Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie Important Irish Art | 1 June 2022 87 54 HUGHIE O’DONOGHUE RA (B.1953) Yellow Man II, 2008 Oil on linen, 207 x 243cm (81½ x 95¾’’) Signed; signed, inscribed and dated 2008 verso Provenance: With the James Hyman Gallery, London Exhibited: Hughie O’Donoghue, The Geometry of Paths, James Hyman Gallery, London, 06 March - 19 April 2008; Hughie O’Donoghue, Parables, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, 30 May - 12 July 2008 Literature: Hughie O’Donoghue, The Geometry of Paths, James Hyman Gallery, London, 2008, (cat.4), illustrated detail (un-numbered); Hughie O’Donoghue, Parables, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, 2008, (cat. 8), illustrated p.15 and again, full page (un-num- bered); Hughie O’Donoghue. € 40,000 - 60,000 The starting point for Hughie O’Donoghue’s group of Yellow Man paintings is a lost work by Vincent Van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon . It’s fair to say that O’Donoghue was drawn not just to the painting itself but even more to its history and the extraordinary status of Van Gogh as a cultural icon, a universal symbol of the artist. The original work is a self-portrait of sorts, a sun-drenched composition in which the painter, carrying his working materials , tramps through the baking southern countryside in search of a suitable vantage point. In time, the work came to reside in a gallery in Magdeburg in Germany. It was possi- bly incinerated there during an Allied bombing raid during the Second World War. It seems more likely, though, given its status, that it was removed for safe keeping with hundreds of other works to the Stassfurt mines. Certainly the so-called Monuments Men, whose story is fictionally recounted in George Clooney’s film, had it high on their list of works to try and recover. Before they got to the mines, however, there were two fires, possibly diversionary to dis- guise theft, and the Van Gogh never resurfaced, then or since. It is known through several photographs and O’Donoghue, who employs photography extensively as a documentary medium, recording a lost or buried past, was intrigued that the painting had been left in this curious, in-between state. He is not alone in this. Francis Bacon, who himself used photographs as sources continually, made a series of paintings inspired by reproductions of the lost Van Gogh. In the painting Van Gogh, within the landscape, was on his way to paint the landscape, and the earth in all its physical reality has consistently been at the heart of O’Donoghue’s work: he has envisaged the painter working the surface of the canvas as an archaeologist working a site, unearthing what is hidden within. In 1973, much taken with the work Van Gogh made when he lived in Arles, O’Donoghue visited the city to see if it might illuminate the mystery of the painter’s achievement. Nobody seemed to know much about the artist. In Arles, Van Gogh rented what became known as the Yellow House after his own celebrated painting (now in the Van Gogh Museum). On the Tarascon road, O’Donoghue asked a shopkeeper about the location of the famous house. “They showed me the place on the other side of the road where the house had once stood.” Badly damaged during the war in an Allied bomb- ing raid, it was long gone. O’Donoghue’s Yellow Man, wearing a straw hat against the sun, stands in for Van Gogh, an every-person artist, setting out to explore through paint what is implicit though invisible, lost in the dense fabric of time past and lives lived, balancing destruction with restitutive creation. At the time, O’Donoghue had fulfilled a longterm plan to build a studio in rural Co Mayo, deep in the country where his mother’s family had lived and he was, figuratively speaking, more closely than ever working the earth of his own family history. Aidan Dunne, May 2022