National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
10 April–10 August 2025
By Joseph McBrinn
For a friendship that so profoundly shaped the course of modern art in Ireland, just how Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett met is curiously unrecorded. What took them to Paris and induced them to approach Albert Gleizes, the only original pre-war Cubist painter to follow through on its implications in creating a totally new form of non-representational art, is known more through legend than fact. It is thought that they initially met in London, where both had attended art school, drawn together by a shared belief in modernism but also a love of Ireland. Born in late Victorian Dublin, in 1894 and 1897 respectively, to middle-class Protestant families of the unionist establishment, they would come of age in a very different country. In the newly independent Ireland of the 1920s their bold abstract paintings were greeted with much hostility and suspicion. Ridicule eventually gave way to recognition, and by the 1930s their steadfast commitment to modernism had received official sanction from the nascent Irish state as a symbol of the new nation’s modernity.
While their artistic legacy owes much to Ireland, its landscape and history, its mythology and mysticism, they initially drew deeply from the dynamic energy of Montparnasse in Paris—an almost electrical force that animated the lives and work of other contemporary expatriates, from Pablo Picasso to Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Josephine Baker. Based in Dublin, they spent long, intense periods working in Gleizes’s studio in Paris or at Moly-Sabata, the utopian artists’ colony founded by Gleizes in the Ardèche region of south-eastern France, between 1921 and 1939. Together, in the spirit of collaboration characteristic of a medieval guild, they bravely abandoned image-making entirely and sought to reinvent painting through a search, in Jellett’s words, for ‘the inner principle and not the outer appearance’. The outcome, a cohesive body of abstraction unrivalled in the history of modern art, positioned Hone and Jellett, uniquely as Irishwomen, amongst the leading avant-garde artists of the time. Their work was widely exhibited, routinely praised and included in the earliest surveys of abstract art. They were amongst the few women who contributed to the major L’Art d’aujourd’hui (‘Art of Today’) exhibition that was held in Paris in 1925. Gleizes subsequently included them in his international survey Kubismus (‘Cubism’), which was commissioned by László Moholy-Nagy and published by the Bauhaus in 1928. And they were invited to join the avant-garde group Abstraction-création: art non-figuratif, founded in Paris as ‘an international union of abstract artists’, at its inception in 1931.
Whilst well received in Paris, the earliest reviews of Hone and Jellett’s abstract canvases in Dublin described their work as a kind of ‘insoluble puzzle’ of ‘squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colours’. In 1924 they bravely held a joint exhibition. The response was vitriolic. Critics such as Thomas McGreevy writing in The Klaxon and Seumas O’Sullivan in The Bell, however, saw in their abstractions an affinity to modernist writers such as James Joyce, as well as detecting sophisticated layers of art-historical references that underpinned the work. In their hands, abstraction would become a means to connect modern art to the great tradition of medieval religious art, and also to ancient Irish art. Jellett, a brilliant writer and teacher as well as a painter, wrote: ‘If an Irish artist of the eighth or ninth century were to meet a present-day Cubist or non-representational painter, they would understand one another’.
In Ireland, Hone and Jellett became a vital, modernising force, much like Sarah Purser before them. Highly critical of the conservative nature of Ireland’s leading venues for contemporary art, such as the Royal Hibernian Academy, they were founding members of the Society of Dublin Painters in the 1920s and established the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943. With brilliant foresight, they saw contemporary art as integral to a nation’s museums and galleries. To this end, they joined the council of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, and Hone was later appointed to the board of governors of the National Gallery of Ireland. In the 1930s Hone turned to stained glass, producing abstract and figurative work of ever-increasing beauty and power. She joined Purser’s An Túr Gloine (see Museum Eye in HI 32.6, Nov./Dec. 2024) in 1935, and when it closed a decade later she opened her own studio. At the same time Jellett, too, began to explore the figurative and the spiritual in her painting. They remained committed, however, to abstraction and still thought of themselves as vanguard Cubists when they were awarded a series of prestigious state commissions to decorate the Irish pavilions at the international exhibitions held in Glasgow in 1938 and New York in 1939.
Jellett died suddenly from cancer in 1944. Hone, whose health had been weakened by the impact of childhood polio, battled on alone and worked with unremitting intensity until 1955. Major retrospective exhibitions were mounted in Dublin, for Hone in 1958 and for Jellett in 1962. Since then their reputations have fallen into eclipse. It is over a century since their last joint exhibition, and the forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland, following on from the recent An Túr Gloine (National Gallery of Ireland) and Sarah Purser (Hugh Lane Gallery) shows, promises to offer more than a glimpse into their world, even if much remains to be recovered about their lives, their careers, their remarkable achievements and not least their friendship.
Joseph McBrinn is Reader in Art and Design History at the Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster.