Can the achievements of Irish art of the last 50 years be summarised in an exhibition featuring just over 60 works?
Shifting Ground, which opens to the public at IMMA next Friday, doesn't necessarily set out to do that, and the show's subtitle, Selected Works of Irish Art 1950-2000, judiciously backs away from any claim to form a general survey or a definitive account. It seems fair to say that it is more an idiosyncratic overview, charting an art scene through a period of seismic change, and leaning heavily on the personal likes and dislikes of the five selectors - one to each decade - though their catalogue commentaries do contextualise their choices.
The selectors - Bruce Arnold, Dorothy Walker, Oliver Dowling, Medb Ruane and Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith - have been variously involved with the art of their respective decades. They were invited to identify what they regard as key works from what has been an important half-century for Irish art. Important, if not quite as revolutionary as one would like.
While certain pieces do spring to mind as key works, none has attained quite the iconic status of British artist Damien Hirst's shark, though Louis le Brocquy's spectral, reconstructed heads collectively do achieve something like an iconic presence.
Through the sheer, sustained repetition of a motif, Patrick Scott's impeccably-judged gold leaf paintings have also won an indispensable place for themselves. The late Micheal Farrell's First Real Irish Political Picture, his bitterly acerbic reworking of Boucher's portrait of Miss O'Murphy, does stand out as a key picture from the 1970s.
Equally, Robert Ballagh's Inside No 3 and Upstairs No 3 are surely key Irish pictures, but Ballagh is represented only by an inferior work from the early 1970s.
Even in the 1950s, towards the close of his life, Jack Yeats, ever equal to the grand gesture, produced several such paintings, including On Through the Silent Land. Derek Hill's Tory Island from Tor More summarises a major strand of his output, while, almost because it is untypical, Patrick Collins' extraordinarily corporeal Nude (one of two similar pictures) earns its place, though there is a case for including one of his best landscapes as well.
James Coleman's Strongbow, in IMMA's own collection, is a key piece in an oeuvre composed almost entirely of highlights. Kathy Prendergast is another artist with a penchant for producing exceptional works, including her City Drawings and Body Maps series, though it would have been nice to include her superb sculpture, Stack, which IMMA owns.
Dorothy Cross and Alice Maher, also working in series, have an ability to devise striking images and objects. Cross's Ghost Ship was certainly a key 1990s work, though of a temporary nature.
In the 1980s, Paddy Graham produced a fine series of big canvases, lacerating critiques of Irish notions of self and society, steeped in angst and autobiography, and The Death of Hopalong Cassidy is a good exemplar of these. Brian Maguire, meanwhile, addressed issues of masculinity, the outsider and institutional authority in a dark, oddly lyrical vein of expressive painting that easily outlasted the Neo-Expressionist vogue of the early 1980s.
The ground has certainly shifted over the last half-century. In the 1950s, Irish artists usually went to London to do, as the painter Brian Bourke put it, "various Paddy-in-the-Smoke jobs". Now they go to pursue their artistic careers. For Irish artists, the 1950s generally meant hard times with few opportunities to show and sell work. Economic prosperity at home and cultural stirrings abroad changed the mood completely in the 1960s. Rosc 67 and its successors intensified the Irish dialogue with international modernism. Another significant strand of work, was exemplified in the Independent Artists.
The 1980s was a remarkable decade, with an exponential improvement in standards of curatorship, documentation, promotion and, arguably, of the work itself, in terms of its relative sophistication. In the 1990s, the establishment of IMMA was perhaps the major development, together with other efforts to raise the international profile of Irish art and artists. James Coleman is one of the few Irish artists to have built successful international careers - to the extent that he is probably better known in artistic circles abroad than he is generally at home. Willie Doherty's photographic and mixed-media work has won him international acclaim; Paul Seawright, too, seems to operate very comfortably in an international context.
The show features several examples of the naturalised artist from elsewhere. Barrie Cooke, whose significant role includes his enormous influence on younger artists, is a good exemplar. Others are Nigel Rolfe and, more recently, Hughie O'Donoghue (who isn't included, incidentally). There are artists nominally, if at all, Irish, in that they have lived or are living their lives elsewhere, such as William Scott or Sean Scully - who, though he lived here for just a few years, strongly identifies with Ireland.
To include 50-something artists is to exclude many times that number. The show was originally flagged with the subtitle 50 years of Irish art, but this was amended to the more cautious, and accurate, selected works. IMMA director Declan McGonagle pre-emptively notes that part of the rationale of the show is "to generate debate and discussion". Running through the list of exhibits, I started noting down artists who weren't there but who might well have been. I had to stop. The list, ranging from glaring omissions to plausible contenders, just got too long. So chances are that there will indeed be some debate.
Shifting Ground at IMMA opens on November 10th and continues until February 18th, 2001. Declan McGonagle chairs a discussion with the five selectors in the Lecture Room, National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, on Friday, November 24th at noon. Admission is free, although booking is essential.
