Clodagh Finn: The ‘twin-souls’ who brought modern art to Ireland

The women were already firm friends — “twin-souls” in the words of one commentator — who met while studying art in London. Evie Hone went to Paris in 1920 and, no doubt encouraged by her, Mainie Jellett followed in early 1921.

Initially, they studied with French Cubist painter André Lhote, but they were looking for something more radical, something better suited to an exciting new age. In the years that followed, these two remarkable Irishwomen would find themselves at the very forefront of international abstraction art. 

If we spool back through their eventful lives, one of the defining moments must have been the day they knocked on Albert Gleizes’s studio door and asked him to teach them. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that (very awkward, as it turned out) encounter sometime in 1921. 

Apart from anything else, I’d give anything to have witnessed the resolve and the vision of these two twentysomething women who engineered a meeting that would have a profound impact not just on their own lives, but on that of Gleizes and on the international art world too.

Thankfully, we have a glorious peephole into that moment because, as CP Curran wrote in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review in 1955, Albert Gleizes left an entertaining account of it. Then in his 40s, Gleizes recounted that, when the two women came a-calling, he was still immersed in his own technical problems and teaching was the furthest thing from his mind.

“Give you lessons?" he said. “But it is I who want lessons... I have the greatest trouble in clearing up my own difficulties. How do you think I can tackle yours?"

The women persisted, and “their quiet assurance and decided tone threw him into an agony of embarrassment”.

When he heard they had been studying with Lhote, he thought he had found a way out. He couldn’t poach a friend’s pupils, he said, but Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett were not for turning. “But we are at perfect liberty to choose our own master,” they apparently said.

Gleizes gave in and lessons were arranged, although it turned out to be a deeply collaborative, rather than a master-pupil, relationship. As CP Curran writes: “Gleizes freely confesses that, forced to clarify the theory of his practice, he profited quite as much from the experience as the two obstinate irlandaises”.

They were instrumental in helping him crystallise his artistic principles and he later acknowledged their considerable influence on his 1924 study, La Peinture et ses lois (the Laws of Painting).

“The friends’ tenacity and readiness to unite would characterise Hone and Jellett’s engagement with the art world for years to come,” according to Dr Brendan Rooney, curator with Niamh MacNally, of the magnificent exhibition, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, The Art of Friendship, which opened at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin on Thursday.

They would need every shred of that tenacity because when Mainie Jellett’s abstract wonder, Decoration, “landed like a comet”, to use Dr Rooney’s evocative phrase, in Dublin in 1923, the lash of criticism was merciless.

The Irish Times reviewer dismissed its “squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colours” as an “insoluble puzzle” while George Russell was excoriating in a piece in the Irish Statesman. He denounced Jellett’s abstractions as “artistic malaria” and "subhuman”, concluding that the convention was so simple that nothing could be said in it.

The same kind of hostility and bewilderment greeted a joint exhibition of the artists in 1924, the only time Jellett and Hone’s work was shown together. Until now. The full turn of a century has offered us the kind of long lens that puts their extraordinary work into perspective.

Now, for example, Decoration, the “freak picture” once compared to an onion, is considered “arguably the most significant modernist painting in the history of Irish art”, to quote Dr Rooney again.

If you can, catch his introductory talk to the exhibition, available on YouTube, before visiting the 90 or so works on show at the gallery. It outlines the sweep of both artists’ work, from Jellett’s painting, her gift for music, her stage-set design, writing and broadcasting to Hone’s art and her now very well-known stained-glass wonders.

It’s interesting to see that the Irish State, in fairness to it, didn’t take too long to recognise the women’s respective genius. They both got significant State commissions in the 1930s.

What is most life-affirming in all of it though is how these two women, buoyed up by their enduring friendship, relied on each other and fellow artists to keep going in a hostile environment.

One of those artists, Maude Ball wrote these uplifting words to Jellett after her trouncing in the press: “Don’t be downhearted to please anybody. It’s wonderful that most [of] us get through and survive.” And they had much to survive – criticism, prejudice and, in Evie Hone’s case, ongoing health difficulties.

The infantile paralysis (polio) she experienced as an 11-year-old (she fell across the altar while decorating Taney church for Easter) left her with limited movement and health issues for the rest of her life.

The sustaining power of friendship is also evident at many stages throughout the women’s lives. Evie Hone, a deeply religious woman, entered an Anglian convent in Cornwall in 1925. 

When she left two years later, without taking her final vows, Hone’s sisters asked Mainie to collect her. At the end of Mainie’s too-short life in 1944 at the age of 47, it was Evie who visited the nursing home the night before she died.

Evie Hone, who converted to Catholicism in 1937, died in 1955 in the doorway of her parish church in Rathfarnham, a sudden but somehow uncanny departure for such a religious woman.

The legacy of their work and their friendship shines on with extraordinary force. These two artists were, to use Dr Rooney’s evocative description, “champions, teachers, collectors, donors, organisers and supporters of other artists. They were amazingly generous and warm individuals, but they were also organisers and doers. They were radical thinkers, but also radical doers who were inclusive and brought people with them.” 

There’s a photograph of Evie Hone talking to Louis Le Brocquy at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, the annual exhibition of abstract art which she helped found with Jellett and others in 1943. Le Brocquy later recalled the support both women gave him in his early career.

They were also involved with the White Stag group of artists, and were hugely encouraging to other artists who came from a different artistic tradition. Many of those artists later acknowledged their intelligence, their understanding and their willingness to help.

I just wish I had been around when Mainie Jellett was living at Fitzwilliam Square. I would have taken a leaf out of her inspiring book and rung the bell, unannounced. Too late for that now but we can all engage in a bit of magical time travel by visiting an exhibition that not only brings her work and that of Hone’s back to life, but gives us an unrivalled insight into the women who produced it.

Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone The Art of Friendship runs until August.