40
Homage to Fra Angelico
is a major work in the oeuvre of Mainie
Jellett, a leading advocate of modernist art in Ireland. Exhibited
at a solo exhibition at the Society of Dublin Painters in 1928, the
work was warmly received by the critics of the Irish Times and the
Irish Statesman, two publications which had only five years earlier
lambasted Jellett for her abstract and seemingly incomprehensible
painting,
Decoration,
(1923, National Gallery of Ireland). The work
represents a turning point in Jellett’s reputation and to some extent
her practice. In it she moves from an extreme abstraction to the use
of more recognisable figurative elements. Homage pays tribute to the
work of the early Renaissance artist Fra Angelico, whose paintings,
which were reproduced in religious journals, were well known in
Ireland. Jellett schematises the underlying forms and shapes of Fra
Angelico’s design of his altarpiece, the
Coronation of the Virgin
(c.
1435, Uffizi), editing out unnecessary detail. The curved form of
the composition derives directly from the framing of Fra Angelico’s
painting. In addition Jellett draws on the work’s dominant colours
and tones using a similar neutral background with yellows, blues and
reds marking the prominent components in the painting.Through the
language of cubism she transforms a 15th century religious artwork
into a modern expression of spirituality. In doing so she convinced
many of her contemporaries in Ireland of the value and relevance of
modern art. As Riann Coulter has discussed Jellett’s choice of the
Virgin as a subject was a way of linking modern art to the sensibilities
of the predominantly Roman Catholic public of Free State Ireland.
The theme of the Coronation of the Virgin is found in Gothic and
early Renaissance art and represents Mary being crowned Queen of
32
Mainie Jellett (1897-1944)
Virgin with Angels
Gouache, 43.5 x 33cm (17 x 13”)
Signed and dated 1930
Provenance: From the collection of the late Miss Hosford
Exhibited: The Dawson Gallery (original label verso)
Mainie Jellett Retrospective
Exhibition, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, July - Oct 1962, Catalogue. No. 100
Irish Women Artists 1870-1970
, Adam’s, Dublin, July 2014, AVA Gallery, Clandeboye Aug-Sept 2014, Cat. No. 29
Literature:
Irish Women Artists 1870-1970
, full page illustration p.29
€4,000 - 6,000
Heaven. The story, which is recounted in the bible, was popularised in
the 13th century Golden Legend. For Jellett such a theme evoked a
period of widespread devotion in which the artwork played a central
role.
Homage to Fra Angelico
relates closely to a work produced by Albert
Gleizes, Jellett’s friend and mentor, who completed a painting with a
similar composition in 1927. Gleizes’s work was intended to be part
of a scheme of murals for a church at Serrieres close to where he had
established a commune of artists on the banks of the Rhone. In the end
the murals were never installed. Jellett, who visited Gleizes and who
corresponded regularly with him knew of the project. Both artists began
in this period to make explicit reference to religious themes. According
to Gleizes’s biographer, Peter Brooke, the French artist’s version of
the Coronation of the Virgin owed a great deal to Jellett.
Homage to
Fra Angelico
belonged to the academic Eileen MacCarvill who was a
great champion of Jellett’s work after the artist’s early death in 1944. In
1958 MacCarvill published Jellett’s key writings on art together with
tributes from And Lhote and Gleizes in Mainie Jellett: The Artist’s
Vision. Included in the book is a full-page illustration of
Homage to Fra
Angelico
together with reproductions of the series of preparatory studies
that Jellett produced for the painting showing how she transformed the
original early Renaissance image. Jellett’s work was seen to incapsulate
the core values of spirituality and universality which her particular form
of cubism championed and which challenged what the artist saw as
the superficiality of contemporary academic and realist art. Dr. Róisín
Kennedy Riann Coulter, ‘Translating Modernism. Mainie Jellett,
Ireland and the Search for a Modernist Language’, Apollo, 164, 2006,
pp.56-62. Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the 20th
century, Yale University Press, 2001, p.159.
Note on Lot 31 Mainie Jellett (1897-1944) Homage to Fra Angelico (1928)
Cont. from p36
