Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, two artists celebrated in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin were Christian Modernists, and that wasn’t an oxymoron. If you include the pioneer Cubist Albert Gleizes, under whom they studied in Paris, that made three of them – Modernists imbued with a profound faith. Gleizes returned to his baptismal faith in middle age (the Catholic revival in France at the time very much included artists); the two Irishwomen came from prosperous (which isn’t to say rich) Dublin Protestant backgrounds, and Evie Hone was later to try her vocation at an Anglican convent in Truro. She became a Catholic in 1939, received into the Church at Blackrock College by the redoubtable John Charles McQuaid. Mainie Jellett remained in the Church of Ireland, though she was, like Evie, profoundly influenced by the art of the early Renaissance.
This wonderful exhibition is subtitled “The Art of Friendship” and the relationship of the two women was a constant in their lives: from their art training in London, where they studied with Walter Sickert, to their years in Paris, first with Andre Lhote and later with the more austerely abstract Cubist Gleizes. Like all great abstract artists, they had a secure foundation in figurative painting.
The exhibition begins in Paris, where the two young women pitched up at Gleizes’ apartment near the Bois de Bologne in 1921 insisting that he teach them his method. He was appalled. “Give you lessons? But it is I who want lessons. What do you want me to teach you? I have the greatest trouble in clearing up my own difficulties. How do you think I can tackle yours?” They were insistent, and he knew when he was beaten. One of his canvases is here and one of Lhote’s, but the first room is dominated by Evie’s and Mainie’s abstract pieces, difficult to tell apart and characterised by arresting colour.
What is striking is that even in these paintings that eschew figurative art for pure line and colour, their work suggests religious and iconographic ideas. Evie Hone’s “Composition” is somehow devotional – its circles of colour framing a central form that powerfully evokes the Virgin and Child surrounded by angels. The same goes for her “Abstract” – concentric lines in blue with the central, majestic shape suggestive of a seated Madonna. Mainie Jellett’s “Abstract”, one of the most important Irish Modernist works, looks quite remarkably like an icon. They put on an exhibition of their work in Dublin in 1924, to a hostile and uncomprehending reception – AE Russell called Mainie’s work “artistic malaria”. Just over a century later, the joke’s on him.
Mainie Jellett was to be a vigorous defender of Modernism in Ireland; she was not alone, but she was perhaps the most combative proponent of the movement, and of the craft of the painter. Artists should not be a separate caste, she wrote; they may have certain gifts more highly developed than the majority, but theirs are vitally important to the mental and spiritual life of society. For her and Evie, their work was, in a real sense, a vocation. Mainie was a generous teacher, too; Elizabeth Bowen, a childhood friend, wrote that “she re-lit lamps which seemed to be going out.” She was a fine pianist; as Bowen observed, “her music is palpable in her painting.”
“Divine Inspiration”, the room which features some of their religious work, feels like a natural evolution of the earlier paintings, only with figures discernible in the concentric gradations of colour and line. Mainie Jellett’s “Study after Fra Angelico/Annunciation” is a distillation of the original painting, in which the forms are purified into the simplest outlines and colours with the kneeling Virgin enclosed by adoring angelic shapes. The works have another source besides the early Renaissance: there’s a study here by Evie Hone of “Daniel in the Lion’s Den”, based on a Celtic cross at Monasterboice. They both admired early Irish art, which was semi-abstract too, and strikingly complex in its construction.
Here divine drama is played out in colour; in Mainie Jellett’s “Deposition” and “The Ninth Hour”, the darkness of the blue and green figures is lit up by a burst of flame-like yellows and oranges. One of the most striking pieces is her painting of a passage from Isaiah, “I Have Trodden the Winepress Alone”. That monumental figure in blazing reds and pinks is defiant; the jutting lines of the head are oddly reminiscent of GK Chesterton’s bold line in his drawings. It was one of her last, for she died in 1944: Evie Hone visited her the evening before.
Evie is best known now as an artist in stained glass. One artist she much admired, Georges Roualt, with his heavy, bold lines, was an inspiration for that new medium – his “Christ and the Soldier” is here, and her own “Homage to Roualt”. Notwithstanding a series of rebuffs, she tackled the challenges of glass with tenacity, undeterred by her own physical frailty. She had polio – or infantile paralysis – as a child, which came on her when she was 11, while dressing the altar of her local church for Easter. She could have been a lifelong invalid; instead, she accepted the assistance of others and cheerfully endured her disabilities, later aggravated in a car crash. But in the film clip of her at work here, there is no suggestion of an invalid, but a serenely attentive artist.
Her work for churches can be seen all over Ireland. Only fragments of her great windows or smaller pieces can be seen in a gallery space, but they look wonderful here. Lit from behind, the glow like jewels. There’s a tremendously perky rooster, perched on a brazier, the cockerel who crowed after Peter had denied our Lord. Perhaps her best known work, the east window in the College Chapel at Eton, is represented here in a watercolour sketch.
The two women were national in feeling and international in their sympathies. Evie Hone was a member of the Seven and Five Society in London, and both women travelled widely. The young Irish state used them for overseas exhibitions; Evie Hone’s great stained-glass representation of the provinces of Ireland for the New York World Fair in 1938 is now in the Government Buildings.
Evie Hone survived her friend for 11 years, and died going into her parish church in Rathfarnham. It was a fitting end, and this exhibition does them proud.
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship<em> is at the National Gallery of Ireland until 10 August</em>
<em>Photo: St. Bridget's church in Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland. Irish artist Evie Hone</em>
