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

94 83 BARRIE COOKE HRHA (1931-2014) Nude with Night Painting Oil on canvas, 122 x 122cm (48 x 48“) Exhibited: Touring Exhibition, ‘ Six Artists from Ireland ’, Catalogue No.26; Hendriks Gallery, solo exhibition, Dublin 1978, where purchased; Clifden Arts Week. € 15,000 - 25,000 Barrie Cooke always painted the women ‘I have shared my life with’, adding that ‘I’ve always painted the people I’ve been sexually involved with.’ In this powerful, intimate painting the woman is not named but her relaxed pose suggests an extraordinarily private relationship between artist and subject, between man and woman, between him and her. If being naked suggests being vulnerable and being belittled, being what Shakespeare calls ‘the thing itself . . . . a poor, bare forked animal’, nude suggests a dignified elegance, a beauty, a confidence, a feeling in this instance, especially, of being at ease with oneself. A nude is also a portrait but Cooke has said that to think about the character before you is a disaster: ‘You have a fact in front of you which is like a mountain, a series of hills. Ideally you forget that you’re looking at the per- son and you empathise not with the personality but with the shapes.’ This female, Rubensesque, relaxed nude, diagonally positioned, dominates the canvas. It is night time, the black background with streaks of light, a painting within a painting, captures that mood but the figure itself is rendered with a luminous touch. Behind her head, a detail catches the light and light is found all through the foreground especially in patches of unpainted canvas. The artist’s every gesture is physical in this oil on canvas; it has the fluidity of watercolour. Barrie Cooke ‘never liked acrylic, partly because it’s terribly difficult to get off once it’s dry, and you can dissolve oil paint.’ Here, Cooke, who said ‘I work on most of my paintings a long time’, dissolves the oil paint resulting in a work that seems spontaneous, a figurative composi- tion that contains abstract, expressionist elements. This nude is in harmony with Cooke’s idea that ‘all good art is abstract and all good abstract art is figurative.’ As for spontaneity, a hallmark in his work, ‘That’s the problem’ says Cooke. ‘To keep them at a point where you can surprise yourself all the way along.’ And that watercolour look? ‘That’s because it’s thin over white. I’m quite conscious of that. Rubens did it. I like his luminosity.’ For Cooke, Rubens is a great painter. ‘He’s not the fat bottoms and slobbery that most people think of.’ Kenneth Clark, in his major 1956 study The Nude , argues that ‘the nude does not simply represent the body’, but is related to ‘all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience’. Clark explores how for Greek sculptors the nude related to their geometry’ and in the twentieth century ‘man, with his vastly extended experience of physical life, and his more elaborate patterns of mathematical symbols, must have at the back of his mind analogies of far greater complexity’. Today’s viewer brings those complexities to Nude with Night Painting and by doing so the painting’s depth is revealed, the viewer’s experience is enhanced. This major work, from the prestigious Pat and Antoinette Murphy Collection, proves that Barrie Cooke is a cel- ebrator and a Romantic. ‘When I’ve painted nudes it’s in celebration of their bodies and their personalities’ and Cooke when he says ‘I’m Romantic in the real sense, an empathist’ that Romanticism and empathy can be seen here in a painting that gathers together what the Italian philosopher, Mario Rossi, identifies as the three great interests of man: ‘air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking’. Niall MacMonagle 2019