THE Hugh Lane Gallery has opened an entire room devoted to Roderic O'Conor, a timely decision in view of the strong, even topical interest in this slightly mysterious painter. It includes pictures from the gallery's own collection, but apparently long term lenders have also helped greatly, and some of the works are unfamiliar. This adds up, in sum, to a kind of condensed survey of O'Conor's strange, always intriguing, sometimes baffling progression as an artist.
It is all the more intriguing because of the Lavery exhibition on the floor above, since the two men were born less than a decade apart (Lavery in 1854, O'Conor in 1860). Both spent their formative years in France, though O'Conor became virtually a Frenchman and never seems to have regretted it. Both were for a time at Grezsur Loing and absorbed the lessons of late Realism and the start of Symbolism. After that their ways parted: Lavery went on, to become a European reputation, but his creative development stalled, while O'Conor was known only to connoisseurs yet stylistically progressed to the very brink of Modernism.
O'Conor, at the moment, has been saddled with a heavy art historical role and responsibility. He is arguably the only Irish Post Impressionist of real stature, if we except Jack Yeats who was sui generis; the man who was authentically at the centre of things, in Pont Aven and later in Paris. He was intelligent, cultured, highly self aware, and he had enough money of his own to collect his contemporaries pictures in a modest way. He has also exercised a kind of subterranean influence, notably on Matthew Smith. So to art historians anxious to establish a pedigree for Irish Modernism, he is heaven sent, a kind of "missing link" who has been found and catalogued.
Allowing for all these factors, O'Conor remains a difficult man to place or evaluate with any sureness - the Masked Man of Irish art, you might even say. His work has become visible in bulk only slowly and piecemeal, and dealers and others appear to have allowed on to the market a large amount of it which is either inferior, or may have been finished by others (including his wife). At his very finest, he is outstanding, but the gap between his best and his weaker pictures is very wide indeed - in fact, it is hard to believe that they are genuinely by the same man. Even the technique itself seems to falter at times. So both his admirers and his detractors have a genuine case to make.
The period between the waning of Impressionism and the rise of Modernism was, certainly, a time of transition and search in which even the greatest seemed to lose their way for whole stretches. O'Conor began as a realist, then moved to Impressionism and even (see the painting La Lisiere du Bois) tried his hand at Pointillism. The seascapes reflect Monet though in a rather raw, simplistic way. The strange painting called Personnages au Chevat is virtually Symbolist, while the gallery's own, familiar Young Breton Girl is conventionally, almost tamely realist. Other works reveal the influence of O'Conor's confrere Gauguin, though they do so positively and not parasitically - he was never a mere "follower of". There is certainly no sense of organic growth as there is in Jack Yeats.
It seems to me that the best comes relatively late, after the turn of the century, when O'Conor balanced exactly his innate traditionalism with his tendency to try his hand in relatively advanced or exotic styles. There are superb still lifes and nudes dating from both sides of the first World War - particularly the full frontal nude of his model mistress (and later his wife), Renee Honda. Here the flesh tones are superbly offset by the green of the chair on which she sits, and there is a mood of serenity and inner certainty. It is pictures such as this which justify the claim that O'Conor is a major painter. He had a penchant for heavy, blunt angled, almost squat forms and while most contemporary painters preferred the cool side of the colour spectrum, he shows an innate bias towards warm tones.
O'Conor came near both to Fauvism and Expressionism, without quite belonging to either - but then, both of these movements owed a major debt to Gauguin, to whom he had once been extremely close. He also, arguably, approaches the Neo Classicism of the 1920s, and Derain in particular (how well did the latter know his work?). He remains, however, his own man, though equally there are elements in that man which remain enigmatic.
