Two women are credited with introducing Cubism to Ireland, Evie Hone and her friend Mainie Jellett, and their work has been explored in Bruce Arnold's Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland (London and New Haven 1991). Having trained at Byam Shaw School of Art and Westminster School of Art with Sickert. in the early 1920s Hone travelled to Paris where she studied under Lhote and Gleizes with Jellett. There they met the designer Eileen Gray, whose use of developments in modem abstract art had an impact upon them Hone and Jellett exhibited in Ireland and France, and were elected to the group Abstraction-Creation. A review in the September 1924 edition of the Studio of their joint exhibition in Dublin was scathing, reporting on the 'vehement controversy' it had excited. By September 1938 the same magazine was praising their work in a group exhibition 'marked by accomplishment and taste' where art of the 'Irish old school tie or more precisely "my beautiful shawl" kind' were thankfully few.
It was art such as Hone's Composition (c.1924-5, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), constructed from geometric shapes, that caused the furore. By 1933 she changed her medium to stained glass, producing her first major work, My Four Green Fields, in 1939 for the Irish Pavilion at the New York World Fair, where it was awarded first prize. Hone made glass for numerous churches, and her window The Crucifixion (1948), based on an ancient Irish stone carving, was placed over a door in the Tate Gallery's sculpture hall. In 1949 she began a commission for a window at Eton College Chapel {a gouache for this is in the Tate Collection). The simplicity and strength of her designs, the lead used as a form of drawing, creating bold outlines, is evidence of her admiration for Rouault.
Hone's and Jellett's careers continued to interlink- In 1943 both were founder members of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. A memorial exhibition was mounted there following Hone's death, and in 1958-9 a retrospective was held at University College, Dublin, and in London at the Arts Council and Tate Galleries. Hone left her own collection, including work by Picasso, Gris and Gleizes, to the National Gallery of Ireland. |
