Painting from the outside in

Robert Ballagh has earned a reputation as a political activist, set designer and showman – but does being the Renaissance man of contemporary Irish art make him a great artist?

IN 2006 THE RHA staged a Robert Ballagh retrospective at the Gallagher Gallery. Elaborately and theatrically designed – by the artist himself – and including many of his best-known works, it was enormously popular, and did much to consolidate his reputation as an artist. As an artist, that is, over and above being a multi-disciplinary designer and a public figure, a lively and provocative commentator on a wide range of issues. His profile as a personality, his willingness to blend the roles of artist, political activist and showman, has often tended to overshadow his artistic work.

A year or so ago, a lavish, limited edition monograph on him was published with the backing of Dermot Desmond, who bought 200 of a total edition of 350 copies. Essentially a hand-crafted work, incorporating 24 "gyclee" prints, it was designed and overseen by Paul Rattigan, with a text by Ciaran Carty that completely updated his previous book on Ballagh. In fact, Rattigan and the artist were intent on producing a substantial monograph even prior to Desmond's involvement, and that generously illustrated volume, Robert Ballagh: Citizen Artist, with Carty's expanded text, was published late last year under the Zeus Medea imprint.

Ballagh is unquestionably the Renaissance man of contemporary Irish art, a seasoned professional willing to turn his hand to anything: portraiture, print-making, stage sets, book jackets, photography, postage stamps, banknotes. In this he’s much closer to being an artist-journeyman than conforming to the Romantic stereotype of the artist as an impassioned obsessive devoted to self-expression at all costs. That’s no bad thing – Leonardo da Vinci even turned his hand to designing parties for his patrons.

If a potential patron wants Ballagh to try a stage set, he'll roll up his sleeves and see if he can devise a stage set that works rather than protesting that such a mundane task is beneath the level of his art. It's an attitude that has served him well, with the example of a stage set very much in mind, given that one of the projects he took on was the challenge to provide a set of painted backdrops for Riverdanceback in 1994. In fact by then he had substantial theatrical experience under his belt, having designed his first set in 1976.

One of the things about him that has attracted some comment is that while he appears to have benefitted from official and business patronage probably more than any other individual artist one could name, he still sees himself, at least to some extent, as an outsider at odds with the establishment. This despite designing Irish currency, a total of 66 stamps and a succession of portrait commissions that encompass an array of prominent subjects from the political, cultural and business sectors. If that’s being an outsider, one is tempted to think, it must involve a novel definition of the term.

In a way Ballagh is an outsider in a novel or at least a particular way. There is something of the contrarian about him. As outlined by Carty, since Ballagh decided not to join any commercial gallery when his dealer, David Hendriks, died in the early 1980s: “He had become virtually a non-person in official art circles, relying on commissions to generate income”. It’s hard to know what the “official art circles” were, the Irish art world being, then as now, disparate and diffuse, and how they might be distinguished from those commissioning art. As described by Carty, the “official art circles” amount to something like a coterie of gallerists and administrators.

In reality, galleries and gallerists vary and one can quite easily get a sense of the nature of the person and the gallery you’re dealing with. The fact is that times were tough for the vast majority of artists at that time.

It is fair to say, though, that Ballagh has had bruising encounters with the art auction houses. He was laudably involved with Ivaro, the artists’ resale rights organisation. The entrenched opposition to the principle and the letter of the law on the part of the auction houses, an opposition which still endures, came across as one of the nastier aspects of the Celtic tiger mentality.

It has been said more than once – notably perhaps by Declan McGonagle on RTÉ's The View– that Ballagh is more an illustrator than an artist. While this is a reasonable point in that he certainly thinks like an illustrator, it is also unfair and woundingly dismissive. It prompted a retaliatory self-portrait titled The Illustratorin which he's clad in a tee shirt bearing the motto "F*** the begrudgers".

He is an illustrator in the sense that he works in terms of representational images that convey ideas clearly, accessibly and often with humour. As a curator, McGonagle has devoted much of his efforts to exploring contemporary art strategies that don’t deal with a subject by means of its straightforward depiction. Indeed, that tends to apply to most contemporary art. Ballagh is also an illustrator in that the image is paramount. His works are technically very well made, but they are exhaustively hard-won. He is extremely capable, technically, but he not the kind of artist you look to for a felicitous touch with materials. He probably wouldn’t even rate such a quality.

Politics has been another bone of contention. Ballagh's republican and socialist sympathies have created waves, particularly given that he is an artist engagé, with not so much a willingness, more a compulsion to speak his mind. Nor, it is fair to say, is he particularly accommodating of alternative points of view. While being a lively, stimulating and entertaining conversationalist, he's pretty sure of his convictions and can seem to regard their rightness as self-evident. At the same time it's important to point out that he is genuinely liked and highly regarded by almost everyone in the art world and in public life.

What about the substance of his work as a painter? His 1970s images of modishly dressed people looking at well-known paintings in art galleries appear now very much of their time. His mostly earlier re-workings of classical paintings in flat colour and heavy black outline, with a nod to Roy Lichtenstein and Patrick Caulfield, are graphically effective and cleverly harness the lightness of Pop Art to political ends, something that interested him from the beginning. He has taken celebrated compositions by Goya, David, Delacroix and most recently Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, and used them to comment critically on current political and economic events. Gericault's wretched shipwreck survivors stand in for Ireland's population, post-boom. The paintings are good, even if they incline towards the illustrator end of the scale.

In terms of his artistic achievement, however, his reputation in the long run probably rests substantially on his exemplary series of self-portraits and related autobiographical works. That may sound like a form of egotism, but it is not. One can readily point to precedents in art history. Rembrandt’s self-portraits amount cumulatively to one of the most searching accounts of an individual life experience in existence. Ballagh, to his great credit, brings a similar intensity of observation to bear on his physical and psychological being, on those close to him, and on his historical moment. All of which amounts to something valuable and exceptional.

This sequence of works includes the family portraits Outside no 3(1977) and Winter in Ronda(1979), and several portraits of both himself and his wife, Betty, including two large-scale nude portraits in the interior of their house in Dublin, Inside No.3and Upstairs No.3. These named paintings stand as significant works of their time, important in any historical overview of Irish art. Other self-portraits, often humorous, show him engaged with historical figures Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Vermeer and James Joyce – and in a pair of Michelangelo underpants. A series of self-portraits made in 2010 (and first exhibited at the Wexford Arts Centre) is outstanding, with something of the cruel candour of Dürer's depiction of himself as a being helplessly subject to the dictates of gravity and age.

Ballagh’s record is also impressive as a portrait painter per se. Notable successes include imaginative studies of several writers, particularly James Plunkett, Hugh Leonard, John B Keane and JP Donleavy. His treatment of political subjects is perhaps more varied, though he fares well with Noel Browne and Michael O’Riordan. He applied great inventiveness to his depictions of architect Michael Scott and singer Bernadette Greevy. Other notable hits include the painter Louis le Brocquy, art collector Gordon Lambert, artist and designer Paul Rattigan and, a recent subject, scientist James D Watson.

What comes across time and again is Ballagh’s willingness to view each subject as a real creative challenge rather than a routine assignment. His paintings display another striking characteristic, which is his ambition to make major set-piece compositions, layered with detail and incident, works that aim to summarise everything that’s on his mind. It’s something that’s all the more noticeable at a time when a great deal of art is small in scale and subtle in expression – to the point of understatement.

Robert Ballagh, Citizen Artist, by Ciaran Carty, is published by Zeus Medea, €70