IN 1923, when shown at the Society of Dublin Painters group show, Decoration by Mainie Jellett caused a furore. Together with its companion piece, these were the first abstract Cubist paintings to be exhibited in Ireland. They generated unprecedented debate and vitriolic comment, including complaints of “sub-human art”, “freak pictures”, and “artistic malaria”.
As a result, the work of Jellett and her friend Evie Hone, both of whom created their abstract works together with the French Cubist artist Albert Gleizes, became central to the introduction of modernism to Ireland. Jellett and Hone held a two-person show in 1924, which drew similar levels of incomprehension; but both persevered and were, in 1943, founder members of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which provided a forum for artists who sought to reshape the Irish artistic landscape.
National Gallery of Ireland Bequeathed, Mrs N.Connell, 1958Evie Hone, Study for Part of the East Window, Eton College Chapel: “The Crucifixion” (top) and “The Last Supper (bottom)” (1950), watercolour with varnish on paper, 123 × 89cm
Although entirely abstract, the shapes that form Decoration and their positioning in the work, supported by Jellett’s colour choices, all recall icons depicting the Madonna and Child. Jellett, Hone, and Gleizes, as Brendan Rooney states, “shared an impulse to seek inspiration from early Italian painting”, principally the Romanesque, and to use such works, together with some early Renaissance works, as models for their Cubist works. For them, Cubism was a rediscovery of those earlier models and the geometric rules that underpinned them, as well as a return, as Joseph McBrinn notes, to “the integration of art as it had been in medieval Catholic Europe where religion and culture operated as a harmonious social unit”.
As a result, all of the abstract work shown in this exhibition has a religious motivation and inspiration, although much, the early work especially, shows no specific sign of those underlying motivations. Later, from about 1928 onwards, as Gleizes responded to a church commission, these underlying influences became clearer in works such as Jellett’s Homage to Fra Angelico and, when such works were exhibited in Ireland, assisted in creating a greater acceptance for modernist work.
Jellett continued in this vein by creating many wonderful semi-abstract religious images, including I Have Trodden the Winepress Alone, The Ninth Hour, and Deposition, while Hone became an inspiring stained-glass artist, whose work enhanced numerous churches and chapels culminating in her masterpiece, the east window for Eton College Chapel.
Hone’s principal inspiration for her stained glass was found in the Expressionist works of the great French Roman Catholic painter Georges Rouault. Works by Rouault and Gleizes both feature in the exhibition to show the wider context to which Jellett and Hone contributed (as members, for example, of Abstraction-Création — Jellett — and the Seven and Five Society — Hone) and from which they drew inspiration. Gleizes and Rouault were both part of the renewal of sacred art in France at that time.
If visiting, see also the stunning Crucifixion by Gleizes, which is to be found elsewhere in the National Gallery, and works by Rouault which were in Hone’s personal collection and are now at the Manresa Jesuit Centre of Spirituality, which also has five of Hone’s windows in a specially designed Prayer Room. Hone’s stained glass can also be found at many other locations in Dublin, while, for those unable to travel to Ireland, look, in addition to Eton, for churches in Downe, Ettington Park, Farm Street, and Highgate.
National Gallery of Ireland Bequeathed, Mrs N.Connell through the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1958Evie Hone, Heads of Two Apostles (c.1952), stained glass, 121.8 × 98.6cm
The curators have created a deeply contemplative space, in which examples of Hone’s stained glass are shown, together with her study for the east window at Eton. The broadly chronological sections used to display the works and tell the story take us from the early abstracts (“Adventures in Abstraction”) through the religious works (“Divine Inspiration”), work on other themes and in other media (“Inflections”), stained glass (“Coloured Light”), and work inspired by Ireland and by landscapes (“Back to the Land”).
The final section has marvellous semi-abstract works by Jellett which explore elements of Ireland’s nature while also revealing the fascination that both she and Hone had always had for Celtic art. The “harmonious filling of a space with rhythmic forms” was, for Jellett, “the ideal root of Celtic and Oriental art”, as also for “the Christian illuminators to the beginning of the Renaissance”. For Hone, “Celtic artists found complete freedom and satisfaction in the realities of form and colour alone.”
Jellett and Hone are significant as pioneering Irish modernists, as women artists undertaking that mission at that time, and as artists allowing their understanding of the ways in which faith and art intertwine to shape the work they produced. As a result, they are important counterpoints to the narrative that treats modernism as a primarily secular endeavour, and abstraction, through its lack of content, as a primary example of art that was principally for art’s sake alone.
This exhibition allows their work to speak, sing, and show as it was always intended to do. These artists are rightly prized and valued in Ireland, but this exhibition offers them back to the wider world of which they were always part.
“Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship” is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square, West Dublin 2, until 10 August. Phone 00 353 1 661 5133. www.nationalgallery.ie