Perhaps prompted by the recent acquisition of Mark Shields' portrait of Mary and Nicholas Robinson, currently on view in the Dargan Wing, the National Gallery has brought together a sizeable group of 20th-century Irish portraits in Room 32. The surprising part of that sentence is the bit about the 20th century, because on the face of it portrait painting does seem quite un-20th century, largely because of photography.
The commercial potential of the portrait was instrumental in shaping the development of photography as a mass medium from its earliest days. There was a vast, waiting market for affordable photographic portraits and our appetite for them has never diminished. However, the camera's unprecedented capacity to provide a faithful and instantaneous record of reality rapidly undid the whole existing portraiture industry. This formidable trade had grown steadily from the time of the Renaissance and was based simply on the artist's skill at capturing a likeness.
It may have killed the industry, but it didn't kill the art. One effect was actually to emphasise the association between the painted portrait and exclusivity, something vividly demonstrated by painters like Orpen, Lavery, Sargent and Boldini, who made lucrative careers in society portraiture. Orpen is represented twice in Room 32, by a typically theatrical self-portrait and a very good study of Lady Gregory. Sean O'Sullivan's striking, sympathetic but slightly uneasy full scale portrait of Sybil Connolly harkens back to the golden age of the society portrait, which had finally been undone, not by the camera but by social and political upheaval. So, for most of the 20th century, the portrait has been a relatively tentative but extremely fruitful form.
Still, its role as an imprimatur of status or class persists, typified in Simon Elwes's academic study of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Here the subject is, typically, an embodiment of institutional authority. Its looseness of handling exemplifies the studied informality that is the artist's gesture towards painterly style, post photography. For the most part this amounts to nothing more than an acknowledgment that painting is not photography. But it can be effective, as with Jacques Blanche's well-known portrait of James Joyce, or Derek Hill's affectionate, relaxed study of art historian Anne Crookshank. The fact that photography is there to do a certain job can liberate the painter. There is a strikingly effective example in Barrie Cooke's portrait of Maire MacNeill Sweeney. If judged in terms of photographic representation, the picture just doesn't make it, but it is a remarkably lively painting which conveys a tremendous sense of character.
Edward Maguire is one of the most renowned Irish portrait painters of the 20th century. There are two pieces by him, a workmanlike study of James White and a tight view of Seamus Heaney as the epitome of 1970s style. Maguire had a famously obsessive painting method and in his pictures everything, be it skin, wood, fabric or hair, has a strange, uniform plastic sheen, as though it is all made from the same material, or as though - just think of his fondness for stuffed birds - he has performed taxidermy on his subjects. But his paintings have compelling presence, and are one of the reasons that the display is so engaging.
Sarah Durcan's show of paintings at the Hallward Gallery is called Details and, true to its title, presents us with fragments of objects, signs and patterns. "Early inventions and more humble utensils" are cited. These various motifs are rendered in flat, subdued colours and seem to float in a kind of indeterminate space. The mood is prozac-calm, dreamy, the pace slow. Stylistically and atmospherically it is similar to the work of Mark Joyce or, more obliquely, Luc Tuymans.
Sometimes both content and tonal range are so subtle that the images are hardly there at all, as with the spectral, very effective Underpainting. Underworld, on the other hand, is a successful painting that stands out by virtue of its burst of strong red. Subtlety is generally a virtue, though. When the motif is left too obviously floating there the result can seem threadbare and contrived. It's when strange, ambiguous interconnections are established that the pictures take off, as with Notebook or Tangle.
Michael Boran is a resourceful photographic artist who always manages to avoid the obvious. His major new show at the Gallery of Photography, The Palace of Bubbles, is a case in point. It's not so much a palace, more a world of bubbles, a dazzling mass of varieties of bubble. Technically meticulous and impressive, the assembled images have the air of a taxonomic project, a catalogue of bubble types. But it is a quirky, not a systematic survey, so its meaning must reside elsewhere.
To judge by Boran's past work including, arguably, his best, the Nature Morte series, it is reasonable to see his imagery, with its honeycomb complexity, its variety and its demonstration of spontaneous organisation, as relating to human society. But he becomes so absorbed in making bubble images - and they are beautiful - that in the end they remain primarily, emphatically, themselves. The bubble-themed kinetic installation on the upper floor of the gallery is extraordinary.
Twentieth Century Irish Portraits, Room 32 of the National Gallery of Ireland. Sarah Durcan, Details, is at the Hallward Gallery until February 18th. Karen Cotter, New paintings, is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until February 26th. Michael Boran, The Palace of Bubbles, is at the Gallery of Photography until February 27th.
