Crawford Art Gallery
20 July – 15 September 2024
Crawford Art Gallery will be closed for two years for refurbishment from mid-September onward. The current exhibition, ‘NOW YOU SEE IT…’ (20 July – 15 September), is the result of a public survey to discover the artworks from the collection that audiences like and will miss during the gallery closure. This collaborative curatorial approach has produced intriguing results. Two floors of the museum and the stairwell accommodate the selected works, which span three centuries, framed by Emily Dickinson’s poem, Forever – is Composed of Nows.
From the paintings and sculptures presented in the Long Room, we can get a sense of how cultural myths are built. Seán Keating’s epic oil painting, Men of the South (1921-22) dominates the north wall. This is a work that glorifies warlike machismo. Femininity is also described in this space: Leo Whelan’s oil painting The Kitchen Window (1926) shows a woman polishing silver, an allegory surely for the restoration of national treasure during the Irish Civil War (1922-27). Yet it also affirms the woman’s place in a supportive role within the domestic realm, and not as an equal. Trath Scoile, Cnoc Foile, Tir Conaill (c.1946) painted by Muriel Brandt, depicts small children in a dreary classroom in Gweedore in the Donegal Gaeltacht. At that time, Ireland was rehabilitating the Irish language and mythology. Nationalism was politically endorsed in the 1920s, but do we licence that sentiment now?
Harry Aaron Kernoff’s The Forty Foot, Sandycove (1940) shows men bathing, while Patrick Hennessy’s Self Portrait and Cat (1978) illustrates how the homoerotic male gaze was encoded in paintings, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland; yet these works found their way into the national collection. What cannot be spoken of can be wrought in paint.
The walls of the Upper Gallery have been painted purple, creating a futuristic energy. Machines Of Learning (1938) by Alicia Boyle cautions against the error of social complacency in the year Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. Across the room, Stephen Brandes’s pen on vinyl drawing, Der Aangstlustbaum (2005) or ‘The Fearlust tree’, is a puzzle whose title neatly summarises our modern neoliberal reality. Tom Climent’s monumental geometrical landscape, Eden (2019), finds echoes in abstraction, subject, and colour palette across other works around the room. It particularly resonates with Ronnie Hughes’s Columns (2022) that in turn resembles data stacks – hidden geopolitical realities layered in tottering columns. Interpreted as the ‘Holy Trinity’ or the holy family when it was first exhibited, Mainie Jellett’s luminous oil on canvas, Abstract Composition (c.1935), may now be perceived as a multi-gendered being, its meaning transcending time and artistic intention.
The Modern Gallery walls are pink and black, with four women portrayed: Dragana Jurišić’s photograph of Irish poet, Paula Meehan; Amanda Coogan’s intriguing giclee print, Mary Magdalene The Wren (2021); Gerald Festus Kelly’s oil painting, Sasha Kropotkin (c.1912), depicting Alexandra Petrovna Kropotkin – a Russian princess and writer, responsible for translating Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; and John Lavery’s The Widow (1921), a portrait of Muriel Murphy MacSwiney whose husband Terence MacSwiney died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, bringing international attention to the Irish Republican campaign.
Of the six male portraits, three are painted by Louis Le Brocquy, depicting Irish literary icons Joyce, Yeats and Beckett. There is also an immense photograph of proud Corkman, Roy Keane, by Murdo MacLeod from 2002, and an oil painting of Irish playwright Lennox Robinson by Margaret Clarke from 1926.
In the adjoining room, a trestle table holds Eclipse (2015), an erasure installation by Kathy Prendergast. Matt black globes of varying sizes cover the trestle table. The work implies the erasure of knowledge based on myth, revealing the precarity of our current reality. An enchanting work in black acrylic and gold leaf by Patrick Scott, Meditation Painting 33 (c. 2006), advocates contemplation. Can art be a corrective to fake news, polarised debate, and other negatives trending now? Is the gallery a safe place to unite opposing voices? If so, this is what will be sorely missed, when Crawford closes for its two-year renovation.
Jennifer Redmond is a visual artist and educator based in Cork.
