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May Guinness (1863-1955)
STILL LIFE WITH GREEN BOTTLE
oil on canvas
25 x 20in. (63_ x 50.80cm)
Provenance:
Christie’s, London, 16 October 2003, lot 481; Private collection;
Whyte’s, 24 November 2008, lot 127; Private collection
Exhibited:
Probably exhibited as ‘La Bouteille Verte’, ‘May Guinness’, Galerie Visconti, Paris, January 1925;
the exhibition later travelled in the same year to the Mayor Gallery, London;
‘Analysing Cubism’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Banbridge, Co. Down, 20
February 2013 to 30 November 2013 (loaned by present owner)
Literature:
Analysing Cubism, exhibition catalogue, IMMA, Dublin, 2013, p.71 (full page illustration)
May Guinness is one of the unsung heroes of Irish Modernism. Born in Dublin in 1863 she was part of a generation of pioneering Irish artists
that included Grace Henry (1868–1953), Eileen Gray (1878–1976), and Mary Swanzy (1882-1978) who travelled outside Ireland to learn about the
most innovative movements in art. In the mid-1890s, Guinness began by studying in Cornwall with Norman Garstin where plein-air painting was
encouraged. Soon after, she exhibited for the first time at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. From 1902-03 she travelled to Florence and then
later to Paris where she was exposed to the avant-garde developments of early Cubism around the salon of Gertrude Stein. During the First World
War she became a nurse in the French army and was awarded the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française for bravery. After the war, she returned
to Paris to study with Kees Van Dongen whose Expressionist style would long influence her. Guinness was already fifty-nine years old when she
went to study with André Lhote in 1922. She exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1923 and continued to work with Lhote until 1925.
Still Life with Green Bottle was made concurrently with her time in Paris and demonstrates that she had absorbed many of the principles of Cubism
in her work. Breaking with academic tradition and the laws of perspective inherited from Renaissance masters, Cubist painters no longer copied
from nature or from the works of other masters. The rules of modelling, foreshortening and especially perspective were abandoned. Paintings
should no longer attempt to fool the eye by conveying three dimensionality, rather the two dimensional space of the surface, canvas and paint
should be celebrated for their formal qualities. The image to be conveyed was reduced to geometric forms. It was then fractured and seen from
multiple viewpoints. Paintings were no longer lit from a single viewpoint but modelled for volume.
Still life was a popular subject for the Cubists and Still Life with Green Bottle is a good example of the genre. The objects depicted such as the fruit
bowl and table-cloth have been successfully reduced to patterns and groups of shapes. We see an image that has been so abstracted that it has
become almost unreadable. The viewpoints taken by Guinness create an overlapping and layered effect, pulling apart the subject, before putting
it back together again – something that was radical for its time. The first works of Cubism by Picasso and Braque demonstrated a restrained palette,
using blacks, browns and greys; here Guinness uses more vibrant colours although the stippling and wood- grain effects are very typical of the
style of Picasso.
André Lhote taught a number of Irish painters including Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, Norah McGuinness, Jack Hanlon and others. These artists studied
with this master of Cubism, but the lessons each learned, the influences they absorbed and the methods with which they applied these were
as unique as each individual artist. As artists who wished to paint in the Modern manner, they rejected academic traditions and instead turned
to Cubism as a short-hand for Modernism, taking many traditional subjects and transforming them in many unique ways. It points to the tumult
of other ideas and styles to be found in Paris in the 1920s and the freedom artists felt to express themselves in whole range of ways. This was
especially true of Guinness whose style would evolve and adapt throughout her life as she engaged with different ideas and made them her own.
She died in Dublin in 1955 and a retrospective of her work was held the following year at the Dawson Gallery, Dublin.
Seán Kissane April 2015
Seán Kissane was curator of ‘Analysing Cubism’, IMMA, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and
F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Banbridge, Co. Down, 20 February 2013 to 30 November 2013
€ 6,000.00- € 8,000.00 (£4,480-£5,970 approx.)
Large Image & Place Bid Lot 44IMPORTANT IRISH ART · 25 MAY 2015 AT 6PM