`The last great painter of the French School" - how often we used to hear that phrase! It was used about Nicholas de Stael, Dubuffet, Soulages, Atlan, even about Bernard Buffet, who is now almost forgotten. True, France no longer seems to produce great painters, after dominating European art for a century and a half. A hunt through Paris galleries today, hopefully scrutinising the various acclaimed new talents, is liable to prove a bleak experience. The great masters of the School of Paris, of course, are long dead and few survive even of the immediate post-war generation which gave 20th-century French art a second or even a third wind.
Alfred Manessier ranks as a modern master in his homeland, though England and America have remained largely indifferent to him. His major retrospective exhibition mounted in Paris earlier in this decade, and shortly before his death, ranked as an important event in France, but was virtually ignored by the British press - which was also rather hostile to him when he won the premier painting prize at the Venice Biennale in 1962. (And not only the press and the critics either: leading British artists at the time spoke rather slightingly of his work). This blind spot may have something to do with the religious aspect of Manessier's work, a quality which England has always disliked in Rouault.
Manessier was a Picard, born in 1911 in a village near the mouth of the Somme whose wide marshlands enter into the imagery of his late paintings. He studied architecture before he switched to painting - a factor which probably saved his life when the second World War came, as he said himself. Called up as an architectural draughtsman, he escaped being sent to the front and was able to spend much of the war years with his wife, Therese, in a remote farmhouse in the Lot region.
The post-war years were the period in which abstract art, and Abstract Expressionism in particular, grew to a kind of tidal wave both in Europe and America. Manessier had begun painting in a figurative style influenced by Picasso and by Surrealism, but though he always rejected the label "abstract", he became one of a generation which included Soulages, Zao Wou-ki, Hartung, Bazaine etc. - France's answer, or equivalent, to the New York School, just as Britain's response was the St Ives School. Where he outshone almost all of them was in the brooding richness of his colour and the emotional-contemplative depth of his vision.
After a visit to a monastery in which he was moved deeply by the monks' chanting, Manessier underwent a spiritual experience and became a Catholic. But he always detested "the Saint-Sulpice brand of pietism" and insisted that for him, painting was essentially a meditation brush in hand. Religious imagery haunts his pictures, but he was also stirred to paint by events such as the death of Martin Luther King and by acts of political violence and oppression. His glowing, patterned, almost tapestried style made him an ideal designer of stained glass, and he created some of the finest church windows since the mid-century. However, he always insisted: "I don't believe in `religious art.' It is man himself who should be religious."
Manessier came to Dublin in 1988, for a memorable exhibition of his pictures at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham (it had not yet become the Irish Museum of Modern Art). I remember thinking, on that occasion, that he looked like a genial country cure or a family doctor - certainly very different from the tough, wiry figure who appears in photographs of the 1940s and 1950s. In Ireland, unlike Britain, there was always a following for his work, though what a pity that no far-seeing churchman here thought of commissioning some stained glass from him! Now, it is a decade too late - too late for ever . . .