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'Modern Times', Preview magazine, Sotheby's, April 2000
One Irish painting was a clarion call to an insular society, as Mark Adams explains.
It has always seemed easy for the Irish to be self-reliant, as Ireland appears to possess all that they could want. The rich landscape, the vast trove of truculant history and grand myth, and the quicksilver wit of the people: all of these are a store that has nourished Irish painters and writers.
Yet among the highlights of this year's Irish sale on 18th May is a major painting that stands apart from this compelling vision. Louis le Brocquy's Travelling Woman with Newspaper of 1947 rails at the complacency and cultural isolation of post-war Ireland, depicting a subject, and by extension its artist, beyond the norms of Irish Society. Travelling Woman With Newspaper established le Brocquy as Ireland's first figurative Modernist painter.
The subject is a matriarch of one of Ireland's traveller or Tinker families ( the picture has also borne the title The Last Tinker). Largely disowned by the state, the Tinkers claim to be the descendants of those displaced by the persecution and famine that have bedevilled Irish history. They exist at the margins of conventional society, begging and dealing in cars, horses and scrap metal, and always on the move. Any visitor to Ireland will see them in settlements of Chrome caravans on the bog roads and motorway intersections, fiercely independent outcasts. As le Brocquy himself said, "Faced with Cromwell's choice, to Hell or Connaught, the forebears of the travelling people took a third way. They took to the road - in time they became the road - that which lies outside the security of a settled society - their wild nature as defiantly distinct as that of a Tiger."
Le Brocquy was born in Dublin and according to the early critic, Ernie O'Malley, it was not until 1945, when he was 29, that he came across travellers outside Tullamore in the Irish midlands. He made many sketches and watercolours of them, resulting in a short series of oils, the most important of which was Travelling Woman with Newspaper. These works established a key theme in le Brocquy's work: an awareness of his Irishness, tempered by a wider concern for the individual human being.
Le Brocquy drew particularly upon his revered Picasso for his traveller pictures, with their exuberant palette and muscular cubism, emphasizing his rejection of the crushing conventions of society and state. His vision of the artist as outsider, ardent, passionate and independent, is perhaps best expressed by O'Malley: "For the creative worker (the travellers) could represent the artist who deals in the unexpected and the unrecognised, and who suffused with meaning familiar things."
Travelling Woman with Newspaper marked a watershed in Irish art. It demolished the idea of the painter as illustrator, just as James Joyce had done for the image of writer as storyteller. Its impact and its message went beyond Ireland, however, for it was exhibited internationally by the British Council in 1948 - 49, when it was reputedly seen by Willem de Kooning at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1949, influencing his own painterly vision of women.
On one hand, Travelling Woman with Newspaper is the most important Irish Modernist painting ever to appear at auction, and is a masterpiece by the man acknowledged as the greatest painter working in Ireland today. Beyond this, it also represents a startling link in the development of postwar international Modernist painting. It is in an Irish context, though, that it is most striking, for it represents a dramatic call to Ireland to awake from the wartime years of insularity and neutrality. In the shape of le Brocquy, Modernism had arrived in Ireland.
Tinker Woman with Newspaper
(a.k.a The Last Tinker), 1947-48
oil on gesso-primed hardboard, 127 x 89 cm
