Jack B. Yeats: The Courage To Feel

After the weekend, I went with Carol to The National Gallery so we could see the new exhibition given over to Jake B Yeats. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this beloved Irish painter and this show was just one of a number dedicated to him this year. Jack B Yeats was the son of John Butler Yeats a great Irish portrait painter and draughtsman and brother of William Butler Yeats - Ireland’s greatest poet. But nearly the whole Yeats family were talented painters, draughtsmen, embroiders, musician, poets and playwrights – a strong case for genetics! The Yeats family was central to Irish social history from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. You could not understand Ireland if you had not come to terms with this wonderfully creative Irish family's contribution to painting, drawing, poetry, politics, mysticism, The Irish Revival, Irish Nationalism, The Easter Rising, The Irish Republic and the gossip columns of Ireland's newspapers. Ironically this quintessential Irish family were not Catholics at all – they were Protestant Anglo-Irish – what were called ‘West-Brits’ in Irish slang. The unrequited love of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne was such a romantic epic in Ireland, that I can remember my mother warning me: “Don’t end up like Yeats! He threw his life away waiting for Maud Gonne to love him!” While W.B. Yeats the poet had a worldwide reputation his painter brother Jack was sadly known only in Britain.                        

As the years passed, I grew fonder and fonder of Yeats’ paintings. I had always liked them since I was a teenager – but I was never really sure whether my love for his work was critically naïve or misjudged. His later canvases were some of the hardest works for the conventional art lover to appreciate. But he only came to his last reckless style after a lifetime of drawing from life or drawing from memory. At times the late canvases could be quite awful – a mess. Yeats painted about 2,000 oil paintings so there was bound to be some dross. But at his best in his late works he set line and colour free to play across the canvas – and if you looked close – you could see that the drawing was bold and assured. The magic of these works was the way we the viewers were encouraged to read the forms and move with them. But then you need not have taken my word for it - reputable foreign painters like Oskar Kokoschka (a friend of Jack B Yeats) and Lucian Freud and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett were fans of his work.

             

Over time, I had grown stronger in the conviction that Yeats was the greatest Irish painter – one who captured the spirit of the Irish people better than many other artists some of whom were technically more skilled painters. No he was not a world rate painter like Picasso, Beckman, or even Pollock but he was a worthy brother to artists like Georges Rouault, James Ensor, and Oscar Kokoschka. Like them, his paintings took a hard look at some of the harsher and more unjust aspects of life. Like them, his work was full of daring colours, lightening brushstrokes, impastoed paint and a judicious use of black. Like them, his work was animated and situated in moments of great spectacle - and like them, he lived his life withdrawn from the world.

            

Masquerade & Spectacle: The Circus and The Travelling Fair in The Work of Jake B Yeats, was a beautifully chosen collection of 22 paintings and watercolours from 1902-1952 about the marginalized and exotic lives of the clowns, bareback-riders and acrobats in the travelling Circus. The exhibition space was dimly lit and each painting was spot lit – giving the paintings an eerie effervescent quality. The lighting brought out his intense colours and the rich texture of his paintings. Despite the fact that most of the works were behind glass – they were all perfectly visible – such a change from awful displays I had seen in the past.

             

The theme of the Circus at the turn of the twentieth century was a favourite of many socially conscious painters like Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, George Rouault and of course Pablo Picasso. The circus people lived on the margins of society, like Gypsies but they also drew in the working and middle classes with their exotic entertainment and proletarian theatre. Many of these artists identified with the circus people because they too were poor and not in respectable employment – living for art, truth and beauty – on the margins of bourgeois, industrialised society. The clown, the bareback rider and the acrobat also provided artists with pictures full of drama and theatre – allowing them to speak to the ‘stage of life’ and the tragedy of its actors. So in some respects their paintings of clowns were in fact self-portraits in disguise.

             

Many of these paintings were from private collections and so unfamiliar even to Irish art lovers. The exhibition covered Yeats slow progression from tight linear black and white illustrations, to moody pencil drawings tinted with watercolour, into angular illustrative oil paintings, then into a wonderfully loose yet still well-drawn painterly canvases and finally into his late almost abstract–expressionist style – the paint taken straight from the tube and scrubbed in dry-brush, or glossy glazes or thick impasto sculpted and drawn with the pallet knife. Although Yeats was never technically on a par with even Irish Belle Epoch painters like William Orpen or John Lavery – he more than made up for it with canny insights into human beings, expressive courage and a little thing called soul – something sadly lacking in this Post-Modern world.

             

All his life Yeats was to benefit from his journalistic background - which sharpened his eyes to the life around him. His early work was illustrational, even occasionally comic like. He was thirty-five before he started to paint in oils. He lived a solitary life in Dublin with his wife – but he loved to sketch in the streets. His little sketchbooks, watercolours and oil paintings are full of moments of daily Irish life – caught in all their movement, rituals, and character. He loved covering sports events, figures in the city, the circus and the men of the west of Ireland.                                                                  

Repeatedly the Irish man in solitude emerges. The man about to write a letter, or alone in the streets bustling with others, sitting alone in a tram while three women gossip utterly oblivious of his existence, or as a melancholy clown, or a dwarf alone and behind the scenes. But at other times he depicted virile Irish men as fishermen, swimmers, boxers, jockeys, bareback riders or heroes of Irish myth. Women in Yeats paintings could be elegant, haughty, dainty, kindly or proud. But he never degraded them - there was hardly a nude in his whole oeuvre. He showed women as social beings - like exotic beauties in cold Dublin city streets full of crowds and incident. Women in Yeats paintings are feminine, self-assured and a vital part of Irish society.  But perhaps his greatest love was for horses. He drew them all his life and his depictions have a freshness, vigour and anatomical accuracy lacking in so many stilted equestrian pictures.

             

This was quite simply the best exhibition I had seen since the Lucian Freud and it was a delight to the senses. I would have happily owned half of these 22 paintings.

             

One of my favourite rooms in the National Gallery in those days was at the very end of the English school. Hung against a dark green wall were lovely, modest, paintings by John Singer Sargent, Alfred Munnings and Augustus John.

            

Woodrow Wilson (1917) by Sargent was a truly emptied out and pointless painting even for a Sargent fanatic like myself. It struck me as soulless, effortless and aloof - nothing better than boardroom art.

             

For sheer visual wattage and painterly fireworks Alfred Munning’s Evening At The Ford (1950) was the winner in this room. His painting of men on horses wading a ford in the dying light of summertime set my pulses racing. Munnings pallet of dark mauve's and browns for the background the figures of the men and horses – contrasted with the lime, lemon and Sapphire blue of the water made me want to paint.

             

I was less convinced by The Red Prince Mare (1921) – perhaps because the painting as a whole did not seem to fit together. This was because Munnings had sketched the horse with rider in scarlet jacket, on top in the paddock. He had painted the sky outdoors. However, he completed the painting in his studio. This meant the sketchy Impressionistic treatment of the sky and background – jostled with almost photographic treatment of the horse and foreground area.

             

Augustus John’s Carlotta c1901 was not wholly believable. The drawing seemed somewhat indecisive and odd-looking. But I liked the nod to Rembrandt and the velvety brushstrokes that harked back to Frans Hals.  Dr Kuno Meyer (1911) was a much later painting and a far more modern portrait of a powerful and impressive figure of a man. Here John had used a quite daring pallet of bold blues, modulated whites and bottle greens. I loved the bold and summery brushstrokes and the power of the design. However, it was John’s portrait of Sean O’Casey (1926) – scraped down and repainted over and over – that was my favourite. I loved the fresh, bold and intelligent - painterly attack. The readjustments were even more telling - in their searched for correctness.

                                      

Anne Madden

On July 5th 2007, I visited IMMA with Carol and Edward - principally we went to the Lucian Freud exhibition again. First, we looked around the Anne Madden retrospective in the Irish modern art museum. To say that I didn’t like her work is an understatement - she was everything I hated about some women's art - technically glib and incompetent, derivative, kitsch, sickly feminine and superficial in the extreme. However, I tried to look around with an open eye.

             

The exhibition started well with her early self-portrait with a pallet (somewhat derivative of Bernard Buffet) and first abstracts in the 1950s. However, despite their subtle earth tones applied justly with the pallet knife - they were in effect worthless works of plagiarism by a student enthralled by the equally stupid paintings of Vieira Da Silva and the far greater paintings of Nicolas De Staël. Then in the 1970s her abstracts got larger and more colourful - but her zips and fields of colour came straight from Barnett Newman - and the compositions were an emasculated and feminized pastiche of his far more original and heartfelt canvases of the 1950s. By the time, I got to her recent abstract canvases I rebelled like a man who had spent too long in a perfumery - the smell though sweet at first had become nauseatingly toxic. By the final and most recent canvases, my eyes were virtually begging to be closed from the sight of her vast canvases painted in lurid Turkish Brothel colours on Opium - and applied with all the tricks of the home decorator - stippled, sponged, dry-brushed and mopped on.

             

I was convinced Anne Madden was not a great painter - in fact, I knew she wasn’t. She was typical of some women in the art world – strikingly beautiful, privileged, glibly intelligent, with a natural aptitude for art - the trouble was things came too easy for such women - there was no struggle to really swim the depths of existence, no hours spent exploring unfashionable ideas and authors, no attempt to push mere smug facility towards profound pathos, her intelligence merely for show and her beauty - fading every year. She had none of the dirty raw power of her female contemporaries like Paula Rego or Louise Bourgeois - they were great artists - she was merely a lady who lunched - with delusions she was part of a tradition stretching back to Cézanne. In one interview, I heard her drop his name and talk about how every brushstroke for her was a risk - what utter self-delusion, what abyssal self-analysis – it was utterly gob smacking!

             

Which is not to say that she had not been successful - she had in fact been disproportionately successful thanks to a 'lucky' marriage to Ireland's most revered living painter Louis le Brocquy an even more nationalistically over-praised, over-hyped and over priced Irish mediocrity.

            

  

Going from her hotel lobby art to Lucian Freud's muscular, grand, weighty canvases of raw human flesh and psychologically stripped human beings - was mind blowing in the extreme. I could have spent days in this Freud exhibition and found more and more in it. The internal, anatomical grammar to his brushstrokes - was astounding. They were so serious, so intelligent, so varied and ordered - yet passionate that I could weep. I spent so long trying to master his technique and yet I was hardly fit to clean his brushes. However, his art inspired me, it elevated me and it filled me with so much joy that I bowed in humility to this master - his art was truly a gift to humanity.

            

 Later Carol and I dropped into The Douglas Hyde gallery – housed in Trinity College Dublin. The gallery had made a reputation for itself exhibiting the most difficult 'cutting-edge' contemporary world art and this show was as tediously faddish as ever. In the main gallery, there were 'sculptures' by Nina Canell, Clodagh Emoe and Linda Quinlan in an exhibition called Come Together.  None of these artists - could draw, paint or sculpt in the ancestral sense - their art was the junk of the playpen of contemporary conceptual art. It was essentially an exhibition of odds and ends scattered around the big ugly gallery floor - signifying I don't know what - to me as Mrs Cravatte in The Rebel (1960) said:"it’s all a load of miscellaneous rubbish!"

           

 In what was known as The Paradise (a tiny gallery space inside the larger DHG one) there were three oil paintings on MDF by Maureen Gallace. To say I have seen these exact paintings about a hundred times already by other equally piss-poor imitators of Luc Tuymans’ school of oil painting was a understatement - they were everywhere in Dublin. Most of these pastisheurs of Tuymans' tended to take his bleached, faded colour and amp it up into garish colours reminiscent of the little pots of bright colour you find in a Paint-By-Numbers set - thus annihilating the meaning of Tuymans really profound paintings and covering their mucky stolen tracks. Stealing his brushstrokes was easier for them - he often painted the brushstrokes in vertical or horizontal strips that echoed the bands of a poorly printed photo - but I knew where they came from. Tuymans art was profound in the ways it intellectually and sensually reinterpreted the mediated images of the magazine, book, television, cinema screen and web-page. His work really did have both intellectual and formal integrity even profundity. However despite the fact that his technique (to paint alla-prima in oils on commercial shop bought canvases - disturbing crop-shots of sad and evocative photos - in dull whites, greys, powder blues, dull or glossy blacks, ochre’s and greenish creams and executed in less than a day) was arrived at from a place of great philosophical depth and seriousness. It was easily copied, and those copies had no such gravity. I honestly thought his influence had done more to condemn and destroy the art of more student painters than any other living master. By coping him so blatantly and so single-mindedly (most of these plagiarizers had not even the wit to add one other influence to their stolen art to make it more distinctive and original) they had pretty much abdicated all right to be called artists.

Robert Ballagh at The Royal Hibernian Academy

Later that weekend I went to see Robert Ballagh’s retrospective in the Royal Hibernian Academy. I went to slay not to praise – and I saw nothing that deterred me from this mission - in fact, Ballagh’s paintings only strengthened my contempt. Ballagh was nearly a household name in Ireland. Even those who didn’t know him knew his work - as he designed the old Irish bank notes, many of the Irish stamps and the set for the famous Riverdance show. Ballagh had emerged in the late 1960s as a self-taught Pop, cum Photorealist cum Trompe l'oeil artist.                                                                      

His work pilfered the grammar and technique of far more talented and intelligent artists from David, René Magritte, Hockney, and his Irish contemporary Michael Farrell. There was a frivolous and at the same time pretentious quality to Ballagh’s oeuvre which I found intensely irritating. Photo-realists like Ballagh had always been a pet hate of mine. The assumption behind their work – that obsessive labour, slavish copying of details, large scale and robotic technique would always produce masterpieces – I found unartistic and reactionary.                                                                                                

Despite being a well educated middle-class boy, Ballagh made much of his working class sympathies. His paintings often featured him reading such tombs as The Communist Manifesto or newspaper articles with headlines reporting the unemployment rates. But don’t imagine that his professed socialist and Republican politics prevented him from making money or brown nosing the establishment – because it didn’t. In fact, like most politically minded individuals – power and prestige was his goal, and rhetoric only a means of attaining it. If you had never seen a great painting in the flesh – let us say by Goya, David, Delacroix, or Hockney (all artists Ballagh had pastished) you might not understand just how dead and lifeless Ballagh’s art really was - but if you had, then the deceitful and crude lifelessness of his work became painfully obvious. The surface of Ballagh’s paintings was as dry and dead as a toenail clipping.                                                                                    
  
There was absolutely no need to actually see his work in the flesh – all one saw close up was airbrushing, stippling and blending of limp lifeless acrylic and oil paint (that looked like acrylic paint.) Ballagh’s vision of reality was as flat as a playing card and so his depictions of people often looked about as real as one of those life size cut out photographs actors advertised their films with – all surface and no depth.                                                                                                             
  
The retrospective was also notable for the complete absence of drawings. Ballagh like most photo-realists could not draw – instead he merely traced, stencilled and projected. What one could say about his drawing as evidenced in the paintings was that there was no inquiry into the nature or texture of reality, merely a colouring in of outlines. This was one major difference between Ballagh and Hockney his far greater English contemporary – for Hockney really could draw with assured and elegant skill.                                                                                                                                 
  
I mused that you did not need to be a Northern Protestant or English victim of the I.R.A. to feel utter revulsion at Ballagh’s portrait of Gerry Adams astride a mountain (yet another plagiaristic rip off, this time of David Casper Friedrich.) The conceit of both artist and politician/terrorist in this painting was literally gob smacking. But look closer – was Gerry Adams just happy to see us or was that a gun in his pocket! In fact I think it’s just one of many clumsy anatomical aspects to Ballagh's art. Ballagh despite his unwarranted success still felt aggrieved. His writings poured scorn on Modern art and the Irish art establishment which had not fallen to their feet in their praise of him. Of course was not alone in that. Every artist no matter how great – will always have their critics – it would be unrealistic and immature to believe otherwise. But what was different about Ballagh was the way he made this anger the subject of many of his paintings.                                                                         

  
In one painting – Still Crazy After All These Year 2004, he was seen from above in his large house wearing a t-shirt with Fuck The Begrudgers emblazoned on it. Other paintings displayed Ballagh digging bog, posing naked, or in political debate! I exclaimed to myself “I mean I am arrogant and conceited but this guy fucking takes the biscuit!” This contempt and self-regard was summed up for me in Highfield (1983/84) a painting of Ballagh at a doorway looking into the country side, by his easel on the floor was a torn up poster of a Picasso cubist portrait. The blinding metaphor being Ballagh’s preference for looking at nature not modern art. But subliminally the message was that Ballagh was a talentless egomaniac who loathed Picasso and modern art.                                                                          

Moreover, his pursuit of reality – it was as fake as a Rolex watch on a market stall. Ballagh like a mocking bird seemed to think that if he could copy something (a photograph, a Lichtenstein, a Pollock or a Picasso) he could prove his superiority. But all he really proved was that he had absolutely no concept of artistic integrity or style as a form of intellectual property unique to its maker (no matter how simple it’s technical means could be duplicated by thieves.) As you may had gathered – if Ballagh were born in Russia in the 1930s he would had been a socialist realist and maybe a successful one. Political people who hold a utilitarian attitude to the world loved art like this – devoid of feeling, propagandist and dead to the real complexity of the world and its interpretation.                       Leaving Ballagh’s dead canvases behind it was a refreshing relief to look at the messy gestural abstract oil paintings of Tim Hawkesworth. However, my relief quickly evaporated when I realized Hawkesworth’s paintings were nothing more than an incompetent miss-mash of Abstract Expressionists like Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and de Kooning.                                                             

  
Before I left the RHA I decided to check out the down stairs gallery – what a lucky break! There I really did find paintings of great beauty, complexity, intelligence and originality by Colin Martin. The exhibition titled The Night Demesne featured oil paintings of the grounds of a country estate photographed with a flash at the dead of night. The paintings variously depicted flower beds, a boat and a peacock seen silhouetted against a lamp black night which shrouded everything in the distance beyond the limited range of the camera’s flash. From a distance Martin’s paintings looked like very elegant contemporary photographs but coming up closer one realized they were in fact lush oil paintings on board. And what paintings they were! Martin proved conclusively just how dim-witted Ballagh’s photo-derived paintings were in comparison.                                                          


 Unlike Ballagh’s paintings, Martin’s were full of mystery, elegance, and superb mastery of colour, tone, brushstrokes and composition. I would have quite happily owned three or four of these wonderfully emotive paintings and no doubt have spent years looking and looking again at them. While there was absolutely no need to view the Ballagh’s paintings in the flesh – Martin’s paintings just had to be seen in the flesh! Otherwise, the range of painterly effects, subtle brushstrokes, rich colour (including the skilful use of black one of the most difficult colours to use) and sumptuous glossy feel of the oil paint would have been utterly lost.

Royal Hibernian Academy's Annual Exhibition 2006

At the start of July, I went with Carol to see the Royal Hibernian Academy's 176th Annual Exhibition. The Annual Academy Exhibition was the Irish equivalent to The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London except the quality of work was a tenth of that in London. I went to see the exhibition with excitement and an open mind. As I grew older, I came to respect craft and skill more and more and thought slightly less of innovation and originality. Rather than endorsing my growing conservatism, the exhibition only served to throw me back to my old youthful contempt for the Academic and Sunday painter.

What was astonishing to see through nearly 550 works - was just how many different ways there was to make truly god-awful art! There was not one single artist in the show that proclaimed a sign of genius, not one single artist who proclaimed an oceanic depth of feeling and there was not one single artist who actually displayed consummate breathtaking technical genius. In fact the whole show was about different kinds of inadequacy, different kinds of incomplete personalities and different ways in which boring, stupid people try to pull the wool over the eyes of the viewer, with the tricks of realism, theft, pastiche, and borrowed emotion. 


There were quite a few artists who had strong (not great) representational skills, but invariably this skill was not married to any sophisticated artistic 'persona', individuality, originality, sensitivity to paint, any sense of emotion or any aesthetic vision. It was as dead and cold as photography and without even the slightest ambition to transform the way people see the world. The list of artists pastiched, or ripped off by these incompetents would be long and boring, but the oeuvres of truly great artist cast its shadow over all these offerings. There was a complete absence of drawing in the paintings - by which I mean the use of drawing to analyze the structure of the world. Instead there was tracing and squaring up from photographs without any underlying analysis or expressive interpretation. At the other extreme, there were lots of garishly coloured 'expressive' paintings drawn incompetently, of stock expressive imagery and full of loud expressive feeling - but without the subtler tones of feeling needed to create truly moving images. 


John Bellany the Scottish Expressionist (an artist I had admired at times in the past) was represented by a particularly awful mess of a painting of flowers, so badly drawn, so shoddily painted and so incompetent one could only presume he was utterly paralytic with drink while painting it. There were stiff plastic portraits by James Hanley which proved conclusively to me that he could not paint at all - everything, from skin to cloth to sky looked as stiff and wooden as everything else and treated with the same schematic brushstrokes. Le Brocquy was represent by yet another timid, spiritless, spotty portrait of his wife Anne Madden that was notable only for it’s signature. Amy O'Riordan was represented with a glamour type photo portrait of a woman on the toilet in her underwear, only the fact that she was a woman and an 'artist' and the bullshit of 'irony' made stupid people thought that her work was in any way an improvement on or telling comment on soft porn images of women. John Long ARHA was utterly shocking in his complete and total robbery of the style of the English painter Euan Uglow. Longs work was so completely the product of theft I was left gob smacked. 


So much of this work was the product of illustration not art. 90% of the work was so twee, kitsch and bourgeois one wondered that these people could call themselves artists at all. Even artists who I had admired in the past in solo exhibitions, like Richard Gorman, came out of the show looking utter rubbish. Part of this was because they were not represented by their best work. But partly because group shows like these in their semi-democratic nature reduce everything to shoddy crap. This worked two ways, first by surrounding good works by rubbish - the good works were diminished. Secondly, by robbing pretensions work of the mythology, piety and bullshit of a solo exhibition, it was shown up as just paint on canvas and products in the market place - like everything else. 


After an hour in the exhibition, I had a violent fit and told Carol I had to leave. My head was splitting, my eyes dazed and my mind scrambled. I felt fit to puke and give up art altogether. Where as a great exhibition could inspire me and send me home to paint, a rotten show like this left me despairing at art.