THE ARTS:An exhibition of Irish art has some gems, but, writes Aidan Dunne, we should expect more from our National Gallery's policy and planning
When, as is bound to happen, a museum closes its doors for refitting and refurbishment, it is common practice that the collection it usually displays is put to work in another context. Put on the road, in fact, dispatched to generate income by being hired out to other, faraway institutions.
One fortuitous result of the Ulster Museum's current, extensive reshaping is the availability of some of its collections for exhibition in the Republic, not for profit but as a practical piece of cross-Border cooperation, and a useful exploration of overlapping identities. Hence Treasures from the North in the National Gallery of Ireland's (NGI) Millennium Wing.
The premise of Treasures is that it distils from the generality of the Ulster Museum's considerable holdings a representative selection of Irish paintings; a kind of concise history of Irish painting from the 17th century to roughly the mid-20th century. Add this visiting show to the National Gallery's own collection and, the press release suggests, you have "possibly the finest collection of Irish painting ever assembled".
Overall, the Ulster Museum's collection is very interesting if patchy, reflecting the wider historical developments that shaped its nature and scope. It began late in the 19th century as, essentially, a municipal museum. What had been an institution devoted to natural history moved to incorporate a fine-art collection, inaugurating a dual role that continues to this day. In the simplest view, one can visualise the museum through its collections as looking two ways: southeastwards, towards London, and southwestwards, to the west of Ireland.
Although in many respects the links with Britain, and particularly with London, the centre of administrative, cultural and political power, became increasingly important with the establishment of the Free State and partition, it is also true that Ulster artists were central to the evolution of the school of Irish landscape painting focused on the west of Ireland. They were also instrumental in the hesitant advent of modernism in Irish art, generally. So, while it can be seen in the context of municipal or regional museums throughout the UK, its Irishness was also a defining characteristic of what only became the Ulster Museum in 1961.
Expansion and ambition led to a surprising surge in international acquisitions in the 1960s and 1970s, and also some imaginative Irish additions, a trend that continued into the 1980s. The exhibition's cut-off point in the late 1960s - and obviously there had to be one - places some fascinating works out of bounds. They include Edward McGuire's iconic portrait of Seamus Heaney from the early 1970s (there's also a drawing of Francis Stuart from around the same time).
Welcome as it is, Treasures from the North is not a particularly imaginative exhibition. The scant catalogue doesn't incorporate an essay on the genesis and nature of the Ulster Museum's collection, for example, which would have been interesting and useful. The methodology of the show is simple to a fault: pick 60 representative paintings and line them up on the walls. Given the uneven nature of the collection, it might be argued that there is a certain logic to this approach, particularly since whoever was acquiring works for the gallery at successive points over the last century had a good eye for particularly important examples of an artist's work. Over a span of several centuries, however, the same does not quite hold, with adequate though hardly startling examples of work by a checklist of such earlier Irish painters as James Latham, Nathaniel Hone, George Barrett, William Ashford, Richard Carver and Hugh Douglas Hamilton.
Still, Paul Henry's Dawn, Killary Harbour is certainly as good as he got, and On Through the Silent Lands, with its stooped, melting figure and visionary landscape, is a definitive later Jack B Yeats. Gerard Dillon's Yellow Bungalow is probably the very painting that comes to mind at the mere mention of his name. The two Roderic O'Conor landscapes are very good, and Derek Hill's dramatic view of Tory Island is reasonably described in the catalogue as his masterpiece. Hilda Roberts's portrait of George Russell ("AE") is amazingly vivid and immediate. The large family portrait by the individualistic Strickland Lowry, an English-born painter who worked in Ireland in the latter half of the 18th century, is a striking piece of work and certainly one of the highlights of the show.
ONE CAN LOOK critically even at works that have a quasi-iconic status, such as Seán Keating's ambitious but flawed epic, Slán Leat, a Athair, in which a group of stoical islanders on Inisheer see a priest off in a currach. Keating was a heavy-handed, illustrative painter, not unlike Norman Rockwell in the US. The huge masses of cloud towering over the sea look, oddly but not inappropriately, as if they are hacked out of marble. Keating's mythologising of the west of Ireland, like John Ford's of the American west, can be bombastic but is not unwarranted.
Sir John Lavery was a terrific painter and, given that he was born in Belfast, is predictably well represented in the museum's collection. Like many of his contemporaries, he followed a well-worn trail to France and the artist's colony at Grez-sur-Loing. Hence the seemingly innumerable versions of the bridge and riverbanks at that location, all painted in approximations of Jules Bastien-Lepage's square-brushed, plein-air manner, by umpteen Irish artists. The biggest work Lavery had attempted at the time, Under the Cherry Tree, is a kind of graduation piece, and it has the air of being an exercise, interesting for the technical demands it made on him, but curiously enervated and full of dead ground.
Something of the same holds for Dermod O Brien's lugubrious view of the interior of the Fine Art Academy, Antwerp. This is no reflection on O Brien, who was a fine painter with an exemplary sober, realist approach that holds up very well, while one could say that, for example, much of Lavery's fashionable portraiture has dated badly - by no means all of it, though, and his HE Cardinal Logue is self-consciously edgy. It's instructive to compare his Cherry Tree with a much later painting on a comparable scale, Daylight Raid from My Studio Window, 7th July, 1917. The pose of the central figure in each is strikingly similar, but in the latter the whole surface of the painting is enlivened by its assured compositional structure and the balance of light and shade. Other Laverys, including a beautiful view of Tangier Bay in sunshine, could well have been included.
William Conor, John Luke, Colin Middleton and Daniel O'Neill all have enthusiastic followings among collectors north and south of the Border and all are, so to speak, local heroes, in that the singularities of their styles have a special appeal to the home audience. Between the Ulster Museum and the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, as a collective entity the Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland (MAGNI) possesses a vast archive of Conor's work which is, dare one say, much more interesting sociologically than artistically. His numerous snapshots of daily life are filled with documentary information but are also blandly indiscriminate.
Luke's obsessive, folksy style has a populist love-it-or-hate-it character, so The Tipster is something of a welcome exception. Middleton was a stylistic chameleon, artistically literate but also, much of the time, glib. O'Neill was prone to facile sentimentality, but that could not be said of either of his pictures included here. These artists, like Gerald Dillon and George Campbell (not represented in the show), were innovators in the sense that each, in their own way, made modestly Modernist gestures in an extremely conservative domestic context.
The Mainie Jellett nude represents an opportunity missed. The inclusion as well of a more naturalistic nude from the museum's collection would have provided a graphic demonstration of the impact of André Lhote's Cubism on her work. A sense of progression is imparted in the William Scotts on view, as he moved towards more radical abstraction, though Whites looks alarmingly as though it is going to physically fall apart sometime soon. A single Basil Blackshaw is hardly enough, though it is a superb painting. Maybe as a contemporary figure he falls outside the show's chronological remit, though that is not explained in the catalogue. The same could be said of TP Flanagan.
PERHAPS THE SELECTION of Treasures from the North should have played more blatantly to the strengths of the collection, concentrating on the work of a handful of artists in depth (Lavery, William Orpen, Yeats and William Scott, for example) in the midst of a more general and diverse display. Mind you, that would have meant a different title to the static and reverential Treasures.
Admirable as it is in many ways, it is worth noting that the show occupies the temporary exhibitions galleries in the Millennium Wing for, effectively, most of the year. In mid-October, an exhibition of paintings from the Polish National Museum will open there. Apart from temporary displays in the Print Galleries, generated from the NGI collections, a show in the Yeats Room devoted to circuses and spectacles will take place in July, consisting partly of works from the gallery's own collection and partly of borrowed works. Recently the gallery has been beefing up its holdings of late 19th and early 20th century European painting, with its most recent acquisition, a Van Gogh, having just gone on display. All well and good, but not a substitute for a coherent, ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions.
Since the inauguration of the Millennium Wing galleries, the record on such shows has been disappointing, displaying a lack of concerted strategic planning. Surely there should be more group and monographic exhibitions drawing on ongoing art-historical research relating to Irish artists? Surely there should be more visiting exhibitions? We should expect more from our own National Gallery. Is the problem that it is under-resourced? Whatever the underlying reasons, there is little sign that the gallery has gotten to grips with exhibitions' policy and planning, which are, more and more, long-term processes that take years to develop and consolidate.
Treasures from the North is at the National Gallery of Ireland Millennium Wing until Sept 16. Admission is free
