In 1921, the sternly abstract cubist Albert Gleizes opened the door of his Parisian apartment to two young women in their twenties, the Irish artists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. They explained that they wanted him to teach them his method of ‘extreme cubism’. He wasn’t sure that he had a method, nor whether it was teachable. They were inexorable. Their gentle voices and their tenacity, he wrote later, terrified him, and he capitulated. They had accepted his pronouncements on ‘painting without subject’; now they wanted to know how.
They were to be trailblazers for modernism in the newly independent Ireland, Jellett as a painter and Evie as both painter and artist in stained glass – the striking east window in Eton College is her work. And from their first meeting at the Westminster School of Art, where they studied with Walter Sickert, to Jellett’s early death in 1944, they remained friends (hence the subtitle to this wonderful exhibition: The Art of Friendship). It’s just over a century since their last and only joint exhibition in Dublin in 1924, which attracted baffled derision from the critics… Well, the women have had the last laugh.
Their unique vision came from a fascinating mix of influences: Dublin Protestantism, Celtic art, a solid grounding in figurative painting, Sickert, Parisian abstraction and, in Hone’s case, exposure to the early Renaissance and Ravenna mosaics in Italy. Jellett also learnt how to paint curvy horses and curlicues from a 1935 Royal Academy show of Chinese art. She was a musician, too, and deployed colour and light as if they were melody and harmony.
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