Adams Important Irish Art 30th September 2015 : You can Download a PDF Version from the Bottom Menu Down Arrow Icon

62 / 196

Oil, gouache and pencil on paper, 39 x 46cm (15.5 x 18”)
Signed and dated 1946
Born in Northumberland to an Irish mother, Phelan Gibb came to Paris in the early
1900’s. He moved in the same circle as Picasso, Matisse and many of the Fauves,
while Gertrude Stein was his friend and foremost patron. In 1909 Gibb became a
Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and had a studio off Boulevard Raspail, where he
taught Canadian artist Emily Carr.
Gibb exhibited fourteen works in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, alongside
artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Cézanne, Brancusi and Jack B. Yeats. Later that year
Gibb was to replicate in Dublin a successful one man held at the Bernheim Jeune
gallery in Paris. Organised by Count Casimir Markievicz and Oliver St. John Gogarty,
the exhibition was closed by the police and his pictures were confiscated, no doubt
deemed as blasphemous due to his tendency to paint nudes.
Returning to England with the outbreak of the Great War, Gibb creates his own pot-
tery and continues to exhibit in London, while in 1926 he illustrates 1830, a French
novel by surrealist Rene Crevel. Falling on hard times during the 1920’s, he is noted
as living in a house marked as ‘Desolate’ on an ordinance survey map. Gibb’s luck
changes in 1931 when he meets art dealer Lucy Wertheim, who promotes artist such
as Christopher Wood and the White Stag Group.
Examples of Gibb’s work can be found at the Tate Britain, the Salford Museum, and
the Towner Gallery as well as in the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. An exhibi-
tion of his work also took place in The Pepper Canister Gallery, in Nov 2011.
€800 - 1,200
Pencil on paper, 20 x 25.5cm (8 x 10”)
€700 - 1,000