Adam's The Antoinette and Patrick J.Murphy Collection 23rd October 2019

120 with the torso stopping at the upper shoulders, whereas the neck of the second one is thick and tubular, its armless torso extending to the small but protuberant breasts. In both sculptures the sitter is depicted as someone who knows her own mind, but whereas the first Head radiates calmness and peacefulness, perhaps an acceptance of the status quo, the second one radiates control and intensity. If the patina- tion on the bronze allows her to shimmer and shine in the light, by contrast the painted bronze absorbs the light like a Black Hole. It’s Yin and Yang, the oppositional elements that course through all of us, here isolated, stripped back, reduced to an essence. When the artist exhibited an entire series of paintings and mixed-media works entitled Manhattan Vertigo in 2000, Aidan Dunne, in an ar- ticle in the Irish Times, described them as ‘some of Bourke’s biggest and most ambitious work to date’. Richard Ryan, then Ambassador to the United Nations, who had previously brought the painter to Andalucia, had also suggested that the artist might find New York of interest. Thus, the artist, he who had previously ‘never really painted towns or cities or even buildings’ found himself leaning out of a twelfth story building - the vertigo of the title! He had read both Lorca and Whitman on New York in preparation for the visit, the former clearly chiming with his own viewpoint as he prefaces the exhibition catalogue with a quotation from the Spanish poet and dramatist: ‘The sharp-edged buildings rise to the sky with no desire for either clouds or glory. There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them’. On several occasions, the artist had previously remarked on his interest in abstract painting, an interest that is clearly observable in the dialogue between figuration and abstraction in much of his works. In relation to his New York experience he observed that he ‘thought that painting Manhattan would lead him into doing abstract painting’. In the event, it did not, and with hindsight it can be seen as rather confirming the painter’s exploration of the dialogue between figuration and abstraction. As Frances Ruane remarked of these works, they demonstrate a ‘technical mastery of composition and colour with a feel for the visual drama of the subject’. Although one critic has described the buildings in the Manhattan paintings as being like Lego blocks – and on one level one can see what he means – it’s the artist’s own statement that he thought the series would lead him to abstraction that is the most telling comment. We know that he likes Malevich, and Kandinsky, and these tall blocky structures suggest a route opening, but never taken. If we look at View from the Roosevelt Island Elevated Tram (No 16 in the Manhattan Vertigo catalogue) the broadly brushed-in blocks of colour – a reddish orange, a dull blue-violet, white, magenta, black – all over under-paint, and sometimes straited with other colours, suggest simultaneously the blocks and stripes of Malevich and Hard-Edge painting, except that nothing is ‘hard-edge’. Mind you, neither is a painter like Ad Reinhardt! There’s a strange feeling of insubstantiality, even though Bourke is often a very sculptural painter, burgeoning with volumes and tactile paint surfaces, but, partly because of the shadow cast by the skyscrapers, partly because of the intensity of light catching fire on the side of a build- ing, this painting, like many of the others, has the feel of a stage set animated by the drama of light and shade. In No.16, presumably looking out from his 12th story window, over lower buildings, and up to the skyscrapers, the black, blocky, almost hard-edge sections of the building anchor the canvas as solidly as the anchor for a cruise ship. The clouds – whoever saw clouds constructed of thick hatchings, often curled at the end? – provide another element of the artificial stage set, conjuring up Lorca’s image of the skyscrapers battling with the clouds. The vertical black block at the left, and the orangey-red one, two thirds of the way across, provide a repoussoir. Typically, for this artist, instead of being ‘full-on’, it is at an acute angle, reminding one that Bourke is a great constructor. It’s geometry bent to the shape of his will. Looking at No.18 (lot 105), one might initially think that there was a limit to the geometrical scenarios that could be constructed from sky- scrapers – but not for long. As with No 16 (lot 106) there is a dual viewpoint. This time we look down on a lower building topped with wa- ter-towers, two sides of which are bleached into a refulgent white, and an equally luminous yellow. The water-towers are insubstantial, like miniature stage-sets constructed out of twigs. The sense of depth is created by the serried, recessed rows of buildings, with the white top of what looks like the Chrysler Building, knifing into the sky as if to wound it, rhyming neatly with the white wall of the building close to us. This is a painting constructed on a double diagonal: from bottom left to top right; and from top left to bottom right, the intersection being at the water-tower in the middle of the work. There is a dialogue between flat surface and volume, between shadow and sunlight, between the ascendancy of the brushstrokes (used for example to create the windows on the yellow wall) and the anonymity of the blocked-in areas. Once again, the highly improbable sky, like clouds created on a stage by billowing cloths which have been carefully spot-lit, and the curving brushstrokes like little flocks of birds, create a slightly surreal element. This is not, of course, the real Manhattan. In the catalogue he carefully states that he ‘would not presume to say that I know Manhattan. I simply saw it’. It’s the Manhattan perceived by an artist for the first or second time. It’s a world where human beings are insignificant and largely absent. It’s a cityscape, not quite as a Dutch or Italian 17th or 18th century artist would have painted it, but it’s a cityscape which encapsulates the vitality of New York into a drama of light and shade. As he observed himself (perhaps politely parodying academic critical usage) ‘I like to break down the hegemony of the rectangle’. In so doing he creates a window into his own world, in the course of playing out the drama within the rectangle. In most of his work since the seventies, Brian Bourke creates a heightened apprehension, as with Munch’s Scream or Van Gogh’s flowers, modulated not into angst but into fecundity. He is high on Nature as a kind of Hortus Conclusus, a demi paradise which is bountiful, munifi- cent, in which trees have the sap and fizz of life as seen in a Millet. Although often categorised as one of the 1980’s neo-expressionists, and equally often classified as a satirist, he belongs to neither school. He mocks, rather than castigates (and usually at his own expense); he sees no competition between figuration and abstraction; he does not explore self-expression in the manner of the neo-expressionists. Despite the tag ‘literary’ being applied to his oeuvre because of the Don Quixote works, he is not remotely ‘literary’ in the usual sense of that term. As a young man in London, he had the nerve to go to the British museum and request works of art: ‘I’d...ask for drawings of Pisanello or Da Vinci and a man in white gloves would bring them down to you’. As an equally young man he was one of the founders of the Independents, the epithets iconoclastic, strident, and rebellious being as applicable to him as they were to the organisation. But his saving grace, that odd combination of humour, ironic mockery and forthrightness, which emerges in many of his off-the-cuff remarks such as ‘the cnuas was the best thing that happened to me since the day I lost my virginity’, also emerges in the work itself. The quirky, the slightly surreal, the confronter of notions of the ideal who is simultaneously a romantic, all of these elements swirl around in some kind of equipoise. His seeming oddities, those strange cloud shapes, those unsettling colour combinations, which have sometimes been referred to as ‘jarring elements’ are there to require you to ask questions. It’s not so much that he provokes the viewer but rather that he wants the viewer to ask questions, rather in the manner of Brecht’s Alienation Effect. Good painting, he once remarked, ‘is a transformation of something mundane into something that is full of life’. One couldn’t ask for a better epitaph. BMcA.