THIS is indeed a rara avis - a large exhibition of 20th-century painting chosen by a painter, Stephen McKenna, himself an artist with a proven international standing. He makes his own case in a very thought-provoking catalogue foreword, but this is not an exhibition geared to a thesis, personal or art-historical. It is an anthology of paintings chosen on their merits, with a certain inter-relationship, but not claiming to be an inclusive survey of 20th-century art they speak for themselves and if there is an overall message, it is simply that painting per se is as much a living art as ever it was
Eyebrows may be raised about the absence of any picture by Picasso, Matisse or Braque (I miss Braque myself much more than I do the other two). Gris is well represented, however, and there is a very beautiful Bonnard of a woman in an interior. The Tate Gallery has lent its Leger, Two Women Holding Flowers and there are two fine Derains one a landscape and the other a full-length portrait of the artist's niece.
De Chirico, now higher in esteem than he ever was in his lifetime, is also well represented and there is a powerful self-portrait by Malevich, whose pioneer abstract work is shown as well. Balthus's Dormeuse is lent by the Tate. There is also a double portrait by him of two children, brother and sister. So far as I know, these are the first Balthus paintings to go on exhibition in Dublin. And, of course, there is Morandi, as timeless as any Old Master.
Picabia is a rather surprising choice, while Gwen John's pure but limited vein of genius makes her look rather like a trim motor-launch among sea-going liners. Another figure on whom the jury is still out, Jean Helion, is shown both in his abstract manner and his later, less convincing figurative one. Among these various Old Masters of Modernism, Jack Yeats carries the flag bravely for Irish art, and then we move to living figures.
Of these the German Bruno Goller (born 1901) is the oldest. His style is flat as a playing-card, using earth colours strongly, with the imagery - what there is of it - kept spare and deliberately simplistic.
Among more recent painters, McKenna has made several unconventional choices and the exhibition gains from it overall in terms of quality and variety. For instance, the two Germans, Hermann Albert and Peter Schermuly, are unfamiliar and highly rewarding - both of them vigorous, unfashionable figures with strong though contrasting personalities. Albert's pictures have a monumentality and weightiness which may owe something to Leger, though they also suggest Italianate influences. Schermuly's accomplished style evokes the legacy of the Neue Sacklichkeit movement and also of Italian Neo-Classicism, both in his flowerpieces and in the "cropped," powerfully sculptural female nudes.
It is hard to relate Jo Baer's quasi-religious, densely emblematic style to the rather dry, minimalist abstractions she showed in TCD back in the early 1980s; indeed she hardly seems to be the same artist. Paula Rego continues to paint faintly surreal pictures which combine the dual influence of Balthus and Freud with a debt to the great Victorian illustrators, notably Tenniel.
Sean Scully is the leading figure among the Irish contemporaries included, and his massive Falling Wrong, dating from the mid-1980s, does suggest that the rugged, almost brutal element in his style has been tamed a good deal since then. This makes for a definite gain in painterliness, but the price paid for it is an increasing "international" blandness. The other Irish exhibitors are Ciaran Lennon, Felim Egan and Richard Gorman. All four are abstractionists, and I rather regret that there is no Tyrrell, Blackshaw, O'Malley or McSweeney to act as a counterpoise.