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The Artist’s Mother: Lucie and Daryll

Chantal Joffe, Self-Portrait in Striped Shirt with My Mother_2019 Oil on canvas 49.5 x 39.5 cm, © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

IMMA’s Head of Collections, Christina Kennedy, introduces us to The Artist’s Mother, a project created in responses to the IMMA Collection: Freud Project. Inspired by Lucian Freud’s paintings of his mother, Lucie, the project presents the work of artist Chantal Joffe who has portrayed her mother, Daryll, in a series of paintings and pastels. In this article Kennedy explores both Freud and Joffe’s artistic processes as they provide certain insights into the intense bond between mother-subject and artist-child, and the difficulty of seeing the real woman with adult eyes.

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Artists have portrayed their mothers throughout history. We think of Durer’s or Rembrandt’s searching, tender portrayals of the physical signs of aging, more than 500 years ago, to the more recent psychological, empathetic images of Alice Neel or Celia Paul. Among the most arresting mother paintings in 20th century art are those by Lucian Freud, The Painter’s Mother Reading, 1975 and The Painter’s Mother Resting I, 1976, which feature in the 52 works by Lucian Freud on long term exhibition at IMMA as part of the Freud Project (2016-2021).

Freud made 13 paintings of his mother Lucie Freud (1896-1989) as well as numerous drawings and sketches, almost entirely during the 10 years before Lucie’s death at the age of 93 (apart from childhood and adolescent drawings). Lucie Freud (nee Brasch) was an indomitable woman who left Berlin in 1933 ahead of the rise of Nazism to make a new life in England with her family.

We invited artist Chantal Joffe in 2019 to begin a dialogue with Lucian Freud’s portraits of his mother as part of our ongoing programme in the context of the Freud Project. The Artist’s Mother: Lucie and Daryll is the resulting exhibition. Originally scheduled for September 2020, Covid-19 intervened and so we have re-orientated our exhibition to the current online presentation.

Both artists’ works are in conversation, in a ‘double-portrait’ of sorts that combines a digitally installed exhibition of 15 of Joffe’s works in a virtual gallery space alongside Freud’s portraits of his mother, as well as a focussed display of six pastels and etchings by Joffe in the physical gallery space and that may be seen with the 52 works by Freud when IMMA re-opens.

Chantal Joffe Studio, Photographer: Isabelle Young © Chantal Joffe Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
Chantal Joffe Studio, Photographer: Isabelle Young © Chantal Joffe Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Through paintings, drawings, videos, essays, poetry and programmed talks The Artist’s Mother provides a compendium of images and voices that explore the role of mothers and carers and the bonds of creativity and intellect. It provides a locus for contemporary discussions of motherhood, focusing particularly on the complex relationship between mother and child over time. Both Freud and Joffe’s artistic processes provide certain insights into the intense bond between mother-subject and artist-child and especially the difficulty of seeing the real woman with adult eyes.

Chantal Joffe has long focused on portraiture. She has depicted her mother Daryll in an exceptional series of paintings and pastels over time, a selection of which are in this exhibition as well as a number of new works as a result of looking at Freud. Joffe’s mother Daryll Joffe, was an exile who arrived in London aged 23. There she worked as a childcare officer and had her first child Emily. Moving to the US following her husband’s teaching job at Stanford University and later Vermont, Daryll’s other children Natasha, Chantal and Jasper were born in the US. The family then returned to London 1983 where Daryll and her children all now live.

Chantal Joffe, My Mother with Fern, 2017 Oil on canvas, 40.8 x 31.3 x 2 cm, © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
Chantal Joffe, My Mother with Fern, 2017 Oil on canvas, 40.8 x 31.3 x 2 cm, © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Always very secretive, in his youth Lucian Freud resisted his mother’s attention and her unerring instinct for knowing what he was doing or thinking. After Lucie’s husband Ernst died in 1970 she had tried to commit suicide, was rescued but there were side-effects and she no longer engaged with life. Freud felt he could be with her because she had lost interest in him and therefore he could paint her. He would collect her from her home and bring her to breakfast before starting the day’s sittings. Three mornings a week she would climb the stairs to his studio on the top floor.

Freud’s working process was forensic, slow, and required hundreds of hours of his sitter’s time to take the artist to their inner world so that he might convey the sitter’s complex psychological relationship with the world.  Freud found ‘the harder you concentrate, the more things that are really in your head start coming out…’ The Painter’s Mother Resting I, is one of a remarkable series of three paintings in which Lucie is resting on the bed wearing the same paisley-patterned dress. Freud stated he had difficulty with the pattern. It’s as though the paisleys are a sort of stress point, that something else is happening here, some contingency that catches the figurative content by default.

Chantal Joffe likewise returned to painting her mother when in old age, after she began to lose her sight.

“My mum has quite bad sight now – which is a hard thing to say because it became easier to paint her because she couldn’t then see the paintings. It’s complicated,” she says, “she is only truly seen when she can no longer see me or how I paint her” – Chantal Joffe

Works such as My Mother at the Door, 2020 lay down line, form and colour in a visceral process that conveys the immediacy of the encounter and mood and a palpable sense of personal feeling and experience of one’s mother. While double portraits such as Conversation, 2016 and Self Portrait in a Striped Shirt with my Mother II, 2019 catch the humour of everyday situations and exchanges. As with Edward Hopper’s windows, motifs of windows and doors are used in Joffe’s works as framing devices that keep the viewer right there looking, reading the space, relationships and everyday experience.

Chantal Joffe, <em>My Mother Locking Her Door,</em> 2020 Oil stick, pastel, pencil on cartridge paper 60 x 42 cm, © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
Chantal Joffe, My Mother Locking Her Door, 2020 Oil stick, pastel, pencil on cartridge paper 60 x 42 cm, © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Joffe starts over time with a slow and continuous process of reading, looking and watching. This is followed by gestures in paint or pastel which are fluid and immediate. The movement and rapidity of her process pick up on the incidental and the accidental, on emotions of memory and of the moment. In works such as Sanibel 1994 and My Mother with St Leonard with the Dogs, 2015 you sense the artist’s hand, the sentience of repetition and memory of movement no longer requiring the mind to engage. Form becomes an emotional heartland, “the curve of an emotion” in James Joyce’s words, born, perhaps, of rhythms that effect us from childhood: nursery rhymes, prayers, games.

The encounter between Freud and Joffe’s work is elaborated through Joffe’s conversations with poet and artist Annie Freud, Lucian’s eldest daughter. Annie Freud recites her poem Hiddensee (2019) which reflects on the impact on her grandmother Lucie, as a mother of a young family who with her husband Ernst was forced to flee Germany and her adjustment to a new life in England. Annie Freud’s essay ‘In the Picture’ conveys a vivid description of Lucie, to whom she was very close, and the generative role she played in her son’s art.

Especially curated to accompany The Artist’s Mother project is The Maternal Gaze, a series of 22 short videos by artists, writers and creatives invited to participate, including the collective Art Nomads, members of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team, and participants of Studio 10, one of IMMA’s most popular gallery and studio-based programmes. Produced by Patricia Brennan and Domnick Sorace, the videos shine a light on enduring inter-generational family relationships. Through images, texts and poems they variously reflect on the role of mothers and carers in our lives, the bonds of creativity and intellect in the context of contemporary discussions of motherhood.

Chantal Joffe, My Mother in St Leonards with the Dogs, 2015, Oil on canvas-board, 40 x 40 cm 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
Chantal Joffe, My Mother in St Leonards with the Dogs, 2015, Oil on canvas-board, 40 x 40 cm
15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in © Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

We are living through extraordinarily difficult times globally particularly for women and mothers in many parts of the world such as Yemen, Syria, Mexico, Myanmar, China. In Ireland too where the weight of oppression by church and state in the 20th century continues to reveal its impact on personal histories, most recently in the Mother and Baby Homes report which continues to unfold.

This exhibition holds many valencies including a context for thinking about motherhood and the variety of family structures that exist today and how related cultural norms and expectations are re-negotiated. In all its elements it reflects the complications of creativity as well as revealing a world of women who perform the endlessly fraught interdependency of creative practice and everyday survival.

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Please visit The Artist’s Mother webpage to view the virtual exhibition The Artist’s Mother: Lucie and Daryll, and listen to the poem Hiddensee, 2019, and essay The Life and Cultural Milieu of Lucie Freud, 2021 by Annie Freud.

Please click here to view The Maternal Gaze video series.

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Stories of Hospitality

Installation view, Visual Voices & Bok Gwai, IMMA, Dublin. Photo Ros Kavanagh

In association with the Visual Voices Project 2021 presented at IMMA, we invited Julie Daniel, the coordinator of the DCU University of Sanctuary Mellie programme with Veronica Crosbie, to share her insights into the rich history of philosophical thinking that shapes the value and importance of Hospitality in our lives. Spanning ideas of Hospitality from Ancient Greeks to more recent propositions by Jacques Derrida, Daniel explains how her PHD research informs her work as workshop facilitator of The Mellie programme at DCU/ Visual Voices. Read more about this collaborative storytelling project, now in its fourth year, and what we can learn from the programme’s core objectives – ‘ to promote cultural integration for residents in Direct Provision, driven by the very notion and act of hospitality, welcome and sanctuary’  a practice much needed in these challenging times. 

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“اعتبر البيت بيتك” “Faites comme chez vous”, “Mi casa es su casa” : “Make yourself at home”. This is a banal invitation, a phrase often uttered without thinking twice about it, familiar to all. It conveys notions of hospitality and, as such, is a common human experience, to be found in all cultures alike. Hospitality contains offers of food and drink or a shelter for the night and accounts of this practice have populated narratives since time immemorial.

Ancient Greeks called the act of hospitality ‘xenia’, a type of transaction between the host, offering hospitality, and the guest, who often comes bearing gifts in exchange. Xenia can be translated as ‘guest-friendship’. It was seen as a fundamental and sacred interaction, as one could never know which god in disguise would come knocking at the door. Indeed, there is no word in ancient Greek to make a distinction between the host and the guest, both are called xenos as it is understood that, like two sides of the same coin, they are both bound by the relationship of hospitality.

DCU Mellie Project Visual Voices

The practice of hospitality is tightly linked with migration; the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov once said, ‘unlike trees which have roots, humans have legs’. As humans have always been on the move, in search of new horizons, stories of encounters between those who seek asylum (guests) and those who are asked to provide it (hosts) are everywhere, from Homer’s epics to Virgil’s Aeneid, from the tablets of Abraham to the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam. Inevitably, accounts of these encounters always imply a duty to protect and attend to the needs of the stranger and to show sociability and solidarity.

It is similarly expected of the newcomer to respect the integrity of the customs and traditions of the host society; any failure to respect the transcendental bind of hospitality is depicted as bearing catastrophic consequences, like that of the famously tragic destiny of Oedipus who unknowingly commits both incest and patricide as his family is cursed for his father’s ignorance of the laws of xenia. In this way, such an initial tacit agreement of mutual respect binds both the host and the guest to a two-way relationship. Like any other human matter, it is both complex and chaotic at times.

It is not uncommon to find tensions or a reciprocal sense of unsettlement and de-rootedness among both the newcomers and the host society. The figure of the stranger, in all its possible disguises, can be upsetting, challenging the existing order as it arrives posing questions. To be hospitable requires constant negotiation, which, in order to be successful, involves a deep and reciprocal understanding by both parties involved.

DCU Mellie Project Visual Voices
DCU Mellie Project Visual Voices

The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, writes that hospitality can only be known through practice. He compares it to the crossing of thresholds (‘seuils’) such as those between the self and the other, the inside and the outside, the personal and the public, and between ethics and politics. Derrida sees the act of hospitality as an ‘interruption of the self’ because in order to be hospitable and to let the new one in, the host must ‘give place’ to the new arrivant which requires a re-negotiation of one’s own identity, taking account of the identity of the guest as well.

In December 2016, Dublin City University became the first Irish University to receive the designation ‘University of Sanctuary’[1], in acknowledgement of its strong commitment to creating a culture of welcome for refugees and international protection applicants within its community. The Mellie programme[2], a collaborative storytelling project, which is now in its fourth year, was set up with the main objective to promote integration, which is seen here as an act of hospitality. Pairing-up DCU students and staff with residents in Direct Provision, it was designed for participants to exchange and co-write their life stories, with a focus on their hopes, aspirations and experiences in common rather than on the more ubiquitous traumatic and sensational stories of migration found in the media. Using a photovoice methodology which links photographs with texts, the collaborative work produced by participants transcends differences of language and culture to display a common narrative of human experience.

DCU Mellie Project Visual Voices

In the context of forced migration, hospitality is sometimes perceived solely as an act of kindness towards those who have suffered from traumatic situations, where guilt and responsibilities for their need and care is taken on by the host society, with good intentions but underpinned by its own values. The Mellie project wishes instead to take a more democratic turn, where hospitality is understood as a recovery of agency. Hannah Arendt defines the human condition as the need to take part in society. She advocates the right for all to speak and act in the public space. The Mellie project considers hospitality as an invitation to the newcomer to enter and integrate within the receiving society’s public space on an equitable basis with the host. IMMA’s invitation to exhibit the participants’ work in its galleries is in itself such a gesture of hospitality.

In the course of the project, Mellie participants work in collaboration towards a common creative goal, and through a process of reciprocity, in which they share and re-tell their partners’ stories, they reach a better understanding of each other’s lives. The forty panels presented in the exhibition are forty stories of hospitality; each allowing for a better understanding of one other’s insight and culture. ‘No man is an island’ wrote John Donne. The words displayed by the Mellie participants are an echo of Donne’s dictum. They are a reminder that behind divisions, based on cultural and linguistic differences, humans are social beings who share a deeply interconnected universe. It would be insanity to think of one’s own destiny as separate from the other’s. The Mellie stories are an example of hospitality: as the delicate process by which we learn how to meet another at a point of shared experience to no longer see in the other a stranger, but a human being, just like ourselves.

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Further readings:

Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford University Press.

Arendt, H. (1996). We refugees. In M. Robinson (Ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. New York: Harvest Book.

Donne, J (1624). No man is an island.

Arendt, H., Kohn, J., & Feldman, R. H. (2007). The Jewish writings. New York: Schocken Books. We Refugee (PDF)

[1]  DCU University of Sanctuary

[2] Mellie (Migrant English Language Literacy and Intercultural Education)

To learn more about Derrida and hospitality click here.

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The Green Journal: New arrivals at the Green Cube

Art and nature on the terrace alongside Niall Sweeney’s black and white graphics.

Over the coming months, Sandra Murphy from our Visitor Engagement Team, will keep you updated on some of the seasonal changes taking place on the grounds of IMMA. In the first Green Journal entry, we will take a look at some recent arrivals on the grounds of IMMA.
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Pictured is a tractor overflowing with Verbena plants ready to be dug in at the Ornamental Gardens. These plants will be providing nectar for our pollinators in early Spring. A New greenhouse is being built for Mary Condon and her gardening team in the nursery at IMMA.

 

1. Tractor overflowing with Verbena plants. 2. New greenhouse being built for Mary Condon and her gardening team in the nursery at IMMA.
1. Tractor overflowing with Verbena plants.
2. New greenhouse.

 

New nest boxes installed on the terrace, courtesy of OPW
New nest boxes installed on the terrace, courtesy of OPW.

 

New nest boxes have been installed on the terrace, courtesy of OPW. We’re really looking forward to new residents setting up house in these and we hope to keep you updated on developments early next Spring! Now is a great time to think about installing nest boxes in your own garden.

 

Butterfly Hotel
Butterfly Hotel.

 

Butterfly hotels! This is our first year to introduce these boxes which provide shelter for our over wintering butterflies on the grounds of IMMA. Again, these boxes can be made for use in your own gardens.

1. Apple Tree. 2. Apple Tree with Ladybird
1. Apple Tree.
2. Apple Tree with Ladybird.

 

Apple trees, planted during the summer, are providing fruits which will benefit the birds at the moment and over the winter months, when food becomes scarce on the ground. The apple blossom in early Spring will provide nectar for our pollinators and produce a delicate, little flower.

Can you spot the ladybird on the left? Yes, it’s a seven-spot ladybird!

1. Male blackbird feeding on the last of the brambleberries. 2. Robin ready for song.
1. Male blackbird feeding on the last of the brambleberries.
2. Robin ready for song.

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

 That perches in the soul –

 And sings the tune without the words –

 And never stops – at all. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

 

1. Red Hawthorn berries in the hedgerows. 2. Autumn flowering crocus on the terrace.
1. Red Hawthorn berries in the hedgerows.
2. Autumn flowering crocus on the terrace.

 

Pictured are Red Hawthorn berries in the hedgerows. Avoid cutting back these hedgerow plants during September as they provide a vital food source for wildlife when ripe. These can also be used for making jellies and jams, but leave some for the birds!

Cheery Autumn crocus can be seen in September/October underneath the sycamore trees on the terrace at IMMA. Note the beautiful purple veining and yellow saffron, which can be used in cooking.

Compliments as always to Mary Condon and her wonderful gardening team (OPW) at IMMA.

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Paula Rego: Empathy is a Moral Force

Paula Rego, War, 2003, Pastel and paper mounted on aluminium, 160 x 120 cm. © Paula Rego Tate: Presented by the artist (Building the Tate Collection) 2005. Photo: ©Tate, London 2019.

Patricia Brennan, Visitor Engagement Team at IMMA and PG student at TCD, continues to engage with the art of renowned realist painter Dame Paula Rego, in an introduction to Rego’s solo exhibition Obedience and Defiance currently at IMMA. This second of a two-part text, pivots on Rego’s engagement with human rights and gender politics from the millennium to the present day. Serendipitous conjunctions with writers and artists – past and present – are observed.
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Tales of mystery and imagination

“The picture begins to tell you what has happened”[I]

This second part of an introduction to Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert, looks at some of the great works from the past twenty years of the artist’s oeuvre. There is, notably, a dramatic increase in scale, while the artist continues the interweaving of gender politics with storytelling, further informed by an awareness of the old masters of European painting.

Rego has followed her own particular research, often closely connected to the Portuguese folktales which she reinvents and upturns with spectacularly unnerving results: “The Portuguese have a culture that lends itself to the most grotesque stories you can imagine”.[ii] Never purely illustrative, the work takes off in a different direction from the point of reference, shaping an alternative vision, whether Rego is reimagining a folktale, a Disney classic, or Jane Eyre.

Paula Rego, Dancing Ostriches, 1995, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium left panel 162.5 × 155 cm; right panel 160 × 120 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Marlborough International Fine Art
Paula Rego, Dancing Ostriches, 1995, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium left panel 162.5 × 155 cm; right panel 160 × 120 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Marlborough International Fine Art.

The documentary film made by her son Nick Willing in 2017 shows his mother’s studio populated by the grotesque fantasy figures made by Rego, sometimes aided by her son-in-law, Ron Mueck. (They appear in works such as The Cake Woman (2004) and The Pillowman (2004)).

Forbidden things

A friend to poets, Rego has referenced literature and nursery rhymes in addition to her beloved Portuguese folktales. In 1997, the painter began a series which was inspired by – yet diverges from – the nineteenth-century Portuguese novel The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Queirós. (A story of seduction, love and betrayal, the book became a film in 2002 starring Gael García Bernal). The title, The Company of Women, puts me in mind of John McGahern’s[iii] best known novel, Amongst Women. Rego and McGahern address the dysfunction in Portuguese and Irish societies respectively, and how the damage is handed down through the generations. Just as Rego’s women sometimes punish the men they love, McGahern’s central character, Mahon, finally becomes as tortuously caught as his daughters in a web of co-dependency.

Paula Rego, The Company of Women 1997, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 160 x 120 cm © Paula Rego Courtesy Museu Paula Rego: Casa das Histórias, Cascais Collection Ostrich Arts Limited on loan to Câmara Municipal de Cascais, Fundação D. Luís I, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego
Paula Rego, The Company of Women, 1997, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 160 x 120 cm © Paula Rego Courtesy Museu Paula Rego: Casa das Histórias, Cascais Collection Ostrich Arts Limited on loan to Câmara Municipal de Cascais, Fundação D. Luís I, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego.


Retribution

In The Coop (1997), from the same series, a harsh and glaring light illuminates the power struggles between genders and generations in a patriarchal society, including the withholding of love and acceptance as a form of control. Amélia is pregnant, with very few options; deserted by her lover. “Who else has painted the world from a female point of view in the manner described by Paula Rego?” asks the Guardian’s Will Gompertz. These large scale works resemble taut, charged and theatrical tableaux. Amélia does not go unavenged in the painterly finale to the tragic epic. Angel (1998), presents us with an implacable heroine in the mould of Lady Macbeth, armed with a dagger and holding in her other hand a sponge, a traditional symbol of the crucifixion.

Paula Rego, The Coop, 1997, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth
Paula Rego, The Coop, 1997, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth

“Painting pictures is like being a man”

Continuing the theme of religious iconography in Joseph’s Dream (1990), Mary – standing in for Rego herself – is portrayed as a painter. The artist chose as the other sitter her companion; the writer Rudi Nassauer, in a tender tribute. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the patriarchy reduced Mary to being a mere conduit; a means of silencing women. Alternatively, Joseph’s Dream presents Mary as the autonomous artist and creator. As Marina Warner said “it is pictures and objects that speak loudest”[iv]. In 2002, by request of the Portuguese President, Jorge Sampaio, Rego made a series of paintings on the Life of the Virgin for the chapel of the presidential residence, the “Palácio de Belém” in Lisbon (not in this exhibition). In those scenes Mary is portrayed as never before in European art; a fully corporeal teenager. This is in contrast to the otherworldly portrayals of Mary since Giotto, and particularly the serene Madonnas of Murillo. (In 1991 Rego completed a rather different commission from the National Gallery based on the Life of the Virgin).

Paula Rego, The Betrothal: Lessons: The Shipwreck, after 'Marriage a la Mode' by Hogarth, 1999 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Three panels: 1 - 150 x 160 cm, 2 - 150 x 90 cm, 3 - 150 x 160 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Tate: Purchased with assistance from the Art Fund and the Gulbenkian Foundation 2002
Paula Rego, The Betrothal: Lessons: The Shipwreck, after ‘Marriage a la Mode’ by Hogarth, 1999, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Three panels: 1 – 150 x 160 cm, 2 – 150 x 90 cm, 3 – 150 x 160 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Tate: Purchased with assistance from the Art Fund and the Gulbenkian Foundation 2002.

Courage in adversity

This show stopping triptych is a complete reworking of Marriage à Mode by William Hogarth, (whose prints are in the IMMA Collection). Hogarth showed professional acumen when he disseminated prints of his paintings to reach a wider audience, and Rego too, is renowned for her accomplished and often discombobulating graphic work. (A selection of Paula Rego prints in the IMMA Collection can be viewed online). Hogarth’s series famously satirises the hypocrisy of polite society with a ribald savagery akin to Rego’s. Hogarth ends his series with the bridegroom shot and the wife left with nothing but unpaid bills. Contrarily, Rego’s final panel shows the husband’s weakened body supported by his resilient wife, in a reversal of traditional gender roles. The Shipwreck has been compared to a traditional Pietà, and was, in part, a way for the artist to come to terms with the loss of her husband to catastrophic illness.

Calling out injustice

A powerful voice for the poor, Rego’s War (2003) was based on a photograph of a little girl being carried from the rubble in Basra, during the Gulf War. Rego’s use of animal figures underlines the vulnerability of the protagonists and the awful poignancy of civilian deaths in war time.

Upending tradition

Rego’s works mentioned here, recall in their aspirations and scale, the paintings of the past which she admires by Goya, Zurbarán, Murillo, Velásquez and of course Hogarth. Rego confided in Catherine Lampert that going to the Prado gives her courage. Rather than consciously analysing the paintings there, the artist has said that she prefers to be with them, “and that contaminates you; I’ll kind of catch it … Photographs do not have presences like that. These are like people or like humans or animals that are alive, so I do like being with them.” [v] Rego never works from photographs, always from the model or from imagination.[vi]

Paula Rego, The Pillowman, 2004Oil and mixed media on paper, collage and canvas Three panels: each 180 x 120 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Private Collection
Paula Rego, The Pillowman, 2004, Oil and mixed media on paper, collage and canvas, three panels: each 180 x 120 cm. © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Private Collection.

 


Subversion

Rego claimed that seeing Martin McDonagh’s play, The Pillowman, changed her life. Subsequently Rego and McDonagh became friends. The playwright’s wickedly dark sense of humour is in tune with Rego’s. In addition, they share a propensity for calling out brutality and hypocrisy within communities and the state. The Pillowman raises questions about art, power, family and religion, according to one review. However, Rego’s huge triptych is not an illustration of the story; there is an echo of her beloved father’s depression in the huge immobile figure of the Pillowman.

Paula Rego,Impailed, 2008, Conté, conté pencil and ink wash on paper 137 x 102 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Private Collection, London Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art
Paula Rego, Impailed, 2008, Conté pencil and ink wash on paper, 137 x 102 cm. © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Private Collection, London Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art.

 

“You punish people with drawings”[vii]

In her series on FGM (and in the abortion series) Rego avoids gore. Instead, she makes us imagine another’s experience, polarised by a choice between outward conformity or the truly unthinkable; social ostracism.

Painting Him Out (2011) is, as Catherine Lampert has pointed out, a playful undermining of the traditional gender roles between painter and model, as the female artist determinedly removes the male presence from her studio. Rego’s creative drive matches any man’s; her breakthrough in the UK came with the 1988 exhibition at the Serpentine. That same year, Rego was nominated for the Turner prize and her largest painting to date, The Dance, was bought by the Tate.

Paula Rego,Painting Him Out, 2011, Pastel on paper on aluminium 119.4 x 179.7 cm © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Private Collection, Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art
Paula Rego, Painting Him Out, 2011, Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium, 119.4 x 179.7 cm. © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London Private Collection, Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art.

 

“It isn’t nice in my mind”[viii]

As noted in part 1 of this article, Paula Rego has much in common with Lucian Freud, another great painter of the human condition now at IMMA, yet there are stark contrasts. Freud was a portrait painter; Rego, for the most part, is not. Her work is political; his reflects a private world. Freud (usually) painted individuals, and even his groups and double portraits convey a sense of separate lives. Rego, on the other hand, implies the complex dramas of interdependence which are always personal, always political.

Cometh the hour

At eighty-five, Rego’s output continues to be prodigious. The narrative tension deployed in the work, a sense of time suspended in the moment before the crisis, makes each piece and every series irresistibly compelling. Not long before he died, Victor Willing wrote to Paula Rego: “Trust yourself, and you will be your own best friend”.[ix] Now internationally acknowledged and heaped with honours, Rego is bravely and defiantly herself; a woman who will not be silenced.

Nick Willing filming Paula Rego in Studio 2016, Credit © Nick Willing
Nick Willing filming Paula Rego in Studio 2016, Credit © Nick Willing.

 

[i] Catherine Lampert, p. 14, “This Dark Corridor it Begins to Light Up”, in Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance, ed. A. Spira and C. Lampert, pub. by MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2019.

[ii] https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rego-paula/life-and-legacy/

[iii] A haunting pencil portrait of McGahern by the painter Patrick Swift and the story of their friendship can be accessed at http://painterpatrickswift.blogspot.com/1970/03/bird-swift-john-mcgahern-writer.html

[iv] Kathryn Hughes: “Rereading “Alone of All Her Sex” by Marina Warner, The Guardian, 23rd March, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/23/rereading-alone-of-all-her-sex

[v] Paula Rego interviewed by Catherine Lampert, 18th September, 2017.

[vi] Rego spoke about the challenges of portrait painting when Germaine Greer sat for her (a commission from the National Portrait Gallery). https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/paula-rego-on-her-struggle-to-paint-a-portrait-of-germaine-greer The square format and informal pose of the Greer portrait share a similar approach to Lucian Freud’s canvases from the ’60s through the ’80s, for example some of his portraits of The Big Man, 1976-77.

[vii] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/aug/22/paula-rego-art-interview

[viii] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/11/paula-rego-it-isnt-nice-in-my-mind

[ix] Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories, directed by Nick Willing, produced for the BBC by Kismet Film Company, 2017.

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Paula Rego, a life between Lisbon and London

Paula Rego standing in front of the painting Stray Dogs, (Dogs of Barcelona), 1965. Image: © Manuela Morais

Patricia Brennan, Visitor Engagement Team at IMMA and PG student at TCD, engages with the art of renowned realist painter Dame Paula Rego, in an introduction to Rego’s solo exhibition Obedience and Defiance currently at IMMA. In this first of a two-part text, there are references to the political context and influences of the artist’s early life and on her works up until the millennium. 

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Darkness in Europe

“If you look the devil in the face you’re less frightened of him”.[I]

In Ireland in 1932 de Valera strode to centre stage as Taoiseach and Salazar came to power in Portugal, against the backdrop of fascism in Europe. While Salazar brought greater economic stability to Portugal, it was at the cost of curtailing civil liberties. The Estado Novo would not be toppled until 1974, and over here, de Valera cast a long shadow. The role of women in the home was enshrined in both the Irish and the Portuguese constitutions, and after a long struggle, complete suffrage was finally won in Portugal in 1976. Born three years into the Portuguese dictatorship, Paula Rego has tackled political issues which festered under oppressive regimes, but also her own personal demons, to bare the hidden lives of women. Rego’s works are often disquieting, undeniably powerful, drawing inspiration from newspaper stories, cartoons, and folk tales, as well as the artist’s inner life.

A liberal education

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon and spent most of her early years in Cascais, where now stands the Casa das Historias Paula Rego. From the age of 10, Rego was schooled through English at St. Julian’s, in Carcavelos, which then as now placed great emphasis on the arts in education and was the competitor of the Irish run St. Dominic’s, (where coincidentally, I taught art briefly in the late ’80s). Her father, Jose Figueiroa Rego, was “an immensely kind and liberal man who tried to give me my freedom”. They shared a passion for film and music. Rego’s mother, Mariade São José, is remembered by her daughter as “quite a lady; I learned from her the pleasure of clothes. She had a marvellous eye for painting.”[ii]

Paula Rego, The Family, 1988 Acrylic on Paper 213.4 x 213.4 cm © Paula Rego
Paula Rego, Under Milk Wood, 1954, Oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm. © Paula Rego. Courtesy UCL Art Museum, University of London.

 

The life room

Rego entered the legendary Slade School of Art[iii] at 17 while William Coldstream was director. As a visiting tutor, L.S. Lowry was encouraging of Rego whereas Lucian Freud was occasionally glimpsed slipping in and straight out of the life room, which was at its zenith, with Euan Uglow a fellow student. (If I had a time machine, I’d go straight to that life room with those three great painters of the human form: Freud, Uglow and Rego). The latter remembers at first being shocked at the sight and smell of naked people, but Rego learnt a discipline in drawing which has served her well as a figurative artist. She particularly enjoyed the print room, where she could escape to draw anything she wanted to. In 1954 Rego won the coveted Summer Composition prize. Her piece was titled Under Milk Wood, a reference to Dylan Thomas.

Soul mates

Rego fell in love with a fellow student, the brilliant, charismatic and handsome Victor Willing. When Rego became pregnant with their first child, her beloved father drove all the way to London to talk things over and took his daughter home, stopping in Paris for new clothes. Willing followed after and the young couple settled for some years in her parents’ summer house at Eiriceira.

Defiance

Rego had her first solo show in Lisbon in 1965, at the Galeria de Arte Moderna, with works which satirised the political establishment.[iv] Manifesto for a Lost Cause, 1965, was about her father, and his frustration with the Salazar dictatorship. Rego’s work from the ’60s threw a sidelong glance at Juan Miró, who likewise satirised dictatorship in his Barcelona series and in his marvellous theatrical costumes for Alfred Jarry’s play, Ubu Roi.

Paula Rego, Manifesto for a Lost Cause, 1965, Acrylic, crayon, graphite, and paper glued on canvas 183 x 152 cm, © Paula Rego
Paula Rego, Manifesto for a Lost Cause, 1965, Acrylic, crayon, graphite, and paper glued on canvas 183 x 152 cm. © Paula Rego. Courtesy Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon

Democracy

Freedom came with the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution in 1974, but too late for Rego’s father, who had died in 1966. In the same year Victor Willing was diagnosed with MS. Despite these personal difficulties, Rego managed to get herself into the studio to work, and she continued to exhibit in Lisbon and Porto, and had a solo show in London in 1981, at the AIR Gallery. Her reputation outside Portugal grew; in 1985 Rego had a solo show in London at Edward Totah and another in New York.

Drawing things out

By the late eighties, Victor Willing was very ill indeed. Rego would roll up the large sheets of paper she worked on at the studio and bring them home for his opinion. The artist has acknowledged Willing as her mentor during their life together. Her paintings, especially from those days in the late ‘80s, show the conflicting emotions and dramas of her personal life. Rego has never shied away from the truth, and gives all sides of the power struggles that exist even in the most loving relationships. The Family, 1988, is replete with tension as much as affection, as the girls care for their father even as they seem to overwhelm him in their efforts.

Paula Rego, The Family, 1988 Acrylic on Paper 213.4 x 213.4 cm © Paula Rego
Paula Rego, The Family, 1988, Acrylic on paper on canvas, 213.4 x 213.4 cm. © Paula Rego

 

A new life

The Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, a great support to the artist from the sixties onwards, gave Rego a retrospective in 1988, the same year in which Victor Willing passed away. In one of her most extraordinary series, the Dog Women of the early ‘90s, Rego used pastel to great effect, and dealt with her own feelings of loneliness after her husband’s death. Pastel felt more immediate, more like drawing than painting. Rego’s renewed interest and ambition with regard to her drawing seems to intensify from here onwards, and she has worked increasingly from the model, often Lila Nunes, (Willing’s carer). The choice of pastels for many major works in the last 30 years points to this stronger emphasis on drawing over painting, although both elements are there in the work.

Paula Rego, Sleeper, 1994, Pastel on canvas 120 x 160 cm
Paula Rego, Sleeper, 1994, Pastel on canvas, 120 x 160 cm. © Paula Rego, Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London

 

Dog Women

In Sleeper, from Rego’s significant Dog Women series, the girl rests on her man’s coat like a faithful dog seeking comfort. As my colleague Sandra Murphy pointed out to me, Sleeper can be compared to Double Portrait by Lucian Freud, with human and dog entwined and somnolent. Whereas Freud is focused on the unique biology of two living creatures, Rego emphasises character.

Paula Rego depicts the lives of women primarily; her series on abortion in particular bears witness to the pragmatic way that ordinary women deal with a taboo subject and makes us share in their experience, without rhetoric or judgement. Curator of the exhibition Catherine Lampert notes in the catalogue: “the work is born of everyday reality and a constant negotiation with life as it is.” The series began as a personal response by the artist to the defeat of the referendum on the right to choose in Portugal, 1998. As in Ireland, it was a deeply divisive issue in a traditionally Catholic country. Some of Rego’s images were reproduced as part of the pro-choice campaign in 2008, when the referendum was passed to allow limited access to terminations. Later graphic works on the issue of female genital mutilation are equally uncompromising.

Paula Rego, Untitled, 1986, Acrylic on paper 112 x 76 cm
Paula Rego, Untitled No. 1, 1998, pastel on paper, 110 x 100 cm. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of The Artist and Marlborough, New York and London


Transcendence

Rego’s creative drive is astounding, particularly in the face of personal adversity, and her ability to marry the private with the political makes Rego constantly relevant as an artist. Rego’s courage and integrity is evident in her choice of subject matter and the determination to speak her truth, and in the authority, power and conviction of her draughtsmanship. The artist’s skilled hands sift through the discomfiting truths of her life, and ours. With Lucian Freud and Paula Rego at IMMA this year, we have the male and the female gaze, and two of the greatest British realist painters of this or any century; both born in Europe.

Part 2 of this article will examine several of Rego’s monumental series. Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance continues at IMMA until 3 January 2021.

[i] Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 1992 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00943vs

[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jul/17/art.art

[iii] For a great read which addresses an earlier and equally celebrated time at the Slade, I recommend Pat Barker’s novel “Life Class”.

[iv] Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance, edited by Anthony Spira and Catherine Lampert, pub. by MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2019.

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The artist as flâneuse, a walking cultural commentator

Eithne Jordan, Night Street XVI, Oil on Linen, 73 x 100cm, 2009

Beth O’Halloran, Visitor Engagement Team at IMMA/lecturer at NCAD, looks at the transgressive role of female artists as cultural ethnographers – in particular the artist as flâneuse. Included are references to works by Isabel Nolan and Sophie Calle, exhibited in IMMA currently and 2004 respectively, and writers Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf.

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With Covid’s constraints on movements in tandem with its release from work and school commutes, daily walks have become important de-stressing moments for many of us. Which calls to mind the 19th-century phenomenon of the flâneur – that figure of privilege with time to aimlessly meander and observe – famously most extreme in 1840, at the height of Industrialization’s manic urban activity, when it was good form to lead turtles on walks through the arcades to enhance the slowest gait possible. It is a given that these early flâneurs were male and their recordings of everyday occurrences were weighted by their gender alone. But, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, Dr Lauren Elkin, sheds light on recent instances of the female pedestrian perspective – “The flâneur – the keen-eyed stroller who chronicles the minutiae of city life – has long been seen as a man’s role. From Virginia Woolf to Martha Gellhorn, it’s time we recognised the vital, transgressive work of the flâneuse.” [1]

Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting” in an essay by that name: sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the “champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets”, we leave the things that define us at home, and become “part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.”

Rebecca Solnit during a Panhandle walkabout. Photo: LIZ HAFALIA / San Francisco Chronicle 2000
Rebecca Solnit during a Panhandle walkabout. Photo: LIZ HAFALIA / San Francisco Chronicle 2000

 

Women who walk and record – recently, attention has been given to the likes of American writer Cheryl Strayed whose walk, as chronicled in her memoir, Wild, was so personally transformative, she changed her surname to the verb. And in Rebecca Solnit’s most recent publication, Recollections of My Nonexistence, she devotes a chapter to the significance of her walks and how frightening it can be to be a woman who likes to walk in a city at night. She says, “Most urban women, you know, live as though in a war zone.” She quotes Sylvia Plath, ‘Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars – to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.”

 

Sophie Calle ‘Suite Ventienne and the Hotel.’’ 1988.
Sophie Calle ‘Suite Ventienne and the Hotel.’’ 1988.

 

Female artists such as Isabel Nolan and Sophie Calle , navigate the contemporary female experience. They comment on interactions with their personas and the public in both highly personal and universal terms. Nolan’s says of her work, Sloganeering 1-4, that she wanted to “create a character who is trying, somewhat desperately to communicate a sense of their identity … in a culture where communication is often reduced to sound bites that are often both pretentious and vacuous”. She upends the ubiquitous and thereby nearly invisible realm of T-shirt slogans as a way to communicate in the public sphere.

Isabel Nolan, Sloganeering 1-4, 2001, Video, Duration: 4 min, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2002
Isabel Nolan, Sloganeering 1-4, 2001, Video, Duration: 4 min, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2002

 

Her casual scrawl is similar to graffiti artists and their ‘tags’ – hastily written codified messages. Calle’s practice can be termed a social ethnography. Calle’s work often focuses on human vulnerability, identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Both artists call to mind Virginia Woolf’s words: ‘What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality – that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.’ (Street Haunting, 1927).

The 19th-century Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff said, “I long for the freedom to go out alone: to go, to come, to sit on a bench … and to stroll in the old streets in the evenings. This is what I envy. Without this freedom one cannot become a great artist.”

Artists such as Calle and Nolan, Strayed, Woolf and Solnit show us the power of navigating this new-found, albeit still limited, freedom and the weight of the female gaze.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/29/female-flaneur-women-reclaim-streets.

 

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Statue Wars

The statue of Queen Victoria ‘in residence’ at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, 1967. Photo: still RTÉ Archive

In this article Lisa Moran, Curator of Engagement and Learning Programmes, IMMA, considers the current debates about the role of statues and monuments in terms of the role of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham as a former repository for unwanted or endangered colonial-era monuments and statues following the Irish War of Independence.

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‘That’s how it goes with monuments. Some of them are put up too soon, and then, when the era of their particular notion of heroism is past, have to be cleared away’. Günter Grass, Crabwalk, 2004.

When talking of monuments the observation by Austrian writer Robert Musil, that ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument’ is often cited to point to the built-in obsolescence of a certain form of figurative, heroic monument found in urban public spaces.[1] Yet, the events of the last few weeks suggest otherwise, that these statues are not invisible, neutral or benign. The recent toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, a man whose wealth derived from slave trading, has been a very visible and symbolic feature of the current protests against systemic racism and police brutality. It is not an isolated event and draws on a long tradition of monumental decommissioning. Since the end of the Cold War statues of Lenin and Stalin were destroyed or removed from public spaces in countries which were part of the former Soviet Union. In 2003, following the invasion of Iraq, the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein was broadcast around the world. More recently, we have seen the ongoing and contested removal of statues of key figures associated with the Confederacy in America.

It seems that Musil underestimated the symbolic currency of such statues and their capacity to function not only as signifiers of injustice and oppression but to actually embody these qualities. This was evident in the cathartic experience derived by Iraquees who hit the broken statue of Saddam Hussein with their shoes while dragging it through the streets of Baghdad. Rolling Colston’s statue through the streets of Bristol and into the River Avon seemed to also evoke a similarly cathartic affect.

Ireland has also experienced a period of statue wars in the decades following the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), although this might be more accurately described as guerrilla warfare, where statues and monuments associated with British Imperial rule tended to be removed ‘by law or dynamite’.[2] Before the Royal Hospital Kilmainham became home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in 1991, it had been a temporary refuge for some of these colonial-era statues that had been removed from public spaces such as that of Queen Victoria, by John Hughes, R.H.S, and those of Field-Marshall Gough and Lord Carlisle, both by John Henry Foley. The statue of Field-Marshall Gough perched on his horse in the Phoenix Park was subjected to several attacks and in one such incident the head was sawn off and thrown in the River Liffey. In 1957, following an explosion which caused considerable damage to the sculpture, the remnants were removed to the sanctuary of the Royal Hospital. The statue of Gough and his horse was repaired and now stands in the grounds of Chillingham Castle, in Northumberland. A request to have the statue re-instated in 1988 was refused on the basis that the conditions in which it had to removed remained unchanged.[3] The statue of Lord Carlisle situated in the People’s Park was blown off its plinth a year later, in 1958, and the damaged work was brought to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

Queen Victoria installed outside Leinster House
Queen Victoria installed outside Leinster House

However, it is the fate of the statue of Queen Victoria that is most commonly associated with this phase of the statue wars in Ireland. In 1908, to mark the occasion of her visit to Ireland in 1901, the statue had been installed in front of Leinster House, which became the seat of the Irish government in 1922. Following a long campaign of protest the statue was removed, in 1948, to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where she sat in the centre of the courtyard along with several figures that had formed part of her elaborate plinth.

Queen Victoria with figures from her plinth at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham
Queen Victoria with figures from her plinth at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham

They were arranged on a wooden structure that created the strange impression they were setting off on an excursion with Victoria at the helm. Victoria was eventually moved to a storage facility in Co. Offaly and, in 1986, she was gifted to the city of Sydney, Australia on the occasion of their bicentenary celebrations. She now sits on a new plinth in the Bicentennial Plaza, adjacent to the Queen Victoria Building and facing Sydney’s Town Hall. She travelled alone and parts of her plinth and the figures which decorated it can be found in several locations around the grounds of the Royal Hospital.

A fragment from Queen Victoria’s plinth in the formal gardens in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
A fragment from Queen Victoria’s plinth in the formal gardens in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

As we have seen more recently, the destruction or removal of monuments, when ‘they fall out of favour’ evokes much heated debate about their fate, where some argue their removal constitutes an erasure or editing of history, while others suggest, in keeping with Musil’s observation, that statues and monuments tell us little about history except that it is constructed through processes of selections and exclusions. These debates present an opportunity for fresh thinking about the modes and contexts for memorials and monuments not only of the past but of the present and future.

Dr Lisa Moran, Curator: Engagement & Learning, IMMA.

The subject of the monument and its relationship to the state will be discussed further during the IMMA International Summer School 2020 ‘statecraft’. For further details and information on public events click here.

All images except the last one are stills taken from a short RTÉ news report ‘Queen Turns Green at Royal Hospital’ by Cathal O’Shannon, for ‘Newsbeat’, broadcast on 13 January, 1967.

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2017/0110/843928-queen-victoria-in-kilmainham/

https://www.rte.ie/archives

RTE Archives logo

[1] Robert Musil, Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (1936), published in English in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wrostman, Eridanos Press, Hygiene, Colorado, 1987, p. 61.

[2] The Irish Times, 7 September, 1943.

[3] Irish Times, December 29, 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/state-papers-repatriation-of-phoenix-park-equestrian-statue-not-permitted-1.3735857

[4] Irish Times, December 29, 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/state-papers-repatriation-of-phoenix-park-equestrian-statue-not-permitted-1.3735857

Watch

RTÉ Archives. Queen Turns Green At Royal Hospital (1967)

Further reading

Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Paula Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius Reaffirmed, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2010.

Florian Matzner, ed., Public Art: A Reader, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004.

Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster, Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.

Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America,

Princeton University Press; New edition, 2018.

James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between, University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.

Listen back

The Artist & The State Symposium. Chaired by Mick Wilson. Listen here.

Art | Memory | Place Seminar. ‘Centenaries: What are they good for? Ann Rigney. Listen back here.

Art | Memory | Place Seminar. ‘Memory of Media in Contemporary Art’, Andreas Huyssen. Listen here.

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The Secret Seven Go Fly at IMMA

Kenneth Hall, Bird, 1945, Oil on canvas, 26.5 x 36 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Donation, Patrick Scott, 2013

Over recent weeks IMMA has been preparing for re-opening, as restrictions have been reduced nationwide, we are delighted that the grounds at IMMA are now once again fully open to the public. In this article, Sandra Murphy (Visitor Engagement Team at IMMA), focuses on some of the birdlife that you may notice when enjoying a visit to IMMA. This is the third article in a series exploring the biodiversity of the IMMA site, Growing Wild at IMMA explores the wildflower meadow and Famous Five Go Wild at IMMA. explores the butterflies. 

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The Secret Seven Go Fly at IMMA

A shadow below, a silhouette in the bush and a tiny white feather floats on a gentle breeze. Gulls on the chimney stacks, wagtails in the courtyard and starlings gather on the weathervane on top of the distinctive clock tower and landmark. But where? IMMA, of course! IMMA is home to the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art in the heart of Dublin 8. IMMA is also home to 33 species of birds that have been recorded here over the years. We have lost four species of birds over the last five years or so. However, in time, these birds may return again. The full listing of species of birds at IMMA can be viewed at the end of this article.

Clock Tower with cockerel weathervane.
Clock Tower with cockerel weathervane.

The sharp frosty early mornings in October/November bring Blackbirds, Song Thrush and Mistle Thrush and my favourite, the Redwing (last sighting 2016). These birds visit IMMA from the chillier Scandinavian countries, in search of the rich red berries of the Yew trees and the flaming orange berries of the Pyracantha and Cotoneaster on the Terrace. Every year I notice them as I make my way from the car park to the West Arch. Some of these birds have traveled over 1000 kilometres in search of food and it is up to every citizen to try to ensure their survival by providing additional nourishment for these birds after their travels. We are privileged here at IMMA to welcome these important blow-ins. The four old Yew trees close to the West Arch provide nutritious red berries and Woodpigeon’s can also be seen on the higher branches. The berries are stripped within 5 or 6 days depending on the weather, etc. We enjoy the song of these birds from Spring till Summer when the males are in search of a mate. Gardens all over Ireland should be ready to welcome these songsters too. These birds from foreign parts intermingle with our own resident birds, adding to the population of birdlife in Ireland. Some of these birds can differ slightly in beak colour and song.

1. Juvenile Starling 2. Blackbird approaching Ivy berries allowed to ripen
1. Juvenile Starling.
2. Blackbird approaching Ivy berries allowed to ripen.
Pied Wagtail in search of insects.
Pied Wagtail in search of insects.

Berries are a very important food source for birds in the Autumn and Winter months when the ground is hard and frozen. They are lifesavers for our bird visitors and local birds alike. Blackbirds and Woodpigeon are particularly partial to the Ivy, Bramble and Elderberries, which are allowed to ripen in the hedgerows and the wilder areas of the grounds. Fruit trees in the Formal Gardens are also another source of food, with apple and pear trees which have been grown espalier style within the walled garden. The two Walnut trees at the end of the Formal Gardens are the favourites of the Grey Squirrels and they can be seen in late Autumn. These squirrels are also very partial to the bird feeders so we have installed some squirrel-proof feeders, and these work really well.

The windfalls (fruit that drop to the ground) are often stored and later used for bird food in the winter months when trees and hedges are bare. Apples can be pierced and placed on the branches of the trees or packed in bird feeders.

1. Grey Squirrel. 2. Squirrel-proof birdfeeder.
1. Grey Squirrel.
2. Squirrel-proof birdfeeder.

Lime trees, which were planted a few years ago and are maturing nicely, stretch from the West Arch to the Officers’ Graveyard and the lime flowers provide a wonderful, fresh, heady floral scent for visitors and staff during the summer months. These trees are beloved by the Long-tailed tits, which fly in small flocks of up to 15 birds, calling as they fly and keeping close for safety, while warning the flock of any dangers of predatory birds. They move almost unseen from tree to tree, as they feed on the insect-rich flowerheads of the Lime trees. The Blue Tit, Long-tailed Tit and Great Tit, also feed from tiny insects and caterpillars from these nectar rich trees.

1. Juvenile Great Tit 2. Blue Tit and Great Tit on peanut feeder
1. Juvenile Great Tit.
2. Blue Tit and Great Tit on peanut feeder.
Great Tit
Great Tit

One little songbird which is often overlooked on the grounds is the Dunnock. The Dunnock is sometimes mistaken for a sparrow due to its plainer, duller plumage, and is more usually seen feeding on the ground on scraps that have fallen from the feeders above. Male and female look similar, unlike some of the Finch family, as for example the Chaffinch. The Dunnock is a beautiful singer and is one to look out for in parks and gardens, where it is often seen feeding on the ground.

1. Dunnock on pasture. 2. Dunnock on peanut feeder.
1. Dunnock on pasture.
2. Dunnock on peanut feeder.

The Chaffinch also has a distinct song and one you should become familiar with it as it is very easy to recognise. Male and female are often seen together. The male has a dusky orange breast and a smoky grey/blue head. The female, on the other hand, has a duller, soft beige plumage.

 

1.Chaffinch. 2 Male and female Chaffinch.
1. Chaffinch.
2. Male and female Chaffinch.
1.Nestbox on Horse Chestnut tree at IMMA. 2.Nyjer seed birdfeeder for Goldfinch.
1. Nestbox on Horse Chestnut tree at IMMA.
2. Nyjer seed birdfeeder for Goldfinch.


Please remember to provide fresh water for birds.

1. Birdfeeder with apple and suet balls. 2. Mixed feeders.
1. Birdfeeder with apple and suet balls. 2. Mixed feeders.

 

Gardener’s outdoor lunch area at IMMA with social distancing.
Gardener’s outdoor lunch area at IMMA with social distancing.


Birds recorded at IMMA
Mallard
Buzzard on Flyover
Kestrel
Black-headed Gull
Lesser black backed Gull
Herring Gull
Wood Pigeon
Collared Dove
Swift (over the meadows) 3-4 birds recorded
Pied Wagtail
Wren
Dunnock
Robin
Blackbird
Song Thrush
Redwing (not seen in 4 years)
Mistle Thrush
Blackcap
Long-tailed Tit
Coal Tit
Blue Tit
Great Tit
Treecreeper (first sighting 2018)
Magpie
Jackdaw
Rook
Hooded Crow
Starling
Chaffinch
Greenfinch (not seen in 3 years)
Goldfinch
Linnet (first sighting 2019)
Bullfinch (not seen in 5 years)
Total: 33 birds

 

1. Great Spotted Woodpecker (Wicklow) – not yet seen at IMMA but coming to a feeder near you! 2. Robin.
1. Great Spotted Woodpecker (Wicklow) – not yet seen at IMMA but coming to a feeder near you!
2. Robin.

Useful websites

https://birdsireland.com/

https://www.cjwildlifetrade.com/

https://www.rspb.org.uk/

https://birdswatchireland.ie/

The Grounds and Formal Gardens at the RHK are managed and maintained by the Office of Public Works.

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Derek Jarman’s Garden by Susan Thomson

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

Besides such places as The Stonewall Inn, there are few physical places that are part of LGBTQ I+ cultural history – Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage is one of them. Writer and filmmaker Susan Thomson takes us on a journey to his cottage and garden in Dungeness, Kent.

More than 25 years after his death, inspired by Jarman’s legacy and its bleak rugged beauty, Prospect Cottage continues to be a site of pilgrimage for the LGBTQI + community. Saved from private sale through public funding, the cottage will now become a centre for a residency programme for artists, academics, writers, gardeners, filmmakers, and others interested in Jarman and his work. His personal archive from the cottage, including notebooks and letters, and the BAFTA he was awarded for outstanding British contribution to cinema, will go on long term loan to Tate Britain and will be available for public access for the very first time.

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“This year the winter never came. The sun rose blood red. At shrove tide flies swarmed. The rosemary bloomed. Eggs soured in their shells. The sky, pierced and torn, no longer sheltered the naked earth. The seasons changed. Men burrowed deep to hide their shameful poisons. For a million years thirty thousand unborn generations bound to the memory of criminal rulers, the secretaries of energy who oil the wheels of mortgage with dead hands…

I walk in this garden holding the hands of dead friends. Old age came quickly for my frosted generation. Cold, cold, cold, they died so silently. Did the forgotten generation scream or go full of resignation quietly protesting innocence. Cold, cold, cold, they died so silently. I have no words, my shaking hand can not express my fury. Sadness is all I have, no words. Cold, cold, cold, you died so silently.”

The Garden (1990) Derek Jarman

Prospect Cottage. Video still by Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Video still by Susan Thomson

I pluck a single Calla lily from my garden to give to a friend who knew you Derek, who has lost a friend during this time, alchemist of sounds of another Blue.

Why Derek? He was my shadow side. Vocal, raging in cinematic poetry against Section 28, which banned the ‘promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’, while I and many others suffered without understanding, teenagers buried at school, in silence. He was the missing piece of the jigsaw, the images, words and music which before was empty. I may not have discovered him in time, at the right time, but even late, in my twenties, his films rented in threes from Laser video store, he was still vital in piecing together, making sense of the past, and working out possible futures, ones that were most definitely queer, but also ones that would involve film, and riches of experience, beyond the mundane, everyday, clockwork rhythms of the life that was sold to us all. Holding to his own artistic truth, in the face of commercial and political pressures, he sets a moral bar high – an ethical, aesthetic one – and shows a road worth following for the wayward.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

A further twenty years later, I finally make it to visit the house where he lived, Prospect Cottage, where he decided to settle and create a garden after being diagnosed as HIV positive, in 1986. A pilgrimage, if you will. I would go during the Summer. Summer came and went. And then I suffered a loss. And two weeks later, I go.

Setting off from Brighton, I stop for lunch in a cramped café in the mediaeval, arched town of Rye, where the Pet Shop Boys live, then through Hastings and its distant rumblings of an ancient battle, roads stretching on and on, wound round and round, a straight road through a forest, and then to Dungeness as if entering another climate zone, first crossing waterlogged grasslands, wildfowl in the lake opposite EDF taking off in a collective, redstart, goldeneye, swallows and house martins, then the desert, (although the Met Office officially said in 2015 that it didn’t merit this title), a protected natural zone, ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’, the bleached landscape of fiction, that I had seen in the moving images of my childhood and adulthood, from Dr Who of the 1970s to Jarman’s The Garden (1990), science fiction created here.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Images: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Images: Susan Thomson

Otherworldly, so that in visiting, you feel as if you are finally entering these worlds, for the first time. The red flags, nuclear power zone, the electricity threaded, flowing in strong tangible currents flickering, twitching, alive. A déjà vu, a recognition from cinema and television, not a real memory. Now I finally am here, as if in a dream. Jarman himself imagines, following a severe storm, that someone in Ancient Rome is dreaming Prospect Cottage and his life and his films, that all of it is a fiction[1].

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

There is no frame around his garden, this psychic garden. Small round stones form circles of their own, primitive sundials, as if the whole garden were some complex symbol system from a mediaeval manuscript, that would give the key to what…the night sky, the motions of the planets. Sea kale, snow green. The wooden boat, with the remnants of a light turquoise paint, from its previous journeys, only just visible. It appears in The Garden (1990), fishers of men, as if it has wound up here, sailed from some other continent, made its own pilgrimage.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

A collection of longer, grey stones, like dolmens or phalluses, bend upwards. A complete circle. The canary yellow of your windows against the tar black house, the writing on the side of the house, John Donne. All have gone now, you, H.B now too, who died in 2018, and now a fundraising campaign to preserve the house and garden, and turn it into an artist’s residency, for others to go on pilgrimage. Shingle and distant sea. Railway sleepers as flower beds, as if travelling always in your destination, sleeping now for eternity. The garden, the opposite of Max’s poisoned dead suburban garden, sprayed non-stop with pesticides and filled with gnomes, in Jubilee (1978).

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

Gardens have become a luxury item in these days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Creating two tiers of people, those with and those without. To have a garden is to be able to go outside more than once a day. It seems as if nature, whom we did not realise we had banished to exile, has returned to us in lockdown, birds returning first to suburban gardens. In the still, less toxic, strange moment when time has appeared to stand still, the layers of all our selves have become available to us, like one of Jarman’s films. Those seeming anachronisms are simply the truth. It is we, too shallow in our everyday, clockwork lives, who forgot ourselves, historical layers of ourselves. Perhaps our collective sickness will prove to be the same epiphany that Tilda Swinton described Jarman’s illness as being for him.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

In the garden, a wooden iron circle attempts to pierce the sky, to go into battle with it, during the day, and at night, to hook the stars. Echoes of the Buddhist protective bamboo forests surrounding temples[2], yet these are dead trees, unable to protect, when the plague has already entered. However, their original intention was to mark, and thereby protect the plants when they were subterranean in Winter. The dead protect the living. Consider this. He could no longer protect himself, but he could protect that which was still to emerge, help it on its way, to grow in darkness. Subterranean cine-children. Apart from the shades of green, yellow is the most brilliant colour, golden, the windows and the gorse. Your winter garden and the eyes of your house, shine golden.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

Rainbows on my lens, prismatic, as light moves through the glass, lens flare. Light brown ferns. And various metal structures, to bring the energy, the electricity outwards, to the rest of the country. Energy source. The fences continuing on and on for miles, beside your house. Danger. No entry. The zone. Russet growth of bushes erupt from the pale shingle, salt. The wooden poles of the electric wires hanging between. Passing their currents along. It doesn’t have the Monet-like profusion of flowers of before, but it is a winter garden and a dead tree with holes stands opposite the doorway. Not the reds and yellows and oranges of a distant summer. The poppies, or even the white flowers of later. The valerian, crocuses, rosemary, daffodils, California poppies, burnet rose, the pinks of thrift, saxifrage, campion, purple iris of the past are gone or invisible. But there is yellow, of gorse. The shingle has lost its rippling concentric circles. Raked. An iron circle emerges from the shingle, as if a new planet, or a setting sun. Or a fallen satellite dish, no longer capturing signals to bring in, digital video communication, and falling silent, like the acoustic mirrors down the road, no longer straining their concrete ears to listen for enemy signals.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

Meanwhile the PROTEST! exhibition at IMMA, art created in one pandemic, sleeps in crates, wrapped, in limbo, unable to move because of another pandemic, waiting patiently to go to its next, postponed, exhibition in Manchester. His last film Blue (1993), which stood at the entrance of the IMMA exhibition, a film about death as well as blindness, is echoed now in life – there are many these days who are dying on camera, their family or friends, not allowed to be present, on the other side of a video call. We have all been dematerialised, transformed into binary code to render ourselves non-contagious. Film, video is a safety thing these days. Video is a condom is a mask. There have been 65,000 excess deaths in the U.K. during lockdown at time of writing. A government, too slow – too inept, indifferent or hubristic to act earlier. In the Covid-19 pandemic, the immunosuppressed, the elderly in care homes, BAME, key workers, are the queers in Britain now.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

This pilgrimage of mine is about loss. Layers of loss. I return to his house after leaving, driving away, and then after half an hour, panicking, thinking I have lost my phone, left it as an accidental, megapixel gift from the future, an iPhone for Derek’s ghost to start filming with, a ritual gift for everything that has been given to me. On my return, his neighbour emerges from her house and after I explain, she offers to phone me. I hear the ringtone from the boot of the car, and camera bag unzipped, my phone emerges from a secret pocket. For a moment though we are all connected, part of the exchange of electricity and waves of this place. I cry while driving along the empty flat roads leaving for the second time. For Derek too, amongst others. I should not be making this trip, but instead getting a coffee and boarding a train to London to go see him speak at the ICA or the BFI. It is also very nearly the last journey I ever take, my eyesight letting me down in the failing light of the return journey, where for a split second of slow motion fear, a fear of life ending or never being the same again, I lose control of the car, and it slides across the road, before I regain control and emerge unharmed. This never happens, has never happened before, but it happened that day on the way back from this unreal visit.

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

White witch’s garden. Apothecary. Pharmacopoeia. Please come back next year.[3] The cottage as a residence for artists will once again breathe new life into the house and garden, like the two small birds nesting shortly after Derek died, as described by H.B., Keith Collins, changing the sense of the garden for him, from one of death, to life. The cycles of eternal return and resurrection of a garden.[4] And so I imagine Derek Jarman, waking the day after a storm, or one afternoon in bed wrestling with fever, dreaming of the artists who will inhabit his house in the future. He sees them enter his house from the garden, bringing in a freshly clipped rose, Rosa mundi, rose of the world, as they sit down next to his bed to create.

“I post a letter to you, dear reader, in a red Italian envelope in the little red pillar box at the end of the garden, and watch the postman collect it at four pm in his red van. Italian business envelopes are always red. URGENT, they say.”

‘Chroma’ Derek Jarman – Chapter ‘On seeing red’

Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson
Prospect Cottage. Image: Susan Thomson

Susan Thomson

Susan Thomson is a writer and filmmaker, currently directing Ghost Empire, a series of films on LGBTQ+ rights, funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, which follow constitutional challenges to British colonial anti-gay laws in various countries, including Singapore, Northern Cyprus, and forthcoming in 2020 on Belize. The films have screened internationally including at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Kashish Queer International Film Festival, Mumbai; Yale NUS, Singapore; Scottish Government, Edinburgh; CCA, Glasgow; Queer Asia Film Festival, SOAS; and INIVA, London, and were nominated for ‘Best International Film’ at MICGénero film festival, Mexico City. A new essay film, about the colonial echoes of the U.K. government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis, also funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, will premiere on NVTV, Northern Ireland, later this year.

Susan holds a Masters in European Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford University, an M.A. in Modern Languages from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University and an M.A. from IADT in Visual Arts Practices, and was represented by WME, William Morris Endeavor, for a novel about Roger Casement. The Swimming Diaries, an artist’s book, has been exhibited and sold at Artbook @ MoMA PS1, New York, and is held in the collection of the Live Art Development Agency, London.

susanthomson.co.uk

[1] Modern Nature Derek Jarman Vintage page 91 “Yet Prospect stood firm on its foundations, unlike the farm in Kansas. Without light or heat for the next week, I stared at the glittering power plant on the horizon and wondered if, like the Emerald City and the great Oz himself, my life and this cottage had been dreamt all those years ago in Rome.”

[2] “A trip to Japan …The Hokoku-ji Temple in Kamakura was the key to the garden at Prospect Cottage” Keith Collins Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks Thames & Hudson Chapter 5 The Garden, Howard Sooley

[3] The Garden (1990) Derek Jarman

[4] Arena BBC 2 1991 Derek Jarman’s Garden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbGbT5uVUHQ&t=331s

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Curating at IMMA, through a queer lens by Seán Kissane

Patrick Hennessy. The Yellow Ribbon c. 1956

Seán Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA, looks back at the exhibition on Patrick Hennessy titled De Profundis he curated in 2016. Hennessy was one of the first Irish artists to depict his life as a gay man in the face of social, religious and legal restrictions.

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In thinking about what it means to celebrate Pride Week in 2020, we can reflect on the history of Irish artists who lived in a less tolerant time and how they explored themes of LGBT+ life in their work. In 2016, IMMA staged a retrospective of Patrick Hennessy (1915-1980) with a particular focus on these themes. Hennessy was born in Cork but raised and educated in Scotland where he met another artist Henry Robertson Craig (1916-1984) who became his life partner. They were separated by the second world war at which time Hennessy’s work took on a particularly melancholy mood, particularly his self-portraits and paintings about the war like Exiles (1943, Hugh Lane).

In 1946 the couple were reunited, and they lived together until Hennessy died in 1980. Although they were private about their relationship, they consistently addressed gay themes in their work, increasingly so in the 1960s and 70s. The private spaces of their relationship are seen in tender works such as Hennessy’s Roses in a Bedroom (1947), a still-life of a vase of pink roses in the background of which is their unmade bed.

Hennessy. Roses in a Bedroom, 194
Patrick Hennessy. Roses in a Bedroom, 1947. Oil on canvas. 40.6 x 55.9 cm. Private Collection

The interior of their home is depicted in The Silent Room (1948, Crawford Art Gallery) as are their pets, Self-Portrait and Cat (1978, Crawford Art Gallery). They made numerous portraits of each other, and depict each other in conversation pieces, such as Craig’s Villa Domino (1968).

Henry Robertson Craig. Villa Domino, 1968
Henry Robertson Craig. Villa Domino, 1968. Oil on canvas. 50 x 88.5 cm. Private Collection

Works by Hennessy that directly address Irish identity include Lake Island (c. 1965) that consists of a man standing by a lake in a landscape reminiscent of a painting by Paul Henry (1877–1958). The man is in contemporary dress, but the view is timeless. At first glance, the scene is pleasant or innocuous. Still, through a queer lens it can be read as a visual representation of the isolation and alienation of the closeted experience. By placing this figure in the west of Ireland landscape more usually associated with virtue and Catholicism, the work can also be read both as a queering of Irish identity and the conventions of Irish landscape painting.

1. Hennessy. Lake Island c. 1965. Oil on canvas. 50.8 x 60.9 cm. Private Collection. 2. Hennessy. Atlas Beach c. 1976. Oil on canvas. 63.5 x 88.9 cm. Private Collection.
1. Patrick Hennessy. Lake Island, c. 1965. Oil on canvas. 50.8 x 60.9 cm. Private Collection. 2. Patrick Hennessy. Atlas Beach, c. 1976. Oil on canvas. 63.5 x 88.9 cm. Private Collection.

The isolated male figure appears regularly in Hennessy’s work; however, Seán Alone (1977) does something different. It shows a group of adolescent boys swimming in a canal. One boy sits apart fully clothed in physical and psychological isolation observing his friends. The reasons for his unwillingness to participate is known only to him but can be imagined by the viewer. When exhibited at IMMA, this picture elicited strong responses from the audience. One man said in his youth he didn’t like to swim with his friends because he thought his thin body betrayed his homosexuality. Another said he wouldn’t undress because when he was a teenager, he could not control his physical responses and felt ashamed, but also afraid of the possible consequences.

Hennessy. Seán Alone, 1977. Oil on canvas. 31.8 x 60.9 cm. Private Collection
Patrick Hennessy. Seán Alone, 1977. Oil on canvas. 31.8 x 60.9 cm. Private Collection

To express themes of LGBT+ life while homosexuality was still criminalised artists used codes in their works to communicate themes in a clandestine way. One of the most popular was in dress codes that signaled sexual orientation to others. For gay men, wearing a red necktie was one signifier. This is often seen in the work of Hennessy and Craig, both in self-portraits and in portraits of their friends. Another method of concealment was by representing the body, but through reference to Ancient Greece. Hennessy’s Man Made Man (1965), and The Yellow Ribbon (1956, IMMA) both show the male nude but presented as statuary, or book illustrations. As the century progressed, they became more frank and they exhibited male nudes when this was not a popular theme in contemporary art.

1. Hennessy. Portrait of a Man, c. 1960s. 2. Henry Robertson Craig, Nude Beach Boys, 1960s
1. Patrick Hennessy. Portrait of a Man, c. 1960s. Oil on canvas. 61 x 46 cm. Private Collection 2. Henry Robertson Craig, Nude Beach Boys, 1960s, Oil on canvas. 101.5 x 121.5 cm. Collection Royal Hibernian Academy.

An example is Craig’s Figures in the Sea (1960s, RHA) which portrays a group of six naked youths in an Irish coastal scene. Two are riding horses in the surf while two others laugh as they run out of the water towards the artist. Craig exhibited this picture at the RHA Annual Exhibition in the ’60s and donated it to the RHA Collection where it remained unseen again until 2016. As a public declaration by the artist it can be seen as a step towards open expression in Ireland. In the late 50s the couple started to spend half of the year in Tangier, Morocco which had a tolerant attitude to homosexuality. There, they painted portraits of handsome men, images of gay bars, and other places where gay men met. When exhibited in Dublin in the 70s they attracted some negative comment in the press, one reviewer saying that “Hennessy’s exhibition is full of stupid pictures of young men standing around on beaches in their underpants”.

Hennessy. Boy and Seagull, 1974
Patrick Hennessy. Boy and Seagull, 1974. Oil on canvas. 87.5 x 63.5 cm. Private Collection

With the 20:20 vision that hindsight affords we can see that Hennessy was offering visibility of gay people and their lives; exactly what Gay Pride does today. At a time when we see the dramatic rise of right-wing conservative politics globally, and with it the restriction of rights to LGBT+ people, the joyful and exuberant images of Gay Pride in Dublin presented in the media, offers hope to people in other countries, where the LGBT+ community are subject to violent oppression and censorship.

Additional Resources

IMMA Modern Irish Masters
Read more about Patrick Hennessy’s life and practice on the IMMA Modern Irish Masters website. www.modernirishmasters.com

IMMA Symposium, Sexuality, Identity and the State
Listen back to this symposium organised on the occasion of the exhibitions Patrick Hennessy, De Profundis  and Carol Rama, The Passion of Carol Rama. Comprising of presentations by artists, writers, curators, educators and psychoanalysts, this symposium addresses issues of gender, sexuality, identity and the state as it relates to the work of artists, Hennessey, Rama and others.

Derek Jarman, PROTEST! 
This highly praised retrospective of the work of Derek Jarman PROTEST!  is the most recent exhibition curated by Seán Kissane. A beautiful new monograph has just been published which offers a definitive overview of Derek Jarman’s life and work, covering all aspects of his oeuvre. Now available from the IMMA Shop for the special price of €35.00.