Now that the prices achieved by 20th century Irish art at auction are not so much climbing as soaring, publicly funded arts institutions are left with an all too familiar headache. How are they going to build representative collections when the works they need to do so are fast becoming unaffordable?
That is why something like the gesture of George and Maura McClelland, in giving, on long-term loan, their major collection of predominantly Irish art to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is particularly welcome. The 400-plus artworks were assembled with focused enthusiasm throughout a lifetime of collecting.
Late last year, IMMA mounted what might be described as an introductory exhibition drawn from the collection. This year sees two more shows that underline the collection's exceptional quality and its usefulness as a resource. One particular strength is that George McClelland often collected in-depth, acquiring large numbers of works by individual artists. The current show at IMMA drawn from the collections, for example, Colin Middleton: Paintings and Drawings, assembles some 50 works by Northern Ireland's celebrated modernist virtuoso, concentrating on a period in the late 1930s and early 1940s when he was greatly influenced by Surrealists, such as Salvador Dali. Later in the year, another exhibition, Tony O'Malley: Paintings and Gouaches, will draw on roughly 80 works by O'Malley in the collection.
These represent significant holdings by any standard. To be able to tap into them is a boon to any institution, and the IMMA curator, Catherine Marshall, was not exaggerating when she remarked on the significance of the loan. "As a source for the history of art in this country, its importance cannot be overstated, because the period it charts was very inadequately collected by Irish public bodies."
Yet, the chain of events that led these works to IMMA is a contingent and at times unhappy one, clouded by the impact of The Troubles. Northern Irish artists predominate in the collection for the good reason that it was assembled by a Northerner. George McClelland was born in Omagh (his wife, Maura, is from Anascaul in Co Kerry). He had the collecting bug from an early age, and reckons he inherited it from his mother. "Not that she had a great deal of money to spend. But she collected anything she could afford. She'd attend all the auctions and pick up pieces of china, chairs, whatever."
While he was interested in art for as long as he can remember, McClelland's first acquisitive efforts were directed elsewhere. Having amassed a considerable quantity of antiques by the mid-1960s, with Maura he decided he would try to convert enthusiasm to livelihood and open an antique showroom, with a small art gallery, partly as a dry-run for a potential move to Australia. They sold initially out of their own home, but soon expanded into a separate premises, an antique and art gallery, in Belfast's May Street.
The first show he mounted was by Tom Ryan, ex-president of the RHA. It included a number of portraits spanning the political spectrum, and Ryan's pictorial recreation of the scene inside the GPO during the Easter Rising. "Not an exhibition I could have done in Belfast 10 years later," McClelland reflects with a wry smile.
As he recounts his experiences, it becomes clear he was usually working - and working hard - on two levels. On one, he was a conventional art and antique dealer, trawling the auction rooms, visiting anyone who offered something for sale. He liked it and was good at it. "It was a very good time to be in the antiques business, providing you were willing to work. There were things of very high quality in circulation. I dealt in silver by some of the best names, like Paul Storr and Paul de Lamerie, and it was a privilege to handle work like that."
But he also had the instinct of a collector. When he became interested in something, he tended to accumulate it. "I was interested in icons," he recalls, "and in European woodcarvings, when not many other people were." However, one aspect of his collecting persona did not really intersect with his dealer persona, and that related to contemporary art. As he puts it, he also dealt a lot in Victorian paintings, "but I never brought them home to hang on the wall. Whereas the contemporary work I brought home and lived with". He was correspondingly reluctant to part with the art that engaged him most passionately and was consciously "working towards building a collection".
He certainly wasn't dealing in contemporary art for motives of profit. "At the time, it was very difficult to sell contemporary art in Northern Ireland. I'd hardly sell anything from show after show." His first sell-out show was by an elderly English artist, William Mason, whose work had wide appeal because he painted like the French Impressionists. "As he said to me, `I don't copy the Impressionists, that's the way I paint'."
He came to know many of the artists. One of the first was the well-known chronicler of Belfast life, the people's painter, William Conor. In the same way he befriended Dan O'Neill, whose work he exhibited very successfully when the artist returned to Belfast after living in London, where his dealer was Victor Waddington. He also knew Gerard Dillon, Arthur Armstrong, and he even got on very well with Colin Middleton, who could, by all accounts, be difficult when he wanted to be. On one occasion, Dillon, who used to drop in to the gallery at weekends and talk art, accepted a dinner invitation. "Maura bought steak specially, but he very politely declined everything, including a drink, and would only take a slice of brown bread and a glass of buttermilk. That was his dinner."
Then, in December, 1971, a bomb was planted in an adjoining antique shop in May Street. "We were told there was a bomb and we had five minutes to get out. The shop had a beautiful bow-fronted window. I can still see it flying across the road, smashing into the railings on the other side and shattering to pieces."
THE damage was extensive. It was the end of the May Street gallery. The remaining stock had to be auctioned. Disastrously, on the day of the auction, 12 bombs exploded in Belfast. "We only recovered a fraction of our costs." They regrouped and the following year, opened McClelland Galleries International on Lisburn Road, concentrating exclusively on art. But the security situation deteriorated. Worried about the children, they decided to move to Dublin. George, meanwhile, commuted to Belfast to run the business.
Still, he maintained a busy exhibitions programme, mounting shows by Colin Middleton, Tom Carr (another sell-out), William Scott, Louis le Brocquy, F.E. McWilliam and a "disastrous" exhibition of Eskimo Art, the opening of which coincided with the discovery of a huge car bomb and a warning to people to stay out of the city centre.
By 1974, however, though he was doing well, and was working hard on making cross-Border and international contacts, things had become fairly fraught. He was receiving threatening telephone calls, had suffered two derailments on the Dublin-Belfast line, and the strain was showing. He decided to close and move to Dublin. Just after he'd sold the Lisburn Road premises - "thankfully just after" - it was destroyed in a bomb blast. "We'd originally thought in terms to moving to Dublin for a few years, but of course we've never gone back to Belfast."
Advised to take things easy for a while, he decided to indulge a long-held ambition and attend the College of Art. He did, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Like a gamekeeper turned poacher, he made and exhibited work, in the Exhibition of Living Art as well as others venues. His Healing Screen is in the Ulster Museum collection in Belfast. He made one more foray into art dealing, when he represented Tony O'Malley for about three-and-a-half years from the end of the 1970s. Though they eventually parted ways, his stewardship coincided with a major transformation in the artist's fortunes.
All three of the McClellands' children gravitated towards England. He and Maura love Kerry and spend every summer there, and rather than heading back to Belfast, they decided to settle in the Isle of Man. "It's quiet, and the landscape is surprisingly like the Dingle Peninsula."
McClelland is, you feel, a dealer born rather than made. He has a busy mind, a grasp of detail, a warm interest in people, as well as things, a huge enthusiasm for the art of the possible and trusts his own instincts. Had the political climate been different in the North, he would in all likelihood have stayed and made a decisive contribution to the contemporary art world there. Others, such as the Kerlin Gallery, followed him South and the commercial gallery scene in the North remains substantially undeveloped. And, of course, if things had been different, the McClelland Collection would probably not be at IMMA.
Colin Middleton: Paintings and Drawings from the McClelland Collection is at IMMA until June 24th.
