seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Figurative Art


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Birth of Charles McAuley, Irish Painter

Charles McAuley, an Irish painter, is born on March 15, 1910, at Lubatavish, Glenaan, near Cushendall, County Antrim.

McAuley is the youngest of eight children in a family whose forebears had inhabited the Glens for many generations. He pursues painting from an early age, in a rural area when farming is one of the main sources of life and income. He goes on to become one of Ireland’s most celebrated landscape and figurative painters, his work synonymous with the Glens of Antrim.

A key encounter comes in McAuley’s mid-teens, when the artist James Humbert Craig, who is arts adjudicator at the Feis na nGleann, praises several of his youthful paintings, telling him, “You go ahead with this, and you’ll do well.” His paintings depicted the rivers, mountains, seascapes and rural life that surround him. He briefly studies at both the Belfast School of Art and Glasgow School of Art until he returns to his homeland to which he is utterly devoted. He is a member of the Royal Ulster Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy.

In 1984. McAuley collaborates with his friend, the poet John Hewitt, on The Day of the Corncrake, a publication by the Glens of Antrim Historical Society, in which twenty-five colour reproductions of his paintings are coupled with thirty poems about the Glens by Hewitt. In a foreword, Hewitt writes that his “awareness was not merely graphic but demographic. This has made him for me the authentic regional artist, the painter who belongs to and finds his themes in a known place. Nowadays, with the rapid flow of international styles succeeding each other, this is a distinctive title one can seldom confer.”

In a BBC Television film made in the mid-1980s, McAuley remarks that he might have enjoyed more success if he had made a career in the wider world, but that he certainly would not have been happier. “I’ve spent my boyhood and manhood in the Glens. . .and I have no desire to leave them until I die.”

McAuley dies at the age of 89 on September 30, 1999. He is buried in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Churchyard in Glenarm, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. On his death, BBC Northern Ireland describes him as “one of Ireland’s greatest colourists, but most significantly, a true and modest gentleman.”

The McAuley’s obituary in The Irish Times notes “Charles McAuley could fairly have claimed to be the artist of “the Glens”; for his native knowledge of the local landscape and people brought to the best of his work a special quality of emotion. Yet it is not a claim he would have made for himself, for self-promotion was a trait absent from his personality.”

McAuley is the uncle of BBC Northern Ireland broadcasters and writers Tony McAuley and Roisin McAuley.

Many of McAuley’s works are in private collections internationally. There are several of his paintings in public collections, for example at the Ulster Museum and Queen’s University Belfast.

(Pictured: “Bridge Near Cushendall” by Charles McAuley)


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Death of Figurative Painter Francis Bacon

francis-bacon

Francis Bacon, Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, emotionally charged and raw imagery, dies of a heart attack while on holiday in Madrid, Spain on April 28, 1992.

Bacon is born in Dublin on October 28, 1909. He is best known for his depictions of popes, crucifixions and portraits of close friends. His abstracted figures are typically isolated in geometrical cage like spaces, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon says that he sees images “in series,” and his work typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on a single motif, beginning with the 1930s Pablo Picasso-informed Furies, moving on to the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s screaming popes, and the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the 1960s portraits of friends, the nihilistic 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler more technical 1980s late works.

Bacon takes up painting in his late 30s, having drifted as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler. He says that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough comes with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which seals his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s he mainly produces portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels. Following the 1971 suicide of his lover, George Dyer, his art becomes more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of this later period is marked by masterpieces, including Study for Self-Portrait (1982) and Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86.

Despite his bleak existentialist outlook, solidified in the public mind through his articulate and vivid series of interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon in person is highly engaging and charismatic, articulate, well-read and unapologetically gay. He is a prolific artist, but nonetheless spends many of the evenings of his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London‘s Soho with like-minded friends such as Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker, and Jeffrey Bernard.

After Dyer’s suicide he largely distances himself from this circle, and while his social life is still active and his passion for gambling and drinking continues, he settles into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards. The art critic Robert Hughes describes him as “the most implacable, lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world” and along with Willem de Kooning as “the most important painter of the disquieting human figure in the 50’s of the 20th century.” Bacon is the subject of two Tate retrospectives and a major showing in 1971 at the Grand Palais.

While on holiday in Madrid in 1992, Francis Bacon is admitted to the Handmaids of Maria, a private clinic, where he is cared for by Sister Mercedes. His chronic asthma, which has plagued him all his life, has developed into a respiratory condition and he is unable to talk or breathe very well. He dies of a heart attack on April 28, 1992, after attempts to resuscitate him fail.

Bacon bequeaths his estate, then valued at £11 million, to John Edwards and Brian Clark, executors. In 1998 the director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin secures the donation of the contents of Bacon’s chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. The contents of his studio are moved and reconstructed in the gallery. Most of his works remain in the Hugh Lane in Dublin today.

Since his death his reputation and market value have grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s popes and 1960s portraits, reemerge to set record prices at auction. In 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud sets the world record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction.