I got up early on
Thursday 27th 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, 20th
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 17th 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.