The NGI Revisited and Reconsidered

I got up early on Thursday 27^th July 2017, and Carol and I spontaneously decided to go into town and see the newly refurbished National Gallery of Ireland. For months, beforehand - I had looked forward to seeing again all those paintings - I had grown up looking at. But I had also ruminated upon the meaning the National Gallery had for me as an artist. For six years the vast majority of the gallery had been shut down for renovation work that cost €25 million. More than a mere restoration, much of the gallery had been gutted and completely rebuilt to include new gallery spaces and vital heating and air conditioning units. During the many years of renovation of the National Gallery, I had felt like a part of me had been amputated. During my youth, my first ideas about artistic quality were shaped by the National Gallery. In my early teens, I shifted from a love of the Impressionists to the Dutch masters of the Golden Age - to the French Neo-Classists and Romantic painters all represented in varying quality in the National Gallery of Ireland.                                                                                                                         

Then at fifteen, I underwent a radical transformation of my idea of art through books on Expressionism and in particular the taboo Egon Schiele - who for decades I only knew through reproductions. My discovery of Schiele came at a vital moment in my life. Throughout all the traumatic and horrific events that I had experienced as a child - because my mother had paranoid-schizophrenia – I had practiced a stone faced look and refusal to talk to people. It had been the same in my art - which said nothing about me as a person. But by fifteen my stoic defence had started to crack and I had desperately looked to art history - for artists who had shared a similarly wounded experience of life. Looking at Expressionist painters like van Gogh, Munch and Schiele - I suddenly realised that the world did not look the same when you felt inner anguish and despair and to pretend that it did - was to lie not only to the public - but to yourself.             

Through Schiele, I also became shockingly aware of just how much of human existence and failing like our sexuality and insanity was edited out of Classical Art. Long before Hollywood was the “dream factory” – painting was the dream factory - where the great and good were idealised and immortalised and all their flaws as human beings edited out. So much so, that the idealistic images in paintings were taken to be the truth by philosophers -  yet it was actually the greatest lie ever told! At the age of fifteen through Egon Schiele, I became aware that the light represented in Western art represented only about 5% of the real universe of existence – 95% of which was made up by the invisible dark matter of existence - deemed too ugly, immoral or politically incorrect to record. But stuck in pre-internet Dublin, all these revelations came to me through foreign art books and magazines and certainly not through the National Gallery or in fact any other gallery in the hyper-censored, repressed and hypocritical Irish capital.                   

Thus, although throughout my life, I continued to visit the National Gallery and marvel at the technical skill of its painters - and wish I had anything like their work ethic, technical skill and refinement – I became antagonistically obsessed with their rank servitude to the rich and powerful, their humanitarian lies, their moral hypocrisy and their social conservatism.  

             

Unlike so many arrogant and self-congratulatory public figures – I regretted almost everything in my life. Chief amongst my regrets was my failure to achieve my childhood dream of artistic greatness. Many of the reasons I failed were a result of things outside my control. I could not help that I never received the kind of Classical atelier training I wanted as a child - and at an age when I would have accepted and been thankful of such training. So I had to teach myself by making every mistake in the book and trying to develop my own kind of virtuosity. Nor could I help that my childhood had been such an insane horror show that it would break me inside and permanently alienate me from others - and make them avoid and reject me. But I was responsible for what I chose to learn from a childhood of madness, neglect, abuse and loneliness. What I learned was that life was full of pain and darkness and I simply could not believe in - never mind recreate - the illusions of faith, truth and beauty of the Old Masters. But I could not help, that when I produced my painfully honest works – people would call me a talentless, insane, perverted maniac. Still, I knew I could never paint what or how others wanted me to. No matter how much reverence I had for the Old Masters – I knew my world had little in common with theirs not only existentially but also historically after; photography, cinema, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, radio, feminism, world war, popular culture, democracy, mass pornography and reality television.                                                                                                  

The Impressionists like Manet and Degas were the last great painters to learn and extend the lessons of the Louvre. The last great painter to try to marry the lessons of the Louvre and nature was Cézanne who famously declared that he wanted to remake nature after Poussin. But frankly if Poussin had been able to come back from the dead and was forced to meet Cézanne - he would have though he was a madman who had taken his name in vain! By 1909, Futurists like Marinetti were declaring that they wanted to destroy the museums and that “Admiring an old picture is about as much good as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn…” (F. T. Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figero, 20^th February, 1909) By the late teens of the Twentieth Century the link between contemporary art and historical western art had been completely broken and all that was left was artists like Picasso making cynical pastiches of Ingres. With the notable exceptions of painters like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, since then virtually everything produced by artists about historical art has been just that – cynical pastiche, ironic sampling or even worse socio-political hijack.                                                                                  

Mere art aside, the most important cultural change in our lifetime - and in fact since Guttenberg’s printing press in the mid fifteenth century - has been the Pandora’s box of the internet. For millennia, kings, religious leaders and heads of state had held a stranglehold over culture and censored anything they did not approve of - or was a threat to their authority. Meanwhile they commissioned painters to glorify them in their luxurious homes, write sycophantic essays about them in the press - while simultaneously censoring, imprisoning or socially ruining anyone who critiqued their authority. The last century of culture in the West could thus be seen as a slow and painful tearing down of all the idealistic lies of the Victorians and those before them - and the fight for free speech. Yet even with all the artistic and intellectual battles for free expression – those in authority still held remarkable control over culture either through direct censorship, moral condemnation, political re-education, the control of editorial boards, the restriction of patronage or the manipulation of desire through advertising. Then almost overnight, the internet demolished all the traditional editorial boards and censorship committees - and attempts to control information and ‘protect’ the vulnerable. With the internet, everyone became their own publishers including all those undesirable people - elitist culture had so vociferously banished from their palaces of art. The internet also resulted in the de facto demolishing of the centuries old elitist copyright laws which became ransacked wholesale not only by the public but more importantly by media company’s exploiting the dissemination of content without payment. Thus YouTube and PornHub - were even more culturally radical than most of the artists, novelists and philosophers of the twentieth century combined!                                                                                                                                            

Yet how many of our freedoms on the net today will be around in even fifty years’ time is open to debate - since already countless laws are being passed by governments around the world to curb internet freedoms, we are all under mass surveillance from state agencies and commercial companies and total freedom of expression has also allowed the expression of fake news and black propaganda often by state actors. So it is only a matter of time when whole wings of prisons will be full of people who just have committed virtual crimes!                                                                                          

So all things considered, in 2017, I believed even less in the Old Masters mature and static sense of style, ideals of authority, faith, reason, morality and sexual repression than I had at fifteen. In addition, I could not see the contemporary viability of the Old Master’s labour intensive machines - because why spend a year painting a huge naturalistic, historic canvas with multiple figures - when a photograph could be taken of real people in real life and blown up as glossy wall sized print - in less than a day. Or to put it another way why paint ‘history’ when CNN showed history in the making on your 50” high-definition flat-screen. That is why, I thought that if painting had any continuing viability - it was to paint what a camera couldn’t – human emotions, the psyche of the artist or visual ideas including those critical of photography, mass media and the internet. A good example of just such a contemporary painter was the Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie whose fantastically manipulated images made one question both figuration and abstraction, photography and truth and the historical and political motives of the artist.                                                                                               

Yet, even though the National Gallery had less and less importance to my own artistic development - I would often return to appreciate what our culture had lost - in the blizzard of images and information of the internet age. What we had lost as human beings was the ability to patiently meditate on the beauty of the world and understand its deeper meanings. What we had lost as artists, was belief in art as a selfless vocation that may never achieve anything in worldly terms and a reverence for craft, the development of skills and the willingness to work like a dog for art works - than may only be appreciated by a handful of people or maybe will never be appreciated at all.

              

Returning to the National Gallery to see its newly renovated sate, I was deeply impressed by the new galleries and delighted that so many people were there enjoying it too. Sixty-five percent of the people where Irish pensioners with the remaining twenty percent young people most of them tourists. If I had been younger, single and less painfully shy and socially anxious - it would have been a great place to meet young women - most of whom seemed to be from the United Nations of hot!                                                                                                                          

Even though I had been going to the National Gallery since my childhood - even I found it confusing and hard to navigate around the new galleries - which looked so different to the ones I had known! I was stunned by the beauty of Joseph Walsh’s modern ash sculpture Magnus Modus, 2017, in the new vestibule - which from a distance looked like a weightless cream ribbon, looped in the wind - but up close, revealed itself to be the most subtly twisted, ash wood with a wonderfully evocative grain. Walsh was able to do things technically with wood that had been unimaginable in the past - yet was also a supreme craftsman - which is why he deserved his place in the National Gallery and why both Carol and I were sure of his genius.

I was impressed by the restoration of Daniel Maclise’s massive canvas the Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife which was one of the most ambitious and complex, multi-figure, history paintings by an Irish artist in the nineteenth century. The painting from 1854, commemorated the first loss of Irish freedom to the Normans in 1066 who were led by Richard de Clare known as Strongbow, but it also spoke to contemporary Irish tragedies like the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 and the Irish Famine of 1845-50. Yet Maclise, who was one of the most successful artists of his day, also made large history paintings for the British Parliament.                                           

Personally, with the exception of the likes of Delacroix, I was temperamentally put off by most of these kinds of historical group scenes - because I personally hated crowds of people – and these academic machines too much the servants of propaganda, too impersonally grandiose and sinisterly elitist. Still, academic artists of the nineteenth century like Maclise had a dogged work ethic and technical command - beyond not only me - but virtually every other living painter in the debacle of Post-Art and social-media kitsch. Ironically the last painter who could have painted as ambitiously as Maclise was the East German painter Werner Tübke and his assistants, who had learned to travel back in time in their art - because their Communist culture prohibited - the freedom of the future of the capitalist West.                                                     

I was delighted to find that the National Gallery could now show many works that had previously been in storage or had not been up on the walls for years. I also enjoyed the new thematic hang of works - where for example portraits, nudes, still-life’s or landscapes - were presented together for instructive comparison. I was also heartened to see more female nudes on show than in previous years - when it seemed political correctness had banished many of them to the storeroom. Many of these nudes were like ancient versions of the cast of Love Island with stunningly beautiful bodies - but lacking any intellectual substance – doomed to be sneered at by the cognoscenti and dammed by no-fun feminists. But life would be almost unbearable without hotties. One nude in particular that I was delighted to see again was Matthew William Peters’ painting Sylvia a Courtesan. I had last seen it when I was about sixteen - when I was both turned on by it - and also astonished that it had been painted by a clergyman! Thanks to the new wall text beside it, I learned that the Georgian period, Belfast born painter Peters, had specialised in such ‘Fancy Pictures’ but later became an Anglican clergyman, concentrated on religious paintings and regretted his youthful saucy nudes!

              

Looking around at the 17^th century still-lives I came across Still Life with Musical Instruments by the so called “Master of Carpets” a virtually unknown Italian painter whose still-lives featured richly patterned carpets. And the carpet upon which the musical instruments were laid - was indeed fantastically detailed and tactile! Pausing for a rest, we sat on a bench beside Matthias Stom’s large canvas The Arrest of Christ from around 1641. Stom was a relatively unknown Caravaggisti and his painting was a version of a similar painting by Caravaggio’s from 40 years before. Although Stom’s work lacked the stupendous realism of Caravaggio I still found it a compelling, warm toned painting, with its character’s spot lit by lanterns and burning torches - even though he had mostly copied his style from Caravaggio - Stom still possessed more talent and skill than virtually anyone painting today. Which made me think that pastiche was mostly a term one should use for technically simplistic works from the late nineteenth century onward and not about the kind of advanced homages made by the likes of Stom.

             

Truly world class paintings are not just about feats of skill, they also embody new and profound ideas and ways of seeing the world. Yet, while the National Gallery of Ireland only had about a dozen world class paintings - it had dozens of paintings of real skill and sophistication that could instruct any student of the medium. In fact, so many of the ‘minor’ paintings in the National Gallery were technical marvels and totally beyond the skills or patience of painters today. Because I had recently spent so long on The Rank Prophet series which had demanded such exacting realist technique – I intimately knew just how much time and back-breaking work went into even a few inches of realist painting – so I was struck by how unfair it was to such painters for viewers to only spend only a few minutes looking at works that might have taken them months to create. It was like ‘listening’ to Beethoven by fast forwarding his symphonies on iTunes or casting pearls before swine.                                                                                                                                       

On the other hand, looking at the worst of the Modern European and Irish paintings in the National Gallery collection – I was struck by the cheek of such painters to present such technically simplistic works to the public – and even enduring a few seconds glimpse of their work was dispiriting. And even the best of such works simply made no sense in a museum of pre-mid-nineteenth century works. Yet again, I longed for the National Gallery to copy the Louvre and have a cut-off point in the mid nineteenth century and the have works from Impressionism onward exhibited in the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane where they would make more sense amongst its more substantial Modern holdings.

              

Still, at least European Modernists like Monet, Picasso, Gris and Soutine in the National Gallery compensated for the technical crudity of their works with the originality of their ideas and the way they changed the course of Art History. The same could not be said for the ragbag of provincial Irish mediocrities like Maine Jellett or Louis le Brocquy. The only virtue of such technically brutish Modern Irish painting, with its litany of pastiched Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Art Informal and Pop Art - was its supposed originality of ideas and authenticity of feeling – except their copycat ideas were stolen from abroad and their feelings were merely bad playacting. Frankly, I had more time for the backward Sean Keating’s social realism which seemed at least authentically rooted in Irish life and politics at the time. Keating may have been a conservative reactionary but the likes of Jellett and le Brocquy were frauds who had toured Europe and brought other men’s ideas back as their own.                                                                                                  

While wandering around the room of the Modern paintings, I also discovered that the National Gallery had acquired a Max Pechstein painting of fishermen from 1920. In the early years of Expressionism, Pechstein had been the most successful of the Die Brücke painters because of his slick skills but his authenticity had always been suspect and his reputation had massively declined since his heyday. The relatively late Pechstein painting in the National Gallery - was the kind of Expressionism as fashion statement - that gave Expressionism a bad name. It was worse than many paintings by the decades late to the party Irish Expressionist Michael Kane.                                                                        

              

Yet again I was incensed by the politically correct highlighting of the likes of Evie Hone whose ham-fisted, pseudo-Expressionist stain glass in the service of the Catholic Church (!) - was disgracefully placed alongside a real genius like Harry Clarke. It was just to keep feminist viragos happy - I suppose. The problem was, that by murdering for politically-correct reasons any understanding of talent, quality, originality or the Canon for the sake of identity politics and “representation”– they were not only presenting token talentless women with a prize they did not deserve. They were also decimating the credibility of the modern Canon and not just for nasty, white, male geniuses but for numerous female artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker, Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois or Paula Rego or Tracey Emin who deserved to be thought of as great modern artists.

              

In the National Portrait Collection, I saw my first Colin Davidson painting in the flesh a portrait of the poet Michael Longley. I had watched Davidson’s career for a few years and thought he was one of the most interesting and talented painters working in Ireland. Davidson’s paintings were like Abstract-Expressionist versions of Lucian Freud - and seeing his painting in the flesh - I was even more impressed by his talent. On the other hand, I thought Davidson who seemed to produce countless portraits of the rich and famous - was in danger of becoming just another sycophantic, money-driven, Neo-Society portrait painter. I was also very impressed by Geraldine O'Neill’s large portrait of John Rocha from 2015. O'Neill’s figurative talent and skill as well as her technical command was self-evident in this portrait of the Irish designer. But I also wondered at the point of such a traditional view of the world - that did not seem to think that much had happened since the Old Masters. So all in all, I thought it a doubly smug work that represented the self-indulgence of both designer and painter. Donald Trump would have loved to be painted by Geraldine O'Neill’s! Looking again at the likes of Louis le Brocquy, Robert Ballagh and James Hanley none of who had the talent or skill of Davidson or O’Neill - I was struck not by how mediocre and conformist their work was (which it was) but how successfully they had engineered successful provincial careers for themselves, through self-censoring super-egos, hard work, relentless operating, public relations, diplomacy and a complete lack of rebellion or whiff of madness.                                                  

The art world loved to project the idea of freedom art – it lubricated their decadence. The art world loved to project the idea of artists as rebels – it made them money. But Art History teaches the exact opposite. For every Caravaggio, Goya, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Scheile, Artaud or Basquiat there were literally thousands of conformists who merely parroted the clichés of artistic fashion and politics. Even in supposedly rebellious cities like Paris, New York or London where occasionally true artistic rebels succeeded –  success at least in the short term - was usually only granted to charming and neutered mediocrities who worked their way up the greasy pole. But in the tiny Irish art world (where there was a total lack of funny money, shopaholic collectors, media sensationalists or a bohemian culture of intellectual provocateurs that could birth rebellious prodigies) there wasn’t even the odd success of a true rebel. In the incestuous Irish art world, there really was only one kind of success, and that was only granted to conformists. In Ireland, there never had been - nor maybe ever would be - a creative youth movement like Romanticism, Expressionism, Punk or the yBas. Because our creative youth were constantly forced to emigrate – leaving our culture permanently mature even geriatric - in its intellectual conformism and socially conservative stagnation. The Irish middle-classes were appalled by the insanity and decadence of people in megacities like London and New York – but it was those kinds of crazy environments that also produced ground-breaking geniuses. Our true creative rebels were buried in foreign lands or in unmarked graves outside our lunatic asylums. Still, despite the conformist dross of most Irish Modern and contemporary art a few figures stood out as at least formally exceptional like Harry Clarke, William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Jack B. Yeats, Michael Farrell, Brian Maguire, Patrick Graham, Dorothy Cross and more recently Aideen Barry, Joseph Walsh, Colin Davidson and Geraldine O'Neill who all promised greatness - though how their work would develop was still to be seen.

              

After spending three and a half-hours looking around the National Gallery and still having not having seen everything we decided to call it day. Despite the beauty of the new National Gallery and my good mood – I could not help feeling - when looking at so many excellently painted works by the Old Masters and even minor masters - that I might as well as go home and throw my paints and brushes and most of my lifework in a skip! These Old Masters and even journeymen had a such an extraordinary work ethic, technical proficiency, intellectual gravity and frankly sanity - that put to shame not only me but most artists since Impressionism. 

Gabriel Metsu At The National Gallery of Ireland

On a gray and rainy Friday 29^th October 2009, I went with Carol to the National Gallery of Ireland to see an exhibition of Gabriel Metsu, a neglected and underrated painter of the Dutch Golden Age. I was familiar with Metsu from two small companion oil paintings that had been donated to the National Gallery by Lord and Lady Beit in the 1980s - after they had been robbed and recovered from Irish criminals. The two paintings Woman Reading a Letter and Man Writing a Letter had long been two of my favourites in the National Gallery and with Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter, they offered an immediate chance to compare the techniques and styles of these two Dutch masters who both sadly died as they had just hit their prime.        

Both were part of the Dutch Golden Age, which after the Spanish Empire had signed a twelve-year truce with the Netherlands and formally recognized it as an independent commonwealth - saw an unprecedented period of peace, trade, commercial prosperity - and the flourishing of Dutch painting. The Dutch did not go in for the Italian love of religious, mythological or historical painting. They were common sense people and the art they liked was a mirror to their mercantile success. The Dutch genre picture was born from the low-life and moralizing pictures of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in the early 16^th century. The Dutch painters of this middle-class genre specialized in low-life debauchery and high-life ‘merry-companies’. The genre produced a host of minor masters like Nicholas Maes, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard Terborch as well as Metsu and of course Vermeer who transcended the genre. Their work appealed to the common person’s love of stories, anecdotal details, realistic depiction, humour and moralizing. In a sense, they were lowbrow works but executed with a lot of talent and some originality.                                                                                     

                                             

Born three years apart and both dying in their late thirties, both Metsu and Vermeer had similar degrees of minor and purely local success in their day. Both produced a small number of finished and surviving works, Metsu about 130 oil paintings and Vermeer only about 34. Both specialized in domestic interiors scenes, Vermeer in a more distant manner - Metsu in a more interactive one. Both knew of each other’s work and were influenced by each other, in Metsu’s case the influence is obvious, Vermeer on the other hand - because of his distinctive style hid his influences better. Yet while Vermeer was almost forgotten in the following two hundred years, Metsu became highly collectable in the eighteenth century - especially amongst the Royal families of Europe. So much so, that Vermeer’s were sold as “in the manner of Metsu.” All this was to change in the late nineteenth century, when art critics, connoisseurs and writers like Proust wrote rapturously of Vermeer. The Impressionist generation of painters and art lovers, prized the painterly magic and originality of Vermeer, while at the same time poured scorn on the kind of minutely detailed and ‘fine’ painting of the likes of Metsu - whose reputation had never really recovered from this change in taste. This was the first exhibition devoted to Metsu since 1968, and the last book devoted to him had been published in 1974. Therefore, I saw this as a historically rewarding exhibition, which allowed modern day viewers to make up their own mind about Metsu.   

                                       

Before going into to see the exhibition of Metsu, I re-read my Heron History of Art volume on Baroque art and its chapters on the prolific and stunning Dutch Golden Age. While Vermeer had three pages of hyperbolic praise devoted to him, Metsu had just one dismissive paragraph: “Dutch art eventually became very tedious. If proof be needed, Metsu provides it. This latter painter was able to create illusion, but in him Gerrit Dou’s mastery became no more than a method; he took Vermeer’s stillness without his mystery... The truth is that Metsu was a cold painter. Ingres amply proved that coldness and stupidity do not preclude genius. Doubtless, Metsu could have proved an analogous demonstration if he had not been so strictly involved with school methods.” (Philippe Daudy, The XVIIth Century II, Heron History of Art, 1968, P. 37.)                     

                                                          

So as I entered the start of the exhibition, and began looking at Metsu’s early canvases my heart sank and my mind concurred with what I had read the night before. Metsu’s early low-life scenes painted on medium size canvases were workmanlike but uninspired. Reminiscent of Gerard Ter Borch, and countless other Dutch genre painters they lacked an authentic voice and offered little visual delight. Yet by the second room, I could already see a great leap forward in Metsu’s technique and maturing of his vision. As he grew into his art, his skill at rendering silk, velvet, fur, metal, wood and flesh became masterful. He was still painting subjects borrowed from others, yet his mastery of his medium was beginning to become evident, as where his own personal gifts of characterization and storytelling. As the size of his work shrank and he shifted from canvas to smooth wooden panels and minute and painstaking brushwork - his work began to exude a genuine glistening magic. In the crass modern age, big is often thought of as better - and even more difficult. Paintings like those of Metsu and Vermeer gave the lie to such primitive delusions. Their paintings made small details a trial of skill and patience beyond most blustering painters. Gerrit Dou for example was famous for spending days on a detail no bigger than a fingernail. I imagined that there must have been countless times when Metsu and Vermeer must have wanted to tear their hair out with despair - while trying to master a detail no bigger than an inch.          

Typically, Metsu painted on wooden panels that he prepared with a reddish brown, buff or grey ground - on which he painted a sketch in black and white, which produced a kind of black and white photograph. Over this, he then painted in colour, before finishing the painting off with a final layer of carefully modulated paint. He used a variety of brushstrokes from blended to stippled to scumbled depending on the surfaces he was trying to capture. Each layer of paint was thin and the final polished painting had virtually no impasto. Metsu’s fine brushwork was subtle but still visible up-close which gave his work a liveliness lacking in other painters of the period - like Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris - whose paintings had an enamelled polish that denied life. Amongst the paintings on show, my favourites were his; Still Life with a Dead Cockerel from 1655-8 whose stark mortality was more moving than many an over the top crucifixion, A Baker Blowing his Horn from 1660-3 which was almost surreal in its magic-realist combination of objects and action, The Intruder an erotic drama from 1661-3 and A Woman Composing Music, with an Inquisitive Man, from 1664-7, a beautiful and charming group scene, masterfully painted.

                 

The influence of Vermeer, was evident in Metsu’s later interior scenes yet the differences between them - were as telling as their superficial similarities. Vermeer’s work was almost dreamlike and uncanny whereas Metsu’s were more naturalistic. Vermeer’s use of a camera-obscurer was obvious - not only because of the strange perspectives, cropped compositions and spatial distortions - but also because of paintwork which seemed filtered and almost abstracted in parts. Vermeer’s use of optical devices may in part explain his rediscovery in the late nineteenth century as photography emerged. Perhaps, it took the photographic age to educate the public in the strange objectivity and dispassionate gaze of the lens. Metsu may have also used an optical device as an aid, but his work seemed far more conventional in its observation and application. While Vermeer presented interiors that were almost voyeuristic in their hidden-camera quality - of people caught unawares in their own silence - Metsu directly engaged us in conventional theatrical scenes that had been set up for an audience. In fact, they presented us with two very different kinds of aesthetics as dissimilar as hidden-camera spying and public theatrics respectively. The hidden-camera Vermeer was more radically modern - presenting a human solitude that was existential in its singularity. The theatrical Metsu was more of his period - presenting the spectacle of social dramas - anchored by a narrative that was traditional in its social discourse and moral presumptions. 

Sadly, the art world is a thing of fashion and bogus ratings. There are always a handful of winners and many losers. However, one of the purposes of the museum is to care for all with talent regardless of the vicissitudes of fashion - so that future generations, can make up their own minds and I for one found Metsu’s late paintings some of the most magnetic and stunning I had ever seen. Besides, even if Metsu was not as great as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals and a host of other Dutch masters he still possessed a talent and skill-set sadly all but lacking today.                                                                                

Apart from the forty oil paintings, there were also a few very rare drawings by Metsu – where he had sketched figures for his later oil paintings present in the show. In addition, there were costumes and objects like a linen night-rail, a pair of mules, an ornate buffalo drinking horn with silver gilt and a sewing cushion from Metsu’s day that all featured in his paintings - these gave an added depth to the exhibition.    After looking around the Metsu exhibition, we went around the permanent collection and looked at Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter. After being immersed in Mestu seeing it again was a shock to the system. Of course, it was a stupendous painting, of course, it was a work of genius and of course - it set me dreaming. However, was it any better than Metsu at his best? Maybe it was. But did it really matter? Besides, although Vermeer had always been an exemplary painter in my mind, I had never been able to rate him as highly as Rembrandt - who was in my opinion was the greatest Dutch artist ever and one of the greatest artists of all time. Vermeer and Mestu were masterful painters of small scenes, so had Rembrandt been in his early years. Nevertheless, Rembrandt had gone on to take in completely the rich pageantry of life. Rembrandt was a humane genius who had a vision of the world that transcended mere subjects or mediums – he was the Shakespeare of painting. Where Vermeer and Metsu had confined themselves to mostly oil painting, Rembrandt had produced drawings in chalk, and ink and etchings that were as great as anything ever done in those mediums. Vermeer and Metsu seemed to look at the work through microscopes – whereas Rembrandt could see the world from on high.                                       

We went to the gallery cafe and had Mocha’s and cakes. Carol had a Carrot cake and I had a Profiterole cake that melted in the mouth. We looked around the gallery bookshop and Carol bought me the catalogue for the Metsu exhibition and bought herself an amazing big book on Henry Darger.                   

As we collected our coats, the friendly girl told us that half the gallery would be closed next year for renovations. The roof was leaking and the heating had to be repaired. She told us also that the Metsu exhibition would be the last major exhibition in a long time because of budget cutbacks. I found it very sad and senseless to cut the funding of our National Gallery. Surely, to God, tourists wanted to come to Dublin to do more than just drink! And what about the up and coming generation of arts lovers and students, how were they going to educate themselves?

The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius

In the last week of March 2009, I went to see The Goldfinch, 1654 by Carel Fabritius’ (1622-54) in the National Gallery. It was on loan from the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, The Hague. It was the centrepiece of a tiny show Vermeer, Fabritus & De Hooch: Three Masterpieces from Delft. The National Gallery of Ireland had painted the walls a beautiful shade of sky blue, which set off this gem perfectly with its companions; Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid by Johannes Vermeer which our National Gallery owned and The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch also on loan. I knew the Vermeer well as a stunning work of genius, so I did not look again at it. I looked at the de Hooch and was impressed by the magical light of his scene of a courtyard. However, I still thought of him as a poor man’s Vermeer. No, I had only come for one reason – to see this little bird.                                                                                                                             

I had first discovered The Goldfinch, in my father’s Heron History of Art books when I was a little boy and I instantly feel in love with it. However, given its location in The Hague I doubted I would ever get to see it in person. The reproduction of the painting in my old book was very crude, dark, warm and yellowed with age - but magical all the same. So to see The Goldfinch in the flesh; the purity of the bone-whites and warm and cool creams of the wall, the subtly modulated dusty blues of the bird box, and the symphony of Naples yellow, burnt sienna and a myriad of flecked greys and ochre’s that made up the bird’s plumage - was intoxicating.                                                                                 

            

It is estimated that during the seventy-five years of the Dutch Golden Age, Dutch painters made around five million oil paintings. That makes The Goldfinch, one of the most precious moments of inspired genius in Dutch art - especially since most of Fabritius’s other works had been destroyed in a catastrophic explosion in Delft.                                                                                                              

Little was known of Fabritius other than he was a star pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam and an early teacher of Vermeer in Delft – whose technique he clearly influenced. The history of art was full of hard luck stories, like when Camille Pissarro’s studio was ransacked by Prussian soldiers and many of his paintings were damaged or destroyed. But, Fabritius was even more unlucky. He was killed with all his family in a fluke explosion at a gunpowder factory near his studio that also destroyed much of Delft. He was only thirty-two when he died. The fire also destroyed virtually all his paintings so that there were only about twelve paintings left in the world by this precocious and unfulfilled master.          

                           

The Goldfinch was a small and deceptively simple picture, just a solitary Goldfinch, perched and tethered by a slender chain, on a rail in front of its feeding box. These little birds were common pets in the Dutch Golden Age, where they were nicknamed puttertjes or little water drawers due to their agility at taking in water. Some have seen the Goldfinch as symbolic of Christ on the Cross.         It was 355 years old, yet it was in immaculate condition, a validation of Fabritius’ technique and the care taken over its preservation by the Dutch who considered it one of the most beautiful paintings of its Golden Age. Ironically, this masterful painting may never have been intended as framed painting, but rather (given the thickness of the wooden panel) it might have been meant as a door to another encased painting.                              

                      

It was a poem in paint, in which Fabritius had gone beyond mere trompe-l’oeil –and entered into the soul of this little Goldfinch. The bird is captured almost in mid movement in a blur of brushstrokes. I looked at it repeatedly thinking that at any moment it might to come to life, sing or try to fly away. The brushwork was broad and direct but also very subtle and measured. The ghostly shading of the white wall behind the bird alone was beyond belief. I was astounded by Fabritius ability to shift even the tiniest portions of the painting from super-fine detail to enigmatic suggestion - in the space of a hairs breath. It was at once highly objective in its technique and humane in its vision, fresh in its paint handling and reasoned in its composition – based on an off-set x pattern. And it was the compositional purity and strength of The Goldfinch which drew me back to look and look again – even at home with the excellent postcard I bought of it. It was as close to a perfect piece of painting - as I had ever seen.

Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art 1870-1920

On Sunday 10^th January 2009, I went with Carol to Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art 1870-1920. After the fitful genius of Paintings from Poland in November 2007, I had high hopes that this exposé of Finnish art would be as enthralling. I cannot say that it was, but then I was not in a good mood when I saw the show. I found the exhibition of Finnish Art a grim experience. Dublin was cold and snow was expected. I was feeling old and fearful for my mother’s health and for my future – so seeing parts of this exhibition was like being taken into a melancholy ward to die. I found many of these paintings gripped with a nihilistic hopelessness that I could easily identify with. However, for once I longed for more beautiful escapist art.    

                                                                                                  

The show was dominated by pictures of pretty children, sorrowful children, pretty women, working women, social deprivation, middle-class bliss, winter landscapes and strange Nordic myths. Overall I found the technical standard of drawing and painting quite high. It was Salon art with workman like draughtsmanship, unusual compositions and odd pallets dominated by whites, greys, greens, pinks and blues– often in an attempt to outdo photography with minute details, intense lighting, obscure narratives and symbolically laden subjects.                                                                                                         

The exhibition was divided up thematically into six sections; Naturalism in Finnish Art, Influence from France, Epic Landscapes, Legends and Myths, The 1900 World Fair and Early Modernism. In the first section there were some sorrowful paintings of children by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but nothing compared to the apocalyptic looking painting Under The Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893, by Eero Jarnefelt. It was an odd painting, combining the usually idealistic and flattering techniques of academic art - with agi-prop social record. The soot covered face of the little girl in the centre of the painting, her clothes in rags, standing in front of burning fires of wood, smoke billowing up around her - as she stared out bleakly at the viewer - haunted my nightmares for months to come. As social propaganda against; child labour, the exploitation of the poor and the ecological destruction of the land - it was compelling. Its grating Naturalism was unforgettable - however as art I did not think it worked. It lacked the universal vision of a true masterpiece.                                                                                                                                 

Albert Edelfet was represented by Conveying the Child’s Coffin, 1879, a large luminous painting of a group of people on a boat - bring a coffin across a lake. In was typical of much of the socially conscious academic art of the 1870s which was inspired by the socialist examples of French masters like Courbet and Millet. Edelfelt superbly deployed academic drawing, composition and tonal-shading – enlivened by a lighter more Impressionist inspired pallet - to record a grim moment in Finnish life. Edelfelt had captured the intense low light of the North excellently and the painting seemed to radiate. However, it had a staged, posed and wooden feeling that made it unconvincing as great art.

Fanny Churberg was represented by some wonderfully fresh alla-prima paintings of skies painted with vigorous and intense flat brush strokes. In fact they were some of the few - free and sensual paintings in the show. On the other hand Pekka Halonen in The Short Cut, 1892 and later in The 1900 World Fair section with Washing on the Ice, 1900, managed to paint some of the bleakest, most depressing and frigid pictures I had ever seen.           
                                                                                        
Later in the Influence from France section, Albert Edelfelt was this time represented by much more atmospheric, sensual and romantic paintings of pretty young women; reading books under trees, learning to play piano, or posed looking invitingly at the viewer. Other’s like Gunnar Berndtson and Akseli Gallen-Kallela also proved themselves adept at making attractive portraits of pretty middle class Finnish girls - and recording the easy going delights of family life. 

Some of the landscapes represented Finland as a barren, inhospitable, lonely wilderness. The extreme coldness of Finland depicted was unusually poignant to me - after weeks of temperatures as low as -3 degrees Centigrade in Dublin. So, I marvelled at these painters fortitude painting in an even colder climate – sometimes out of doors!                                                                                                   

The unsurpassed masterpiece of the landscape section (and maybe the whole show) was Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Imatra in Winter, 1893. This huge canvas of an icy river, bounded by banks of deep snow and trees densely frosted with snowflakes was epic in its intensity. Gallen-Kallela had managed to go beyond the merely picturesque and animated nature. His masterful and evocative use of a Mirada of whites haunted my imagination. However most of the rest of the landscape section was undistinguished - apart from its unusual Northern topography. 

The low point of the show for me was the Legends and Myths section, with its crude folk revival art that verged on the comically bad. It exposed the poverty of Gallen-Kallela and Hugo Simberg’s imaginations, the limitations of their technique and immaturity of their visions. Akseli Gallen-Kallela reappeared again with two of the most ridiculous looking paintings I had ever seen. Aino Myth, Triptych, 1889, which seemed like nothing more than an excuse to show lots of naked Finnish girls being chased by a long bearded old man. (Although I did enjoy seeing his use of the ancient Nordic Swastika all around the frame of the picture - long before in the hands of Hitler it became a symbol of race-hate, vengeance and death.) While The Forging of the Sampo, 1893, looked like nothing but a children’s book illustration rendered with all the skill and lack of imagination of an academic oil painter. I hadn’t a clue what any of these old myths meant and I didn’t care – I hated myths.  

At least Akseli Gallen-Kallela had technical skill, Hugo Simberg on the other hand was as crude as an adolescent. His work was too illustrational and rudimentary – he simply did not have the visionary power of James Ensor working in Ostend or Edvard Munch in Oslo at the same time. 

The final modernist section, like with that of ‘Paintings from Poland’ in 2007, displayed a noticeable decline in originality and authenticity as Finnish artists pastiched (with some skill and panache) the latest trends of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in Paris. They were always four or five years too late, and never contributed anything new to these movements.  

Seeing most of this art only served to prove to me how necessary modernist’s like Cézanne, van Gogh, Munch, Matisse and Picasso had been - to render truly visionary and technically powerful art in an age of polite and commercial art. Their oeuvres had taken the same questions of; social life, form, subjectivity, primitivism, myth and sexuality – which these Finnish and a host of other minor European artists had been battling with - and given convincing, hard won and transcendent answers.                        

Overall, I found this show educational and enjoyable. Given my depressed mood, I felt I had not given the exhibition a fair enough look. So I instantly vowed to go back again when my spirits were better. However, unforeseen events would make that impossible.