Antonio Mancini at the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane

On Friday 6^th June 2014, Carol and I went into town. In Easons I bought a Wargames Illustrated magazine and Modern Painters magazine because there was a review of a Julian Schnabel exhibition in the The Brant Foundation Art Study Centre in Greenwich, Connecticut.              
                                                           

Next we went to the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, where I was delighted by landscape oil paintings by Wilson Steer (who was something of a revelation), Nathanial Hone the Younger and John Constable. I also marvelled again at the bravura skills of Sir John Lavery and the comic existentialism of Philip Guston. All of them gave me something to think about how to manipulate oil paint and energize a canvas. One of my favourite paintings Fidelma in a Red Chair was a thickly slathered sprawled out nude by Leon Kossoff from 1981, in oils on a panel - which looked like it was made of clay and dug up from the Cro-Magnon age. Today people demand art have ideas, but the ideas present in Fidelma in a Red Chair were pretty simple – expressive painter makes a thickly impastoed painting of a nude woman he knows well. Yet there was a depth of feeling, energy and passion in this work that made mere ideas feel too impersonal and like ideological death.                                                                                                                           

I also reacquainted myself with the beautiful Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot paintings which were being exhibited in a room to themselves painted a beautiful eggshell green that matched the paintings perfectly. Some of the Corot paintings must have taken no more than an hour for him to paint, but they conveyed everything necessary and hinted at so much more in their sketchy perfection. After all painting isn’t a contest of who can work on a painting for the longest amount of time. Some rapid paintings just work - while many laborious canvases fail desperately - despite all the earnest work put into them.                 

We spent some time looking again at the Impressionist paintings of the Hugh Lane collection which we greeted again like old friends - but slightly bored by their company. I did notice that Renoir’s famous painting The Umbrella’s from 1891-6 was a surprising artificially coloured work with its predominantly blue notes and pointing to the handsome man being ignored by the beautiful woman with a basket  in the foreground - I told Carol of the Tumbler page dedicated to ‘Women Ignoring Men in Art’! I also noted how beautiful Renoir made women look and how charming were his depictions of children. I also loved the fresh, zigzagging application of paint by Berthe Morisot in her pretty painting of two women in a boat on a river.                                                                                                                          

In the contemporary Irish section of the gallery, I loved a snow scene painted with luscious think oil paint applied with paint brush and pallet knife by Letitia Hamilton if only because her work had so little critical baggage. However, I totally ignored the Cubist Christian kitsch of the grossly overrated Mainie Jellett whose only claim to fame was studying under the Salon Cubist imposter Albert Gleizes - who turned a revolutionary style into an academic formula and form of illustration and had the cheek to try with the equally talentless Jean Metzinger to lay claim to Cubism. Though try saying that in Irish art circles - where Jellett is taken as some kind of mother of modern art in Ireland – by the same people who sneer at the macho and far too successful Picasso! Such is the twisted logic of Post-Modern provincial curators who are too concerned with a creating a Nationalist, Academic and Feminist travesty of art history to be bothered with matters of talent, originality or authenticity. Barrie Cooke was represented by a Munch like recycling nude from 1962, that almost tipped out head first from the top left of the canvas out towards the viewer in the right hand corner. Though I found the absence of feet and the clumsy rendering of the woman’s upper torso telling about Cooke’s realist abilities. I liked Basil Blackshaw’s Niall’s Pony from 1997 that with its layers of slathered paint and crude rendering of a hobby horse looked like a child’s version of de Kooning – but it just worked! I also liked Brian Maguire’s agitprop paintings The Big House from 1988 and Stardust Memorial from 1990 with their stuttering acerbic drawing and brush work - though again I found Maguire’s draughtsmanship wanting. Patrick Graham’s Ire/Land III in oils on canvas from 1982, was similarly crude though powerful.                                                                                                                                   

To take a break we sat in the Sean Scully room for a few minutes and I looked around again at this most overrated and bafflingly successful artist who had made no innovations and merely restated Modernist abstraction. As such he was closer to the reactionary French academics of the Salon in 1870 than to the heroes of Abstract Expressionism like Rothko who he was often fatuously compared. I no longer thought it mattered a dam what Sean Scully thought he was doing with his endless series of painted rectangles - which any competent decorator could have made - had they first had a lobotomy so that they too could spend over thirty years painting the same thing. What was really important in terms of Scully’s success was what hunger his work satisfied in his audience. For a rich collector, corporation, bank or public museum, he provided abstract works of supposed feeling and depth that did not disturb the peace with content like; portraits of recognizable people with messy lives or worse still naked human bodies, or worse still erotic scenes or worse still pornography or for that matter issues of identity, politics, race or religion. Scully’s painting was upper-class Muzak! You know, the upper classes like to muse on the qualities of landscape, most of which they own, and likewise they enjoy musing about the poetry of Seamus Heaney with his endless prattling on about the bog (while the whole of Ireland convulsed with terrorism and bigotry) and they like praising the abstractions of Sean Scully with his endless hints at ordered landscape – because none of them answer back or challenge the status quo. Amongst the élite, Scully had many supportive critics (including many I rated highly as critics) who praised his brilliance, yet their praise was perfunctory and not very convincing - as though the thing they most admired about Scully - was the lack of threat he posed to their own authority or way of life. Scully’s art for art’s sake was the ultimate escapist fantasy for conservative pensioners in an art world turned upside down by Post-Modernism, multiculturalism and agitprop art.          

After our rest, Carol and I chose not to waste any time in the Francis Bacon studio which had become too familiar and whose work I had begun to find too cartoony, mannered and his Existential angst too much the work of a virtuoso - which struck me as a contradiction in terms. I also doubted any human being could pouring real unflagging suffering into hundreds of vast canvases over the course of over fifty years. Besides Bacon’s style was so individualistic it was impossible to imitate him.                                           

My greatest delight was finding six thickly painted oil paintings by the eccentric Antonio Mancini that had thankfully emerged again from the storerooms. Mancini had been a cult hero of mine since I had first haunted the Hugh Lane as an art historically ignorant teenager - and now as a middle aged man who had fallen out of love with the myth of Modernism - I rediscovered my love for his work. For me Mancini combined a number of traits I found fascinating - a prodigiously gifted artist he also suffered from mental illness and painted according to his own rules oblivious to fad or fashion. Although his choice of subject matter – street urchins, pretty ladies, centrefold nudes and society portraits – was often kitsch, commercial and retrograde – his eccentricity and wilful technique fascinated me. Besides, as I grew older and more and more bored with the conventional history of Modernism, I found I was more and more interested in genuine oddballs like Mancini as well as the pleasures of bad taste.      

                                         

Born in 1852 in Naples, Mancini was a child prodigy who became the youngest pupil in the history of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples at the age of twelve. His early work was populated by young street urchins with soulful expressions. Perhaps they reflected Mancini’s own impoverished upbringing as the poor son of a tailor. At the age of twenty he was already exhibiting at the Paris Salon and Jean-Léon Gérôme pronounced him a “phenomenon”. Mancini was also represented in Paris by the prestigious dealers Goupil & Cei. Mancini became a key member in the Italian Verismo movement that was influenced by French Realism. However, in his late twenties (perhaps due to overwork or mercury poisoning from the paints he was using) he suffered from a mental breakdown and entered a Naples mental hospital for four months. A rather naïve and unworldly man, shy and paranoid, he struggled to achieve the success his talent had promised and suffered from bouts of extreme poverty reminiscent of La Bohème. Thankfully he was discovered by John Singer Sargent who proclaimed him “the greatest living painter”, bought a number of his canvases and facilitated contacts with wealth English patrons whose portraits Mancini painted.                        

By the mid-1890s Mancini started to use his eccentric graticola technique, in which he put a frame with a grid of threads or wire in front of his sitters and another corresponding grid over his canvas in order to help capture the likeness of his sitter. Many painters had used grids as a method of squaring up an image and Dürer had famously illustrated this technique in drawings, but the way Mancini kept a wire grid over his canvas was eccentric to say the least - and it meant that even after the painting was completed an embossed pattern of lines remained on the canvas - which Mancini made no effort to conceal. Moreover, Mancini’s grids were a rather haphazard affair and he would add diagonal lines as well. By working up each painting square by square, shape by shape, Mancini played with an abstraction of form that had its echoes in the portrait paintings from the turn of the millennium of Chuck Close who worked from squared up photographs. Had Mancini not been a child prodigy with an undeniable technical gift for drawing and tonal painting, his use of a grid might have been proof of a lack of skill or self-confidence - but in Mancini’s case it might have been a desire to make things more complicated and avoid easy facility. It may also have provided a much needed an anchor for his wild alla prima attack.                                                        

Mancini’s modelling of his sitter’s faces and bodies was often done with careful academic modelling, skill and subtlety - though at other times his treatment of faces and hands could be sketchy and expressive - somewhat in the manner of late Lovis Corinth. When Mancini painted faces and hands in a conventionally academic manner there was always something rather uninspiring about these aspects. For me the real excitement in Mancini’s paintings came in the background, clothing and surrounding details which he painted with intense accumulations of impastoed paint as much as half or three quarters of an inch thick - which he sometimes mixed with paper, foil or glass. It was as if the conventional world of these socialities was in danger of being overrun by a wilderness of Dionysian paint. Mancini’s turbulent impastos also had echoes in later paintings by the likes of Jackson Pollock who’s Full Fathom Five from 1947 had nails, tacks, buttons, cigarette butts and matches imbedded in its surface. Moreover, Mancini’s pastose society portraits with their combination of embossed graticola and thick impastos anticipated later society portraits in oil paint on broken plates mounted on boards by Julian Schnabel at the end of the twentieth century.                

In all the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane had twelve paintings by Mancini most of which I had seen at one time or another over the past twenty-seven years. The Customs from 1877 painted when Mancini was twenty-five, was the earliest, smallest and most conventionally realist. This canvas displayed the facility Mancini had already quickly acquired. A portrait of a pretty and fashionable woman sitting amongst baggage - it seemed like a moment caught in time and made you wonder where this young lady had come from and where she was going. The Marquis del Grillo from 1889 was an atmospheric portrait of a gentleman painter surrounded by the opulent trappings of wealth, culture and travel including a bronze figure, tapestries, silks and leopard skin. The Marquis looked out at the viewer with an air of lost distain as he sat in a tailored suit holding paintbrushes and a pallet. The painting captured a fading decadent age of aristocracy - that both painter and sitter seemed sadly aware was nearly over. Maker of Figures circa 1895, a portrait of Mancini’s father was an enigmatic portrait of the old man seen in profile in a white shirt and in the crook of his arm he held a china figure. The white sleeve of Mancini’s father literally bulged out of the canvas in a layer of impasto three quarters of an inch thick. By now Mancini’s mature technique of graticola and heavy impastoed surfaces had fully developed and it could been seen both in his portraits and his allegorical canvases like Aurelia from 1906 - where the figure of a pretty woman in a black dress emerged from a pastose background of flowers beside a classical sculptural bust of a woman. Overall Aurelia was a blizzard of impasto as rhythmic and dense as a mid-career Jackson Pollock. Mancini’s Portrait of a Lady: Sylvia daughter of Charles Hunter Esq, had a very haphazard and wonky grid showing and Mancini’s treatment of the young woman’s face was more suggestive and unfinished looking than some of the other paintings. Mancini stayed at the Hunter’s country house and Mancini was introduced to Hugh Lane by Mary Hunter. The remaining paintings were from a couple of years later and included not only a portrait of Sir Hugh Lane but also his sister Mrs Ruth Shine as well as Lady Augusta Gregory. Sir Hugh Lane travelled to Rome to have his portrait painted by Mancini, but Mancini briefly came to Dublin to paint the portraits of Mrs Ruth Shine and Lady Augusta Gregory. In these works, Mancini pushed the boundaries of Belle Epoch portraiture over the edge. His colour became richer and more varied and his impastos thicker and so unruly that they were almost proto-Expressionistic. It was Mancini’s mixture of traditional skills and odd experimentation that I loved. In Mrs Ruth Shine, Mancini perfectly captured the Irishness of his sitter - even if the setting of her beside an orange bush and classical bust was set up using laurel branches and oranges he hung up using strings! Mancini’s portrait of Augusta, Lady Gregory from 1908, was another oddball, deconstructed Rembrandt style masterpiece that William Butler Yeats famously wrote about in his poem The Municipal Gallery Revisited: 

Mancini’s portrait of Augusta Gregory,

‘Greatest since Rembrandt,’ according to John

Synge;

A great ebullient portrait certainly;

But where is the brush that could show anything

Of all that pride and humility?

And I am in despair that time may bring

Approved patterns of women or of men

But not that selfsame excellence again.

W. B. Yeats, The Municipal Gallery Revisited, Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 2000, P. 204.

In fact, let’s be realistic, Mancini’s portrait of Lady Gregory was not as good as Rembrandt or even one of Rembrandt’s pupils. Maybe from a distance, it looked a bit like a frantic Rembrandt studio sketch - but up close the face of Lady Gregory dissolved into an unruly storm of impastoed brush marks that was wonderful but lacked the attention to detail of Rembrandt. Yet since my teenage years, I had loved this crazy painting - and it had inspired me to explore impasto in my own early work.                   

                                                       

Not speaking any English, Mancini did not like Dublin and returned to Italy after the commissions were complete - thus ending one of the strangest visitations the Irish art world had ever witnessed. Mancini continued to paint in Italy and 17 of his works were shown at the 1920 Venice Biennale. However, in an art world that had moved on to Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism - he died in 1930 - a sadly, largely forgotten figure from a lost age.                                                                                                  

Finally, we went around an exhibition of sculptures and a video piece by Eva Rothschild. This exhibition left me feeling very conflicted – I loathed her comic geometric sculptures and loved her video piece Boys and Sculpture in which the destruction of her sculptures featured. Rothschild’s sculptures seemed to be a piss-take on macho geometric minimalism and looking around at her sculptures - I wondered if we had suddenly gone back to the worst commercial crap of 1986. I was baffled that any artist male or female would want to make these boyish, geometric playthings - that reminded me of the designs on my Men Only bed sheets with their black, grey and red patterns and my black furniture in the mid-1980s! I realized I had gotten old enough to start to see everything come back into fashion.             

However, despite the retro kitsch of Rothschild’s sculptures - they did serve well as props in a comic remake of the Lord of the Flies set in an art gallery. In Boys and Sculpture from 2012, Rothschild (who was a mother of three boys) had installed an exhibition of her sculptures in the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Eleven primary school boys were told to go in and explore the art and if necessary through touch. They were also told they would not get into trouble. At first the boys wandered around the exhibition craning their heads and walking around the sculptures. As more boys came in their mood got giddier. Then they started touching the works and soon after they started testing the strength of the works. When they dismantled a tall vertical sculpture made of rugby shaped orbs and now had things to kick around the room - all hell broke loose - as they systematically destroyed the exhibition. Having reduced the show to rubble the boys soon got bored and walked out. It was frankly the most fun art video I had ever seen.


However, in retrospect, I wondered if it was just another dig at boys and men by a female artist. Also it presumed that young boys were capable only of destruction - yet many of the greatest artists in art history had started out as young boys studying under a master in a studio workshop which were also known for their hijinks. Rothschild in interviews seemed to have a heroic vision of herself as a lone woman in a medium dominated by men - though I knew plenty of women in contemporary sculpture. But female or male made, I still loathed Rothschild’s sculptures and wondered if they existed only meaningfully as props in an ironic gag about masculinity - and if that was ever a good enough reason to make art. Besides, I was sick to death of over sixty years of art for the sake of jokes.                                      

                                                             

Before we left, we looked around the art books in the bookshop and I was astonished by the number of philosophical books on art. Who exactly was reading these impenetrable tombs? Why had art become such an academic and pretentious subject? Too many art students and professors trying to outdo each other in intellectual masturbation I surmised. There were of course many ways in which an artist might be obnoxiously grandiose about themselves, emotional excess was a commonly criticized one but intellectual posturing was just as likely to prevent works of real universal quality.

After leaving the Hugh Lane we went to Chapters bookshop and had a rummage around the second-hand art books. I bought two small Thames & Hudson books; one on Turner by Graham Reynolds and the other on Impressionism by Phoebe Pool. I was very fond of these small Thames & Hudson books because of the quality and readability of their writing. Finally we went back to Easons and I bought a tube of white oil paint, a putty rubber, Prit Stick and Blue Tack - before we caught the bus home.