Irish Modernism: How Cubism Reached Ireland
In 1923 a painting called Decoration went on the wall at the Society of Dublin Painters' annual show. Nobody in the room had seen anything like it. One critic wrote that the pictures were "all squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colours"; another called the work "sub-human art". The painter was a 26-year-old Dubliner named Mainie Jellett, and she was not going to apologise for it.
Two Dublin women in Paris
Jellett had trained in Dublin and London, but in 1920 she moved to Paris with her friend Evie Hone. There they studied first under André Lhote, a teacher who loved Cézanne and taught students to see a scene as planes and volumes rather than a surface to copy. Jellett and Hone then moved on to Albert Gleizes, one of the theorists of Cubism, who pushed further: a painting did not have to depict a thing at all. It could be built from rhythm, colour and the relationship between shapes.
That was the idea Jellett carried home. It is easy to forget how far from Dublin's art world it was. Irish painting in the early 1920s was still dominated by portraits, landscapes and the afterglow of the Celtic Revival. A canvas with no obvious subject was an insult to many viewers.
Decoration, and the fight that followed
The 1923 picture, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, is abstract, but it is not cold. Its format, palette and tempera-on-wood surface echo old devotional paintings of the Madonna and Child. Jellett always insisted that abstraction and tradition were not opposites. She wrote and lectured on the subject for the next two decades, usually to audiences who needed convincing, and she slowly won them over.
Evie Hone took the same training in a different direction. She became one of Ireland's best stained-glass artists, and the geometry she learned in Paris sits behind the colour of her windows.
What Irish Cubism actually looks like
It is worth saying plainly that Irish modernism was not a copy of Paris. Jellett's compositions from the mid-1920s and 1930s turn arcs and planes of colour around a central point, with a musical sense of rhythm. Look at An Abstract Composition (c.1926), a long panoramic canvas from the peak of her abstract period, and you can see why she kept using the word rhythm.
By the 1930s and 1940s she was bringing the world back in. Achill Horses, painted in 1941, keeps the Cubist structure but lets horses, sea and Atlantic sky become recognisable again. It is now one of the best-loved pictures in the National Gallery.
Later, with other artists, she helped establish the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which opened in 1943, a year before she died, and gave modern painters a place to show work that the established societies would not hang.
Why it matters now
A century on, the gap between the audience and the avant-garde has narrowed. These pictures sit comfortably in a modern home: strong colour, clear structure, and an obvious Irish pedigree for anyone who looks twice. A few practical ways in:
- For a narrow wall or a space above a sofa, the long format of the Sea Rhythm canvas works well.
- For something softer, Abstract (c.1930) is a harmony of blues, blush pinks and cream, available as a framed print.
- To start with the story rather than the style, read our Mainie Jellett artist page.
Where to go next
If this period interests you, the Irish Abstract Art Prints collection gathers the modernist and abstract work we print, and the wider Irish Art Prints hub lets you set it beside the landscapes and portraits it was reacting against. That contrast is half the pleasure. Hang a Jellett near a Victorian watercolour and you see the argument she was making in 1923: that Irish art did not have to look back to be Irish.