Confronted with a room of glorious cubist colour, you can almost get a sense of what it must have been like when Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett first held an exhibition together, 101 years ago.
The pair had already been exhibiting in Paris and Jellett had stunned Irish audiences the year before, when her composition Decoration went on display in a group show at the Society of Dublin Painters.
Now considered to be the first abstract cubist work shown in Ireland, Decoration exercised the pens, if not the critical faculties, of reviewers at the time. George (AE) Russell wrote of Jellett’s “subhuman art” and described her as succumbing to the “artistic malaria” of cubism. The Irish Times published a photograph of Decoration alongside an odd-looking onion, under the headline “Two freak pictures”.
What was so upsetting? The inherent capacity of art to surprise and challenge is part of its power, and not everybody is comfortable with that. New ways of seeing have always tended to take a while to catch on. Just like impressionism before it, cubism was originally coined as a term of disparagement.
On show now, as part of Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship, at the National Gallery of Ireland, Decoration, while definitively abstract, doesn’t seem quite so freakish after all. It clearly shows the influence of Jellett and Hone’s tutor Albert Gleizes, who had set out his method of abstraction in a text, La Peinture et Ses Lois (Painting and Its Laws), published the year Decoration was made.
In a series of diagrams, Gleizes demonstrated his theories of translation and rotation, by which he pursued his abstractions. The method was to distil an image into a set of geometric elements, then move and layer these to create the artwork.
His goal was to get away from art as imitation, to create an expression of unspoken emotion – or, as he put it, art that makes “intersections between known images of the natural world and unknown images that reside within intuition”. Gleizes wanted abstract art to lead to a new way of thinking. No wonder people were so dismayed.
This is undoubtedly part of the reason for the aggressive response to Decoration’s first exhibition. For many, the experience of being presented with something for which there are no easy words can be deeply unsettling, especially when emotion gets involved.
But Jellett’s painting does more. Decoration’s debt to the shapes and structures of religious art is clear, with blue and gold echoes of altarpieces and a haunting of the shapes of a Madonna and child, as she takes Gleizes’s strict system and lets a little connection to the more easily perceived world back in, strengthening both in the process.
The works in The Art of Friendship continue in this vein: there are seascapes, landscapes, horses and a strikingly rich vein of religious-inspired work, all bringing Hone and Jellett back together in a shared exhibition for the first time in a century.
Through it we discover the capacity their art retains to astonish. Both born in Dublin, to well-to-do families, the pair had met in 1917 in London, as students of Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art. By 1921 Jellett had followed her friend to Paris, to study with André Lhote. A cubist painter, Lhote was a teacher with an eclectic mix of students, including Tamara de Lempicka, Elizabeth Rivers and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Hone and Jellett didn’t stay long, instead persuading Gleizes to take them on later that year. Gleizes didn’t typically accept students, so some persistence was involved, but it was a fruitful relationship of mutual respect, and Gleizes’s own work and ideas would come to be influenced by theirs in return.
The critical response to Hone and Jellett’s two-person show in 1924 was much more nuanced than the explosions of derision that had greeted Decoration a year earlier. The Freeman’s Journal reviewer was probably the most accurate, writing: “A little introspection before condemning these pictures or dismissing them as inconsequential things will go a long way to a finer understanding of them, and incidentally, of one’s self.”
That remains true 100 years later, in art as well as life. It reaches back to Gleizes’s theory that abstract art can expand the limits of our thinking while giving us a window into the workings of our own thoughts and emotions. This doesn’t make it better than representational art, just different, and Hone and Jellett would continue to paint representational work throughout their lives.
Still, exploring the carefully restrained storms of colour and line in the first space of the National Gallery’s magnificent exhibition, it is tempting to look for an origin. Where had these artists come from? What were their early works like? Were clues to their cubism embedded, say, in art from their time in London? Or earlier, when Jellett had received art lessons from Elizabeth Yeats, and then at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and Hone had been a day student at the National Gallery of Ireland?
Brendan Rooney, who has curated the exhibition with his colleague Niamh MacNally, says that an imbalance in the pair’s surviving early work influenced their decision to start with the full impact of that glorious burst of cubist colour. So much less of Hone’s early work is today available.
It is a small niggle but one that lingers through the exhibition, as a knowledge of Jellett’s precubist work, from the 1991 show Mainie Jellett, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, lent the brilliant sense of an artist searching for the limits of picture making.
Hone was the same, and while initially the pair’s work was intriguingly similar, as the exhibition demonstrates, it soon diverged. Both were influenced by their religious convictions, as their cubism became a way to express some of their sense of the ineffable mysteries of the divine. Born Protestants, they had a fascination with medieval and renaissance religious art that was more Catholic in affect, and Hone would go on to convert to that latter religion later in life.
By 1927 The Irish Times was describing Jellett as “the only serious exponent in this country of the ultra-modernist school of painting.” The writer might have said “in these islands”, as Jellett was also years ahead of her celebrated UK counterpart Ben Nicholson.
This demonstrates that Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s was not entirely the backward-looking place that later histories might like to imply. Ireland at the time was by no means a feminist paradise, but the young Irish Republic wasn’t entirely a swamp of misogyny. That set in harder, later.
Instead, the early ideals of the new State included space for the arts and culture, and for women in articulating the place of Ireland in the world. Jellett’s The Bathers was selected to represent Ireland in the 1928 Olympics, back when there was a category for artworks depicting sports. In 1937 the government of Éamon de Valera commissioned Jellett to create murals for the Ireland pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938, while Hone’s stained glass My Four Green Fields, which was commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, now hangs in the Department of the Taoiseach in Government Buildings in Dublin.
Still, shocking headlines are always, unfortunately, preferable. Take the Guardian’s coverage of the current exhibition, with its headline “‘Freak pictures’: Ireland’s art revolutionaries who were treated so badly one fled to a nunnery.”
In truth, Hone did enter a convent in Cornwall as a postulant in the year after the pair’s joint exhibition, but was she run out of town by opprobrium, as the Guardian suggests? Or was it, as is more likely, that the quieter and more retiring of the pair, who had experienced a life of ill health after contracting polio at the age of 12, had had enough of public life for a while?
Either way, it didn’t last, and in 1927 Jellett went over to collect her. The pair went on to travel together, visiting Gleizes, painting and exhibiting.
Jellett explored beyond the canvas, with screens, designs for carpets, advertising posters and theatre sets. Hone turned to stained glass. Originally rejected by Sarah Purser, when she applied to join An Túr Gloine – the Glass Tower, Purser’s studio – in 1932, Hone went on to triumph in the field.
Her major masterpiece is, sadly, not on general view unless you happen to be a student at Eton College, the English public school, where her East Window was made between 1949 and 1952. Sketches and studies for this, and other of her works, are shown in a dedicated space in this exhibition, and it is a joy to see the intricacies of her art at eye level.
Some, such as Heads of Two Apostles, and Head of Christ (a study for the Eton window) show the influence of Georges Rouault, but their power belongs entirely to Hone.
In the final room, representation comes back into the picture. The pair were always curious, always exploring, and I’m reminded of the arc of Picasso’s career, where it is obvious that his restless genius was less concerned with dedication to form than to the enigmas of painting itself. Picasso’s own work will be on show at the National Gallery later this year, when From the Studio opens, in October.
Resisting the clumsy idea that abstract art must be superior because it can be difficult, this exhibition likewise demonstrates the power of a pair of artists who were intrigued by what imagemaking can do. Paintings of woodlands at Marlay, where Hone spent the final years of her life, are wonderfully mysterious, and there is also a lovely watercolour by her of a country house in St-Rémy-de-Provence that would have made Matisse very happy had he made it.
Dedicated to their work, Hone and Jellett continued to promote modernism in Ireland, through exhibition and also through their support of a younger generation of artists, including Louis le Brocquy, who would speak with fondness of them.
They were founder members of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and while Jellett was by nature more forceful, they both worked to spread the word on new ways of seeing. They were also entirely collegiate in their outlook, bringing people together no matter their own artistic styles or leanings.
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Hone and Jellett remained friends throughout their lives. Hone was the last person to sit with Jellett on the evening before she died, from cancer, aged just 46, in 1944. And when Hone died, 11 years later, she left many of her own collection of Jellett’s works to the State. Her bequest included Decoration, now described by the gallery’s curators as arguably the most significant modernist painting in the history of Irish art. It is a powerful legacy.
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship is at the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, until August 10th
