36
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
48
Mary Swanzy HRHA (1882-1978)
TREES
oil on canvas
signed lower left
21 by 18in. (53 by 46cm)
Provenance:
Family of the artist
Although she studied art in Paris in 1905 and 1906 where she was amongst the first Irish artists to see the work of
Pablo Picasso, Swanzy did not begin making and exhibiting Cubist inspired work until the 1920s and 1930s. She was
one of Ireland’s most innovative exponents of this approach, using it in imaginative ways in a range of landscapes,
figure studies and paintings of propellers. As she never dated her paintings, it is difficult to be precise about the
chronology of the work, but she appears to have made and exhibited most of her Cubist inspired paintings after
1920.
Having moved back to Dublin from Paris, Swanzy continued to travel widely visiting London, Italy, Czechoslovakia,
Polynesia and the United States. She maintained contact with the French art world throughout the 1910s and 1920s,
exhibiting at and becoming a committee member of the Salon des Independants, the largest show of modern art in
Paris. Her work was shown at this venue alongside that of the Orphic cubists, Sonja and Robert Delaunay. Orphism, a
hugely influential movement, was concerned with the impact of light and colour on the vision of the artist.The
paintings of Robert Delaunay are preoccupied with aeronautical flight and altitude through which he could
demonstrate how form is made of pure colour.The influence of these ideas is apparent in
Trees
.
The bright colours and dynamic geometric patterning of the composition of
Trees
are also evocative of speed and
movement. Swanzy was clearly aware of Italian Futurism and British Vorticism when she painted the work. Both
movements stress the importance of dynamism in art and of representing technology. The railway track or roadway
in the foreground of
Trees
suggests movement through the landscape resulting in a distortion of the forms. Swanzy’s
father was a well-known ophthalmic surgeon and her fragmentation of the composition is equally reminiscent of
ophthalmic lenses and optical devices.
The giant pink trees with their swaying yellow barks are probably inspired by the exotic vegetation that Swanzy saw
on her travels to Samoa and Hawaii in the 1920s.The tall towers in the distance (to the right) recur in several of her
paintings, a memory of San Gimignano, the medieval city in Tuscany, near to Florence where the artist lived for a
period before World War One. Swanzy draws on her vast experiences of travel and modern art in her work.The result
is an inventive and unique engagement with Cubism and Futurism that was not always valued by her contemporaries
in Dublin which she left in 1926 to settle with her sister in London.The originality of her work, however, ensured
Swanzy’s rediscovery as one of Ireland’s most significant modernist painters at the end of her life in the 1960s and
1970s when she finally enjoyed critical and commercial success.
Trees
is an important example of her Cubist work.
Dr. Róisín Kennedy
April 2014
€
15,000-
€
18,000 (£12,400-£14,880 approx.)
