Exhibition pioneering art of Irish women

Exhibition shows how female artists were often more innovative, writes Colette Sheridan

AN EXHIBITION of the work of pioneering Irish female artists of the 20th century at UCC’s Jennings Gallery will include the work of Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, Norah McGuinness, Nano Reid, Sarah Purser and Mildred Anne Butler.

The exhibition is curated by Paul Finucane, retired Professor Emeritus at the University of Limerick (UL), and is based on his book, Journeys Through Line and Colour: Forty Irish Women Artists of the 20th Century written in conjunction with Dr Maria Connolly, FOI officer at UL.

Finucane, whose background is in medicine, has a passion for art, as has Connolly. They both completed a certificate in the history of art at UL and went on to write the beautifully illustrated book, published in 2010.

All the art in the exhibition is from private collections. Finucane says of the artists that will be on show, that they have been poorly served by history. “In their own lifetime, they were largely shunned by the art establishment for reasons to do with gender. A lot of the women were Protestant and came from the Big House. The establishment at the time was peasant in its orientation, strongly nationalistic, with a Catholic perspective. These women artists didn’t fit in. They were perhaps ambivalent about the sense of Irish nationalism at the time. They struggled hugely for recognition. But they found it very hard to get space to exhibit in. There were some very fine female artists, born in the late 19th and early 20th century, whose work has been neglected.”

The women had to go to the continent for art education. They couldn’t access it in Ireland. “Ireland wasn’t unique that way. Women artists the world over had to fight for recognition. The 20th century came later to Ireland than elsewhere. Sarah Purser was the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1925.”

Some of the women were the younger daughters of landlord families who, without dowries, had their artistic talents nurtured so they could work as governesses. Finucane says that these women’s style of art differed from that of their male contemporaries.

“Men with artistic talent had access to the RHA School and tended to get very academic training. They weren’t exposed to modern movements in art. What was being produced on the continent by Cubists and Fauvists never much influenced what was happening in Ireland. Women artists had to go abroad to study, particularly Paris. It was there that they became exposed to things like painting en plein air.

Later, when abstract art came in, people like Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, May Guinness and Norah McGuinness to a certain extent, began to explore new influences. The male establishment in Ireland had no idea of what all this was about. They laughed at it or felt threatened by it.”

Such a response led to the likes of Mainie Jellett trying to develop an alternative way of exhibiting work in the late 1930s and early 1940s. “The Irish Exhibition of Living Art had its first exhibition in 1943. It was a way of bypassing the RHA.”

Finucane points out that the artists were an extraordinary group of women.

“If they never handled a paint brush, they would have made their mark in Irish society in other ways. You had people like Countess Markievicz, an extraordinary revolutionary and politician, who was an artist as well. Edith Somerville was as much an artist as a writer. She was also a Suffragette, as were many of the women artists.”

Irish Female Artists of the 20th Century runs at UCC’s Jennings Gallery from tomorrow to September 8