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WHYTESS I N C E 1 7 8 3
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Robert Ballagh ( b.1943)
MAN WITH A MAGRITTE, 1973
oil on canvas; (octaptych)
each of the eight panels numbered, signed in monogram [RB] and dated [‘73] on reverse
96 by 48in. (243.84 by 121.92cm)
Exhibited:
‘Portrayal or Betrayal’ - an exhibition of portraits of Nicholas Treadwell, Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, London, 1973
Man with a Magritte was painted at a pivotal stage in Robert Ballagh’s emergence as an international artist. Earlier in 1972 his frst
show at the Lerner Heller Gallery in New York was called of at the last moment. He was down to his last £100 and needed to sell a
few paintings quickly. The painter Cecil King, an exhibitions ofcer at the Arts Council, advised him to try the Basel Art Fair, a sort of
cultural Spring Show where hundreds of leading European galleries had stands. After four days without making a single contact, he
was about to give up. Perhaps sensing his desperation, the Parisian Galerie des Quatre Mouvements agreed to look through his slides
of series depicting people looking at paintings by iconic contemporary artists. They promptly ofered to buy the lot for £2,500.
Ballagh had chanced upon a style strikingly in tune with the New Realism then coming into vogue while painting a portrait of his
collector friend Gordon Lambert standing beside an Albers painting. Now suddenly everyone wanted his work. Aktionsgalerie
mounted a sell-out show in Bern, the Isy Brachot Gallery in Brussels followed suit. But frst Ballagh accepted an invitation to participate
in a group show on the theme of ‘Portrayal or Betrayal’ at the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery in London. The idea was to provide an
interesting comparison of styles of portraiture in the spirit of the 1970s at a time when it was considered aesthetically redundant.
Ballagh’s acrylic on eight canvas panels show a man in white with a mop of black hair - in fact a portrait of the gallery owner, Nicholas
Treadwell - looking at a surreal painting of a shattered window with jagged pieces of glass on the foor between drawn curtains. It is
not a copy of an actual Magritte but rather a pastiche, as are all the paintings in this series that would become a virtual gallery of
Ballagh’s own version of iconic painters who come to defne modern art. It uses a panel format; originally developed purely as a
means of making large paintings in the small room in a terraced cottage in Broadstone, which he used as a studio up to 1970.
Shattered glass would become a recurring motif in Ballagh’s visual iconography, most notably in his portrait of the Miami Showband
in 1976 and more recently, his 2009 portrait of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.
The people looking at paintings series gradually developed into Ballagh’s own personal examination of modernism. By the time he
fnished with it in 1975 by painting himself bending down to sign his 1970 homage to Goya’s The Third of May he wasn’t just signing
of from the series, he was signing of from modernism itself and its rejection of all art that preceded it.
Ciarán Carty
Dublin, February 2012
€25,000-€35,000 (£21,010-£29,410 approx)