The Arts: Exhibition at Crawford Gallery includes some real gems but is curiously dispirited, writes Aidan Dunne.
THE CRAWFORD Gallery's Realism and Modernism in Irish Art (1900-1990)sounds promising and is based on a sound idea: gather together work from the gallery's permanent collection, together with selected pieces from the Great Southern Collection, and make a show that encapsulates an eventful nine decades in Irish art history. The Great Southern Collection was built up during the 1960s and 1970s under a joint purchase scheme operated by the Arts Council, and it provides a fascinating cross-section of Irish art of the mid-20th century and beyond. It is not a systematic collection and was never intended to provide a comprehensive overview, but it does, nonetheless, possess some real gems and has the flavour of the times about it.
Then Arts Minister John O'Donoghue gave the collection to the Crawford in 2006, when the Cork gallery became a national institution. This is the first chance to see how it actively augments what was there already. The Crawford has also taken the chance to highlight two other significant gifts, the Fr McGrath Collection, bequeathed to it in the 1990s, and, in a rather different vein, the Gibson Fund which has underwritten a formidable series of acquisitions since the mid-1920s. The Gibson in question was Joseph Stafford Gibson, who left a substantial sum of money to the School of Art in Cork when he died in 1919.
Most of the funds were spent over three decades from the 1920s, the Crawford's director Peter Murray has noted, though as late as 1973 there was still enough to acquire a substantial, late Jack B Yeats, Returning from the Bathe, Midday. After a pause to allow the residue to accumulate, there were significant Gibson acquisitions in the 1980s, including a first-rate Tony O'Malley and distinctly less appealing pieces by Kathy Prendergast and Michael Mulcahy, who can be a powerful painter but not in the overblown canvas on view here. But overall the Gibson Fund was a boon for the Crawford.
By now, of course, most of the works purchased with the Gibson bequest have become naturalised and have settled seamlessly into the overall collection, which is not altogether the case with those that formed the Fr McGrath Collection and not at all the case with the Great Southern. So a concerted approach, pointing up the underlying correspondences and unities and narrative continuity between the various strands seems like a really good idea. And it is one, though the result is strangely muted and low-key and not particularly satisfying. It certainly doesn't rock the boat and prompt us into any startling historical reassessments. More disappointingly still, it does seem as if genuinely strong works have been excluded.
There is also a problem about the level of presentation and organisation. The exhibition is spread across several quite different spaces in the gallery and seems to wind down as you make your way through them. The galleries in the new extension (which have been considerably tweaked since their controversial early days) notwithstanding, much of the Crawford looks a bit tired, as though it is starved of funds, and the show comes across as being stymied by being put together with the minimum of expenditure. None of the Crawford's curators said that or anything like it, incidentally, but one does get that impression. The established narrative of 20th century Irish art history pits Academic Realism, which jumped the hurdle of independence and survived in a new, nationalist guise, against an encroaching European Modernism. There are some essential qualification to this vastly over-simplified summary. Brian Fallon memorably described the emergence of Free State realism from the English academic tradition as resembling the post-Independence transformation of the red Victorian post boxes with just a coat of green paint. It also took on some strange forms of its own.
Sean Keating was perhaps the prime exemplar of Free State realism. His Economic Pressure, a late work from 1959 about emigration, is painfully forced and stilted in its symbolism. Yet the theatricality of one of his iconographic pieces, Men of the South, from 1924 (which was purchased with Gibson funds), is actually effective and the painting is a valuable historical work. Yet the quintessentially Irish painter of the 20th century was not a Free State realist by any definition of the term.
The prodigious Jack B Yeats was not only staunchly individualistic but followed a surprising trajectory in his stylistic development, from illustrative beginnings to fluently naturalistic paintings to later, idiosyncratic expressionism, characterised by an unpleasantly acidic palette and a mode of description that has been described, plausibly, as symptomatic of a crisis of figuration. Both naturalism and expressionism are well represented here, and the best work is certainly Off the Donegal Coast, an early Gibson fund purchase from 1922 that has a startling ferocity to it. It is vividly expressive of the power of the sea and what it demands of the people who work on it.
The very word Modernism is usually linked to abstraction, but it was a long time before abstraction gained a foothold in Ireland. Much more relevant was the etiolated form of Cubism introduced by Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, a kind of systematic, decorative stylisation capable of producing perfectly good paintings, as is evident here. Eventually the opposition between academicism and Modernism was formalised in the contracting philosophies of two organisations, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. The latter played a crucial role in broadening out the debate about what art might be and what it might become before it became irrelevant itself, by virtue of the changes it had helped to generate.
From our perspective, it's become apparent that the opposition wasn't as clear-cut as any crude account would have it. There are significant subtleties and ambiguities to the story, many still to be elucidated by historical scholarship.
Realism and Modernism in Irish Art is the kind of exhibition that should facilitate this process, but it doesn't particularly do so. It's an interesting show, and not a bad one, but it is also curiously dispirited and curtailed. We can only hope that the Crawford gains the resources it surely needs to live up to its status as a national institution.
Realism and Modernism in Irish Art (1900-1990) at the Crawford Art Gallery. Emmet Place, Cork, until May 3.
