Who in particular was Margaret Watkins, and what were her connections with Ireland (if any)? And why should a selection of her photographs be on view at the Westport Arts Festival from September 22nd? The obvious answer to the last question is: on their merits, and on hers.
Her only connection with Ireland appears to be an Irish grandfather, on the paternal side, from Birr. Her father ran a clothing business in Hamilton, Ontario, where she was born in 1884 to a solid middle-class background. Margaret moved from Canada to New York while still in her teens, which must have been daring at the time, and after a few years enrolled in the Clarence White School of Photography. She seems to have impressed White, because a few years later he asked her to join the staff, which she did and over the years taught some distinguished pupils.
White was one of the most eminent photographers in America, in a golden age of the camera which included the great Alfred Stieglitz, the husband of Georgia O'Keeffe. Margaret Watkins, however, appears to have been anti-Stieglitz, perhaps because he had little time for women photographers, and she was associated with a new group, the Pictorial Photographers of America, who had broken away from him. She became one of its main organisers and edited its journal - she did, in fact, write some significant articles about "art" photography in her own right.
White had many famous pupils, including Dorothea Lange (who visited Ireland many years later and took many photographs here), Doris Ulmann, Anton Buehl, et al. Margaret Watkins seems to have been particularly close to him, however, and when White died suddenly in Mexico City in 1925 she chose many of the works for his memorial exhibition in New York. This led to an unseemly wrangle with his widow, which had to be settled by lawyers - mainly in Watkins's favour, but she seems to have found the experience a souring one. Margaret Watkins herself had a major exhibition at the Art Centre in New York in 1923 and became a figure in the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, friendly with painters, writers, actors and dancers, many of whom she photographed. In 1928 she visited Europe, and made at least one more visit there, taking in Russia, France and Germany - and in Scotland, her mother's homeland. She was in Moscow and Leningrad - as it was then - in 1930 and took some remarkable pictures there, though in spite of her father's ancestry she does not seem to have visited Ireland.
Art photography apart, she did much commercial work for Macy's and other firms, and her advertising photos appeared in the New York Times, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, the New Yorker and Vogue. Her career bogged down in the 1930s as a
result of a visit to her aunts - her mother's sisters - in Glasgow, where she stayed on to look after them in their rambling 16-room family home, and apparently never got away again. She exhibited for the last time in Glasgow in 1937, and a few years later the second World War came, cutting her off from America. In a kind of informal diary, she wrote: "Living in a state of curdled despair, keeping Bennax to keep up my courage . . . I'm doing my utmost to cope with a well-nigh copeless situation . . . I miss the artistic crowd most desperately . . ." By then the old bohemian New York must have seemed a long way away, and she was also short of money. When she died in 1969, after years as a virtual recluse, her bags were still packed for a return to the US.
At that stage relatively few people remembered her, but the gradual rediscovery of the pioneer 20th-century photographers has found her out in turn, and since the early 1980s there have been a series of exhibitions of her work.
A few years before she died she gave Joe Mulholland, a Glasgow lawyer and journalist, a sealed box which he was not to open until after her death. It turned out to contain almost a thousand photographs, many of which had won prizes decades before; and it is on these that the Westport exhibition will be based. Margaret Watkins was an ultraprofessional and versatile photographer, whose works included still life, portraits (including one of Rachmaninov, taken in the early 1920s), self-portraits, nudes, street scenes, people in interiors, landscape, studies of women and children. The influence of her teacher, White, is obvious in the slightly veiled, soft-focus style and in her affection for sepia tints, but she also obviously learned from contemporary European work and even from Cubism.
Though her career eventually petered out in obscurity and anticlimax, she left her mark on her age and her pupils respected her teaching and her memory - even if one of them remembered her many years later as "a tough dame." But then, she belonged to a generation in which women artists still had to push hard (Georgia O'Keeffe is an obvious example) if they were to be taken seriously and get a place in the sun. Her native country, Canada, now has seven of her works in its National Gallery and an eminent academic is working on a book on her and her work, with official backing. So Margaret Watkins appears to have come home.
The Westport Arts Festival opens on Friday. Highlights include a street parade on Saturday at 3 p.m. which celebrates Grainne Uaille, a reading by Paul Durcan at 4 p.m. on Saturday, concerts by accordionist Sharon Shannon (Wednesday, 9 p.m.) and fiddler Josephine Marsh (Thursday 10 p.m.), and a ceili with the Tulla Band and the Westport Set Dancing Group on Sunday 28th at 4 p.m. Information on 098-27375 or at the festival caravan on Shop Street, Westport.
