Trivial Contemporary Irish Art vs. the Grandeur of the Old Masters

On Tuesday 2ed June, Carol and I went into town at 11:30am to go to see the 185^th Annual RHA Exhibition and then to visit the National Gallery of Ireland. I would not have bothered going to the Annual RHA Exhibition, but Carol, had wanted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You.  Frankly, by the age of forty-four art contemporary art had lost all meaning to me - and if it wasn’t for Julian Schnabel - I would have virtually no interest in contemporary art and even his work of the last twenty years had largely been one disappointment after another.                                       

                                                           

Still, Carol  was delighted to see Tracey Emin’s neon writing piece Wanting You immediately in the foyer - though for me it was a vacuous piece that formally had taken from Joseph Kosuth’s use of neon writing - and was only interesting because it took an expressive sentiment and turned it into an adult bookshop sign. Which made me wonder if any authentic expression was possible today - especially in an art world determined to embrace ironic conceptualism and rabid commercialism. Besides, I had long since fallen out of love with Emin after getting sick to death of seeing her on television  - and she had become nothing but a desperate, self-involved celebrity droning on about her suffering while raking in the cash and claiming that - despite all evidence to the contrary - that she could actually draw! Not only could Emin not draw, she couldn’t even make interesting bad drawings. In fact, I had long since lost interest in the whole yBa movement – which had proved to be so artistically limited and hypocritical in its early Punk posturing and then rapid commercial whoring and smug membership of the RA.               

                                    

To say I was unimpressed by the vast majority of what was on offer in the RHA is an understatement. Though at least it was an open submission exhibition that theoretically at least offered everyone a chance. I found the commercialism, snobbery and elderly, upper-middle-class nature of the RHA nauseating. It was certainly not a club I wanted to be part of - and never had. Despite applying to countless galleries and accumulating over ninety-eight rejections - I had never applied to the RHA and never wanted to! I considered it a betrayal of my anarchistic ideals.                      

                                                

As usual the Annual RHA Exhibition was a mixed bag and the sheer quantity of work on display made it more a treasure hunt in a junk shop than a contemplative experience. I was very fond of John Behan’s bronze sculptures - some painted white - in particular Famine Ship in which the emigrants were blowing like sails in the wind. Though I did wonder when Irish nationalists would stop milking the famine.   

I was very impressed by David Begley’s large charcoal drawing of an x-ray which was both quite contemporary and technically a tour de force, moreover it was far superior to previous paintings I had seen him make and there were other excellent charcoal life drawings and landscapes but by people whose names I instantly forgot.                                                                                                                                

Dorothy Cross’s Silver Plates one with a cast dead bird and the other with a castrated penis (though in the art world they call it a phallus that symbolises the penis), was just another pastiche of Louise Bourgeois by Cross and another sign of an art world run by women and ineffectual, chastised men that delighted in images of castrated males and repellent anti-sex images. Yet woe betide the male painter who continued to paint naked women especially in a sexy way!                             

                                    

I was baffled by Alice Mahar’s bronze sculpture Goddess after Canova which was on an Yves Klein blue pillar. Overall it reminded me of the short lived fad in the early 1980s for the Italian Anachronisfici pastiches of Neo-Classical art by the awful painter Carlo Maria Mariani - and Maher’s work was just as pointless. I wondered if there was anything Mahar was not prepared to pastiche? And was anyone in the Irish art world ever going to call her on it? Apparently not, because here at least - they thought her a genius - and nothing critical could ever be said of a female artist these days!                 

                                    

In fact most of the sculptures on display at the 185^th Annual Exhibition, were dismally conventional or crassly wacky - in a desperate attention seeking way. The exception being Stephanie Hess’ March Hare - a sensual and deceptively simple abstracted hare in patinated bronze that actually looked like it had been carved in stone - and which I craved to touch.                                                                                

                

Eithne Jordan’s bland paintings of streets and interiors in a facile, generic, contemporary style left me cold - and all I could remember was that I had preferred her when she had been a more Neo-Expressionist artist back in the late 80s and I wondered if she would ever find out who she really was.  Diana Copperwhite’s painting Fake World II did little to impress me though everyone else seemed to think she was amazing. To me she had one idea – take a large 4 inch flat paint brush and apply different colours to its sides and middle and then swipe the rainbow of colours all around the painting in vaguely figurative shapes. It was a flaccid, crass and gimmicky version of what some might consider - seen at a considerable distance - to be a wonky, late, drunken de Kooning. Yet it was too pretty and desperate to please - to ever be as great as a de Kooning.                                                                                         

James Hanley’s comical drawings from monuments and sculptures were absurdly stupid works which proved to me why his work was so unconvincing, he aspired to classical values but he had the personality of a clown. Hanley’s huge unsubtle portraits in oils were so bad they reminded me of illustrational murals on a toy store wall.                                                                         

A far more convincing work was Geraldine O'Neill’s large Drawing which was similar to her large oil painting Is feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal which had been shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 and I had hated. This time however, I found O’Neill’s Drawing to be a far more coherent and satisfying work, though I still found O'Neill caught between wanting to be a pretentious Old Master and gimmicky contemporary artist – resulting in work that satisfied neither desire.      

                                

Colin Martin’s painting of interiors like a sound studio were above average though not as good as work I had seen him do years ago - because they seemed comparatively rushed and unfinished. Donald Teskey displayed some actual soul in his expressive Irish landscapes though they were very conventional works.                                                                                                                                                           

Rapid Eye Movement an oil on panel painting by Darragh Dempsey of a woman’s legs seen poking out from under a bed and spot lit by a torch was a technically accomplished work that actually haunted my imagination.                                                                                                                               

       

There were probably many more quality works that I did not look at properly because I was so dazed or appalled by the surrounding rubbish. And trying to make sense of why some works sold and so many others did not - I could only think they did not match people’s interior decoration. I found, so much of the rest of the art at the 185^th Annual RHA Exhibition, posturing and pastiched art that was desperate to be liked, flattered to deceive and grandstanded its supposed technical skill which in fact was mostly nothing but the following of formulas, largely pointless and not worth the effort. So many of these works were trying to ape photography or were obsessed with memetic skill - but without any consideration for original ideas, deeply felt emotion or an authentic vision of the world. Mostly it was schooled art by technician’s who had learned some shortcuts but who were not real artists and who despite tricking out their work with contemporary themes were as bourgeois, conservative, sanctimonious, sentimental, twee, kitsch and unoriginal as their boring, ludicrous and instantly forgettable predecessors in the RHA a hundred years ago.                                                                                                       

                           

Moreover most of this art was politically and socially correct to a fault, parroting the new liberal consensus around sexuality, the nationalist consensus around Irishness and the political right wing consensus around economics. That, I too shared some of these views - did not stop me feeling uneasy in such an age of conformity, group think and rabble rousing - and I itched to be contrarian. Fed on bohemian myths of Modernist transgression and rebellion, I had decided as a youth to become and artist, but now as a middle aged man, I realised that rebellion in art was just a Hollywood fiction and the forces of coercive academic, commercial and stylistic conformity were vast in comparison.                                    

                        

Of course to these respectable professionals, my art was offensive, deplorable, unacceptable, and nothing to do with art as they saw it. Yet, I frankly did not care a wit what they thought of as art – in fact the whole idea of ‘Art’ had become questionable to me because; art had once again become; an academic exercise, success required such incredible networking and media whoring, styles had become as meaningless as musical one hit wonders, art was never going to be anything but a censored, glorified and moralised version of reality, artists would always strive toward ever greater self-aggrandising pretension and obscurity and art was largely nothing but a business like any other - where ‘rebels’ were nothing but entrepreneurs posing as Punks. After the blip of Modernism, art was again the most bourgeois, sanctimonious and conventional thing to do imaginable - yet it pretended it was still radical.                           

                       

So for me, the vast array of pastel and grey coloured paintings - mostly painted in a similar way - blended into one amorphous academic mass of conformity. Even the more youthful and gimmicky works by younger artists played with the same clichés of NCAD painting and Vitamin P (the much passed about book on self-consciously contemporary, arty illustrational painting) that I had become all too familiar. And the so called expressive works were risible cartoons of expressivity by buffoons not tortured souls.                    

 

I noticed how stupid many of the abstract works looked amongst figurative paintings, photographs and sculptures - which made their aesthetics seem slim and insignificant. Even abstract artists I had previously thought highly of in solo exhibition like Richard Gorman - looked exposed and vacant and I was astonished his work had not developed or changed in nearly fifteen years. If ever a style need the unchallenged megalomaniacal solo exhibition space it was Abstraction - especially if it was very mediocre abstraction. There was a whole room full of artily staged looking photographs, many of them magazine supplement quality - but I simply did not care about the vast majority of photography as an art form.                                                                                                                                         

               

In the basement some head banger in a balaclava and army fatigues was in a cage pottering about, amongst new canvases still in their cellophane wrappers. In fact all he had seemed to do is scrawl on a white board for a few minutes and then go out for a cigarette break. I took one look at him and walked back upstairs. I had no idea what he was trying to say or why he chose to stage a revolution in the bowel of academia - and I didn’t care. Besides I had done a far better performance piece in an art gallery in 2002!    

Of course all the above was my own personal opinion and one not shared in the Irish art world by all accounts. In fact if one was to judge by critics like Adian Dunne and Cristín Leach Hughes most of this art was splendid. For Irish art, with it incestuous familiarity, did not operate on the principal of open critique but rather on the basis of opaque favours - handed out to those in the beloved inner circle - and wordless banishment to all those not deemed worthy. In other words, you were either exhibited by curators or not and mentioned by critics and praised - or ignored completely. Such a ‘humane’ system where if you couldn’t say anything nice you said nothing at all - allowed nothing in the Irish art world to be questioned and nobody’s position to be revealed. ‘Geniuses’ were presented to you and you either believed the hype or were a philistine - not worth inviting to their dinner parties. The unfashionable, obscene, ‘non-artists’ living in oblivion, were denied bad reviews - and the possibility of historical redress - that had been accorded so many of the heroes of Modernism. Thus in its way this new liberal consensus held an even greater death grip over culture than the conservative anti-Modernist culture it had over thrown.                                              

Getting a headache from the sea of mediocrity we left and headed to Hodges Figgis, where I bought The Essential Cy Twombly a beautiful tomb on one of my favourite artists of the past sixty years and one of the biggest influences on my own art. I also bought Keeping an Eye Open a collection of essays on art by Julian Barnes whose writing instantly impressed me – which was not easy. Barnes brought a novelist eye to the lives of many of the great French masters of Romanticism, Impressionism and Modernism and gave me a refreshingly jargon and theory free perspective to their art. In fact, when I started reading it at home a few days later - I could not put it down! Barnes instantly became one of my favourite contemporary literary writers on art up there with the sadly departed John Updike. (Then at the end of June, I was delighted that Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open was the book at bedtime on BBC Radio 4 and even though I had read it by then - I enjoyed hearing Barnes reading extracts from it.)                                                            

Then we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and went around the Sean Scully retrospective which had a few surprisingly beautiful paintings from the mid-1980s which made me slightly reassess my poor opinion of him. However, he remained in my mind the most overrated painter of the past thirty years and a desperately limited one at that. Looking through a catalogue to the exhibition, I saw a large number of his early figurative works from the 1960s - which were sadly not included in the exhibition because they would have given me a great source of merriment! There were one or two promising life drawings, but overall his figurative work was appallingly bad – tenth rate at best – so I found it amusing that he had the cunning to ditch figurative art and become an abstract painter hailed as one of the foremost painters alive! Personally I thought there was more artistry in the stone wall makers of the Aran Islands (whose walls Scully photographed in some of the better works in the exhibition) than in him. Yet the likes of Scully, were the professional model to follow in the debacle after the death of Modernism. His academic pedigree, his teaching posts, his rabid commercialism, his incessant exhibitions of his over 1,400 paintings of rectangles - were acceptable to every country in the world from Communist dictatorships, Islamic Kingdoms and Western democracies where taking politically correct offense had become endemic and forming Twitter lynch mobs a sport.             

                                                                                                                      

Finally after an afternoon in the bogs and foothills of art we ascended near the peak with a look around the permanent collection which though largely mediocre - compared with the likes of The National Gallery in London, Louvre, Prado, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie or the Metropolitan Museum of New York - still possessed paintings of a technical skill, sophistication and humane ambition that made what we had seen earlier in the day look like the pathetic efforts of remedial students. Perversely, this more quietly spoken art revealed truths of beauty, which the noisy shouting of mediocrity could not even envision, and rather than bludgeoning the viewer with claims of importance, which turned out to be nothing but a sales pitch, this great art uplifted and inspired in ways we today are not even fully conscious of - because our visual awareness and attention span has become so scatter-brained, distorted and debased. Compared to the garish sound bites of contemporary art these paintings by the Old Masters were visual epic poems of the most entrancing kind. However, I wasn’t even interested in looking at the overly familiar world class masterpieces by the likes of Titian, Vermeer or Goya. Instead I wanted to spend some time looking at other quality works that I had not seen in a while, like the stunning 14^th century altarpieces replete with old gold leaf and displaying naïve but endearing form and intense and loving faith in God. Though looking at them I felt a shiver of sadness at these alters ripped from their churches and reduction to aesthetic objects - as well as a curiosity about how they originally looked in the churches they had been painted for. Still, in their thick, wooden, amputated reliefs - they had a tremendous suggestive power. Some young women laughed nervously at their naïveté - yet surely they were whistling past the graveyard – unnerved by an uncanny vision so alien to our modern world. For who are we to judge their work? Yes, their perspective and anatomy was naïve by later standards - yet this was compensated for by an obsessive faith in God we cannot even imagine. Personally, I did not believe in God, but if anything artistic was going to persuade me - it was these paintings.                                                                                                                                                 

As for portraits, there was not a woman or man able to paint as convincing and regal a portrait as Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese from around 1560 and which was a far better proof of female talent in painting than the hysterics of Feminist artists since the 1960s. I also was entranced by the torch light painting The Image of Saint Alexis attributed to Georges de La Tour with its mixture of chiaroscuro, dramatic torch light and classical solidity of form  - which made the efforts of RHA members look like gaudy computer generated graphics.                                                                                          

As for still-life, just take Jan Weenix’s Game-piece: the Garden of a Château, from the 1690s. It was a relatively minor genre painting by a minor painter, however its mastery illustrated to me the tragic technical and intellectual gap between our contemporary efforts in paint with those before the advent of photography. I remember first seeing this painting as a young boy teaching myself how to draw. I studied How-To-Books in which almost the first lesson was how to draw an apple - that was rendered as a schematic line drawing of what looked more like something made of quartz. I could not imagine then, just how far I would have to go to ever attempt something like Jan Weenix nor did I know that I would never reach that point nor have the temperament or sanity to achieve it. Moreover, I did not know that the whole idea of representational painting would be called into question by my later study of Modernism and Post-Modernism and embrace of Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism.                                                       

Yet, I was delighted to see this old friend again, and marvelled at its sumptuous display of atmosphere and sensual and tactile surfaces from; the damp dusky sky above a limpid classical landscape in the background, to the ripe fruit and brace of birds, cockerel and the dead hare hung by its right paw and slumping forward in a diagonal pose that was reminiscent of Ruben’s The Elevation of The Cross. It took the sad death of an animal and made it tragic and lamentable. Yet it did so without the psychotic ranting of vegans today, and it made it clear that this was simply the way things were in the natural world where men still killed what they ate. Every object in Game-piece: the Garden of a Château had its own feel, from the damp of the sky, to velvet feel of the flowers, to the fuzz on the peaches to the fur on the hare and every inch of the canvas had hidden details like classical sculptures in the background and busy insects on the fruit. There was not a single painter alive who could paint like that convincingly nor was society set up to encourage such patient and selfless labour nor was any audience willing to spend as much time contemplating it as the painter had on painting it. Neither today’s painter nor his audience had the patience or focus to look for hours at the same image and forsake all the millions of others spewed out by the internet daily. Nor did we believe in ancient symbolism or understand their meanings in the visceral way those schooled in them once did. So Jan Weenix’s painting illustrated for me all that we had lost and could never regain - but which we would be fools not to at least acknowledge. That was the glory of art history - it proved a constant rebuke to those contemporary manipulators who try to pretend things can never be any different or we are living in a golden age of geniuses or that we are progressing toward some kind of utopia.

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.