Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 9th December 2020

www.adams.ie Important Irish Art | 9 th December 2020 27 22 NEVILL JOHNSON (1911-1999) Kilkeel (c.1946) Oil on canvas, 40 x 60cm (16 x 24’’) Signed with monogram; inscribed verso Kilkeel was probably included in the first exhibition Nevill Johnson took part in with Victor Wadding- ton in 1947, soon after he was taken on as a gallery artist. It belongs to a small group of paintings in which Johnson included the most appropriate of the driftwood, shells and stones he collected in the mid-1940s from the shores of Lough Neagh. Their arrangement suggests unease or struggle between these anthropomorphic forms into which human and animal life has been mutated by some apocalyptic event. Painted in response to the Second World War, this group of works also express a more profound consciousness of the fears and despair of the atomic age. This is the existential psychological land- scape of the post-war world, at the edge of sea and land and illuminated in a mysterious, nocturnal glow, and there is an interesting comparison with Francis Bacon in the blurred, turning profile of the left-hand ‘head’ of the large driftwood form. S.B. Kennedy wrote of Johnson’s paintings in this period that ‘along with Jack B. Yeats’ Tinker’s Encampment: The Blood of Abel , 1940, Kenneth Hall’s Après la Guerre and Middleton’s Our Lady of Bikini [they] are amongst the most poignant images of war and its effects painted by any artist in Ireland in the modern period’. (S.B. Kennedy, ‘Irish Art and Modernism 1880-1950’, Irish Academic Press, Queen’s University, Belfast, p.139) Dickon Hall € 3,000 - 5,000