Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 31 MAY 2023

54 36 CAMILLE SOUTER HRHA (1929-2023) La Verit L’Espresso Mixed media on paper, 54 x 40cm (21¼ x 15¾”) Signed and dated June 1957 Provenance: With The Dawson Gallery, Dublin, where purchased, framing label verso, thence by descent to the present owners; The Estates of Dr. John & Mary Esther O’Driscoll, Kildare € 10,000 - 15,000 Dating from 1957, La Verit L’Espresso is an excellent example of Camille Souter’s early work. Her earliest surviving paintings date from 1955-1956. The use of newspaper as a painting support was unheard of in Ireland at the time and something she began to experiment with while on her first trip to Italy from September-December 1955. By January 1956, she had returned to Ireland. She would give birth to her daughter Michele in July 1956 and would have her first exhibition in Dublin in December. Numerous paintings by Souter from 1955-1957 were painted on newspaper. Given this work is on Italian newspaper (L’Espresso was founded as a weekly magazine in Rome in October 1955), one wonders whether this work was commenced in Italy and com- pleted in Ireland in 1957 as suggested by the date on the lower right. Alternatively, she might have brought some Italian newspaper home with her in 1956 and only worked on it later. Stylistically, this work appears more advanced than some of those dated 1955 or those painted on Irish newspaper in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art dated 1956. The use of black lines and the relatively abstract appearance of the work invites comparison with American Abstract Expressionist artists like Franz Kline. The small scale of the paint- ing and its use of cheap materials like newspaper is temperamentally far more European than Ameri- can however. In a vast and wealthy country like the United States, mid-century American artists tend- ed to express themselves on an unabashedly large scale, unrestrained by a long history of painting. By contrast, post-war Europe was re-building itself and after years of rations, the enormous scale of Ameri- can painting might have seemed something of an anachronism. Unlike Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning Souter’s use of newspaper as a painting support inevitably keeps things on a hu- man, intimate scale and routed in the real world. One is never inclined to view it as entirely abstract or non-representational even if her subject is hard to pin down. The use of cheaper materials such as newspa- per could also be said to anticipate the later Italian Arte Povera movement (which surfaced from 1967 to 1972) and to a lesser extent, Pop Art. With its strong black calligraphic lines over joyfully coloured patches of yellow, orange, blue and white, this painting almost has the appearance of stained glass. The conspicuous appearance of text from the newspaper is also reminiscent of advertising hoard- ings where some later layers of posters have peeled away to reveal older advertisements underneath. It is notable that just over a month later Souter would paint a work titled Out of a Window on newspaper. That work was inspired by a view from the window she worked under in her basement flat in Upper Fitzwil- liam Street, Dublin. La Verit L’Espresso also alludes to world events beyond the painting itself even if these are deliberately left undefined. Garrett Cormican, April 2023