THE CECIL King retrospective at Imma, augmented by a really outstanding selection of his work at Hillsboro Fine Art, makes for fascinating viewing. King, who was born in Co Wicklow in 1921 and died in 1986, was a significant figure in the Irish cultural landscape for a long time, writes Aidan Dunne.
He was one of the instigators of Rosc, the ground-breaking series of international exhibitions of contemporary art, and he was involved in establishing the Contemporary Irish Art Society, which was crucial in directly supporting Irish artists.
King was also an art collector and a commentator who wrote about contemporary art. And he was an exceptionally likeable man, generous and trusting, who was fondly regarded by a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.
All of which could have the effect of eclipsing his work as a painter, a calling he pursued with the utmost seriousness, dedication and modesty. Besides which there is the intriguing fact that his development as a painter followed a trajectory that was almost contrary in going against the fashionable grain.
Writing in the handsome publication accompanying the Imma show, Sean Kissane details the way King began to paint in a broadly modernist vein at a time in the late 1960s when abstract painting was being aggressively supplanted by developments in conceptual and other forms of experimental art.
Furthermore, his work progressed towards an idiom of hard-edged abstraction just as the international art world embraced the hedonistic delights of Neo-Expressionism.
UNDERLYING KING'S LINE of development is the fact that to be an artist is not, as in the popular imagination, to be an entirely free agent. It entails being involved in an ongoing argument with yourself. Each artist is stuck with their own argument, so to speak, and must follow it to its conclusion.
To be sure, on occasion individual artists opt out and decide they should be doing something because it's
fashionable, but by and large art is most interesting when it is part of that instinctive argument. Besides which, it would be a mistake to make too much of a distinction between representation and abstraction in King's or anyone else's work.
In terms of colour, form, tonality and sensibility there is tremendous consistency to pretty much everything King did. One of his earliest extant paintings is called Trapeze and the metaphor of the skilled circus act remained central to his work. From relatively straight representation to virtual abstraction, the use of lines of tension as a means of animating background field of colour depends on the same underlying motif, and works on several levels.
From early on King employed a very particular palette, and it seems reasonable to assume that his feeling for what might be called the texture of colour, a quality that enlivens what would otherwise be an inert expanse, derived from his considerable experience in the print industry. He was perhaps a little uneasy with the free, gestural mode of painting he embraced for much of the 1960s, but he was very good at it and the links with his later work are significant and obvious. He seems always to have been able to imbue a field of colour with energy, and to use line in a slightly irreverent, even mischievous way that takes us by surprise.
The obvious connection here is Barnett Newman, whose "zip" paintings consistently employ a comparable strategy. Is it fair to suggest that one point of difference is King's way of undercutting any hint of high seriousness in his own work? Like Rothko, Newman is always playing for the highest metaphysical stakes. It's life and death, being and nothingness.
Whereas it's hard not to smile when you see King's Traverse from 1984. It's a beautifully sonorous painting, and it comes across as being sombre and serious - up to a point. But then you notice a point of white that tracks its way - the traverse of the title - across a deep expanse of green, like a cartoon missile, and the whole mood lifts.
King often includes such touches. They stop us from reading the paintings as po-faced exercises in colour field metaphysics, opening out ways to other layers of meaning and possibility. Mind you, he was clearly interested in perception, and many of his paintings play tricks with our eyes, not just keeping them moving but making us wonder just what it is we're looking at, something flat or shaped, advancing or receding. He likes symmetry but also likes knocking it off-balance, and was clearly well aware that symmetry dislodged is a sure way of livening things up.
It's hard to say how influential King has been as an artist on succeeding generations. Several pieces do seem to anticipate some of Fergus Martin's paintings but then Donald Judd is presumably a more potent influence on Martin than King. Yet King was an exemplary figure in many ways, an artist who pursued his own argument, who refined and developed his own considerable strengths, who remained largely indifferent to the dictates of fashion.
More importantly, perhaps, his work holds up very well. Some pieces look a bit shabby and could do with a bit of cleaning, perhaps, but in terms of technique they were obviously very well made, and his skill with tone and colour shines through. He richly deserves the tribute that these exhibitions represent.
, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham. Until May 18 Cecil King: Celebration, Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Square West. Until Mar 29