Adams
Lot 60
Mary Swanzy HRHA (1882-1978)The White Tower (c.1926)Oil on canvas, 101 x 81cm (39¾ x 32)SignedExhibited: IMMA, 'Mary Swanzy - Voyages', Dublin Oct 2018 - Feb 2019; IMMA, 'Analysing Cubism', 2013, Dublin, Cork, Banbridge; Belltable Arts Centre, 'Towards the World's Edge', Limerick 1981; University of Limerick, 'Familiar Faces', 2008; Clifden Arts Week.Literature: S.B. Kennedy, 'Irish Art and Modernism', illustrated with colour plate; 'Analysing Cubism', IMMA, illustrated p.85; IMMA, 'Mary Swanzy - Voyages', illustrated p.121 and 211.White Tower combines architecture and environment in a powerful example of Swanzy’s interpretation of cubism, perhaps the only Irish cubist painter of landscape, Swanzy is not one of the students of Lhote or Gleizes that dominate the later modernist school in Dublin. She slowly develops her singular interpretation of the emerging trend on a study trip to Paris in 1906 where she witnessed Picasso’s unframed portrait of Gertrude Stein in her apartment. Swanzy first exhibited at The Salon des Indépendants in 1914 when Robert and Sonia Turk Delaunay were both strongly represented with their influential lyrical style of Salon Cubism known as Orphism.Her visit to New York in 1925 returning from Samoa and Hawaii produced many drawings of skyscrapers and she is also known to have visited the Italian town of San Gemignano with its skyline of medieval towers; this painting is perhaps a layering of those historical and modernist concerns. The portrait format heightens the scale of the towers while Swanzy anchors the viewpoint with natural forms and an earthy palette in the foreground. The airy brushwork of the blues framed by the white geometrics allows the subject to soar. Her use of perspective goes against the strict cubist concern of flattening of the picture plane however it illustrates Swanzy’s independence of vision and ability to see things from her own point of view. The circular motif she adopts has something of the dynamism of futurist concerns with movement while also containing an element of Celtic interlace in the swooping elliptical lines she employs. Her economy of colour and the use of pinks and violets to balance the palette is Swanzy at her most confident. The use of flowers is somewhat reminiscent of her contemporary Georgia O Keefe (1887-1986).Liz Cullinane, September 2019
