hazoumè’s work so much we bought the catalogue.                                                                                                                       

Then we went upstairs to see a huge collection of Old Master prints from the Madden Arnholz collection. The galleries were darkly lit, hot and stuff and I felt tired so it was hard to concentrate on these small black and white etchings, though I did linger over some gems by Rembrandt, Dürer, Goya and Honoré Daumier.                                                                            

                                                                

Finally, we saw Anima Mundi a showcase of Philip Taaffe paintings from the last ten years. For decades I had seen his exhibitions around the world mentioned in art magazines and seen reproductions of his work. I had never thought much of him, but had held off judging his work until I saw it in the flesh. When I did, I was disgusted by such a successful and rich artist without an ounce of passion or talent. He took the art of textiles and made it even more mechanical and soulless. The huge canvases echoed again, male artists’ egotistical desire to overwhelm their viewers and cow them into credulity. Perhaps such huge pattered art would have looked funky in a bank but in a museum, it looked empty and pointless.

A Tour of Dublin Galleries 2013

We went into town to doing a mini tour of the galleries. First we went to the RHA Gallery were we saw an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Seán Keating an artist for whom I had long harboured a dislike because of his obnoxious mix of Irish nationalism/provincialism, reactionary aesthetics and dictatorial approach in the National College of Art. Keating was industrious and possessed above average skills, yet his work utterly lacked humanity or imagination and addressed the viewer with the kind of pompousness typical of nationalist propaganda. Yet, even I had to grudgingly admire some of his watercolours and oils of ESB engineering constructions at Ardnacrusha and Poulaphouca, even if they reminded me of far more daring, original and heartfelt work by the likes of Kokoschka.        

                       

An instillation of Michael Warren consisting of eight wooden folding chairs hung flat and vertically on the wall, each with minor alterations to the angle of the back slats, was cleaver but pointless and the comparison with the work of Piero della Francesca an utter cheek. A series of pretentious technical drawings, by Julie Merriman was worse still for its cleaver conceit of a sheet of paper with one drawing and tracing paper with another drawing laid on top. So what, as an idea it was not brought very far and as technical drawings they were crude and adolescent looking to me.                                              

Upstairs we saw the Futures 12 exhibition, which had two painters of quality, one painterly imposter and three ‘sculptors’ without a shred of talent between them. Peter Burn’s crumby paintings left me baffled as yet another manifestation of pseudo-naïve painting in Ireland. When I wondered had it become the ambition of so many young painters in Ireland to paint the most archly dumb paintings possible? Perhaps if Burns had proved himself as a craftsman and artist of significance and then like Philip Guston turned to black humour his rank efforts might have had some meaning.                                    

Jim Ricks’ inflatable Dolman sculpture (a mocking comment on the commercialism of Irish heritage) I found irritating for other reasons. It lacked any subtlety and while a great deal of industry had gone into this gag – I loathed joke art even if it put me out of step with virtually everything presented as iconic art since 1955. Peter Burns and Jim Ricks continued the tradition of joke art that had begun with the Dada artist of the 1920s and since the 1960s had achieved success in an art world sadly aware of its own insignificance in the modern world. Personally I loathed joke art; I thought it was an easy knee-jerk response to the impossible demands of creativity. The artists I truly admired where those who had avoided such defeatist strategies to find new expressive possibilities. Humour becomes dated notoriously fast, and there perhaps is humour to be found in the way naïve art students now revere the feckless urinal of Duchamp or the supposed can of shit of Manzoni. Joke art just doesn’t have the sustained meaning of tragic art. The only humorous art I had ever actually laughed out along with was Martin Kippenberger.      

Lucy Andrews ‘sculptures’ that looked like the most shoddy and incompetent science experiments in a high school left me equally baffled by their lack of technical quality and their cryptic meaning which I could not care less to decipher. Caoimhe Kilfeather’s sculptural installation was even worse than Lucy Andrews’ collection of woe begotten science experiments and I could barely waste a second look on her sculptural shambles.   Later I read that Kilfeather’s lump of lead was supposed to represent a waterfall, though at the time I recognized none of the fury and beauty of such a thing - in that shroud of clumsy lead.                                                                                                                          

On the other hand Stephanie Rowe’s miniature oil paintings on wooden boards of actresses caught in a freeze frame millisecond were technical and luminous masterpieces on a small scale. Though their subjects were modern silver screen actresses and their colours bright and lush – their miniature scale, smooth surfaces and minute sable brushed details were reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age painters like Metsu and Vermeer. Rowe’s use of screen-grabs from movies, illustrated again, how reproductions of reality had come to dominate more and more of our lives and take on part of our dreamscape. They were beautiful, patiently rendered, evocative memorials to screen goddess - many of us had daydreamt about. Rowe’s work proved what modesty, craft and real intensity could achieve.                                                   

Ed Miliano’s vast collection of smaller than A4 paintings on paper laid out on long shelves, initially did not impress me. However the closer and longer I looked the more I became sucked into their visual delight. The paintings of gardens, varied from a kind of early Expressionism to abstraction to a kind of contemporary realism. It was fascinating to observe the daily changes in Ed Miliano’s mood and vision and the different intensities. Seen close up each painting hummed beside its companions, yet looked at en mass a whole new rhythm revealed itself. Although Ed Miliano’s technique was not as stunning as Stephanie Rowe I found his paintings had more gravitas.                                                      

On our way out we briefly stepped in to Gavin Murphy’s twenty minute video On Seeing Only Totally New Things. We caught the video as the camera was fixed on a trendy chair and a male voice over waffled on about design. I had already given this piece a minute of my life and I wasn’t about to waste another nineteen so I walked out. Apparently it was about a modernist building called the IMCO which was built in 1939 and demolished in 1979.                                                                                          

Next we went to the Taylor galleries to view a new exhibition by Pauline Bewick one of the most commercially successful Irish artists due to the popularity of her Celtic brand of illustration which pillaged the images of far greater artists like Picasso and feminized them into mush. Personally I had never given a dam about her work, though I thought it might be fun to see her work in the flesh. They were not worth the trip, Bewick’s works was in fact worse in reality than in reproduction, her drawing flaccid and awkward and her colours utterly uninteresting and forgettable. Even Carol could only praise the ultra expensive handmade paper she used. Yet, Bewick’s show was thronged with school kids, minor celebrities and the prices of her works was truly eye watering. Bewick was yet more proof that nothing succeeds in the short term like charming mediocrity.                                                                                            

Next we went to the Rubicon gallery to see an exhibition of new oil paintings my Nick Miller, whose retrospective in the RHA in 2004 had been one of my favourites. I found these new paintings, which were again landscapes painted from his van a dreadful disappointment. They were under drawn and over painted, with none of the energy of his previous work. He seemed to be going over old ground for no particular reason.                                                                                                                  

Finally we went to the Kerlin gallery to see a new exhibition of oil paintings by Callum Innes. I was no particular fan of geometric abstraction, though when done well by the likes of Innes I found it strangely compelling, even if it went against my own instincts. Started as stained black canvases, Innes then worked them up to colour. Seen from the front their vertical bands were reminiscent of Barnett Newman, yet looking at the exposed sides of the canvases revealed something of the subtle build up of colour. They were a strong reaffirmation of pure intellectual abstraction and the power of minimalist paint to still carry ideas and emotion. With my faith in art restored we went onto Grafton Street and Carol and I went into the Disney store where she happily looked around in a childlike trance. Finally we had a meal in McDonald’s and looked around at the art books in Hodges Figgis before getting the DART home.                                                                                                   

Basil Blackshaw at Eighty

On 11^th September 2012, Carol’s friend Anne drove us up to the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio in Banbridge Co. Down to see a retrospective of paintings and drawings by Basil Blackshaw a painter’s painter who had been a hero of my old art teacher Kenneth Donfield. There were few Irish artists I would travel such a distance to see - but Basil Blackshaw was one of them. The border between North and South was so subtle that we looked around unsure if we had entered the North. But when we saw the Union Jack flying over housing estates - a primal shudder ran down my spine. Still apart from the flags there was little to distinguish between Republic of Ireland bungalows and Unionist bungalows. After a life time of watching ‘The Troubles’ on television, I had avoided Northern Ireland like the plague, so it was my first ever trip to the North and I was pleasantly surprised by how normal it was. The centre was a beautiful one with very friendly and helpful staff. Before going around the exhibition, Anne bought us coffees and delicious scones with cream and strawberry jam.                                                                                  

                 

I did not think much of F.E. McWilliam’s work, though I did find his more intimate and personal small sculptural maquettes more interesting than his large scale bronzes. I found F.E. McWilliam’s version of surrealism kitsch and inelegant and his expressionistic work inspired by the bombings of The Troubles unredeemably brutalistic. Looking at McWilliam’s various 3d playthings, it struck me again that sculpture could descend into abysmal kitsch faster than painting ever could. However, I admired F.E. McWilliam’s more conventional portraits and busts from early in his career – and it struck me again, that many regional artists had not profited from their modernist adventures. McWilliam seemed to have given up on such slow and deliberate study of form and turned to make a series of pastiches of fashionable styles - yet originating nothing. Still, I wondered what kind of artist he might have been if he had more integrity and courage to avoid the allure of each passing fad.                                                                      

 The retrospective of over sixty years of work by Basil Blackshaw proved to me that he was painting better and better. His early work was very strong and always wonderfully painterly with hints at an obsessive interest in Cézanne and Walter Sickert. More conservative art lovers must have been most impressed by his realist paintings and drawings of horse races but I found them somewhat irrelevant in the age of photography and lacking the intimacy of his paintings of his pets. Though, Blackshaw’s portraits of friends (mostly male) were evocative, I personally found his ‘portraits’ of his dogs and horses truly insightful and full of love and respect. Blackshaw never made a casual or sloppy brushstroke though his freedom and searching might have made the unsophisticated think otherwise. He was a master of creams, browns, greys, blacks and muted colours - yet his efforts at strong pure colour did not convince me.                                                                                   

                                                                

It was Blackshaw’s paintings since the age of sixty-eight that most impressed me. They married a modern day freedom reminiscent of Cy Twombly and even Basquiat (especially with their deployment of writing and painterly erasure) with a lifetime of realist skills and criticality – to create some of the strongest arguments in favour of contemporary painting. They were so much more than mere ideas in paint - they were paint come to life to embody a spiritual manifestation. His hard-won virtuosity went beyond uncritical illustration, tedious realism and crass expression into a painterly grandeur only a few ever achieved. In his late paintings he made everything look childishly easy - but as a fellow painter I knew what kind of mental and physical labour had gone into such final life affirming freedom. These late paintings were some of the very best and most relevant I had seen in years. I felt inspired to paint in the presence of such valiant and free expressions. Before we left we bought the catalogue for the exhibition, however I was disappointed when I saw how poorly lit, discoloured and unfocused the reproductions of the paintings were.                                                                                                                      

Strangely in retrospect, I found my initial impression of Blackshaw’s work diminished. His early work struck me as too academic and his later work overshadowed by the far greater examples of Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat, still he was one of the few real painters in Ireland.

States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art

On the last day of August 2012, Carol and I went into town to see States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art which included late paintings by Robert Motherwell and recent paintings by Gary Komarin and Larry Poons. Although I regarded Motherwell as the most significant of the three painters, his late work on show was mostly a minor reworking on a small scale his early abstract imagery. These small, late Motherwell’s were turgid and uninspiring - unlike his earlier signature works - though they played with similar amorphous, torso like shapes. The Komarin paintings were a revelation to me, since I had never heard of him or see his any of work. Though I detected echoes of Richard Diebenkorn, the Komarin paintings lacked any significant originality of form or style. Still, I found his deceptively simplified abstractions with dusty colours and splashy shapes very evocative.                                                                                           
However, it was Larry Poons paintings that left the strongest impression on me. Poons was a survivor of the vagaries of art world fashion that had briefly held him up as a major painter in the early 1960s but had slowly turned away from him as abstract painting’s dominance was challenged and then overthrown by Pop, installations, video and performance art. As young artist Poons’ hero was Mondrian and he consciously avoided the legacy of de Kooning that had turned so many weaker talents into pasticher’s of de Koonings hooked dynamic brushstrokes. Yet, despite his early fascination with geometric abstraction, Poons had later became one of the most energetic revitalizer’s of expressive abstraction. Over a sixty year career, Poons abstract painting had progressed from Geometric to Op-Art, to Post-Painterly Abstraction and in his last years a more expressive style that hinted at figurative elements. A good friend of Jules Olitski, in the late 1960s he had turned away from the more planned and structured abstract work that had initially made his reputation, to produce more spontaneous free form canvases in which he poured paint in rivulets down the canvas and then cropped them where appropriate. Yet, such canvases that often looked like abstract variations of Monet’s late water lily canvases were derided as mere backgrounds by many.                                                                                                       
  
I appreciated the free paint handling and form making Poons had arrived at after a lifetime of devotion to abstraction. His broken line and shimmering, scintillating colour reminded me of late Bonnard. I had thought they would be in oils, so I was surprised to find they were in acrylic often manipulated with his hands. Poons’ colour was electric and his handling of paint full of feeling. I thought they were some of the most exquisitely beautiful abstracts I had seen in years. Poons work made me want to get back to painting - the highest compliment I could possibly give. We topped off the day with a meal in KFC and a rummage around the art books in Chapters and Easons.