MAINIE JELLETT (1897-1944) Homage to Fra Angelico Oil on canvas, 183 x 152.5cms (72 x 60'') Provenance: From the Collection of Dr. Eileen MacCarvill, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin Exhibited: Mainie...

MAINIE JELLETT (1897-1944) Homage to Fra Angelico Oil on canvas, 183 x 152.5cms (72 x 60'') Provenance: From the Collection of Dr. Eileen MacCarvill, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin Exhibited: Mainie Jellett Exhibition, Dublin Painters Gallery 1928 Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1944, Cat. No. 91 An Tostal-Irish Painting 1903-1953, The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin 1953 Mainie Jellett Retrospective 1962, Hugh Lane Gallery Cat. No. 38 Irish Art 1900-1950, Cork ROSC 1975, The Crawford Gallery, Cork, 1975, Cat. No. 65 The Irish Renaissance, The Pyms Gallery, London, 1986, Cat. No. 39 Mainie Jellett Retrospective 1991/92, Irish Museum of Modern Art Cat. No. 89 The National Gallery of Ireland, New Millennium Wing, Opening exhibition of 20th Century Irish Paintings, January 2002-December 2003 The Collectors' Eye, The Model Arts & Niland Gallery, Sligo, January-February 2004, Cat. No. 12; The Hunt Museum, Limerick, March-April 2004 A Celebration of Irish Art & Modernism, The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye, June- September 2011, Cat. No 21 Literature: The Irish Statesman, 16th June 1928 Stella Frost, A Tribute to Evie Hone & Mainie Jellett, Dublin 1957, pp19-20 Kenneth McConkey, A Free Spirit-Irish Art 1860-1960, 1990, fig 58 p75 Dr. S.B. Kennedy, Irish Art & Modernism, 1991, p37 Bruce Arnold, Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland, 1991, full page illustration p120 Mainie Jellett, IMMA Cat, No. 89 p75 Homage to Fra Angelico is a major work in the oeuvre of Mainie Jellett, a leading advocate of modernist art in Ireland. Exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Society of Dublin Painters in 1928, the work was warmly received by the critics of the Irish Times and the Irish Statesman, two publications which had only five years earlier lambasted Jellett for her abstract and seemingly incomprehensible painting, 'Decoration', (1923, National Gallery of Ireland). The work represents a turning point in Jellett's reputation and to some extent her practice. In it she moves from an extreme abstraction to the use of more recognisable figurative elements. Homage pays tribute to the work of the early Renaissance artist Fra Angelico, whose paintings, which were reproduced in religious journals, were well known in Ireland. Jellett schematises the underlying forms and shapes of Fra Angelico's design of his altarpiece, the Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1435, Uffizi), editing out unnecessary detail. The curved form of the composition derives directly from the framing of Fra Angelico's painting. In addition Jellett draws on the work's dominant colours and tones using a similar neutral background with yellows, blues and reds marking the prominent components in the painting. Through the language of cubism she transforms a 15th century religious artwork into a modern expression of spirituality. In doing so she convinced many of her contemporaries in Ireland of the value and relevance of modern art. As Riann Coulter has discussed Jellett's choice of the Virgin as a subject was a way of linking modern art to the sensibilities of the predominantly Roman Catholic public of Free State Ireland. The theme of the Coronation of the Virgin is found in Gothic and early Renaissance art and represents Mary being crowned Queen of Heaven. The story, which is recounted in the bible, was popularised in the 13th century Golden Legend. For Jellett such a theme evoked a period of widespread devotion in which the artwork played a central role. Homage to Fra Angelico relates closely to a work produced by Albert Gleizes, Jellett's friend and mentor, who completed a painting with a similar composition in 1927. Gleizes's work was intended to be part of a scheme of murals for a church at Serrieres close to where he had established a commune of artists on the banks of the Rhone. In the end the murals were never installed. Jellett, who visited Gleizes and who corresponded regularly with him knew of the project. Both artists began in this period to make explicit reference to religious themes. According to Gleizes's biographer, Peter Brooke, the French artist's version of the Coronation of the Virgin owed a great deal to Jellett. Homage to Fra Angelico belonged to the academic Eileen MacCarvill who was a great champion of Jellett's work after the artist's early death in 1944. In 1958 MacCarvill published Jellett's key writings on art together with tributes from Andr? Lhote and Gleizes in Mainie Jellett: The Artist's Vision. Included in the book is a full-page illustration of Homage to Fra Angelico together with reproductions of the series of preparatory studies that Jellett produced for the painting showing how she transformed the original early Renaissance image. Jellett's work was seen to incapsulate the core values of spirituality and universality which her particular form of cubism championed and which challenged what the artist saw as the superficiality of contemporary academic and realist art. Dr. R?is?n Kennedy Riann Coulter, 'Translating Modernism. Mainie Jellett, Ireland and the Search for a Modernist Language', Apollo, 164, 2006, pp.56-62. Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the 20th century, Yale University Press, 2001, p.159.

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