On
Tuesday 30th December 2014, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of
Ireland. I had avoided the National Gallery for a few years because I could not
stand to see the museum I grew up with - reduced to a few rooms of selected
highlights. However, I was interested in seeing the Hennessy Portrait Prize ‘14 and its twelve shortlisted artists -
though I was shocked to see they had converted the old café into a cramped space
to show the portraits. Portrait painting had suddenly become quite fashionable
again with shows like Sky Arts Portrait
Artist of The Year which Carol and I had greatly enjoyed - if only because
we always liked to see artists working and amongst the shortlisted artists at
the Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 was Comhghall Casey who had twice appeared
in the early heats of Portrait Artist of
The Year. Still, in the age of modern media, I tended to find portrait
painting as anachronistic as calligraphy, pottery or basket weaving – of course
it could still be done but why bother? For me portrait painting only had
continuing value if the artist could present a vision different to the one mass
media already supplied - which is why I tended to think most conventional
naturalist or realist painting pointless.
Overall,
I found the twelve works shortlisted for the
Hennessy Portrait Prize ’14 mediocre - although with flickers of promise
here and there - and most represented a particularly conservative, bourgeois and
middle brow notion of the portrait that seemed to bypass the most troubling
insights about modern alienation and mediation of Expressionism, Cubism, Pop or
Post-Modernism.
I
thought Comhghall Casey’s self-portrait the kind of third rate kitsch realism
of someone who acted as though the last two hundred years of painting hadn’t
happened. Casey’s self-portrait was a deluded, smug, self-satisfied, self-portrait
by someone who could draw and paint in a conventional and generic manner but
knew nothing about art history and thought they were an Old Master living
amongst us.
Gavan
McCullough’s arrogant looking self-portrait - a kind of paint by numbers
version of Lucian Freud that displayed the dubious ability to make luscious oil
paint look like latex - showed similar delusions but also a contempt for either
himself or the viewer depending upon whether he had painted it looking in a mirror
or camera lens.
Una
Sealy’s portrait of her son was an even more blatant sugary pastiche of Lucian
Freud and with none of his intensity, angst or relentless scrutiny. The
backstory of Helen O'Sullivan-Tyrrell’s blurry portrait of her daughter sick in
hospital was moving and humane, but undermined by its generic Gerhard
Richter/Luc Tuyman’s blurred and muted painterly grammar which frankly tens of
thousands of art students have mimicked worldwide for the past twenty years to
no great effect. The only reason I could fathom for the popularity of this
style was its contemporary stylish look - that allowed painters to shamelessly
use photographs - and its comparative ease of production.
Geraldine
O'Neill’s huge canvas Is
feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal - depicting a girl
holding a plastic bag with a goldfish which was quite well painted into a
feeble copy of an old master painting probably of Flemish origin upon which she
then drew childlike drawings - was an awful pretentious mess just like its
title. O'Neill’s desperate attempt to look profound fell as flat as her attempt
to paint like an old master which literally came apart at the edges of her
wonky and fitful drawing and painting. All in all it reminded me of some of the
most generic Post-Modern pastiches of the Old Masters from the early 1980s.
Worse still was the hectoring symbolism and attempt to seem profoundly
intellectual. For me this cat was clearly dead. But I noticed that this confused
pastiche and grand attempt to be what people popularly thought was the work of
a real painter had pulled the slack jawed crowd around it.
The
winner of the exhibition had been Nick Miller’s Neo-Expressionist portrait of
fellow painter Barry Cooke who had sadly died this year, however despite being
in a style I admired I thought it crabbed, crude and even adolescent - despite
Miller being middle aged.
Despite
loathing video art, I found Saoirse Wall’s work Gesture 2 - in which she lay in a bath
with white tiles beside her and in a white dress as she looked out at the
viewer challengingly – actually quite intense and unsettling and it remained in
my memory. It was reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s vulnerable paintings of herself
in a bath or Tracey Emin’s photographs of herself in a bath looking exhausted by
debauchery and fame. Wall’s Gesture 2 also
had more impact when seen in the gallery where her gaze could unsettled the
viewer unused to portraits looking back challengingly at the viewer.
Hugh
O'Conor’s sepia photograph of Beckah,
a young black woman working in Dublin airport was the most beautiful and moving
work in the show and a reminder that one can find moments of beauty in the most
mundane places.
But
the most interesting work for me was Cian McLoughlin’s Tronie a menacing yellow smear of a head that
from a distance appeared almost in profile yet close up appear frontally. This
was the only painting in the show that had any spark of original and modern feeling
for me.
I
had become a painter to avoid having conversations with other people - though
in later life I did enjoying talking about art with my girlfriends - my
preferred conversations were with paintings. I had become a painter to avoid
the written word but now museums were consumed with a diarrhea of text turning
galleries of paintings into reading rooms and temples into freak shows. And art
now had to be mediated by writers giving personal anecdotes about their
fondness for such and such a work in the museum and how it influenced them –
yet another example of the dominance of literature in Ireland. Even my own
writing was a subconscious attempt to explain my work to a society that would
not dream in paint. Perhaps such text helped the uninitiated - but personally I
thought it was better to read about art at home and make the most of the time
in galleries actually looking at the art. Worse still was the jumble sale
assembly of paintings heedless of chronology, school or style, which hung
masterpieces of world class stature with provincial daubs by Irish mediocrities
turning everything into rubbish. It was like going to an insane house party
where people were playing classical music, jazz and rock and roll in the same
room – creating nothing but a berserk cacophony. I have frankly seen countless
student exhibitions better curated than this costly vanity exercise. I thought
an exhibition that included masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer,
Velázquez, Monet and Bonnard could be nothing but awe inspiring - however if this
show proved anything it was what philistine curators could do to the art they
were entrusted with. Moreover, by removing the paintings from their historical
schools and matching them with works created centuries later and of no real
similarity they robbed all the work of their historical meaning. For example I
loved the work of Jack B. Yeats and regarded him as the greatest Irish painter
ever, and valued the radical expressive power of his work - but when his late
gestural oil paintings were hung beside the Old Masters - he looked like a
demented lunatic. I had noticed this cataclysmic rupture between modern
painting (let’s say from Cézanne and the advent of mass photography onwards)
and Old Master painting (let’s say from Giotto to Manet) particularly in
exhibitions that disastrously pared Picasso with Rembrandt, Velázquez and Goya.
I was sure that Picasso was the genius of the twentieth century - but his art
was a slap in the face of the Old Masters and comparing his late cartoony doodles
in paint after the old masters - was like comparing a savage issuing a torrent
of profanities with gentlemen reciting poetry. Yet if Post-Modernism had proved
anything it was that the past could now be used and abused in whatever way present
philistine curators wanted - after all the dead cannot speak in their own defense and the living are always secretly flattered by the ludicrous
comparison.
Still,
I was delighted to see again Jusepe de Ribera’s Saint Onuphrius one of the most touching and humane portraits of
an old man I have ever seen. Ribera’s handling of the old saints wrinkled and
worn skin was heartbreakingly sympathetic. I loved the way Ribera built up the
hands of the Saint with dark, cool brushstrokes and then modeled the
highlights with warm, light accents than came alive as weathered and wrinkled skin.
In fact, Ribera was one of my favourite artists and one I thought sadly overshadowed
by his peers like Caravaggio. Yes, Ribera lacked Caravaggio’s history
changing style but arguably he brought more emotion out of his subjects, was
more humane and handled paint in a more interesting way.
Amongst
the cacophony of verbal, literary and visual bombardment, I managed to glimpse
again the astonishing naturalistic verisimilitude of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ and admired again his
revolutionary use of chiaroscuro and composition - though again I thought his brushwork
and handling of paint was relatively uninteresting from a modernist perspective.
Looking
again, at Caravaggio’s paintings in books in the weeks following our trip to
the National Gallery of Ireland, I was reminded of my contradictory nature. I
was usually disgusted by the sentimental kitsch of film, novels, music and art
that flooded the world with positive uplifting notions about humanity and
demanded that art reflect the tragedy of existence. However, when I did find an
art like Caravaggio’s - all I wanted to do was return to the safe embrace of
sentimentality. There was only so much pain in art one could bare. I wondered
again, just what was it about Caravaggio that put me off his work? Caravaggio
was many things I admired, he was a rebel, revolutionary and dark brooding genius
and briefly as a selectively mute and troubled shut-in teenager I had hero
worshiped him - but I quickly came to infinitely prefer Rembrandt - who had humanized
his use of chiaroscuro and set paint free to express the inexpressible. What I
did not admire about Caravaggio was his murderous pride and sinister narcissism
even if I could partially empathise with both. While Caravaggio’s paintings
were ruthlessly brilliant and possessed a darkness of damnation that had appealed
to me as a teenager – as a more mellow middle aged man I found his vision
almost sociopathic and his paintings too arrogant, fatalistic, lacking in
humane virtues and obsessed with a largely homoerotic vision I did not share. While
there had been many artists in history I had daydreamed about befriending - if
I had seen Caravaggio approaching me in the street I would have braced myself
for a fight.
More
importantly, as an expressive painter, I found Caravaggio’s highly finished painting
style was so enclosed that it allowed me very little room to understand him on
a personal level. If brushwork is the personal handwriting of an artist - which
can provide an insight into their soul - Caravaggio built an impenetrable wall
of illusion between himself and the world. His paintings were too dependent on
his naturalistic talent and not enough on intellectual or sensual virtues. So I
lamented his early death at the age of thirty-eight and thus consequent lack of
a late mature style that could have revealed more of his character. It was
almost as if after finding his rough trade models and staging them in his
dramatically lit compositions in his cellar and perhaps using some kind of
optical aid like a mirror to fix the drawing – painting them was just an
(admittedly brilliant) afterthought.
Yet,
to me, Caravaggio’s paintings were a fait accompli and viewers were left to
either worship them or not give a dam - and as a middle aged man - I was mostly
one of the latter. I had no doubt that if Caravaggio was alive in the age of
cinema he would have been a masterful and enigmatic cinematographer or director
- but like with Caravaggio the Baroque painter I had problems with the aggressively
theatrical, declamatory and rabble rousing nature of a lot of cinema.
Amongst
the curatorial rubble, Vermeer’s Woman
Writing a Letter, with her Maid glowed jewel like and almost made me weep.
Though Vermeer’s measured and highly finished painting was the total opposite
of the kind of painterly painting I admired - I found every inch of his
painting and every brushstroke captivating in the most unexpected ways. I had
been painting for over thirty-four years, so I was usually harshest on other
painters - if only because most of the time I could see how they achieved what
they did in their paintings - yet when looking at passages of painting by
Vermeer I was still baffled by how he did it. While I was convinced that
Vermeer had used a camera obscura to aid his paintings, I did not think that
fully explained his uncanny distillation of reality, after all, over a hundred and
fifty years of mass photography had passed and nobody had even remotely approached
Vermeer’s genius for verisimilitude and magical realism - and more pertinently
the intense need for such work had been eviscerated by the immediacy of
mechanical reproduction. If Vermeer had used a camera obscura it would have
only given him a basic basis for a drawing - he still had to have a masterful
understanding of oil painting, perfect tonal pitch and a refined ability to
place the right brushstrokes just so. Besides, Vermeer’s paintings were much
more than a dutiful record of visual reality, since he spent half a year or
more on each painting - they were as much about memory - in the kind of heightened
way that the image of a beloved friend, lover or moment is longingly recalled
in our mind. No wonder then that Proust the famed author of À la recherche
du temps perdu (translated
in my old copy as Remembrance of Things
Past though now more literally translated as In Search of Lost Time) was one of the greatest admirers of
Vermeer. As important as his use of the camera obscura must have been the
influence of the superbly talented Carel Fabritius who painted the sublime Goldfinch and was Delft’s greatest
painter until Vermeer – and who would surely be better known had he not been
killed by an explosion in a nearby gunpowder magazine - which also destroyed
most of his life’s work. Compared with virtually everyone in the exhibition who
haphazardly threw down cliché brushstrokes - Vermeer’s brushstrokes spoke
constantly of the most captivating delight in close, patient observation and reconsideration
- such that the only comparison in modern terms could be with Cézanne - although
his interior compositions also found echoes in the work of Edward Hopper.
Moreover as an artist with perfect taste, Vermeer’s deep symbolism - that spoke
of a world beyond the enclosed domestic spaces he inhabited - did not irritate like
most attention seeking symbolism does - but rather enchanted and created a
sense of wonder.
Anyway,
I could not bear to stay any longer in the National Gallery and we left after
just an hour. I only hoped that when the National Gallery refurbishment was
finished in 2016 that - the museum I loved would be returned to its former
glory. Exasperated I ranted to Carol that the only gallery in Dublin that was
maintaining standards was the Dublin City
Museum The Hugh Lane and doubtless on less funds.