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Irish Examiner
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: Irish women who were ahead of their time
Few artistic relationships have been as long or productive as that maintained by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. In London, Paris and their native Dublin, they created some of the most innovative Irish art of the early 20th century, often in the face of critical opprobrium and the bewilderment of their peers. A broad selection of their work as pioneers of abstraction and Cubism in this country is currently showing at the National Gallery of Ireland, in the exhibition Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship The two had much in common. Both came from well-to-do Protestant families, and they were born just a few miles apart, Hone in Donnybrook, Co Dublin in 1894, and Jellett in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin city centre in 1897. 'But their personal experience was a little different,' says the exhibition's curator, Dr Brendan Rooney. 'Hone's parents both died in her childhood, whereas Jellett's family were what you might call more conventionally secure. 'Also, Hone contracted polio at the age of 12, which left her very compromised. A lot of her early years, and particularly her teen years, were spent undergoing various medical procedures in England and elsewhere. "So it was really tough for her, notwithstanding her privilege.' Both determined early to pursue careers in art. Jellett studied under William Orpen at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, before proceeding to the Westminster Technical Institute in London. It was there that she first encountered Hone, who had already spent some years in London, studying at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. At the launch of Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship at the National Gallery were Dr Brendan Rooney, head curator; Niamh McNally, curator; and Dr Caroline Campbell, director. Picture: Naoise Culhane 'At Westminster,' says Rooney, 'they would have had a very academic training, with an emphasis on drawing. Both studied under Walter Sickert, among others.' Hone moved to Paris in late 1920, and Jellett followed a few months later. Both were keen to explore new ways of art making. 'They set themselves up as students in this incredible, creative, post-war environment. I think it was in Paris that their friendship really began.' Initially, they studied under André Lhote, but they soon bored of his brand of representational Cubism, which mainly dealt with landscapes and still life. 'Abstraction was where they wanted to go,' says Rooney. 'It was more extreme, and more reductive, I suppose, as an art form. So they approached Albert Gleizes, and asked that he become their tutor. Gleizes had just turned 40. He was still in the process of formulating his own aesthetic and his own ideas and his own philosophy about art, and probably the last thing he needed was two overenthusiastic Irish students arriving on his doorstep.' Gleizes had no other students. 'So Jellett and Hone moved into this much more intimate situation, where they became his collaborators, really, and played a key role in the formulation of his ideas.' Jellett and Hone travelled back and forth from Paris to exhibit in Dublin, where their work was often seen as controversial, and never more so than when Jellett exhibited a painting called Decoration at a Society of Dublin Painters exhibition in 1923. 'Decoration was met with anything from suspicion to downright hostility,' says Rooney. 'George Russell - a painter himself, as well as a writer and critic - was among the most outspoken critics. He dismissed Jellett's work as 'artistic malaria.' The Irish Times published a photograph of Decoration and a photograph of an onion side by side, and described her painting as a 'freak.' I mean, this was a really hostile and adversarial sort of language.' Evie Hone, The Cock and Pot. The two artists responded to the disparagement of their work in markedly different ways. 'Jellett was emboldened. She really turned to proselytizing about modernism. She lectured. She wrote. She was very industrious. But Hone, I think, was crushed by the criticism. She became more reserved. She even joined an Anglican convent for a year or so. Jellett would not have approved, but she was on hand to collect her friend when she left in January or February of 1927.' In time, Jellett and Hone's work became more accepted in Irish art circles. Jellett was even invited to design a series of murals for the Ireland Pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1937. Hone, meanwhile, took an interest in stained glass. She retrained at the College of Art and joined An Túr Gloine, the workshop and co-operative founded by Sarah Purser. Before long, she took on a number of significant commissions in the medium. One of the best known is My Four Green Fields, commissioned by the Department of Industry and Commerce for the Irish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The window now dominates the entrance hall of Government Buildings on Merrion St, Dublin. In Britain, Hone is celebrated for another work in stained glass, a magnificent Crucifixion in the Chapel at Eton College, Windsor, which she completed between 1949 and 1952. 'That was her magnum opus,' says Rooney. 'It was a colossal undertaking, involving thousands of individual pieces of glass, which she manufactured in Dublin and had shipped over. The window was incredibly well received, and is now accepted as being one of the finest pieces of stained glass created anywhere in the world in the 20th century.' Despite their success, the two never really became establishment figures. Towards the end of her life, Jellett founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which challenged the dominance of the Royal Hibernian Academy's invariably conservative annual group exhibition. Hone was also involved, along with Norah McGuinness, Fr Jack Hanlon, Hilary Heron and Louis le Brocquy. Mainie Jellett, The Virgin of Éire. Sadly, Jellett fell ill with cancer and could not attend the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943. 'It's one of the great injustices that she never got to see it,' says Rooney. 'And she died before the second exhibition the following year.' Hone continued to work until her own passing, in 1955. The Irish Exhibition of Living Art outlived them both, surviving into the early 1990s. From the first, Jellett and Hone had insisted that older, more conservative artists – RHA stalwarts such as Seán Keating and James Sleator – be featured alongside younger, bolder creatives, and successive organisers were loyal to that spirit of broadmindedness. 'Jellett and Hone were aware of the importance of the collective,' says Rooney. 'They were inclusive, and emphatically so. They managed to bring people with them, which takes real skill, particularly in a Europe that was fragmented for all sorts of cultural, political reasons. It's a very impressive achievement.' Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship runs at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until August 10. Further information:
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Freak pictures': Ireland's art revolutionaries who were treated so badly one fled to a nunnery
Two oils on canvas hang together, strikingly similar, in the first room of the National Gallery of Ireland's new show. Both titled Composition, they date from 1924 and 1925. They're cubist still lifes, with the regular, geometric patterns and contrasting colour schemes favoured by many early 20th-century modernists, Marcel Duchamp and Juan Gris among them. The paintings are clearly by the same hand. Except they're not. The 1924 work, featuring what might be a fried egg, or might be an easel, is by Evie Hone; the piece from the following year, centred on a chessboard, is by her best friend, Mainie Jellett. These two women, virtually unknown outside their homeland, and not well-known even there, revolutionised art in Ireland by introducing modernism. In the deeply conservative country that it was at the time, that didn't always meet a favourable response. And yet they soldiered on, buoyed up by one another across several decades, plying their craft, and turning their hands to different styles and art-forms. So the exhibition feels very eclectic. Here there's cubism; there, abstraction; in the next room, we're back to figuration. In another room landscapes, and elsewhere devotional religious art. Most are paintings, but one room is filled with the stained glass that Hone spent part of her career focusing on – she made commissions for public buildings and churches alike. But there is one element that unites almost all the 90 artworks in the exhibition, and it's colour. Bright colours, primary colours; rich colours, strong colours; clashing colours, harmonious colours: they sing out of every room, and without knowing anything else about the women who put them together, they tell you that this pair believed in life and believed in art. They were both born in Dublin, into well-to-do middle class families. While they met for the first time in London during the first world war, this exhibition traces their story from the early 1920s, when they moved to Paris to train under André Lhote then, Albert Gleizes, whose work exploring abstraction they very much admired. He didn't take students, but the pair had made up their minds: he remained in touch with them all their lives, and much is made in the show of the importance of his influence on their work. It was a two-way street – Gleizes acknowledged the importance of Hone and Jellett on his own oeuvre – but art history in its inimitable way has remembered him, and airbrushed them out. For now, though, they're back. The quality of the art is as eclectic as the styles. The standout piece is Jellett's Decoration (1923): fantastically well composed, immensely pleasing, this piece pays homage to the work of the Renaissance artists whose work both women adored (they knew it mostly through reproductions), painted in tempera on wood with gold leaf to reference that period of art history. But it's more than a homage: it's a marrying together of old and new, a gorgeous abstract depiction of the ages-old Madonna and Child, contained within the shape of a Trecento altarpiece, with a pointillist background. Sheer genius, and considered today to be the single most significant modernist painting in Irish history, it went down like a ton of bricks: writer George 'AE' Russell made the astonishing remark that there was nothing much to say about it. The following year, 1924, Jellett and Hone had a joint show – the current show in Dublin is only the second time their work has been shown together – which was met, again, with much criticism. The Irish Times used the phrase 'freak pictures' in a review, and Russell again had a field day, referring to their work as 'artistic malaria'. It all weighed heavily on them both, so much so that it was almost certainly a factor in Hone's decision to enter an Anglican convent in Cornwall in 1925, much to the horror of Jellett, who was left alone trying to convince the Irish art world of the importance of modernism. Happily Hone's life as a nun was short-lived, and just over a year later Jellett went to retrieve her and return her to her primary vocation as an artist. But religion remained a central theme, for Hone – who later in her life became a Catholic – and also for Jellett, whose other works shown here include a striking Deposition (1939) and an intense crucifixion titled The Ninth Hour (1941). Hone, though, would mostly pour her religious feelings into her stained glass, using her cubist training and love of strong colour to great effect in a series of windows including one often-seen on Irish TV, My Four Green Fields, as it's installed in the Department of the Taoiseach (having been made originally for the 1939 New York World's Fair) providing a backdrop to many a government statement. The window, bringing the symbols of Ireland's four provinces – Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht – together, was one of her greatest triumphs. But an even more magnificent example of her stained glass is in England, and sadly behind closed doors (excepting occasional public tours of the college). It's a huge (almost 1,300 sq ft) window in Eton College chapel, and it was commissioned to replace a window destroyed by bombing during the second world war. The window, showing the Last Supper in the lower section and the crucifixion above, is regarded as one of Britain's finest 20th-century examples of stained glass. In Dublin we get only a glimpse of its splendour via a watercolour study Hone made in 1950. By then, Jellett had died, aged 46, of cancer. Hone visited her in the nursing home on her last night. Neither woman had ever married; and while there is no suggestion they were a couple, they clearly filled a role that might be called a partnership in each other's lives. Jellett had spent her final years much influenced by Chinese art, after a visit to an exhibition at London's Royal Academy. Hone, despite the legacy of childhood polio which affected her throughout her life, continued to travel in France and Italy – as works here attest – and painted the woods and landscape around her home in Marlay in the Dublin hills. By the end of their careers, the women – whose work had been so similar in the early days – had each found her own style, with Hone's intuitive, freer approach contrasting with Jellett's much more precise attention to detail. Convergence, divergence and a friendship that brought the stirrings of the great changes in Ireland that continue to play out to this day. Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, from 10 April to 10 August
