The Great Southern and CIÉ collections, taken together, form a fascinating mini-survey of mid-20th-century Irish art, until now under-represented in public collections , writes Aidan Dunne
This week the art collection of the Great Southern hotels, which was entrusted to the care of the State at the time of the sale of the hotels earlier in the year, went on view to the public for the first time. Some 50 works by Irish artists, dating from the 1930s to 1996, form an exhibition at the Office of Public Works building on St Stephen's Green. The majority of the works date from the mid-20th century, and they make up something of a time capsule. They were acquired under the Arts Council's Joint Purchase Scheme, which operated in the 1960s and 1970s, and was designed to encourage the acquisition of Irish art at a time when the Irish art market was in its infancy.
The collection hit the headlines when it emerged that the Dublin Airport Authority, latterly the owners of the Great Southern group, had dispatched paintings for valuation prior to the sale of the hotels. Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue said that the collection should be handed over to the State, having been entirely funded by public monies - the collection was built up by a public company, CIÉ, which ran the Great Southern hotels until 1985, with the other half of the purchase price covered by the Arts Council - and the collection therefore belonged rightfully to the people. The DAA quickly indicated that it would act in accordance with Government policy.
Now we have a chance to judge for ourselves what was at stake.
As it happens, highlights from what might be described as the Great Southern's parent collection, the CIÉ Art Collection, are currently on tour, in the exhibition Art on the Move: Hidden Gems from the CIÉ Art Collection. It will be on view at the Athlone Institute of Technology from Monday. The works in this exhibition used to reside in the reception area and offices of Heuston Station prior to the development of the new concourse.
Taken together, the work in the two exhibitions makes up a fascinating mini-survey of mid-20th century Irish art. It is particularly interesting given that such work has been under-represented in our public collections, due to limited resources and the lack of appropriate national institutions - Imma was only established in 1991. Because Irish art has progressively increased in value at the auction houses, it has become increasingly difficult for Imma and other museums to fill the inevitable gaps in their collections. They are substantially dependent on gifts.
THERE ARE SOME outstanding and historically significant works in the CIÉ collection. Patrick Swift's portrait of Patrick Kavanagh, for example, is positively iconic. Painted in London in 1961, it is ambitious in scale and scope, giving an account of the writer as a monumental - though somewhat truculent - figure. No single viewpoint could give us the view of Kavanagh's head that Swift offers. It is as if he unfolds a conventional three- dimensional image in a quasi-cubist manner. Equally, Patrick Collins's painting of standing stone in the landscape is one of his most physically substantial pictures, large in scale and built up with thick impasto. A dazzling marriage of light and substance, it is one of his definitive works and, more, gives a tremendous sense of achieved artistic potential.
TP Flanagan is rightly famous as a watercolourist, but he has also made a sizeable body of work in oil, and in the 1960s he made some terrific paintings of the north Donegal coast. One of the best is included in the CIÉ show. In a boldly simplified composition, the landscape is reduced to contrasting horizontal bands with just a few vertical accents, making for a powerful, atmospheric painting.
Maurice MacGonigal's Connemara landscape is also an important work by him, and the Arthur Armstrong landscape is a fine painting by a still underrated artist.
Not everything is on a comparable level, and some works have, not surprisingly, dated more than others. Perhaps because they are very spare and austere, Cecil King's hard-edged abstracts, though of their time, have stood the test of time very well; the same holds true for Patrick Scott's pared down abstracts, though the Solar Device included is not one of his best. Equally, Gerard Dillon is represented by a typical if not especially significant piece, dating from his time on Inishlacken. The Beckett head by Louis le Brocquy is a fairly slight watercolour.
Its general range and quality, and its core of really exceptional works, make the CIÉ Collection an important one. The overlaps are so pronounced that it is in many respects of a piece with the Great Southern Collection. It too features a number of important works by some of the same artists, including a smaller though very beautiful piece by Patrick Collins, The Bog Pool, and exceptional, big still lifes by both George Campbell and Arthur Armstrong. TP Flanagan's Two Islands, a pale, shimmering, misty study, is a good pendant to the CIÉ landscape.
Norah McGuinness's paintings are so strongly stylised and repetitive in format that they tend to average out, and despite their general level of competence it's hard to pick one as being of particular interest. Her fixation on seagulls can be very tiresome. Having said that, the Great Southern collection includes a group of pictures that present her in a much more sympathetic light. Yes, there are seagulls, but even her seagull study is a rather good one, and First Snow and The Small Fields of Donegal are positively adventurous, evidencing a much wider palette than usual. In all, the seven paintings by her are enough to considerably enhance her rather lacklustre reputation.
THE FIVE GERARD Dillons provide a good capsule selection of his varied experiments, from the near abstraction of Simple Façade to the emblematic figure of the clown in Stunts, as well as sterling examples of his studies of Connemara life. Nano Reid, that least ingratiating of painters with her muddy tonality and permanent half-light, is well represented by a fine oil and two watercolours. There are two substantial Daniel O'Neills, an immensely popular (and commensurately expensive) artist, although his simplified, doll-like figures and formulaic landscapes can steer perilously close to facile sentimentality.
Anne Madden's Burren Land, a white latticework of thick paint, is terrific. William Leech, always likeable but perhaps overly laid-back, does well here with a very accomplished view of boats on the River Stour. Maurice MacGonigal's George Moore's Garden is a major cityscape. Patrick Pye's Upper Liffey Valley is a strong example of his work. The collection was thought to include one or more pieces by Louis le Brocquy and Harry Kernoff, though neither artist is included in this show and there is no indication of whether they will eventually surface.
In all, the Great Southern collection provides a snapshot, rather than a comprehensive cross-section, of mid-20th-century Irish art.
Taken together with the CIÉ pictures, though, it amounts to something more. Between the two, you begin to see significant numbers of key works concentrated together. It has long been recognised that there is no good, representative permanent collection of Irish art of this era. Even a carefully selected, substantial, temporary group exhibition that focused mainly on the 1950s and 1960s would be fascinating and, potentially, extremely popular. The State's ownership of the Great Southern collection is a positive move towards both those possibilities.
The CIÉ Art Collection, in the exhibition Art on the Move, will be on view at the Athlone Institute of Technology from Monday. Paintings from the Great Southern Hotel Art Collection is at the Atrium, OPW, 51 St Stephen's Green, Dublin, until next weekend