John Hewitt’s curatorial eye: art and poetry in the municipal galleries

ABSTRACT

This article examines the art writing of the poet, critic, and curator John Hewitt in mid-twentieth century Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hewitt’s promotion of modern art and artist collectives in Ulster through shifting definitions of internationalism and regionalism will be linked to the art writing of Herbert Read and the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to Hewitt’s poetry and art writing reveals the sustained imbrication of politics, poetry and the visual arts in his thinking. Hewitt’s ottava rima poem in response to Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited, October 1954”, will be reassessed with recourse to the context of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin and its mid-century sculpture collections. By identifying artworks within the Municipal Gallery poem, the article illustrates Hewitt’s broader dialogues with the late Yeats and the art scene in Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• John Hewitt
• W.B. Yeats
• Irish art
• sculpture
• art gallery
• poetry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A compromise was reached in 1957 whereby the paintings were shared between the Municipal Gallery and the National Gallery, London.

2. Hewitt, Collected Poems, 90–91. The Oireachtas Art Exhibition at the Municipal Gallery ran from 14 October to 7 November 1954. In total, the exhibition included 126 paintings and three sculptures. Irish Times, 15 October 1954, 7.

3. Hewitt, Collected Poems, 90–91. The poem was originally published in 1956 in the pamphlet A Winter Harvest: A folio of new poems from the North of Ireland, edited by Andrew Molloy Carson.

4. Ibid., 91.

5. White, “John Hewitt and the Art of Writing,” 41–49.

6. Coulter, “John Hewitt: Creating a Canon of Ulster Art,” 1–18.

7. Hewitt, “Foreword,” Exhibition of Sculpture: 30 January – 21 February 1953 [unpaginated, first page].

8. Hewitt, Art in Ulster 1, 139.

9. McVeigh, “Alert to Continental Influence,” 31–44, 39.

10. Hewitt, A North Light, 42–43.

11. Exhibition of Jugoslav Paintings and Sculpture, December 1930–18 February 1931.

12. Hewitt, “The Exhibition of the Ulster Academy of Arts,” 53–54, 53.

13. Ibid., 54.

14. Hewitt, A North Light, 84.

15. Hewitt, “The Ulster Academy of Arts Exhibition,” 8.

16. Hewitt, Colin Middleton, 9.

17. McVeigh, “Alert to Continental Influence,” 38.

18. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism, 73–77, 76.

19. See also Coulter, “Herbert Read and Irish Art,” 102–111.

20. McCann, The Ulster Unit, [unpaginated, final page]. Hewitt purchased McCann’s Stone Mask after the Ulster Unit exhibition at Locksley Hall. In A North Light, he compared the sculpture, “with the flat nose and the bulging eyeballs,” to the masks of Henry Moore. Hewitt, North Light, 80.

21. Moore, Unit One, 30.

22. Hewitt, The Ulster Unit, [unpaginated preface].

23. Read, “English Art,” 243–77, 243.

24. Ibid., 269, 270 [italics mine].

25. For a wider discussion of Read’s essay, see: Aspinall, “Signature of Our Race,” 102–123. On the role of anarchist thought in Read’s pairing of the individual and the community, see also: Ward, “Art and Anarchy: Herbert Read’s Aesthetic Politics,” 20–33.

26. Read, “English Art,” 243.

27. See note 22 above.

28. Ibid.

29. For recent studies of this post-partition cultural shift, see: Woodward, Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War; and Parr, Inventing the Myth.

30. Ó Faoláin, “Ulster,” 6.

31. Woodward, Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War, 142.

32. Nesbitt, A Museum in Belfast, 40.

33. Ibid.

34. Hewitt, A North Light, 128–31.

35. Hewitt, “Belfast Art Gallery,” 18.

36. Ibid.

37. A series of one-man “Ulster Artists” exhibitions were held in the immediate post-war period, including: G. Moutray Kyle (5 December 1945–12 January 1946), John Luke (4–28 September 1946), Doris V. Blair (8 September–2 October 1948), and F.W. Hull (31 August–24 September 1949). See also: Nesbitt, A Museum in Belfast, 43; and Hewitt, A North Light, 128–31.

38. Hewitt, “Belfast Art Gallery,” 24.

39. Hewitt, “Regionalism: The Last Chance,” 125.

40. Ibid., 122.

41. Ibid., 124–5.

42. See Woodward, Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War, 131–77.

43. Keenan, “Mr Hewitt’s Folly,” 5.

44. Ibid.

45. Hewitt, “From Chairmen and Committee Men,” 48–55, 52.

46. “My mind such nurture seeks, dissatisfied/with the long hours my passion or my pride/determines I shall fill with rhetoric/of Paul Cezanne.” Hewitt, Collected Poems, 3–12, 6.

47. See note 43 above.

48. Ibid. Hewitt’s poem “Dichotomy” was published in the Irish Times, 11 April 1952, 8.

49. Longley, The Living Stream, 130–49, 148.

50. Corcoran, “Modern Irish Poetry and the Visual Arts,” 251–65, 254.

51. Hewitt, Collected Poems, 58.

52. Heaney, Preoccupations, 207–10, 209.

53. See note 51 above.

54. Ibid.

55. Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time, 50–53.

56. Yeats, Variorum, 611.

57. Ibid., 604.

58. Hewitt, “The Bitter Gourd,” 115.

59. Heaney quoted in O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 332.

60. See note 58 above.

61. Ibid., 116.

62. Yeats, Variorum, 603.

63. Roberta Hewitt quoted in McCormack, Northman: John Hewitt, 153.

64. Roberta Hewitt journal 1954, PRONI D3838/4/2/2. Roberta Hewitt records a visit to Dublin with her husband, where he met Daniel Corkery for the first time and visited the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

65. Hewitt papers, Ulster University Coleraine, Hewitt Notebook 34, 107. Hewitt composed the poem from 25–26 October 1954 and revised the poem on 23 December of the same year; see Ormsby, Collected Poems, 555, 587.

66. Hewitt, Collected Poems, 90–91.

67. Yeats, Variorum, 445.

68. Frank Ferguson and Kathryn White, “Introduction” to John Hewitt, A North Light, xviii.

69. See Municipal Art Gallery, Dublin: Illustrated Catalogue (Dublin: The Corporation of Dublin, 1958), 11, 19, 30, 32.

70. Hewitt, Collected Poems, 91.

71. Robert Elliott, The Leader, 19 March 1904. For further context on Sheppard’s bust of O’Leary see John Turpin, Oliver Sheppard, 152–155.

72. Edmond Thomas Quinn (1868–1929), American sculptor and painter. Quinn’s bronze bust of James Stephens was lent to the Municipal Gallery by the National Gallery of Ireland. See: Municipal Art Gallery, Dublin: Illustrated Catalogue (Dublin: The Corporation of Dublin, 1958), 30.

73. See note 70 above.

74. Ibid.

75. Hewitt, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited: Dublin, 21-X-1954,” A Winter Harvest, 13.

76. See note 70 above.

77. Ormsby, Collected Poems, xxix.

78. Hewitt, “From Chairmen and Committee Men,” 48–55, 51; and McCormack, Northman, 126–50.

79. See note 70 above.

80. Horace, “Ode 30, Book 3,” The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. David West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108.

81. W.J. McCormack, Northman: John Hewitt, 216.

82. The plaster bust Maud Gonne MacBride (1932) was exhibited at the RHA in 1935. See Ann M. Stewart, Royal Hibernian Academy, 117.

83. Yeats, Variorum, 618.

84. Yeats, Last Poems, 268–9.

85. Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes, 46, 136–7.

86. See note 83 above.

87. Ibid., 618–9.

88. Ibid., 619.

89. OED, “scorch”, v.2, c. 1430, from the French “écorcher”: “To strip off (skin or bark), to flay.”

90. In the 1960s, the Gallery attempted to contact the artist who had moved to America. The Arts Council of Ireland made £75 available for the work to be cast in bronze by the sculptor Edward Delaney and the Gallery was seeking Campbell’s permission to do so. I am grateful to Jessica O’Donnell at the Hugh Lane Gallery for bringing this to my attention.

91. Hewitt, Collected Poems, 91.

92. See note 57 above.

93. Dawe, Against Piety, 101–102.

94. See for example: “Men Improve with the Years”, “Lapis Lazuli”, and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”. Yeats, Variorum, 329, 565–7, 428–33.