Adams Summer Loan Exhibition - George Campbell And The Belfat Boys 7th July - 3rd September 2015

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At the start of 1974, Tom Carr and Campbell were included in the twenty-nine artists
represented in the collection of the ACNI that toured Dublin, Cork and Limerick (fig.235).
In the same year, the ACNI sponsored Campbell and Carr in their touring exhibition that
had been postponed in 1969. From this period, Campbell’s paintings contain less structure,
brushwork is looser and subjects emerge from a soft background.
In October 1974, Hendriks and Campbell fell out over ‘a disagreement on the ethics of
fine art’.195 Troubled from remarks critics had made about his work,196 Campbell learnt that
a collector had visited the Hendriks gallery to purchase one of his paintings but Hendriks
showed him a younger artist’s contemporary work. Without consulting Hendriks, Campbell
persuaded Armstrong to move to Tom Caldwell’s new gallery in Dublin,197 which opened
in 1974. Disappointed, Hendriks wrote to Armstrong requesting he collect all his work
from the gallery.198 Hendriks was popular in art circles and ‘had a loyal following’,199 and
Campbell’s actions would have led to further negative comment about him. For a number of
years, however, Campbell had been ‘disillusioned with the art Establishment’.200
In Spain, February 1975, Campbell held a solo exhibition of thirty gouaches in Galleria de
Arte, Malaga. He was also preparing to mount an exhibition, ‘Friends and Acquaintances’,
with Tom Caldwell, both in Belfast and in his new gallery in Dublin. The exhibition featured
absent friends, Dillon and O’Neill, and people he admired, Beethoven and Jack Yeats,
disguised as clowns. Years later, he referred to his interest in the subject of clowns: ‘What you
think you see is not what you see.’201 Like Dillon, he employed the comic–tragic clown figure
to evoke an underlying message: behind the mask there is an air of melancholia. It was the
first exhibition to open both sides of the border on the same theme. The Belfast exhibition
opened in April; the exhibition in Dublin in October consisted of over sixty oils and mixed
media works. The sales before commission and framing totalled close to £9,500.202
195David Hendriks in Campbell’s exhibition catalogue, George Campbell, November 1974.
196Brian Fallon, ‘Campbell Threatened by Fluency’, The Irish Times, 3 October 1969, p. 8.
197Campbell left Hendriks over the incident.
19825 October 1974.
199Conversation with Oliver Dowling, 3 December 2014. Several people stated Hendriks was upset at the way
Campbell left his gallery and the influence he had over Armstrong.
200Conversation with Pierce McAuliffe, 8 January 2015.
201BBC TV Triptych ‘painting’, 9 April 1979.
202The Belfast exhibition opened in April 1975 and total sales were £4,460 and opened later in October in
Dublin, total sales £5,040.