Evie Hone, Irish, HRHA, (1894-1955)  “Composition 1925,” g...

Hammer

€6,400

Evie Hone, Irish, HRHA, (1894-1955) 

“Composition 1925,” gouache on paper, 40cms x 28cms (15 ¾” x 11”) Signed lower right ‘E. Hone 1925’.

Bears Dawson Gallery label on verso inscribed ‘Composition 1925 by Evie Hone, No. 13 in exhibition 1957’

The title of this work, Composition, is apt, as a small section contains, or at least suggests, music notation. If music was an indeed an inspiration, this may be revealed also in passages, in this otherwise resolutely abstract work of art, where the side of a lyre is suggested, or the curve of a grand piano. However, the central concept that finds expression in Composition is a religious one. Within the abstract forms can be discerned the head of a Madonna leaning over a child, an key element of Renaissance art that Hone has sublimated within a finely coloured harmonious abstract composition.

Along with her fellow-student and friend Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone is credited with introducing Modernist abstraction into mainstream Irish art. In 1920, she travelled to Paris, to study under the Modernist painter Andre Lhote. A few months later, she was joined by Jellett. Disenchanted with the liberal atmosphere in Lhote’s atelier in Rue Odessa, the two artists moved on the following year to study with the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes at his studio in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris. Well-connected politically, Gleizes had converted to Catholicism three years earlier, and his social idealism and intense devotion to religious subject matter in art was to the taste of the two young Irish artists. Although Gleizes did not as a rule take on students, he made an exception in the case of Jellett and Hone. In 1921 they began their studies, although it is clear, that they quickly began to influence Gleizes. Over the next decade, furthering their studies, they visited him one or twice a year, either in Paris or at the atelier he had found in the Ardèche. In the years following, in Ireland, while Jellett continued to produce Synthetic Cubist paintings that closely reflect Gleizes’ teachings, Hone took her exploration of Modernist art to a new level. In particular, in designs for stained glass windows for A Tur Gloine, she began to outline her figures with heavy black lines, echoing the work of Georges Rouault. However, while Rouault had, in addition to Christian themes, depicted courtrooms, circus clowns and bordellos, Hone’s piety is reflected in her unwavering subject matter of landscape and religious subject-matter. At a time when the teaching in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin was resolutely controlled by Realist and Impressionist artists, as was the Royal Hibernian Academy, both Hone and Jellett introduced, what was for Ireland, a radical new vision in art.
Dr. Peter Murray, 2022

Provenance: Formerly in the collection of An t'Athair Eric Mac Fhinn (1895-1987) of Galway, Patron of the Arts & Noted Scholar.

More Information

Signature clear. Colour vibrant.
No rips, tears or repairs.
Some scuffing to frame.
Please see extra images attached.