Adams
Lot 22
Evie Hone HRHA (1894-1955) Abstract Composition c.1929 - 34Oil and gouache on canvas, 113 x 84cm (44.5 x 33")Provenance: Leo Smith (The Dawson Gallery) thence by descent to his sister Mary Murnane; her sale 1980's H. J. Byrne, Bray, where purchased by the present ownerExhibited: Dublin, Society of Dublin Painters Gallery, May-June 1929 and May 1931; Dublin, The Dawson Gallery, April-May 1957.This relatively large painting dates from the late 1920s or early 1930s and embodies many of the conceptual and technical concerns that had preoccupied Evie Hone for almost a decade. Its strong, sonorous colours and simplified modulated forms, its expressive almost gestural brushwork, its sense of animation and rhythm reflect how Hone, working between the Parisian avant-garde and her home in Dublin, developed ideas emanating from the radical experiments of Cubism (form and space) and Orphism (sound and colour) to create a new pictorial language of pure abstraction. With the absence of any form of representation it is a palette of pale and deep blues and greens and contrasting accents of purple and teal that construct the composition. These bands of pure colour are underscored by accents of fleshy pink, yellow and orange which provide balance but also add warmth and depth and activate the composition’s circular rhythmic movement. The canvas is arranged in an almost architectonic manner into two distinct parts – a larger upper compartment and a smaller horizontal predella panel. The interlocking concentric shapes in the upper level clearly denote figures, possibly a Madonna and Child, framed by an arched canopy complete with architectural tracery in the form of a lopsided trefoil (left) and quatrefoil (right). The predella with its composite of shapes in deep ochre, emerald and jade green as well as accents in lavender and blue suggests a recumbent figure stretched across the plane. Contrasting dark and light shades of brown are used to fix the composition in place like the gilt frame of a gothic or early renaissance altarpiece. Hone’s use of colour, rather than conventional drawing, to generate an arrangement of abstract almost biomorphic forms locates her in the vanguard of European modernism and is without parallel in Irish art. Although born in Dublin, Evie Hone had studied at a secession of London art schools from 1912, where she had gone to access specialist medical treatment for the paralysis she suffered after contracting polio as a child. But it was on a trip to Italy in 1914 that Hone decided to devote herself to painting and make art her vocation. Here she was profoundly moved by the medieval and early renaissance art she encountered – often still located in the churches and religious buildings it was originally designed to decorate. Her developing interest in primitivism, colour theory, spirituality and non-representational art would lead her to study with the painter and theorist Albert Gleizes in Paris from 1921. Accompanied by her friend and fellow Dubliner, Mainie Jellett, Hone worked with Gleizes in his studio and exhibited her abstract work in Paris as well as in Dublin. The ideas generated by the group Gleizes consolidated in an essay, and later in a book, entitled Le peintre et ses lois (1922-4), which argued that the representation of an object should be a form of ‘translation’ (its relation to other objects in space) and ‘rotation’ (how the object itself exists in space). Pictorially these ideas were worked out through a process of reduction of an object to a series of elemental forms and the synthesis of these into a multi-layered image that was not dependent on the system of single-point perspective that had dominated European art since the fifteenth century. This painting is a work of some significance and part of the group of mature abstract paintings shown in Hone’s two major solo exhibitions in Dublin in May-June 1929 and May 1931 at the Society of Dublin Painters Gallery at 7 St. Stephen’s Green. These were last displayed together in the posthumous exhibition of Hone’s abstract work staged by Leo Smith at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin in April-May 1957. Dr. Joseph McBrinn, October 2022
