Irish Exhibition of Living Art

Cnoc Buí Arts Centre and 20th Century Irish Art

We have a major new player in the arts scene in West Cork. Over the last couple of years, Cnoc Buí (cnoc buí – yellow hill) Arts Centre in Union Hall, has quietly established itself as a significant focus for the arts. I have attended several exhibitions there, always marvelling at the space, the light, the curation and the excellence of the art on exhibit. Here’s the list for 2024, although it doesn’t include the current exhibition, and that’s the one I want to write about today. 

First of all, a little about Cnoc Buí itself (photo above by Amanda Clarke). As the name suggests, it’s a yellow house, beside the sea in in Union Hall, renovated and fitted out for the arts. It’s the brainchild of Paul and Aileen Finucane, who have come to live in Union Hall permanently, after owning a house here for forty years. Passionate about art, and avid collectors, they are ‘giving back’ in the most magnificent way possible through their philanthropic efforts. Read more about them and Cnoc Buí in this story from the West Cork People. (Photo below courtesy of the West Cork People.)

Those of you not living in West Cork – you have no idea how rare it is to come face to face, in your own backyard, with the great Irish artists of the 20th century. Normally we have to go to Dublin, to the National Gallery, or the Hugh Lane.

Ahakista by Letitia Hamilton

I often get my fix from the wonderful Facebook Page 20th Century Irish Art, and I have come, thanks to that source, to recognise many of the names and styles of our leading artists.

Phyllis Leopold’s The Belfast Blitz

The only other comparable experience I have had here in West Cork was with the Coming Home expedition in 2018. Don’t get me wrong – I love 21st century art and we have SO many excellent artists and great venues here in West Cork, and we have written about and reviewed many, many shows. Remember The Souvenir Shop? Rita Duffy is here as well.

Kathleen Fox, Still Life with Bust

This show emphasises Irish women artists – over half of the pieces are by women. We are all rediscovering the superb women artists who were in the shadow of famous husbands (Grace Henry, Margaret Clarke) or unjustly neglected (Kathleen Bridle, Hilda Roberts, Gladys Mccabe), better known as stained glass ‘craftswomen’ (Evie Hone, Sarah Purser, Olive Henry, Kathleen Fox), written off as mere ‘Illustrators’ (Norah McGuinness), or who were even actively discriminated against by the male establishment and dominating figures like Sean Keating. Some are getting the last laugh now – there’s a new exhibition opening now in the National Gallery devoted to Mildred Anne Butler, who is represented in this exhibition.

Olive Henry is more familiar to me as a stained glass artist, so I was delighted to see this fine portrait

But it was women who led the Irish art world into the modern era: The Irish Exhibition of Living Art was founded by women who had been able to afford to go abroad to study  and had picked up newfangled ideas on the continent – women like Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. Young artists flocked to their exhibitions, while the old guard stuck to their conservative, academic forms – echoed, of course, in the suppression of women and modernism in the new Irish State.

Evie Hone, Drying Nets – The Harbour Wall, Youghal

But here they all are, in Union Hall! The pioneering, courageous, persistent, driven, women of the new State. 

Portrait by Hilda Roberts

There are lots of men here too, of course – even Sean Keating, with a marvellous charcoal portrait of deValera. Did they grumble together about the goings-on over at the IELA?

John Sherlock was new to me and a great discovery – I have used his bust of John Hume as my lead image. 

Oisín Kelly (above, Bust of a Young Girl) is a personal favourite, and I have mentioned Thomas Ryan in another context: he is also, perhaps, under-appreciated. George Campbell, despite designing windows for Abbey Studios in the 60s and 70s, never got written off as a stained glass craftsman. The portrait (below) is of his mother, Greta Bowen, who only began painting at 70 and exhibited well into her 90s.

I recognised this painting, Mary Magdalen (below) as a Margaret Clarke right away, even though I had never seen it before.

It’s that combination of exact portraiture (I am willing to bet the angel was based on one of her children), the haunting expression in the eyes of Mary Magdalen, and the way the gestures mirror the scenery and shrubbery behind the figures.

The Sarah Purser is interesting on a number of fronts. Purser made her name with portraiture, using her connections to obtain many commissions – she herself said she went through the British nobility ‘like the measles.’ But this nude (below) is of Kathleen Kearney, ‘Mother of All the Behans’, who worked for Purser as a young (and very beautiful) woman. Sarah Purser’s many talents (she was a superb manager of An Túr Gloine Stained Glass Studio among many other things) are currently on full display at the Hugh Lane Gallery.

I have only given you a flavour of what’s in this exhibition. If you can, get down to Union Hall and take a wander through it yourself. If you get there on a weekend, the charming Nolan’s Coffee House will be open. 

Maeve McCarthy’s Tomatoes

Evie Hone and the Modernisation of Irish Stained Glass

This is an Evie Hone window from Blackrock in Dublin – Bridget, Mary and Jesus, and Patrick. Evie Hone is one of our greatest stained glass artists and helped to move the practice of stained glass into a more modern direction. To appreciate this, it is helpful to know a little of her background.

Our Lady of the Rosary, completed in 1948 for the Catholic Church in Greystones, Co Wicklow. While the figure is not cubist, the influence of that style is discernible

She was born in 1894 Dublin, a member of the extended Hone clan of painters and artists. A childhood accident left her disabled and in pain but also set the course for her life’s work by providing the consolation of sketching. She studied in Britain, Ireland and Paris, where she came under the influence of the Cubists, and also met her great friend and fellow-modernist, Mainie Jellett.

The Good Shepherd, also from Greystones

The two women applied to exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy but it was dominated by male traditionalists who refused to allow cubist paintings to be shown. They responded by exhibiting elsewhere and by starting a new organisation (the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, or IELA) for those interested in modern art. At first critics ridiculed this new style of painting but young artists were enthusiastic and gradually she and Mainie “introduced modern art to Ireland.”*

Evie Hone stained glass on display in the new, and very popular Stained Glass Room in the National Gallery

Evie was deeply spiritual, at one point joining a community of Anglican nuns and eventually converting to Catholicism. Moving away from painting to stained glass she trained under Wilhelmina Geddes and eventually joined An Túr Gloine in 1935. Her stained glass work was never strictly cubist, although the influence was traceable, but it was thoroughly modern.

This is her Bridget window for Loughrea Catherdral, completed while she was a member of An Túr Gloine and at the beginning of her development as a stained glass artist. It is noticeably a more conservative and less modern treatment  – contrast it, for example with Bridget from the Blackrock Church

Nicola Gordon Bowe, in her entry on Evie Hone in The Encyclopedia of Ireland (edited by Brian Lalor) says of her work for An Túr Gloine, she was designing and painting mostly figurative windows using a powerfully innovative vocabulary of deep smouldering colour and loose expressionist brushwork.

Two small windows from Cloughjordan Church (Co Tipperary) depict Mary and Joseph. These windows were among her last, and are beautiful in their restrained style and subdued palette

From 1944 she worked in her own studio at Marley Grange in Rathfarnham. Gordon Bowe, again: In ten densely packed years she introduced a new, loosely painted, resonantly coloured, and sombrely religious treatment. We are fortunate that a short documentary recorded this period on her life and work. It also functions as a primer on stained glass!

View the documentary here

About the same time, in 1952, her friend and fellow-artist, Hilda van Stockum painted her in her studio, capturing her complete absorption in her work. This image comes from Marie Bourke’s paper* and is a copy of a photograph from a National Gallery Catalogue. The original painting is in the National Gallery.

What is most striking about her work, in contrast to her colleagues at An Túr Gloine, is how painterly it is. Using a restrained palette, with occasional bursts of bright colour, she creates quiet and reverential portraits of her sacred subjects. Modernity is obvious, but she herself claimed that the major influence on her work was medieval Irish carvings. If this was true, it was certainly mediated through an expressionist sensibility.

Bridget – detail from the Blackrock window

Evie Hone died in 1955. She has left an impressive legacy of paintings and stained glass windows. I have only used photographs that I have taken myself of windows that I have visited, but there are many more waiting to be explored.

* The quote, and also the photograph of the painting of Evie Hone in her Studio are from Evie Hone in Her Studio: Hilda Van Stockum’s Portrait, by Marie Bourke, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 86, No. 342 (Summer, 1997), pp. 165-174.  The paper is available on JSTOR