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Abstract
This essay explores how the London art press affected debates on avant-garde art in Ireland prior to World War I. The emergence of new specialist art periodicals, such as The Studio, The Connoisseur, and The Burlington Magazine, provided access to metropolitan ideas on art for those seeking an alternative to the dominant discourses in their own regions or nascent nations. While the significance and impact of Roger Fry's (1866–1934) groundbreaking post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910–1912 have been extensively explored, it is often forgotten that versions of these exhibitions were also shown in Dublin at a pivotal moment in Ireland's history. Taking as its case study the staging of Exhibition of Works by Post-Impressionist Painters (1911) and Modern French Pictures (1912) at the United Arts Club Dublin, this essay examines the critical contexts around them. It focuses on Ellen Duncan (1850–1937), the curator and instigator of both exhibitions, who began her foray into visual art through her contributions to the art press. Duncan defended the exhibitions in the Irish press, advocating the individuality and freedom of avant-garde culture. “Old forms must become outworn,” she asserted. This essay also explores how the overturning of traditional ideas found in post-impressionist art was for some a radical model for the invention of a New Ireland.
Notes
1 Ellen Duncan, “The Dublin Gallery of Art,” Burlington Magazine 12 (February 1908): 276.
2 E. D. [Ellen Duncan], “Studio-talk,” Dublin, Studio 24 (December 1901): 204–5; online at http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/studio1902/0217?sid=7471c56a09ed476ea1b873777edc557e. For information on Ellen Duncan, see Patricia Boylan, “Mrs Duncan's Vocation,” Irish Arts Review 12 (1996): 98–101; Rebecca Minch, “Ellen Duncan,” Dictionary of Irish Biography (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2002), 3, 535; Nicola Gordon Bowe, The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2012), 144. A middle-class Dublin Protestant, she was a sister of the medium, Hester Dowden; mother of mother of Alan Duncan, close friend of Harry Clarke and Samuel Beckett; and wife of a civil servant based in Dublin Castle. She was a talented musician and a suffragette.
3 Memorandum and Articles of Association of the United Arts Club (Dublin: Companies Consolidation Act, 1908).
4 Patricia Boylan, All Cultivated People: A History of the United Arts Club (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 42–48; S. B. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991), 14–16.
5 Art in Revolution: Liverpool 1911 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 24 June to 25 September 2011) (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/art-in-revolution/art-in-revolution-online-catalogue.pdf) commemorated this exhibition. No mention is made in the catalog to the earlier showing of the works in Dublin.
6 Athenaeum, June 8, 1907, 706.
7 Thomas Bodkin, “Post-Impressionists in Dublin,” Freeman's Journal, January 26, 1911, 8.
8 [Anon.], “The Post Impressionists in Dublin: A Coming Exhibition,” Irish Times, January 21, 1911, 7.
9 Pall Mall Gazette, 1910, quoted in Francis Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 136.
10 Kate Flint, “Moral Judgement and the Language of English Art Criticism, 1870–1910,” Oxford Art Journal 6 (1983): 59–66.
11 Bodkin was later director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1927–1935) and director of the Barber Institute and Professor of Fine Arts at University of Birmingham (1935–1952).
12 Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism, 16.
13 AE [George Russell], “The Post Impressionists: Art and Barbarism,” Irish Times, January 26, 1911, 5.
14 Thomas Bodkin, Hugh Lane and His Pictures (Dublin: Brown and Nolan, 1934), 73.
15 Bodkin, “Post-impressionists,” 8.
16 Bodkin, “Post-impressionists,” 8.
17 Bodkin, “Post-impressionists,” 8.
18 Exhibition of works by Post-Impressionist Painters (Dublin: United Arts Club, 1911), n.p.
19 AE “The Post Impressionists: Art and Barbarism,” 5. See also Logan Sisley, “Barbarism or Awakened Vision? Art, Theosophy and Post-impressionism in Dublin,” in Pádraic E. Moore, ed., A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin, exh. cat. (Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2014), 77–92.
20 Letter of E. Duncan to editor, Irish Times, February 15, 1911, 5.
21 [Anon.], “Post-Impressionists in Dublin,” Irish Freedom (February 1911): 1.
22 Flint, “Moral Judgement,” 61.
23 “Modern French Pictures in Dublin,” Freeman's Journal, February 3, 1912, 8. Prices were included in the catalog.
24 Ellen Duncan, “Modern French Pictures at the United Arts Club,” Irish Review 2 (May 1912):164.
25 [Anon.], “Post-Impressionists and Cubeists [sic],” Irish Times, March 19, 1912, 7.
26 Charles J. Holmes, Notes on the Science of Picture-making (London: Chatto and Windus, 1909); online at https://archive.org/details/scienceofpictureocad00holmuoft.
27 “Post-Impressionists and Cubeists,” 7. Holmes's book received a mixed review by George Clausen (in The Burlington Magazine 15 [April 1909]: 57–58). Holmes was co-editor of The Burlington Magazine with Robert Dell from 1904 to 1906 and then its sole editor until 1909, when he was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery. Holmes was a regular contributor to this journal until his death in 1936.
28 “Post-impressionist and Cubeists,” 7.
29 Duncan, “Modern French Pictures,”164.
30 Morna O'Neill, “Decorative Politics and Direct Press: Hugh Lane and the Global Art Market, 1900–15,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, ed. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2011), 174–94.
31 Bodkin, Hugh Lane and His Pictures, 73.
32 Robert O'Byrne, Hugh Lane, 1875–1915 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 146.
33 For various perspectives on the painting, see Bruce Arnold, Orpen: Mirror to an Age (London: J. Cape, 1981), 232–36; Adrian Frazier, George Moore, 1858–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 351–52; Roy Foster, “Orpen and the New Ireland,” in Robert Upstone and David Fraser Jenkins, eds., William Orpen: Politics, Sex and Death, exh. cat. (London: Philip Wilson, 2005), 70–72.
34 The most recent analysis of the Lane Gallery controversy is Fintan Cullen, Ireland on Show: Art, Union and Nationhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 153–72.
35 Quoted in Frazier, George Moore, 352.
36 Frazier, George Moore, 352.
37 O'Byrne, Hugh Lane, 144.
38 Frazier, George Moore, 352.
39 Ellen Duncan Archive, Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane. See also Boylan, “Mrs Duncan's Vocation,” 98–101; Minch, “Ellen Duncan,” 3, 535.
40 Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane's Life and Legacy (London: John Murray, 1921), quoted in O'Byrne, Hugh Lane, 112. Floral arrangements were central to Lane's strategies for displaying art. See O'Neill, “Decorative Politics,” 182.
41 Bodkin, Hugh Lane and His Pictures, 45–46.
42 Minch, “Ellen Duncan,” 3, 535. Duncan's husband was discharged from his civil service post at this time. Ellen Duncan made an unsuccessful attempt to move back to Dublin and restart her writing career in 1931.
43 In 1922, Paul Henry and Arthur Power curated Modern Pictures at the Mills Hall in Dublin, consisting of thirty works by leading French and British modernist artists, including Picasso and Matisse. See S. B. Kennedy, Paul Henry (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2003), 15–16. In 1944, the National Loan Exhibition of Continental Paintings was shown in Dublin, including a rare preparatory sketch for Manet's Olympia.
44 Róisín Kennedy, “‘Politics of Vision’: Critical Writing on Art in Ireland, 1939–1972” (PhD thesis, University College Dublin, 2006), 2, 17–30.
45 Riann Coulter, “Translating Modernism: Mainie Jellett, Ireland and the Search for a Modernist Language,” Apollo 164 (September 2006): 56–62; Analysing Cubism, ed. Sean Kissane (Dublin: Crawford Art Gallery, IMMA, 2012) 18–26; 98–111.
Additional information
RÓISÍN KENNEDY is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Irish art at University College Dublin. She is former Yeats Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, 2006–2008, and Curator of the State Collection at Dublin Castle, 1998–1999. Her research focuses on modern Irish art and its contexts. She has published widely on the subject in edited collections and in Circa, Irish Arts Review, Third Text, and Journal of Art Historiography. She has recently completed a book manuscript on the reception of modernist art in Ireland, which is in preparation for publication.