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

70 56 MAINIE JELLETT ( 1897-1944) Abstract Composition with Three Elements (1925) Oil on canvas, 93 x 73cm (36.6 x 28.7“) Signed and dated (19)’25 Provenance: Stanley Mosse Collection; With The Dawson Gallery, Dublin. Exhibited: Dublin IMMA, ‘Mainie Jellett’ , December 1991 / March 1992, Catalogue No.77; Dublin IMMA, ‘ Analysing Cubism ’, 2013, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Banbridge. Literature: Albert Gleize’s book on Cubism, illustrated; ‘A nalysing Cubism ’, IMMA 2013, Dublin, Cork and Banbridge, illustrated p.55 & 116. € 50,000 - 80,000 Mainie Jellett is a towering figure in the history of Irish art. She is acknowledged as the first native artist to exhibit pure abstraction in Ireland and for two decades, from 1923 to her premature death in January 1944, she was as Bruce Arnold has written, ‘the acknowledged leader of the modern art movement in Ireland’ (1). Patrick Murphy’s interest in Jellett began in 1964 when he bought a small watercolour landscape from an auction at Adams. Although the work was signed and dated 1921, it had been catalogued simply as ‘Irish watercolour’ and so Murphy, who was the only bidder, got a bargain! (2) Born in Dublin into a prominent Protestant family of Huguenot descent, Jellett took art lessons with Sarah Cecilia Harrison and May Man- ning before enrolling at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1914 where she was taught by William Orpen. She later studied under Walter Sickert at Westminster Art School in London and it was there that Jellett met fellow Dubliner, Evie Hone, who was to become her life-long friend and collaborator. In 1920 Jellett was awarded the Taylor Scholarship which enabled her to travel to Paris, then the centre of the art world. Hone was already in Paris and working in the studio of the Cubist André Lhote. Jellett joined her and together they learnt from Lhote how to abstract from nature while always maintaining an element of representation. After a period with Lhote, Hone and Jellett decided that they wanted to move further towards truly non-representational art. They approached the Cubist Albert Gleizes and asked if they could study with him. Gleizes did not take pupils but Jellett and Hone convinced him to make an exception. Thus began a long and fruitful collaboration between Gleizes, Jellett and Hone through which they explored both abstraction and the expression of spirituality through art. Despite the political and social turbulence that was engulfing Ireland during this period, Jellett decided to return to Dublin and introduce Irish audiences to abstraction. In pursing this goal, Jellett became both the greatest advocate of modernism in Ireland, and the prime target for those forces that rallied against it. In the autumn of 1923, Irish audiences were exposed to abstraction for the first time when Jellett exhibited a small abstract composition titled Decoration in the Society of Dublin Painters exhibition. The critical response to Decoration in 1923 reveals the hostility towards modernism in Ireland. While the Irish Times compared the painting to a malformed onion (3), utilising language reminiscent of continental attacks on modernism, the artist George Russell, described Jellett as ‘a late victim to Cubism in some sub-section of this artistic malaria’ (4). Despite Russell’s criticism, Jellett continued to paint and exhibit abstract works, including Composition with Three Elements. This accom- plished work demonstrates, in both scale and ambition, the confidence that Jellett had in her ability to produce fully resolved abstract compositions. Bruce Arnold illustrates this work in his monograph on Jellett under the title Abstract Composition and notes that Albert Gleizes also illustrated it in his book Kubismus in 1928 ‘to demonstrate the third Stage of Cubism (Epic Cubism)’ (5). The palette of grey, green, blue, ochre, brown and pink is distinctly Art Deco, the design movement also known as Art Moderne, which was fashionable in France and throughout Western Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Composition with Three Elements, represents the zenith of Jellett’s experiments with pure abstraction. By 1928, she had begun to rein- troduce figuration into her cubist work and in paintings such as Homage to Fra Angelico (1928) explicit references to both art history and Christian iconography are present. This return to representation aided the reception of Jellett’s art by the Irish public but also signalled the end of her avant-garde pursuit of pure abstraction. Dr Riann Coulter (1) Bruce Arnold, Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland, New Haven & London, 1991, p. vii. (2) Patrick Murphy, A Passion for Collecting: A Memoir by Patrick J Murphy, Dublin, 2012, 32-33. (3) ‘Two Freak Pictures: Art and Nature’, Irish Times, 23 October 1923. (4) George Russell, Irish Statesman, 27 October 1923. (5) Arnold, p. 90.