The surreal in Irish Art

I would like to thank Dr. Riann Coulter for inviting me to open this exhibition which is a great honour. It is a pleasure to be involved in such an exciting and absorbing venture. I congratulate Riann and the staff of the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio on the show and Banbridge District Council for it support of a gallery which has already established itself as one of the country’s most well appointed exhibition spaces, with a high calibre of exhibitions. The latter draw on the expertise of Dr. Riann Coulter and her considerable knowledge of modernism and modern Irish art.

It is very appropriate that the Surreal in Irish Art should have been instigated by the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio. There were, as FionaLoughnane outlines in her catalogue essay, close connections between ‘Mac’ and the Surrealist movement in London in the 1930s. However rather than being a Surrealist with a capital ‘S’, McWilliam was a surrealist with a small ‘S’. Throughout his subsequent career he adapted and developed often in very humorous ways the surrealist aesthetic particularly its distortion of the human body. He used surrealist strategies in a playful subversion of dominant artistic styles and attitudes – most notably classicism and he even punctured the gravitas of, his friend, Henry Moore’s work.

 The other artists in this exhibition, like McWilliam, are also surrealists with a small s. They use or refer to surrealism in very diverse ways. The artists are all individuals and each has a demonstrably unique approach to their practice.  Their work is linked by a shared aesthetic rather than a commitment to any underlying theory and dictum. They are of course all, with a couple of exceptions, Irish. In this respect the Surreal in Irish Art exhibition picks up and traces an alternative narrative in modern and contemporary Irish art which while appearing obvious now that it has been laid out so well, is rarely found in established accounts of the development of visual art in Ireland. These tend to focus on the endless fascination with the Irish landscape as a theme or the chasing after a clinical cosmopolitan style, and of course, the pursuit of a national approach to art.

While Irish artists were drawn to aspects of surrealism as far back as the 1930s, Irish art critics were not particularly interested in the movement. Surrealist art, with the exception of its manifestation in the work of Colin Middleton or Nevil Johnson, was rarely exhibited in Ireland. One writer in the Irish Times  in 1941 remarked that the work of the White Stag group, exhibited in Dublin during World War 2 and the nearest to international surrealism then seen here, was characterised by various phases of ‘modernism ranging from surrealism ‘upwards’.  Clearly surrealism with its overt eroticism and its rejection of bourgeois values was less palatable than cubism or expressionism, styles of modern art which had been assimilated into Irish art by this time.

 The relationship with the surreal on the part of Irish artists was never about chasing after Paris or Dali. It was and is a more personal and considered venture. Surrealism or an aesthetic that uses surrealist strategies investigates an inner landscape, the landscape of the imagination or the unconscious with all its associated trappings. It seeks to make the familiar strange as for example in Nevil Johnson’s painting, Nets, Lough Neagh where a specific location has been made to look alien. This, like other works in the show, uses symbols gleaned from both established theories of the unconscious and from more intuitive sources. Dislocations of space and time, distortions of perspective and scale and the use of objects and symbols to create alternative realities are common to surrealist inspired art. They express a need to make sense out of prevailing chaos and fragmentation.

Very significantly the Surreal in Irish Art bridges the great divide between modernism and post-modernism, encompassing work made between the 1940s and the present day. Surrealism provides strategies for dealing with trauma which spans the 20th century and the contemporary period. Works in the exhibition by artists such as Middleton, Johnson, and Patrick Hennessy respond to the psychological impact of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Later artists such as Catherine McWilliams, Dermot Seymour and Jack Pakenham deploy surrealist strategies of distortion and metamorphosis to reflect on the personal and societal disintegration which came out of the Troubles.  A key reason for the continued deployment of surrealist devices is due to its recognition of the significance of human sexuality in the creation of the individual and by extension society in general. This is evidenced in this show in the work of Dorothy Cross and Alice Maher. 

Why has surrealism continued to fascinate viewers and artists? As Anna Balakian has also written, the surrealist artist has to rise above logic, and conscious reasoning, and find within himself or herself the marvellous. Surrealist art cultivates the absurd. It has been described as liberating art from the finite or natural aspects of things and beings. It seeks the marvellous in the everyday, and yet it does not produce vague artworks. Rather it concerns itself with real issues. It uses modern technology, mass produced objects, photography, computer generated imagery as well as traditional materials. There are examples of all of these media in the exhibition. The process of creating the work is therefore very evident and is integral to its meaning. ‘The essential modernism of the surrealists is their concept of art as a building process, not as an expression or statement of existence as it is, but as a modification or an addition to it’ writes Anna Balakian.  Above all surrealism leaves the viewer with a puzzle. It raises questions about experience which are ultimately left unresolved.

 ‘Man is full of Gods, like a sponge immersed in deep heaven’.  Louis Aragon.

Dr. Róisín Kennedy
May 2011

 (i) Irish Times, 13 February 1941, p.6.

(ii) Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, Unwin Books. London, 1972.