Irish Arts Review Sailing to Byzantium: The Portraits of Edward McGuire Author(s): Dorothy Walker Source: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 21-29 Published by: Irish Arts Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492027 . Accessed: 18/06/2014 18:22 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Irish Arts Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Arts Review (1984-1987). http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:22:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Irish Arts Review
Sailing to Byzantium: The Portraits of Edward McGuireAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 21-29Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492027 .
Accessed: 18/06/2014 18:22
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Irish Arts Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Arts Review(1984-1987).
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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: THE PORTRAITS OF EDWARD McGUIRE
Edward McGuire died just over a year ago, on 26 November 1986, at
the relatively early age of fifty-four, too young for a painter of his ability and consistent style.
The renowned critic Brian O'Doherty used the word "declarative" about
McGuire's painting, "clearing away styl istic mannerisms." McGuire's portraits,
Byzantine in their stillness, frontality and schematic colours, subscribe nothing to the convention of the living, breath ing subject. On the contrary, they are directly in the tradition of still-life painting, substituting the human person for the usual flowers or fruit, in what
Yeats calls "the artifice of eternity." Yet the portraits are iconic in that they are images of a presence and are neither narrative nor wholly descriptive. The attendant grave-goods of the sitters are not documentary; they are as mysterious as they are sacramental in the sense of being an outward sign of an inner reality. As such, they do not have to be 'real istic', although the manner of painting is a realist mode. Through the mildly sur realistic content of seemingly normal settings, the painter relates to his subject by a vatic instinct rather than by an inventory of biographical access ories in the painting, as other portrait ists have done.
Edward McGuire painted no less than twenty-five portraits of poets and
writers, an astonishing specialization; it is hard to think of a similar body of
work in Western art history. It may be that he felt that painting images of poets gave him a sort of vicarious poetic licence that freed him from his own restricted mode: the poets became 'the singing masters of his soul.' The essent ial energy of his work lies in these iconic presences, painted with little regard for painterly pretensions, but
with a dynamic commitment to pure, 'declarative' painting. McGuire was born in Dublin in 1932,
the youngest son of Senator and Mrs. Edward McGuire. His father, E.A.
McGuire, a leading figure in the com mercial life of Dublin, was also a well known amateur painter who exhibited regularly with the various group exhibit ions. So when the young Edward start ed to show his work in the mid-fifties, he at first used the name Edward Augustine which, however, he soon changed to his name, Edward McGuire,
The premature death last year of the artist, Edward McGuire, was a
sad loss to his family, his friends and the world of art. Here
Dorothy Walker, Ireland's leading authority on contemporary
painting, discusses the work of this committed and talented but
often enigmatic artist.
Iue to the almost instant acclaim for his
Avork. He studied art history in Florence .n 1952, and art in Rome in 1953, and :hen attended the Slade School in London in 1954, where he came under :he life-long influence of Lucien Freud. It is arguable that painters come under the influence of those they resemble, so it is profitless to speculate how his work
might have developed had he been influenced by a less rigid, more colour loving artist than Freud. Freud, al though bom Austrian, would seem to epitomize a certain type of pale, inhibit ed, tight-lipped English art, whereas
McGuire, in his personal life, was any thing but pallid or inhibited or tight lipped. It may be that many of the troubles of Edward's personal life arose from the contradictions of his art and his personality.
When McGuire returned to Ireland from London, the young artist Patrick Swift (who died in Portugal, at an even
younger age than McGuire) was instru mental in getting him to start painting seriously. At that timc, in the mid fifties, both Swift and McGuire were almost indistinguishable in their painting from Lucien Freud. McGuire's paint ings were mostly still-life studies of birds, dead game-birds such as snipe.
When asked in later years why he paint ed so many pictures of dead birds, he typically replied "because they stay still." It seems obvious, however, that the challenge of rendering a dead form into a live painting was one which fascinated him and which led to the lengthy series of owl paintings, twenty
one of them, only exceeded as a subject by the portraits of writers. I will return to the owls later.
McGuire's first portrait of a poet is the 1961 water-colour of Patrick
Kavanagh which John Jordan has de scribed, in the 'Irish Imagination' cata logue of 1971, as "sombre, remorseless,
transcendent but naturalistic." He received a small number of portrait commissions in the 1 960s, his first 'Wanda Ryan', a child portrait, in 1966, 'Garech Browne' in 1968, and 'John
Ryan' completed in 1970. It was, how ever, in 1970 that he painted one of the very best paintings of his career, the full-size portrait of the poet Pearse
Hutchinson, truly iconic in its arresting image of the bearded poet, clothed in an overcoat which seems to have its own independent presence. Clothing in
McGuire's portraits often has this effect of an independent existence, sometimes at the sitter's expense, as in Mrs. Doreen Mullen's fur coat, or Mrs. Ann Reihill's embroidered jacket.
'Pearse Hutchinson', like all McGuire's paintings of poets throughout his life, except that of Seamus Heaney which was commissioned by the Ulster Mus eum, was not commissioned but was painted at the artist's request. It is one of the very few paintings in which there is a celebration of colour, in the beauti fully painted Persian rug. It seems to me that McGuire was not really interested in colour; the colour in his portraits is illustrative, not expressive nor expres sionistic, nor even lyrical. He did not use colour structurally. He appears to experience no sensual pleasure in either colour or in the texture of paint as such. Even the still-lifes are of dun coloured birds. The only painting with an actual use of colour as a pictorial means is the unfinished portrait of Maurice Craig on which McGuire was working when he died. This painting, which looks extremely exciting in its unfinished state, has an unified soft orange background with the distin guished architectural historian wearing a dark green shirt. It is the only McGuire painting that I know of in which the subject is held suspended in planes of colour.
In this century, particularly with the profoundly pervasive influence of the great French painter Matisse, we have become so accustomed to the enjoy ment of colour that it is difficult to grasp the concept of a painter to whom colour means little. Even in McGuire's portrait of the little girl Rebecca O'Mara, with the charming motif of huge butterflies all over the painting, the colour is applied rather than inherent. One exception is the very fine
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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: THE PORTRAITS OF EDWARD McGUIRE
portrait of the actor Eamon Morrissey, in which the jaunty figure of the comedian sits astride a kitchen chair turned backwards, against a background of a Georgian kitchen dresser painted pale blue-green, with a row of white and orange plates on the top shelf. The dresser was a favourite background which McGuire used in his first com mission, the child portrait of Wanda Ryan, and again in the 1968 portrait of Garech Browne; but it is only in the Eamon Morrissey portrait that is is used as a colour plane. The portrait of Nuala
Mulcahy, for example, is delightfully decorative with its background of daffodil heads, but again there is no colour; the sitter is wearing a black dress (at the artist's request) and even the daffodils are white. Yet his black and white drawings are mostly studies for paintings, not really an exploitation of the black and white medium for its own sake.
In the Pearse Hutchinson portrait, McGuire began the introduction of mysterious, enigmatic objects which are a notable element in his best work: in this case, a curious 'flower' which could be a dried sunflower head or the thistle of an artichoke that has gone to seed. In the Michael Hartnett portrait of 1971,
which remains, also, one of the very best, a mysterious bird perches on a window-pane behind the poet. This same window appears in many of the paintings although the corresponding window in the artist's studio was perman ently shuttered and screened by a heavy panel while he was painting. The image of the young poet's face, with his stylized hair, epitomizes McGuire's ability to combine intensity and depth of expression with a quite, relaxed precision.
The 1972 portrait of Seamus Heaney reproduced on the cover of this issue of Irish Arts Review, is possibly the best known of all the portraits, having been reproduced on other occasions and used as a cover illustration on some of Heaney's books. In some ways, it is quite unlike the popular image of the genial poet; in fact Heaney himself quotes the painter Derek Hill's protest that the painting was "just a wooden carving .., catching nothing of the warmth, the geniality, the charm..." etc. But Heaney himself thinks quite otherwise. At the time, he was prey to a feeling of great wariness about his own
situation as a Northerner favoured by a British publisher and the British poetry reading public. Heaney tells me that having been warned by the novelist Benedict Kiely that McGuire "was a very dangerous man", and being very careful as to how to situate himself in the literary nexus, he came to the studio every morning "at a safe hour" about 10 o'clock, and always sat at the same table. At about 11.30 the first bottle of stout was produced, and thereafter things became more relaxed. But finally
what the painter caught was this general wariness, a real essential of the time. I would add that the tension in the paint ing portrays a crucial balance of atti tudes, a fending off of multiple dangers or attackers, a feeling of the siege instinct of the poet's home town, Derry. It is a portrait of the besieged National ist poet keeping at bay potential destroyers: British adulation, Unionist resentment, and even the professional envy of poet colleagues.
Among McGuire's many portraits of poets and writers, he has painted no women poets and only two women novelists, Eilis Dillon and Julia 0 Faolain. But he did paint more women than is generally thought, fifteen por traits in all, and five portraits of children about which his widow, Sara, has written in the current issue of
Martello Magazine. The 1976 portrait of the poet
Anthony Cronin strikes a wry and rational note of a poet's state and expectations, sitting before an empty plate with an old and empty iron cooking pot on the table before him, together with a large and heavy tailor's iron. The figure of the poet is closer to the spectator than in most of the por traits, with an insistent, relentless, un conquered look in his eyes, his familiar cap on his head, and confronting the world with a determination of which the various domestic iron utensils are a satirical metaphor. The painting has an almost Dutch character in the scale and position of the poet sitting at a table, recalling paintings like the sixteenth century Dutch painting of a banker and his wife counting money at a table, except that the presence of the poet is more intense in the McGuire painting.
McGuire himself has said that another major influence on his work was the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, and this can be seen not only in the sur
realistic ideas in some of the work, but in the flat, heraldic manner of the paint ing. Magritte's influence is also evident in the restrained colour range of the paintings, the flat blues and dull greens, and in the treatment of background skies and clouds.
There are only four paintings by McGuire in which there is any treat ment of landscape: two of these are singularly unsuccessful portraits which attempt a traditional eighteenth-century mode of depicting the landowner, if possible on horseback, and preferably attended by his favourite dog, glowing with pride of ownership in front of his handsome mansion. Such portraits often included the sitter's residual chattels such as his wife and children. One of the 'landowner' portraits is of Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, with Russborough in the background, and the other is of the Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey in front of Abbeville, Kinsealy.
The Taoiseach spoke to me this October at some length about the artist. He was fond of Edward McGuire as a person and had known him as a friend for many years. But he felt that
McGuire never did his best work on commissions. In fact Mr. Haughey went on to say that he felt that no artist really worked at his or her best when commis sioned; they were all better when doing something that inspired them person ally. He believes that McGuire attempt ed to overcome the restriction of portrait commissions by imposing his own conditions. He would always, for example, decide what the sitter was to wear and what the background to the portrait would be. Thus he insisted on Mr. Haughey wearing a hunting bowler for his first portrait of him, giving in fact an erroneous impression since he normally does not wear any hat. McGuire also insisted on the second, equestrian portrait of the Taoiseach which does not work even as a pastiche of the eighteenth century genre. It may have been sparked off by Mr. Haughey's previous suggestion to him that since he did so many paintings of bird life, he should try his hand at animals, and in particular the Irish idol-animal, the horse. The Taoiseach was able to borrow Stubbs's book on the anatomy of
RIGHT Francis Stuart, oil on canvas, 3 1/2" x 26/2.
Photograph provided by Sally Maguire.
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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: THE PORTRAITS OF EDWARD McGUlRE
the horse for McGuire but was very sur prised when McGuire telephoned him two days later asking where he would leave it for him to be returned to its owner. "Was it of no interest?" asked a disappointed Haughey. "Of course it was!" replied the painter "I've copied it all." The whole book, in two days! The Taoiseach cited this incident as an example of the extremes of energy and lethargy to which the painter was subject. He could work frenetically for a period and then nothing would happen for weeks.
McGuire's methods were quite inter esting. He had a small studio in Sandycove with only overhead daylight lighting. He used a conventional easel and painted sitting on a low chair on castors which he had devised for following the movements of his first child sitter, Wanda Ryan, in 1966, and which he continued to use for the rest of his life. It enabled him to retreat from the canvas at the same eye-level and judge his work from the short dist ance across the studio. He had also devised an elaborate cabinet for keeping his paint moist and pliable: a series of rectangular glass palettes carried the colours for work in progress and were slotted into a tray over water. When required for a particular painting, he
would simply insert the pane of glass into an 'arm-board' comfortably strapp ed to his forearm, and select the required brushes from a brush-stand he had also devised, in which rows of brushes were neatly ranged according to size, and immediately to hand. He generally worked on several portraits simultaneously; at the time of his death, he was working on twelve unfinished portraits. It is touching to see the glass panel with the colours still malleable, labelled "John Hume's tie"; other panels are simply "eyes", a series of tones of blue and grey. McGuire made detailed working
drawings for the paintings which cer tainly account for their accuracy of scale. Unlike many popular portraitists, he never made mistakes of scale, which in turn accounts for a curious occur rence when the paintings are repro duced. As they are so clearly and lucidly painted, they reproduce very well; since they are also less dependent on colour for their basic structure, they translate
well into black and white, hence they
tend to be frequently reproduced. Because of their accuracy of scale, when they are reproduced they always look as if the portrait is life-size, yet in reality very few of the paintings are life-size, so one is generally surprised at how small it really is, when encountering a portrait one has known by reproduction but not in reality.
One of McGuire's most devoted collectors has eight of his paintings but he is also one of his most detached critics.
"Edward was a snob" he declares, "not a social snob, but an intellectual snob who
wanted to retreat from his family back ground of commerce. His best paintings are of people he regarded as his superiors and whom he admired; that's why he painted all those poets. He was like Proust in that way. Proust was a snob too, but a social snob who liked to be with all his duchesses and barons. That didn't stop him from being a genius and a great writer, any more than it stopped Eddie McGuire from being an excellent painter. He could also be a cruel painter; many of his portraits are cruel, like the painting of Paddy Moloney. His paintings of women are often cruel, like the portraits of Eilis Dillon and Terry Keane. Even the Heaney portrait is trying to be cruel, and the idea of painting Charlie Haughey in a bowler hat; he wanted it to be cruel historically, like the equestrian portrait, the pastiche of an eighteenth century gent. The Beit portrait is naive, like a child's painting. The Pearse Hutchinson is a great painting. He painted a few very good paintings, but he was lazy and indulged in doubtful practices with com
missions, making extra copies and selling them on the side without his gallery's knowledge."
Whether the collector's contention of wilful cruelty on the part of the artist is true, I cannot say but even were it true, I feel that the artist in that case has been hoist with his own petard because in both the Heaney and Haughey por traits, the strong personalities and un questionable presence of both subjects easily overcome whatever attempt there
may have been to represent the one as a lumbering peasant or the other as a riding-to-hounds squireen. The Haughey portrait, the simpler of the two, catches the indomitable character of the sitter, in spite of the irritating bowler hat.
In any case, that same collector commissioned McGuire to paint one of the most interesting paintings of all, not a portrait but a painting of a mummified
cat found in an old cottage in Co. Wicklow. The painting is not in the
least pretty; one experiences a frisson of horror on seeing it, not least because the cat, in some most curious way, still looks alive. It has the streaking dynamic action of a cat, arrested like some rigor vitae image from Pompeii, yet it is very obviously dead. The painting stays per sistently in the mind perhaps because it touches on a subject that has preoccup ied artists through the centuries: the threshold of life and death, the almost knowledge of death while still in this life. It may seem exaggerated to com pare this cat with Velasquez's great 'Crucifixion', but having seen that
painting again recently in the Prado after an interval of some thirty years, it is very much in my head, and there are similar concerns. The 'Crucifixion' is the first modern icon, a life-size figure
meticulously painted in minute realist detail, even to the exact grain of the timber in the cross, and free of either stylistic mannerisms or attendant relig ious cast. This figure of a beautiful, handsome man hangs dead, against a black background which is not a black plane, but rather a black void of dark ness and dimensionless despair, 'death's dateless night.' The sense of death in the painting is almost heretical, the consummatus est seems so final. The meticulous detail of the body and the cross, and even of the notice in Greek, Latin and Hebrew pinned to the cross, offset the meticulous vagueness of the dark background. Everything seems dead except the small glowing aura around the head of Christ, not the formalized halo of religious painting but a hyper-realist, meticulously painted aura which declares that God is not dead: the figure is. both alive and dead.
Similarly, in Goya's famous 'Third of May' painting, the figure of the rebel about to be shot is bursting with life, his eyes starting from his head, while the rebel who has just been shot is so irre vocably dead. In reproductions of the painting, the dead figure is not so noticeable because of the intense light in the centre of the painting in which the live figure is pinned, but in the picture itself, the subject is actually this threshold of being alive one moment and dead the next. The numerous paint ings of Salome with the head of John the Baptist similarly address the prob lem but tend to over-formalize his live
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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: THE PORTRAITS OF EDWARD McGUIRE
Anthony_Cronin. Photh by- Jh Sea e
Anthony Cronin. Photograph by John Searle.
eyes in his decapitated head. The most arresting images of life-in-death that I have seen are the American photo grapher Diana Michener's black and white photographs of beheaded cattle where the eyes are still alive in the de capitated heads. The live eyes are perpetuated in the medium of photo graphy - again the artifice of eternity - whereas in reality the eyes die almost immediately but she has caught them in that instant of life in death. The photo raphic images state precisely the contra diction of being visibly alive when we know that, in fact, the animals are dead.
The dead cat was proposed to McGuire as a challenge to him to bring
to life in paint an image of a dead animal. There were no opportunities for virtuoso painterly rendering of feathers or fur, but since the cat was mummified, muscles and skin still adhered to the skeleton. It is one of his most unexpect ed exercises in still-life, which he saw as being both still and live, even when dead. The much earlier painting 'Four snipe' (1969) which is aesthetically
more pleasing, has something of the live stillness of the cat. Four dead snipe are laid out in a row on a table with disarm
ing candour. There is no attempt to arrange them in any formalized still-life 'composition.' So while they are realist images, they also display a realist no
mannerisms attitude to realist painting. This painting was the occasion of an unique event at the Dawson Gallery in the time of Leo Smith. Invitations were printed and sent out, and a full-scale art opening held for the public to come and see just this one painting, certainly the archetypal McGuire still-life. The dead birds are generally better paint ings than the numerous owls, and again there is a complex paradox at work in
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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM: THE PORTRAITS OF EDWARD McGUlRE
Sean McBride_
Patrick Cl
Sean McBride. Patrick Collins~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the owl paintings. There were two 'models', the barn owl and the white owl, both of them stuffed owls; the studio was full of numerous stuffed birds. Theoretically, it should be poss ible to make a convincing painting of an owl, again a Byzantine frontal owl, using a model of a stuffed owl. But there is a double artificiality which somehow affects the intention of the painting: there is first a dead owl, then a stuffed dead owl brought back to artificial life which is nevertheless quite apparent, it is obvious that it is not alive; then there is a realist painting of the artificially 'living' stuffed dead owl looking alive in the painting, but not really looking alive, although its eyes are open. Yet it is not claiming to be anything other than a stuffed owl; there is no attempt to make it look 'natural'. I think that these many ambiguities cancel out both the purpose and the portent of the paintings. Both the dead cat and the dead birds are more alive than the seemingly live owl.
To conclude, I would like to reprint a paraphrased quotation from Andre L'Hote which Edward McGuire had stapled to the wall of his studio and
which Sally McGuire has also quoted in her article on the child portraits; it may clarify the intentions of this apparently
clear and lucid but always enigmatic and mystifying artist:
"The intelligence of the painter is the equilibrium maintained between the impulses of the heart and the sum total of his knowledge."'
Dorothy Walker
A Sitter Remembers Edward McGuire
I had never sat for an artist, indeed was very much afraid of doing so then, in the early seventies, as I am now. But I had sat with an artist, Edward McGuire,
many times and in many pubs. One day he said he wished me to sit for a portrait. I was certainly flattered, if timorous. He had been working on (or intended to work on) portraits of
Anthony Cronin and Seamus Heaney and this was august company indeed.
I had seen some portraits he had been commissioned to do of non literary subjects. They were impeccable,
as all Eddie's work was, but they lacked a certain flair, spark, perhaps inspiration. His plant and bird studies always had this last quality. I would not go so far as to say that poets' conversations are
more stimulating than others' but Eddie seemed to extract an extra, almost sur real dimension from their presences and record it on canvas.
The sittings (and I think there were five) took place in his seaside studio or, I should say, laboratory. He worked from life and photographs combined. The spectrum and I suspect spectra of his own devising hung around the walls, hundreds of slides, each with many colour variations. This conglomeration of rainbows, the smell of turpentine, paint, the scatter of dead leaves, dead birds, books, paintings and prints gave me the impression of being in a fif teenth century Florentine studio. We talked, discussed Andrew Wyeth and Francis Bacon and poetry. Though I never saw the canvas as work-in progress, I was startled and over whelmed with the result. Eddie had not seemed to be painting, just talking -and he was an excellent conversationalist - but he had caught me, bitterness, warts and all, on canvas. I mourn him.
Michael Hartnett
NOTES
1. Andr? L'H?te, Figure Painting published in
English by A. Zwemmer, London, 1953.
Photography by John Searle.
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