Emil Nolde: The Cunning Expressive Fascist

I got up early with Carol at 11am on Sunday 4^th March 2018, as we planned to go to see Emil Nolde: Colour is Life in the National Gallery of Ireland. Due to The Beast from the East and Storm Emma and the resulting heavy snow which had shut down Dublin for three days – the exhibition was free on Sunday. And Carol and I had such cabin fever after being stuck indoors - that we welcomed the opportunity to get out of the house.                                                                      

Emil Nolde: Colour is Life was the first major exhibition devoted to the Danish/German Expressionist in Dublin since a far smaller one in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1964. It included 120 oil paintings, watercolours, prints and drawings from the Nolde Foundation dedicated to his art in his German homeland on the German/Danish border. Yet, even though I was delighted to view such a large body of work devoted to an Expressionist master - my enthusiasm was tempered by the early headlines of reviews of the exhibition that included Alastair Sooke’s Emil Nolde: fiery, nightmarish art by a card-carrying Nazi and Jonathan Jones’s Emil Nolde review - A seething visionary twisted by antisemitism. Knowing that I was going to write a blog on Nolde, I read in preparation every book on him I owned and every review of his art that I had in my files - and it was depressing reading. But I had hoped to make a traditional defence for the art - despite the man.                                      

After getting up, Carol and I got dressed and had a coffee before heading out to the Nolde exhibition. On our way down the snow strewn road, I told Carol “the important things to know about Emil Nolde was that he was an Expressionist rebel when he was middle aged but then a Nazi party member and lover of Hitler in old age! So the important question is can you separate the art from the life…” “No you can’t! I hate Nazis!” Carol interrupted. “So will we go back home?” I asked. “No! No! I like his paintings! I want to see the exhibition! And besides, they’re all dead now!” Carol replied. “Well the interesting thing is, that no matter how hard he tried to get the Nazis to approve of his art – they hated it!” I observed. After getting the DART into town we went to the National Gallery of Ireland and I bought the catalogue to the exhibition and we had mochas in the café to wake us up.    

                                                                                                        

The more I adore an artist the more I write about them – I can’t help it. But seeing this exhibition on Emil Nolde turned me against him - so frankly I don’t care too much about his life. Nolde is a perfect example of what I would call the “asshole rule” – namely, some artists - regardless of their talents and originality - are such assholes that you simple want nothing to do with them! Or in today’s parlance you stop following them on Facebook and Instagram. And one can only imagine what crap Nolde would have bombarded your Facebook timeline with - had it existed back in the 1930s!     

                                                                                                 

He was born Hans Emil Hansen in 1867, in the village of Nolde on the German -Danish border. His father was German and his mother Danish. His fundamentalist Protestant family were of rural peasant stock and his father was a farmer. Emil Nolde had a protracted and undistinguished training as an artist in art schools in Germany and France. In 1902, he changed his name to Emil Nolde. His early work was a bleak and sinister form of fantastical and Romantic kistch with which he was quite successful - but already it was clear that quite apart from having little real conventional talent as an artist he had serious personality problems.                                                                                                 

  

In 1906, he was asked by the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to join Die Brücke a group of young largely self-taught Expressionist painters based in Dresden that included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Max Pechstein. With them he found sympathetic peers and a style that suited his limited abilities. They shared an obsession with Vincent van Gogh (though they lacked van Gogh’s rigorous self-training) and desired to work as directly and spontaneously as possible. None of them were traditionally skilled artists - but they made up for their lack of conventional ability - with intense and original expression. The solitary and anti-social Nolde liked to keep his distance from Die Brücke and did not share their youthful decadence and liberal politics and within a year he and left Die Brücke. Yet, is debatable if he would ever have flourished as an artist - if he had not learned from them, appropriated their style and jumped on their bandwagon.    

        

Despite the Modernity of his style, Nolde was a socially conservative reactionary and although he painted many canvases depicting female religious nudes and decadent Berlin nightlife – he did so ambivalently even accusatorily. Usually socially conservative, sanctimonious, bigoted and philistine artists paint in an illustrative realist style - where things look like what they look like in photograph - and make common sense. But Nolde was unusual because he was a socially conservative, sanctimonious and bigoted artist who painted in a very up-to-date form of Expressionism - where the world was twisted and coloured according to his own right-wing, Libertarian vision. Formally, Nolde invented nothing – he simply amped up to eleven all the stylistic advances of van Gogh, Gauguin, Ensor, Munch and the Die Brücke artists. I might even suggest that - knowing he lacked the talent and skill to paint academically - he was cunning enough to appropriate the far less technically challenging Expressionist style. And frankly, I have seen and met far too many of these cute whores in the art world – though usually they lack even Nolde’s ability.                                                         

Nolde married twice, his first wife was a Danish actress and they were married for forty-two years and she was to become as much a fan of Hitler as himself, after his first wife died and when Nolde was eighty-one he married his second wife who was twenty-six, he was incredibly arrogant and fought with virtually everyone who crossed his path, he thought the term Expressionist did not do his talents justice, despite playing the tortured artist and outsider he was a shrew marketer and skilled businessman, inspired by Paul Gauguin he travelled to the South Seas in 1913 and painted the natives in an effort to appropriate their culture, he wrote a self-pitying and arrogant autobiography the second volume of which titled My Struggle was published in 1934 and which contained many supportive comments about Nationalism and anti-Semitism perhaps to get the approval of the Nazis, he sold truckloads of paintings, his work was in countless German museums before the Nazi’s took power and removed them in 1937 and thirty-three of Nolde’s paintings and several of his works on paper were included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition – in which Modern artists were viciously mocked by the Nazis. After the war, despite his Nazi party membership, Nolde was absolved by the Denazification Committee and thinking him a persecuted Degenerate Artist, German curators put back up Nolde’s work. And so on. There are plenty of books on Nolde to read - if you really want to know the rest.                                                                                     

After our mochas in the National Gallery of Ireland’s café and a couple of cigarettes outside in the freezing cold, we went into the exhibition. Emil Nolde: Colour is Life was not hung chronologically but rather thematically and the oil paintings were hung in simple dark frames that superbly suited the work and avoided the distorting plague of gold gilt frames. The work was hung against the dark walls of the museum and spot-lit in a thrilling manner - that also suited their sulphurous nature. But looking at the mostly crude and sinister early paintings in the first room was a shock to the system. Even in the earliest canvases from 1901 when Nolde was already over thirty-four, it was clear that Nolde had little natural talent or conventional skills as a painter or draughtsman and his blaring and creepy work gave me a headache at first. But in the next room his work began to improve greatly. Though my concentration was disrupted for a while by a group of mothers and fathers with their children - who seemed to think the National Gallery of Ireland was a free crèshe - and great opportunity to loudly discuss their remarkable children.                                                                                     

           

Getting back into looking at Nolde’s work, I tried to think of another so-called major painter whose work varied so much in quality - from the crude and amateurish to the simply sublime. Yet, if anything this gave me greater faith in his integrity as a Modernist painter. Although the overall strategic style of Nolde’s work remained almost constant throughout his life - he took tactical risks with brushwork and colour in all his work. Nolde had the daring and courage to experiment and go for broke in every work he made. I have noted many times when looking at expressive work - that the greatest Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist artists – go to formal extremes no timid amateur ever would. Nolde’s refusal to get bogged down in details or worry too much about realism, his daring to paint from his imagination and simplify and amplify forms through directional brushstrokes, pastose paint and vivid colour - made him an archetypal Expressionist painter. Nolde’s pallet was uniquely his own and throughout his work he used the most incredible variety of vibrant yellows, reds, blues, purples, greens and oranges and he rarely used tones to shape forms - preferring to use different intensities of colour.                                                                                                                                                

By the room with scenes of Berlin night life Nolde was in full force and these spot-lit paintings glowed incandescently in the dim gallery. Yet already there were sinister overtones - that only viewing the work in the flesh really revealed viscerally. Many of the decadent men and women in these café scenes had ‘Jewish’ hooknoses but even worse was Noldes depiction of a Slav couple in Slovenians from 1911. On the other hand, his writhing female dancers in Candle Dance from 1912 were Expressionism at it ecstatic best.                                                 
                          

When we entered the room dedicated to Biblical themes I began to feel very uneasy. As an atheist I did not share his belief or religious furore. Besides, I did not think that Nolde was really convincing in his ugly religiosity.  For me, Nolde was far too selfish, obnoxious and intolerant a man - to claim piety and humility and I was repulsed by his hell and damnation view of life. When I stood in front of Martyrdom II from 1921, my stomach turned at the sight of Christ on the cross surrounded by monstrous looking Jews. And I nearly fainted in distress in front of such a crude, ugly and blatantly anti-Semitic work.                                                                                                                          

As I went around looking at the other portraits and figure paintings in the exhibition - I had the creeping feeling that I was looking at the world through an illustrated Nazi guide to ‘untermensch’ (‘inferior people’). Nolde’s portraits and figures revealed him to be a rural misanthrope at best – and an Aryan racist at worst. Nolde’s tendency towards caricature had the Expressionist defence that he sought to capture the essence of people – but it also meant that he simply did not look close enough at other people (because he actually hated them) and thus crudely reduced them to what he thought were their essentials. But it is notable that he paid far more attention to his Aryan models from his hometown and depicted them far more sensitively and beautifully. There were of course exceptions to this, and though most of his male figures from the South Seas were vulgar racial caricatures others were profoundly dignified - and Nolde did in fact have a great interest in ethnography and ‘primitive’ cultures – which was one of the reasons the Nazis could never accept his art.                                                                                                                                            

Then I came to the so called unpainted pictures a series of small watercolours on thin Japan paper that Nolde claimed that he had painted in secret when banned from painting by the Nazis and painting in oils was too risky. Yet recent research had discovered that many of the watercolours might have been painted before the ban and others even painted after the war and that despite the ban Nolde had still managed to paint some oil paintings during the ban. The unpainted pictures were still as formally inventive and delightful as they had been when I had studied them enthusiastically in books over the years – but I no longer shared any sympathy for Nolde the martyred artist.  In the grand scheme of things, the fact that the card carrying Nazi Emil Nolde was banned from painting - is small beans compared to the genocide of the Jews and extermination of gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and political and artistic dissidents, the terror state of the Gestapo, the destruction of Europe and the sad tales of flight of other artists who refused to live in Nazi Germany and were terrified their actual lives were at risk.                                                                                      

                                                    

The last room was the least contentious with Nolde’s seascapes inspired by Turner and Nolde’s flower paintings which provided him with a pretext for the most vibrant displays of pure colour. Carol and I loved his large late oil painting Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red) from 1942. In these late, free flowing paintings Nolde achieved an inimitable mastery of his own. But overall I found Emil Nolde: Colour is Life one of the most morally depressing exhibitions I have ever seen - and I was actually very upset by it for quite a few days.                                                                                                                                  

As you know, I have been a fanatical lover of Expressionist art since my teenage years and after Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Emil Nolde was my second favourite German Expressionist. But in the late 1980s when I started reading about Nolde - the popular books I read on him concentrated on his work from 1907-1914 and ignored his later life - apart from mentioning that when the Nazis took power they confiscated over 1,000 of his work from German museums, included him in their exhibition of Degenerate Art and stopped him from painting and exhibiting. What they failed to mention was that in later life Nolde became a rabid anti-Semite, racist, member of the Nazi party and courted its officials like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler - who initially admired his work. The irony was that Hitler despised the Expressionists - and every attempt by Nolde to ingratiate himself with the Fascist party that he loved - ended in abject failure. Not only did Hitler and the Fascists want to re-create a Classical conception of art – they hated Modern art which they thought a con and Jewish conspiracy, they loathed non-Western art and wanted to annihilate any vestige of personal expression from art since Romanticism. So naturally, an oddball painter, lacking in most conventional academic skills like Nolde - was an anathema to them. Despite himself, Nolde was as much a Modernist painter as he was a reactionary political bigot. You would think that after being having his work confiscated from museums, after being branded a Degenerate Artist, after seeing German democracy gutted and after seeing the hell the Nazis brought to Europe - Emil Nolde would have turned against Hitler. But no. This character still supported Hitler right up to the end! After Hitler had brought death and destruction to Europe and eventually to Germany itself and Germany was defeated and Hitler was dead - Nolde underwent denazification - and successfully presented himself as a politically naïve Degenerate Artist persecuted by the Nazis. And since Germany needed to find some heroes somewhere to rescue its reputation - Expressionists persecuted by the Nazis were lauded and ushered back into German museums - and sneaking in with them, was the far from naïve, cunning old fox Emil Nolde.                 

             

As a teenager and rabid read of Catcher in the Rye, I, like Holden Caufield, loathed the hypocrisy of the world and in particular the phoney game players who always succeeded in getting to the top. I still do. I have spent my life trying to find genuine artists who were not also operators and media whores. But life teaches you that there is hardly anyone you have ever heard of that was not cunning like a fox - though the likes of Emil Nolde took it to extremes. For example, people naïvely believe that artists, writers, musicians and actors just appear on our TV - because of the indisputable quality of their artwork. But artistic quality is entirely subjective and thus the perfect vehicle for hype. So nearly every TV appearance by artistic types including so called charity work has been stage-managed by public relations agents and backed by commercial funding and the tribal support of the artistic community. And once you are somebody with financial power – you can always find people to make excuses for you - if only because they are invested in your success and they will share in your disgrace. Moreover, the general public and media machine which cares only for ratings - will usually forgive an artist everything - except failure. Nolde profited from these various laws and like artistic celebrities today, Nolde knew how to jump on every artistic, social, moral and political bandwagon going - in order to increase his profile and relevance. Initially he played up the role of the isolated Expressionist rebel unconcerned for the decadent and material world. When by 1922, he had turned himself into one of the most successful and richest artists in Germany - he played the role of the strutting master. Then he jumped on the growing Nationalism and anti-Semitism in Germany to continue his relevance, side-line the challenge of French art - and push aside those that might challenge his position. And initially he successfully courted Nazi party members like Goebbels and Himmler. He was so craven that he even denounced Max Pechstein an Expressionist rival as a Jew (he luckily wasn’t) in order to end his career! And when Nolde himself was persecuted by the Nazis and banned from painting - he managed after the war to use this - to turn himself into a martyr. You could say that he at least had the integrity to continue working in the Expressionist style that had brought him so much trouble from the Nazis – but maybe he had such a psychological, intellectual and political form of arrested development and such a paucity of conventional skills - that he had no ability to paint any differently. Besides few seventy-year-old's change the style of their lifetime. His final cunning genius was to ingratiate himself back into the German and Danish art worlds and societies - and since most of Germany had actively supported Hitler - they all had a vested interest in promoting the idea that there had been great and good German artists like the Expressionists who refused to bow to Fascist aesthetics – so Emil Nolde was pardoned by default and fêted with exhibitions throughout Europe before his death in 1956.                                                                          

Of course, separating the art of an artist from their personality, politics and sexuality is a contentious issue - especially in today’s toxic political environment. But personally, thanks to my self-destructive and obscene honesty - I have never been given the benefit of such equivocation by the art world. Traditionally artists and members of the art world jealously guard the autonomy of art against the knee-jerk bigotry of the general public - especially since the typical political agitprop of the art world is extremely left-wing. But art history constantly throws up artists who even the art world finds difficult to defend. Like Emil Nolde there were many Modernist artists, writers and intellectuals who were infatuated or complicit with Fascism including painters like Salvador Dali and Francis Picabia. There were also murderers like Caravaggio and misogynistic, sexual predators like Picasso and paedophilic fantasist painters like Schiele and Balthus. And every season, new biographies on artists we love - reveal unsavoury character traits and behaviour that make us question our admiration of their art. Yet, who amongst us is without sin?                                                                                   

I do not think that Emil Nolde was ever a truly great artist of the first rank - but to me as a lover of Expressionist art - he was an admirable one from a distance. So I thought I could make a classical defence of Nolde the artist deserving to be separated from Nolde the Nazi. However, since Nolde was not only a reactionary religious bigot, racist, anti-Semite and Nazi - but also an inherently phoney conman who got away with it – I can’t.              

                                             

So I want to make another kind of point. In today’s political climate, there is an ongoing threat to free-speech and practice of no platforming individuals whose opinions and lives we oppose. But we cannot reduce art history to a list of the most blameless, if only because - artists by nature are often selfish even sociopathic creatures whose lack of concern for conventional morality - is married to formal originality. Thus, much of the best art ever made - was produced by the kind of obnoxious people - you wouldn’t want to deal with personally. More importantly, we cannot censor history according to our own contemporary present day moirés. Because the most fascinating thing about history is that it is another world, long since passed - that is often a complete contradiction of ours - but which we can learn from!              

Fundamental to art history and history in general is truth - and what we choose to do with that truth. Those that seek to alter that truth or hide it (like those historians that tried to hide or downplay the complicity of artists like Nolde with the Nazis or those that would seek to ban exhibitions of Nolde’s work now) - are the true enemies of art and history, civilisation and humanity. Because we never know when and where a lesson is going to be imparted. I have studied World War Two, the Holocaust, and the Nazis since childhood and I thought I had understood the nature of German anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. But looking only at the monsters of Fascism can have a dulling and predictable effect. Of course they would behave so dreadfully - they were sadistic sociopaths! Far more troubling, is the story of those that we might admire artistically - who sympathised or collaborated with the evils of Fascism. One of the constant slurs against Expressionism from Marxist critics is that it heralded Fascism, but for me blaming any artists in the 1910s for what emerged politically in the 1930s is grossly unfair. However, with an artist like Nolde who was admired by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, Marxists do indeed have a prima facie case.                                                                                              

Looking at the Expressionist paintings by Nolde - I was taken off guard. I loved the myth of Nolde the Expressionist rebel, I adored the immediacy of his style and his volcanic colour - so I felt at home formally with him. Moreover, seeing previously only a handful of Nolde’s landscapes and still-life’s in the flesh and looking at most of his figure paintings in reproduction gave me a false idea of the man. Not only do reproductions of artworks give one a false sense of scale, touch and texture – they abstract and anonymise the character of such works - making real humanistic interpretation impossible. Seeing Nolde’s work in quantity in the flesh – I was stabbed in my heart by Nolde’s Aryan pride, Nationalistic bigotry, religious sanctimony, crude anti-Semitism and racial stereotyping. It felt like going to meet a beloved hero hoping for an enjoyable chat about art - only to be assaulted by a bigoted and racist rant - which left me wondering if I had ever really known them and feeling disgusted. But I had learned a valuable lesson.

Vermeer a Genius - Amongst Mere Painters

On the afternoon of Saturday 19^th August 2017, my sister and brother drove Carol and I into the National Gallery of Ireland to see the touring exhibition Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry. When we went into the exhibition space - my heart sank - when I saw the throngs of people! In hindsight, going at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon was not a good idea! Briefly, I was delighted to see that the walls were not cluttered with text plaques. Then I realised that the names of the painters and paintings were printed up at the very top of the walls - so you had to crane your neck up to try and see them! It was all beginning to seem like an insane curatorial exercise!  Then I realised what a room full of people looking up to the ceiling to try to read the titles, listening to audio guides and reading exhibition guides - meant for someone actually trying to look at the art! Instead of looking at a painting and then graciously moving on to look at another painting - people stood in front of paintings they were only looking at as part of a historical slideshow - and only moved when their audio guide moved on to the next exhibit. It was a nightmarish revenge of the philistines! I rapidly exited from the first few rooms where there was a bottleneck of viewers and made my way further into the exhibition were there was less people. But I could feel my hackles rising as I struggled to get lost in the paintings. A few minutes later Carol came up to me - and I explained my anxiety and frustration. Carol thought I was being unreasonable and thought people had a right to listen to audio guides. But I was adamant that an art gallery was a place to look at art not read or listen to audio guides! It was as bizarre to me - as reading a book at a concert, great fight or orgy! Carol gave me a hug and soothed by her, I calmed down and simply started going back and forth in the exhibition wherever I saw an unblocked painting - especially an unblocked painting by Vermeer. Still, I have to say it was one of the most unpleasant viewings in an exhibition I had ever had - in any museum in the world. That Vermeer’s paintings amidst the throngs of people - still lingered in my mind weeks later - like the memory of the faces of long lost loves - was a tribute to the transcendent beauty of Vermeer’s art.                

The exhibition Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry had ten paintings by Johannes Vermeer and a further fifty paintings by his best peers and rivals like Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris. Accompanying the exhibition was an incredibly detailed historical survey of the period that was a must for Vermeer fanatics but my own interest in Vermeer was less obsessive - since I had always preferred the dashing alla-prima brushstrokes of Franz Hals’s portraits and the imaginative expressivity of Rembrandt the painter, draughtsman and printmaker.                                                                                                                                         

The whole point of Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry was to wreck revenge upon Tracy Chevalier’s book Girl with a Pearl Earring and in particular the Hollywood film based on it. Since the Twentieth century there has been antagonism between the artistic establishment and the Romantic representation of artists in Hollywood movies. The depiction of an artist battling for recognition against a hidebound art world is made for film as much as the story of a boxer trying to achieve success in the ring. It allows film makers to concentrate on human drama of the most personal kind. The trouble is, the script for the average movie is eighty pages long and there is only so much you can say about an artist in a little over an hour and a half. So historians grumble about Romantic exaggeration, factual inaccuracy and lack of context. Then they produce books like Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry - which is the artistic equivalent of a train-spotters guide to Dutch Genre Painting. It is laden with the most obscure and pointless facts about Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris and Johanne Vermeer; where they lived, where they may have travelled to, who they many have known, how many paintings they painted, what kind of prices they achieved in their lifetimes for each painting and after their deaths, what kinds of pigments they used, how they painted fur, silk, walls, skin, and so on…  The exhibition and catalogue showed conclusively how Vermeer’s peers like Gerard ter Borch invented many of the visual tropes of Dutch Genre and how it was Frans van Mieris that was the most successful and famous of the group well into the Eighteenth century. Well, call me a boorish, but I ended up longing for the myth of Vermeer the exceptional human being and genius. And to be spared the academic forest of influences and symbols - and walls filled with paintings by minor painters - I did not give a dam about! All I longed for was to be left alone in a room with just Vermeer’s paintings! Despite all their efforts to create a liberal community of equal artists – Vermeer stood out like a sore thumb with his singular genius, evocation of soul and refusal to be deconstructed by academic hacks. So despite all this contemporary research, I concurred with John Berger’s observation from 1966 that, “... the only thing Vermeer had in common with the other Dutch interior painters was his subject matter, and this was no more than his starting point.” (John Berger, The Painter in His Studio, John Berger: Selected Essays, New York: Pantheon Books, 2001, P. 122.) Thus sometimes, ‘myths’ tell us far more than the smart arsed retrospective carping of academics devoid of connoisseurship and determined to make a point.                                                                                  

Since I had already enjoyed an extensive exhibition of Metsu over six years ago and we already had two of the finest Metsu’s in the world in the National Gallery - I was not that interested in looking at his work again. And try as I might to summon interest in the rest of Vermeer’s peers, I was left unmoved. They were all technically fine painters – but as Berger noted, Vermeer was doing something so much more than painting rich people enjoying their wealth. Yes, Vermeer used and built upon many of the tropes of genre painting at the time, for example; the depiction of women reading letters, playing musical instruments or wistfully busying themselves with domestic chores or the use of rooms seen through doorways from outside other rooms. But it was how he constructed these scenes and then painted them that made his works speak in the most sophisticated way about the philosophy of painting!                               

                                       

Apart from Vermeer, my favourite paintings were by Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch - but I was shocked by how uneven they were from painting to painting. I loathed the work of Gerrit Dou who was consistently technically smug and aesthetically awful and to a lesser extent the inexpressive Frans van Mieris. Compared with Vermeer, the work of the likes of Gerrit Dou appeared too impersonal, fantastical, extravagant and technically narcissistic, Gerard ter Borch’s work was too inconsistent, awkward, mundane and superficial, Jan Steen too slick, anecdotal and trivial, Gabriel Metsu too inconsistent, cold and tedious, Pieter de Hooch varied from imitative mastery to shocking crudeness and Frans van Mieris was too slick, trivial and soulless. 

                                                                                                                               

Most of the dramatic tableaus of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris were like amateur theatre compared with the cinema vérité of Vermeer. Vermeer’s people went beyond mere people posing - to people posing and actually exposing their souls despite themselves - because of the human insight of Vermeer and his masterful lighting, composition, and abstract painterly genius.                                                                                                                                 

Overall too many of Vermeer’s peer’s paintings were full of clunky symbolism and ham acting and most importantly their painting technique was vacuously skilful. For example, in Vermeer’s day Gerrit Dou a star pupil of Rembrandt was one of the most successful painters of the day. But looking at his syrupy detailed painting The Dropsical Woman from 1663 - I found nauseating. Despite an obviously high work ethic and technical command, Gerrit Dou’s work lacked any real humanity or aesthetic vision – instead he looked to me like someone who today would be making kitsch, fantasy illustrations - that are all style and no substance.                                                                          

                                                            

The ‘fine’ painting techniques of these painters who strove for a kind of hyperrealism - were feats of skill. But technique and skill are only part of the story of artistic greatness - without personal vision, soul, ideas and humanity they mean nothing. Most of these paintings were valuable only as historical records of the vanity of the rich at the time. So the whole world of Dutch Genre painting left me feeling unexpected Marxist disgust for such smug painterly servitude and such a decadent world of material exhibitionism – it was like being forced to watch The Kardashians for hours on end.                                    

                         

Living and working in Delft a small town ringed with canals with a population of a mere 25,000, Vermeer proved genius can emerge anywhere. Long before the Impressionists, the first bourgeois art movement occurred in Holland were artists created paintings about and for their fellow citizens. Yet coming at the tail end of the Dutch Golden Age, Vermeer had only a couple of decades to enjoy the buoyant art market in Holland before the war brought an abrupt end to the Dutch Golden Age and catastrophe for tiny Holland.                                                                                                                                         

We know virtually nothing about Vermeer the man, since he left no drawings or letters and no one recounted meeting him or seeing him paint. At the end of his life, he suffered some sort of loss of faith in his art, painted with less mastery and less often and suffered some kind of physical collapse and died the next day at the age of forty-three. We don’t even know where he was buried. Moreover, there are only thirty-five paintings attributed to him that have survived and only three were dated. Vermeer’s father had been an inn-keeper and picture dealer and many of the fine objects in Vermeer’s paintings may have come from his father’s collection. Vermeer also became a picture dealer to support himself because at a time when many of his peers were making fifty canvases a year - he struggled to finish two or three. We do not know who trained Vermeer but by the age of twenty he was already a member of the artist’s guild in Delft. Vermeer’s early paintings owed a debt to the recently deceased Carel Fabritius the painter of The Goldfinch who Vermeer may have known before his death and some have speculated was trained by him. Vermeer had one local collector who bought around two-thirds of his output. He only used the finest linen canvases and ground his own paints like all other artists of the day. He was particularly fond of lapis lazuli a pigment more valuable per ounce than gold. To put that into context, today artists, buy paint in tubes, and use the far more economical ultramarine blue which today costs around €11.25 for a 60ml tube whereas a tube of lapis lazuli from the same maker would cost €94.65 for a 60ml tube! Born a Protestant, Vermeer, married the Catholic Catharina Bolnes in April 1656 and I imagine he loved her dearly. His mature paintings combined a love of feminine charms with spiritual questioning. A mostly housebound painter, Vermeer lived for his wife, eleven children and his art. The most common female model in his paintings may have been his wife and often she may have been pregnant. Other models may have been his many daughters or maids. Though he must have spent long hours in his studio at home, he must also have travelled around Holland to familiarise himself with the art of his peers which the exhibition showed he learned greatly from.        

In Vermeer’s early canvases the attraction and titillation between the sexes was made explicit sometimes too explicit. One of his first canvases that survives, The Procuress from 1656 featured two leering men, the one on the left may have been Vermeer holding a glass of wine and laughing while looking out towards the viewer, while his friend cups his left hand around the harlot’s breast and presents her with a coin with the right hand - while in the background the sinister madam oversees the exchange. The Procuress was crude not only visually but also in terms of subject matter and character. But Vermeer was to learn from the overly dramatic failure of this work - that often it was better to leave things to the viewer’s imagination. So in Vermeer’s later paintings, things have either just happened or are about to happen and the viewer is left to wonder about the situation. In fact, Vermeer became a master of sophisticated voyeurism - where the viewer is allowed to secretly view a scene they are not supposed to. It is also notable that when men appeared in his later works they were often artists, men of science or learning – mirroring his own mature, cultured and thoughtful masculinity - rather than the rouges of his early work.                        

Everything that we now prize in Vermeer, the quiet, understated and detailed beauty of his work and its rarity - made it almost impossible for him to make a big impact with his work even in the Dutch Golden Age. Today, with the tsunami of artworks on the internet and in the countless galleries around the world - he would have found it ever more difficult. Vermeer was one of those introverted, neurotic geniuses that are not even noticed amongst the noisy empty-headed braggarts and social whores of the art world elbowing their way to money and fame. He did not paint the kind of click-bait images we are bombarded with today - that are dead as soon as you glance at them – but rather he created images that make you ceaselessly wonder. In fact, if alive today to see ignoramuses becoming famous for doodles on post-it notes and collections of junk - he may have given up art completely.                                                             

When you first start art, you think it’s all about stylish affirmations and technical tricks but by middle age you understand it is an endless series of questions. Vermeer was one of those few painters who leave you speechless and questioning. Forgotten for nearly three centuries, Vermeer was only rediscovered by the art critic Théophile Toré-Burger who brought his work to the attention of art lovers in the late nineteenth century. Since then Vermeer’s reputation has continued to grow to the point where he is now considered one of the greatest painters to have ever lived.                                                                                

Having painted all my life and in all kinds of styles, never mind, having read hundreds of books and magazines on art and visited countless museums and galleries around the world - I find that I can understand how most paintings are made - even if I could not do it myself. But there are some geniuses of painting that I not only could not copy satisfactorily – I still don’t fully understand how they did it. But at least I am honest, other more deluded painters like Dalí tried to ape Vermeer - but just look at Vermeer’s The Lace Maker and then at Dalí’s copy and laugh! Yet Dalí thanks to his own hype, was hailed by many (who should have known better) as the only painter in the Twentieth Century that had the skills of an Old Master. So maybe now, you can start to wonder - at the catastrophic fracture between the Old Masters and us!                                 

With virtually all other painters, I find that going from a distance to close to the painting to right up to its face - makes the painting completely explicable. Yet with the true geniuses of painting like; van Eyck, Rembrandt, Velazquez or Vermeer – coming up close to the painting only increases the mystery! Vermeer’s idiosyncratic and pain-staking approach to painting; his use of a camera obscura, his intricate laying in of perspective lines, his subtle and soft painting technique with few visible brush marks or impasto, his masterly blurring of forms and simultaneous lightning spots of detail and his patient painting and endless looking - made his work infinitely mysterious. Moreover, despite their immaculate, jewel like perfection and detail – Vermeer’s work looks effortless. Yet, knowing just how much craft, skill and patience even a square inch of his paintings required, I must imagine that he often teared his hair out with the mental effort!                

In 2001 in their famous book Secret Knowledge David Hockney and Charles Falco made the not very original point that many artists since van Eyck may have used a camera obscura or some form of optical device to plot their paintings. While I believe that there is merit in this claim - especially with Vermeer, because apart from the strange perspectives and collaged look of some of Vermeer’s paintings - what is also notable is the way he seems to be painting forms derived from images – resulting in forms that verge on the abstract. Yet it is not as pronounced as it might be with a lesser artist - because Vermeer had superfine, modelling skills and an intimate understanding of form. It is also notable how ethereal many of Vermeer’s figures seem in comparison to their surroundings - perhaps because while the room and settings stayed put throughout the painting process - his sitters may not have been present for long. It has been noted that after his death, when his wife had to sell most of their possessions because they were bankrupt - there was no mention of any optical devices in his possession. On the other hand, he was friends with the lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who was also his executor at his death. Leading to speculation that van Leeuwenhoek - omitted any reference to a camera obscura device. So Vermeer may well have gained many insights from looking at the world through a camera obscura - but I do not think it played as big a part in the final work as Hockney and others claim. And even if it did, it does not make Vermeer a copycat artist - it makes him an avant-garde innovator! Countless artists since the nineteenth century have used photographs of their own making or by others - but that does not make them lesser artists. Only ignorant philistines believe that today.  It is not what technology you use that matters – it is what you do with it that counts! I also think that contemporary artists like Hockney use the supposed widespread use of camera obscuras by Old Masters - as an excuse for why we draw and paint so badly today. When the truth is we simply do not have the teachers, training, discipline, work ethic or lack of media distractions needed to come close to even the minor painters of the past.    

                                                                    

As an artist, I have drawn from other artist’s paintings, my imagination, from life, from pre-drawn cartoons, traced and worked from photographs, video screen-grabs and recently from my computer screen and I have found that each method has its advantages and drawbacks. But even when I paint from mediated images – I am aware that I am looking at an image with the knowledge and skill of someone who has drawn from life in the round. On the other hand, having traced images from my TV screen, I am aware how strangely compelling a traced image can be – even though it fails most traditional measures of fidelity. One can fall in love with the abstractions of tracing - and I imagine that if Vermeer did use a camera obscura he also fell in love with the abstract lessons he learned. So I am sure Vermeer also tried different approaches to reality and it is that which makes his work so enigmatic and original. Personally, I imagine that he may have initially used a camera obscura to plot the perspective in his paintings then painted them from reality but with the knowledge of what optics had taught him. Because, even if some artists today choose to work from life all the time - they must on some subconscious level - be affected by a lifetime spent surrounded by photographs, TV, cinema and the internet.            

                                                                                

Vermeer was the most brilliant architect of forms on a domestic scale and even a square inch of one of his canvases - can delight a painter with its uncanny brilliance. I was a struck by how much of Vermeer’s paintings were in soft focus but how he made them come alive with sharp pin point highlights.  Vermeer’s paintings were predominantly made up of shades and colours that have no proper name. He was a master of muted silvery greys, creams, ochres, blues, reds, yellows and greens. Like a visual poet he knew all of the things he could leave out and exactly what had to be put in to a composition. Married to his masterful craft and technique was a personality that eschewed flashy pictorial declarations, expressive manipulations or intellectual bullying. His work had a warmth and humanity nurtured by a life protected by female love and domestic security. He may have struggled financially and died a pauper, but his life had been rich in all those aspects of family life money can never buy. Like us, Vermeer lived in a time of bloody wars, religious hatred, commercial decadence and moral decay but in his modest home - he built an enchanted realm - were masculine learning and artistry was glorified and female beauty and feminine caring was worshiped. That must be why - we need moments in front of his canvases - more than ever today.           

Only a few decades ago it was popular for many talentless abstractionists to insist that all painting was abstract. It was a canard to justify their own pictorial inadequacy. It was also, almost completely untrue for most figurative painting at least up until the Impressionists and the emergence of photography. This cult for seeing all paintings even figurative ones as abstract, I suppose really got going with Cezanne in the late nineteenth century and his supposed obsession with cylinders and cubes, as well as the emergence of photography that created a mechanical form of reality that made artists aware how impersonal reality could be. But any figurative painter taking this approach will only end up with a world that looks like Lego. What such a cult of abstraction fails to realise is that conventional drawing and painting requires an intimate understanding of form in the round - in other words to not only know what feet look like seen head on but also knowing what feet look like from all other angles – until the artist can not only see what is in front of him or her - but also what is hidden. Then they must also bring to their all-round understanding of form - the ability to impart humanity and feeling to it. If they cannot do these three things their work will be nothing more than the equivalent of an autistic person who doesn’t speak a word of English trying to recite Shakespeare.                                                                                                                                        

Yet obsessing about the abstract nature of reality - was true for an idiosyncratic genius like Vermeer who had the ability to see the world both in a conventional manner and in an avant-garde way - influenced by the use of some kind of optical device like a camera obscura – so that he could play with reality like a photographer, blurring parts of the background, highlighting the centre ground and strangely abstractly blocking in areas of the foreground so that they loom forward.                              

                              

The result was paintings that not only anticipated photograph they also supersede photography! To say that Vermeer’s paintings are photographic is an insult to Vermeer! What photograph have you ever seen with the kind of magic realism of Vermeer!                                  

                                       

Because there was something odd about Vermeer’s realism – it not only convinced completely at a distance – it also baffled and bewildered up close. Much the way reality itself does - if inspected closely! The only artist to match the fantastic realism of Vermeer was Jan van Eyck who came nearly two centuries before Vermeer and who was another artist that was suspected to have used optical devices.     

                          

How often do we look at our hands? All our life I suppose - but mostly absentmindedly. Yet whenever we really look at our hands closely we are shocked by their complexity and strangeness. A genius like Vermeer did something very similar with bourgeois domestic scenes we may have taken for granted. He showed us again and again, how strangely beautiful the world is – even our own habitual environments that we do not appreciate or only distractedly pay attention to. Vermeer a virtual studio hermit - albeit one with a large and vibrant family - spent his life looking and looking and looking into the world around him and discovered mystery and magic everywhere!                                                         

However, with all my misgivings about the curation of Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, I would barely have given this exhibition and its masturbatory-academic accompanying catalogue 4/10!                                              

The NGI Revisited and Reconsidered

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

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

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

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

             

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

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

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

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

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

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

              

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

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

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

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

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

              

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

             

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

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

              

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

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

              

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

              

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

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

              

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