Dr Brendan Rooney, Head Curator, National Gallery of Ireland explores the lives and work of Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, the subject of a major new retrospective at NGI, and the first joint exhibition of the two artists since they showed together in Dublin in 1924.
Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, who both lived and worked during the first half of the 20th century, were innovators and bona fide Modernists – concerned less with the literal or naturalistic depiction of the world around them than they were the harmonies of line, colour and form. They were also lifelong friends.
Hone and Jellett first met in London in 1917 as students at the Westminster School of Art. However, it was in Paris a few years later that their artistic journey together began in earnest, initially under the tutelage of painter André Lhote and, subsequently, and more transformatively, in the studio of influential Cubist Albert Gleizes.
Gleizes was a reluctant teacher and it was only through sheer persistence that these two Irish women, both in their mid-twenties at the time, managed to inveigle their way into his studio and, thereafter, his friendship. He later said that he had found their initial tenacity terrifying.
Hone and Jellett's decade-long shared experience in Paris was hugely significant for them. In essence, they arrived as academic figurative painters and left as abstract artists. Both were convinced that art had to occupy a place in modern society and France provided them with the blueprint.
They observed and digested Gleizes’s theories of rotation (how an object exists in space) and translation (objects’ relationship to each other in space) and adapted them to their own work, to the extent that their paintings not only revealed the clear influence of his art, but also resembled each other's, often closely. Juliette Roche-Gleizes, the artist’s widow, later recalled: "Mainie and Evie were so much his [spiritual daughters], one cannot separate them." This is how they are still viewed by many today: as two inextricably connected artists.
Watch: Dr. Brendan Rooney introduces The Art Of Friendship
The purpose of the new National Gallery of Ireland exhibition – featuring more than 90 works across a variety of styles and materials – is not to debunk this theory altogether, but to test it. Stories in the arts of collaboration and influence are complex and Hone and Jellett’s is no different. With this exhibition, the Gallery invites visitors to consider not just the similarities between the art (and personalities) of these remarkable friends, but also the differences, which became more pronounced as their careers evolved. Their artistic interactions were characterised over time by convergence and divergence, and this duality underpins the show.
The inclusion in the 1923 Dublin Painters Group show of Jellett’s painting Decoration, 1923 – an abstract composition with echoes of early Renaissance religious painting, and depictions of the Madonna and Child in particular – was transformative and the critical response to it, at times, hostile. A reviewer in The Irish Times wrote that the painting, and another similar piece by Jellett, "are in squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colours… to me they presented an insoluble puzzle". The less restrained George Russell (known as "AE") referred to Jellett’s painting in The Irish Statesman as "sub-human art".
One of the remarkable details of Hone and Jellett’s shared history, given the degree to which they are associated with one another, is that they exhibited together in isolation just once, in Dublin in 1924. That exhibition, held at the Society of Dublin Painters, consisted entirely of abstract, untitled works, in a variety of media, and elicited responses that ranged from bafflement to ridicule. The adverse reaction to Hone and Jellett’s work affected the artists in very different ways. While Jellett was emboldened, Hone was overwhelmed – Jellett launched into exhibiting internationally (in Dublin, London, Paris and Amsterdam), but Hone retreated, relinquishing art and entering an Anglican convent in Cornwall.
Hone's absence was relatively short-lived, however, largely due to the efforts of Jellett who ushered her back onto the artistic stage and restored her creative vigour. Indeed, it was Jellett who picked up Hone from the convent when she left, unordained. Hone began to paint again and in 1928 accompanied Jellett to visit Gleizes in France. Shortly afterwards, in a declaration of intent, not to say defiance, Hone held a solo exhibition in Dublin.
The contribution of Jellett and Hone to the story of Irish art in the 20th century cannot be overstated.
While Hone may have opted against religious life, she did not relinquish her faith. Indeed, religion and faith exercised a profound influence over both Jellett and Hone – albeit, again, in different and perhaps unexpected ways. They were inspired by early Renaissance art, particularly the work of Fra Angelico, not just for its devotional and thematic characteristics, but for its formal and material qualities. They saw in the careful geometry and decoration of early altarpieces a foreshadowing of their own formal, aesthetic preoccupations and believed that abstract painting possessed a comparable capacity to encapsulate spirituality. They recognised similar qualities in medieval Irish art, too. Differences in their personal religious expression – Hone converted to Catholicism in 1939 – undermined neither their shared faith nor their friendship.
The definitive separation in their work occurred in the early 1930s when Hone began to establish herself as a stained glass artist. This shift also had its origins in France, where Hone had viewed the magnificent windows of Chartres Cathedral shortly after her arrival in 1921. Having attempted, unsuccessfully, to join An Túr Gloine, the ground-breaking cooperative stained glass studio established in Dublin by Sarah Purser, she enrolled on the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art's stained glass course. She received further tuition from artist Wilhelmina Geddes in the Glass House studio and workshop in Fulham, London, and advice from the Dutch artist Roland Holst. Within a matter of months, she was a member of An Túr Gloine and had established herself as one of the most sought-after stained glass artists active in Ireland, or indeed England, where she undertook a large number of church commissions. Her single most significant commission was for the east window of Eton College Chapel (1948–52), which comprises more than 1,500 individual pieces of glass and is a testament to the connections between painting and stained glass that Hone helped to re-establish. Hone’s design, which replaced the window that had been destroyed during the Second World War, features the crucifixion in its upper register, and the Last Supper in the lower.
Jellett, too, diversified her practice, recognising utilitarian potential in the schematic Cubism that she and Hone had adopted in Paris. She designed commercial posters and, like Hone, rugs and dressing screens, an example of which, newly restored, features in the exhibition, along with an entire room dedicated to Hone's stained glass.
Abstraction could not sustain either artist, but it continued to inform their figurative work throughout the 1930s, 1940s and, in the case of Hone, who outlived her friend by some 11 years, the early 1950s. So, too, did the linear and colour values in Cubism that had excited them both as young students.
The contribution of Jellett and Hone to the story of Irish art in the 20th century cannot be overstated. By 1927, The Irish Times, which had reacted with such suspicion to Jellett’s work just four years earlier, described Jellett as "the only serious exponent in this country of the ultramodernist school of painting". She and Hone played pivotal roles in the organisation of the Irish Exhibition of Living Artists – an annual, independent showcase of Irish art – and were associated with the White Stag Group, an avantgarde collective that had been formed in England but moved to Dublin during the Second World War. Hone, for her part, promoted Irish art and design outside Ireland through her stained-glass work, developed a deep interest in medieval art and was also a discerning collector; her bequest to the National Gallery included work by, among others, Jellett, Gleizes, Jack B. Yeats, John Piper, Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso.
Their friendship sustained throughout. Indeed, Hone was among the last people to see Jellett, visiting her in the nursing home the evening before she died in 1944, of cancer, aged just 46.
Dr Brendan Rooney is the Head Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship is at NGI, Dublin until 10 August and is co-curated by Dr Brendan Rooney and Niamh MacNally - find out more here.
