On
Thursday 4th June 2009, I ventured into town with Carol to see an
exhibition in The Dublin City Gallery
Hugh Lane. It was my first trip into the city in a month and since we were
both broke it was my first trip on a bus in nearly a year. The sun was high and
hot in the sky, the wind was cool, and dirty Dublin looked better than usual.
Looking around the city and seeing dozens of very attractive, sexy and happy
looking women – I felt like a man released from prison to find that life was
still going on in the city. Yet it was also depressing to see so many premises
boarded up – victims of the economic depression.
I had been lured out of my house to see The Quick and the Dead an exhibition of
Irish Neo-Expressionists from the 1980s. In 1986, Patrick Graham (b.1943),
Brian Maguire (b.1951), Patrick Hall (b.1935) and Timothy Hawkesworth were
featured in 4 Irish Expressionist
Painters – a collaborative exhibition between Northeastern University and
Boston College. The exhibition had been staged to coincide with Politics and the Arts in Ireland a
conference held by the Irish Studies
Programme in Boston College. All four had been born in Ireland, though
Hawkesworth had emigrated to the U.S. by 1977. However, he had begun to exhibit
in Ireland since the turn of the millennium, including a show in The Royal Hibernian Academy in recent
years.
The show in
the Hugh Lane brought together a handful of their early paintings and a larger
number of their most recent works to show how their art had developed since
then. Although classed as Irish Neo-Ex’s these painters could also have been
called Irish Neo-Gothic artists. Their dark, pained, thwarted and shamed
paintings registered the morbid Catholicism of Ireland in the 1980s amidst the
hysterics of a dying religion. Graham and Maguire had been teenage heroes of
mine and I had followed their work closely ever since.
Given our new economic and social
crisis, this show was timely as it transported us back to the troubled Ireland
of the 1980s. After a decade of prosperity and peace when we in Ireland had
felt we could take on the world, we had seen our economic bubble burst and
public unrest grow. Fear, panic and anger had returned to Ireland in the space
of one calamitous year – so it was a perfect time to show these agi-prop works
of the soul from the decade in which we had been called ‘the sick man of
Europe’. It was also a reminder of the emotional, confessional and
confrontational approach to painting that had been pushed aside by more photo
and process based painting in the past twenty years. Plus, by featuring all
Irish based artists it was cheaper to stage than one based on expensive, in
demand foreign artists.
In
the catalogue, Ireland was said to have been in a schizophrenic state in the
1980s torn between the troubled past and an uncertain future. Apart from our
economic crisis and the mass emigration of many of our most ambitious and
talented young people - we lived in a state of fear and despair as we witnessed
the outrages of Northern Ireland and fought cultural wars in the South around
the subjects of; divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, pornography
and the role of the Catholic Church in modern Irish society. As such, the work
of these and other Neo-Expressionist like Brian Bourke and Michael Kane –
documented our cultural and national, identity crisis – or at least as it was
seen from a very masculine perspective.
These
angry, political and antagonistic Irish paintings - obsessed with the body and
its place within the state might have been part of a Neo-Expressionist
bandwagon but it fit the Irish character at the time like a glove. The grimness
of Graham, Maguire and to a lesser extent Hall and Hawkesworth – went deliberately
and defiantly against previous Irish academic art, abstract bank art and
popular culture. They were accused of egotism, misogyny, socio-political
incorrectness and the production of reactionary painting by their numerous
critics – particularly those in the pages of Circa magazine. In the end their dedication and integrity had paid
off and they all went on to be represented by our best private galleries,
exhibited in our best museums and bought and sold by some of our biggest
businessmen.
By and large, our painters in the
early 1980s lacked the finances and support of rich painters in New York or
Cologne and so had to make ends meet as best they could. The Irish art world
had always been small, but in the eighties it was especially restricted in
terms of the number of active collectors. So denied sales, most painters had to
apply to the Arts Council, for the cost of a large canvas and some paint. But
the number of grants was small, the grants limited in finance and competition
was fierce. Arguably, the likes of Graham and Maguire achieved far more than
most with what resources they had. They were also lucky to have the support of
dealers like Blaithin De Sachy.
The
drab, shoddy look, of many of these Irish Neo-Ex’s canvases – the paucity of
colour, crudeness of drawing and lack of sensually handled paint - could make
these hard works for the unfeeling, bourgeois art lover to enjoy. Added to that
was their frequent mixture of painting and writing – which repelled the
occasional art goer unfamiliar with the precedents of Picasso’s Cubist
paintings, René Magritte’s Pipe, Beuys lectures or Dubuffet, Twombly and
Basquiat’s graffiti inspired work. Personally, I admired the honesty, bravery
and intensity of their works.
Looking
at the early work of Graham, Maguire and Hawkesworth, I was struck by my own
painterly timidity in comparison. I had always loved ordered chaos and usually
respected the picture plane. The writing on my paintings in comparison to
theirs was far more neurotic, naïve, voluminous and unself-conscious in its
graphomania.
Graham
again came out of this show in my mind as the greatest painter alive in Ireland
– our most honest, agonized and redemptive. His work was also the most
consistent of the four. Graham, was a shy unassuming man who never pushed his
art as shamelessly as others and so while achieving success, failed to win the
wider recognition he deserved. He was notoriously media shy and rarely attended
even his own openings. All of the texts on Graham spoke of his early
precociousness but having seen nothing done before 1980 - I had to take his
advocates word for it. It was seeing an exhibition of paintings by Emil Nolde
in Dublin that made Graham realize that his academically prized work was
limited, safe and dishonest. Nolde’s highly expressive and daring paintings
encouraged Graham to adopt a rawer more expressive style and to push beyond
mere facility.
By the 80s, both Graham
and Maguire had developed an art of fragmentation – of paintings that did not
quite fit together – divided through drawing or composition – or literally
ripped apart in the case of Graham’s fragile, battered and repainted images.
Graham seemed to test his paintings to destruction – ripping, tearing and
stabbing his canvases and then remounting, sowing or stapling them back
together onto a new larger piece – I envied their intensity.
Graham’s pallet had since the 1980s been
dominated by greys, whites, blacks and small shots of blue, red and pink. His
paintings centred around the figure and landscape - and the need to make sense
of their relationship. In interviews and writing, Graham cited the likes of
Piero Della Francisca and Andrea Mantegna as influences – and I could see it –
but other names like Kiefer, Lucio Fontana, Twombly and Basquiat came to mind
sooner. Though, these never received a mention from Graham – a typical
professional artist’s obscuration.
Graham’s work played with revelation
and concealment, sexual longing and castration, spiritual quest and abandoned
pain. His work was intensely private and intelligent in its attempt to find a
lasting beauty that did not pastiche itself.
In
recent canvases like Famine (Mayo Series)
2006 – Graham wrote an initial draught of writing on the canvas – and then
corrected this writing in the manner of a Christian Brother upbraiding an
unruly pupil. In the centre of the black cross – was pinned a small pearl drop
earring – just one of many small fetishistic details, hidden on first sight by
the huge scale of Graham’s work.
Maguire on the other
hand appeared to have developed more as an artist and human being in the past
few decades – mapped through an engagement with social politics and the lives
of the poor. In this he was a rarity amongst Expressionists. Maguire recognised
early on that Expressionism could be fatally solipsistic, voyeuristic and
self-aggrandising. So by the late 1980s he had began to teach and work with
marginalised groups like prisoners, psychiatric patients and children in the
slums of Sao Paulo. However, I wondered if he had merely replaced the voyeurism
of Expressionism for the voyeurism of Fine Art socialism. Few of his paintings
of marginalized people told me anything about them as human beings other than
as life-models or objects of social propaganda.
Maguire’s
early paintings recalled the Berlin nudes of Kirchner, but his latter work had
evolved into a more open, lyrical and painterly style. Maguire’s early drawing
was woeful but by his later years he had achieved a subtle and evocative form
of charcoal drawing that he often left exposed under the acrylic in his
paintings.
Maguire’s
best painting in the show, was the massive double canvas Memorial, 1998, which was based on the killings of prisoners in a
riot in Carandiru Prison in Sao Paulo. Maguire had bought the rights to the
photo archive of the riots from the O
Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper for a nominal fee and also interviewed some
of the prisoners and a warden who had witnessed the killings. In charcoal,
Maguire had drawn the battered bodies of the prisoners laid out in their
coffins - amidst an ethereal field of dripped and cascading white, grey, ochre
and black paint. Their coffins appeared to float upwards - hopefully towards
some kind of peace. It was elegiac and heartbreaking - and for once Maguire had
used subtle, aesthetic persuasion to engage the viewer politically.
Patrick Hall’s work bore
similarities to Outsider art, famous Italian’s like Enzo Cucchi and more
obscure German Neo-Expressionists like early Walter Dahn. I found Hall’s work
far less convincing and memorable than any of his influences. There was a gimmicky
quality to many of his later paintings in particular that failed to impress me.
My favourite piece by Hall was Doll-House,
2008 - an old wooden doll house painted in a faux-naïve outsider style. It
looked funky and collectable like a lot of the ‘outsider’ art that was hot in
New York in the late 1990s – but I didn’t think it meant much of anything.
Timothy Hawkesworth was the weakest
and most irrelevant of the four painters for me. His work did not seem to add
much to Expressive painting that had not already been said first and better by
Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly or Martin Disler. His best work
for me was his early canvases like The
Sower at Night from 1986 and Sweet
Song from 1992. Yet when I heard he had spent over two years on The Sower At Night I was dumb-founded
that he had still failed to resolve it. Hawkesworth’s later paintings just
looked like flaccid messes of expensive paints – in the vein of late Jules
Olitski – though not nearly as good.
Despite
my restricted budget I simply had to buy the catalogue for the exhibition and a
small pocket book on Graham by Gandon Editions from 1992 (€32 in total – half
of what I would normally spend in their excellent bookshop.) The text in the
exhibition catalogue was very good but it was let down by the awful quality of
most of the reproductions. In the age of digital camera’s there was no excuse
for this. I was also irked by the fashionable photographing of many of the
paintings from a distance in the gallery – like an installation and the
fetishistic photographing of their studios.
While in the Hugh Lane we also had a
chance to see Yinka Shonibare’s installation Egg Fight, 2009. It was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, particularly the
endless battles between Lilliput and Blefuscu over which end of an egg one
should open – Swift’s disguised comment on the many wars between Catholic
France and Protestant England in the eighteenth century. Shonibare was an
interesting if somewhat limited artist. Born in 1962, he grew up in Nigeria but
later studied in England and most of his work played off these two cultural
heritages in a knowing and stylish way. In 2004, he had been shortlisted for
the Turner Prize – but for me he was always a poor man’s Chris Ofili and he
came many years after the initial groundbreaking yBa’s.
The installation
consisted of two rifle men mannequins, in uniforms of the eighteenth century –
but made of Dutch wax patterns popular in Africa. Between the two figures was a
rope net filled with eggs - which were in fact made of polystyrene and
hand-painted to look like eggs. There were a few broken ‘eggs’ their yellow and
white yokes spilled out onto the white platform – but this was in fact yellow
and white silicon. Overall it was an intelligent and hip illustration of
post-modern simulation, visual sampling and recoding - given a post-colonial
spin. But it was not a work I ever had to see again.
Accompanying this installation was a separate series of
collages entitled Climate Shit Drawings,
2008-2009 by Shonibare. The shit
in the title - came in the form of photographs of turds in various sizes and
colours – cut out and pasted onto whimsical collages which teemed with various
things like ocean liners in trouble and very mundane observations on disaster
written all over the page - along with arty doodling. It was a big theme dealt
with in a glib, first-year, fashion student kind of way. My usual fondness for
looking very closely at an art work was confounded by the sight of the shit –
even if they were merely reproductions of the natural waste products of every
single human being on the planet. This was compounded by a deeper concern with
the copying of the idea from the likes of Gilbert and George and Chris Ofili.
As for what any of it meant as a statement on Climate change, disaster or the
end of the world – I hadn’t a clue. The greatest shame of these collages was
their total waste of beautiful, modern, black and gold frames - which must have
cost quite a pretty penny. These works were literally crap!
Finally, we had another quick
look around the permanent collection to review our favourite paintings. Carol
loved Claude Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow,
c.1878-79 - with its sexy mix of whites, blues and pinks thrown down with
skill, passion and delight. I loved John Lavery’s luscious oil on panel
painting of his wife and daughter skiing – rendered with an enviable economy of
bravura brushstrokes. Before we left, we decided to have one final look around The Quick and The Dead – which repaid
our reviewing with more revelations. We decided not to waste our money in the
cafe and went to McDonald’s instead which we thoroughly enjoyed. That night
when I fell asleep, I dreamed I was back in the Hugh Lane alone, looking at the
Patrick Graham’s – and floating on air.