DAVID THISTLETHWAITE
Art of God ideas into art
HUGH LANE AND THE LEGACY OF HIS BELIEFS: AESTHETIC CERTAINTY IN AN AGE OF RELATIVISM
David Thistlethwaite, October 2000
Recollection of a lecture delivered to the Friends of the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, given October 22nd 2000
On the occasion of the publication of Robert O’Byrne’s Hugh Lane (Lilliput Dublin 2000)
Lane’s vision: fulfilled, but not in the way he planned
Since coming to Dublin two things have struck me. On the one hand, there is the tremendous fact that Hugh Lane’s vision has been in large measure achieved, so many years after his death. Art, visual art, is now part of the lifeblood of Irish culture, accepted, talked about, seen, and at home; and flourishing in a diversity of styles and galleries. It has its own life, it makes its own decisions, in an international context, but without too much sense of subservience to what is going on elsewhere. The gallery which Lane founded has become, as he intended, a point of reference, not a model or law for Irish art, but an encouragement and mark of the highest standard, and is held in affection by Irish painters and sculptors who by no means try to work in the styles favoured by Lane and his supporters. The achievement of Lane’s vision, which of necessity was longterm since it involved such a radical change in the then perceptions of art, does to a large extent place in diminished proportion the complaints, the ruffled feathers, and the gossip about the way in which he did things, which so often miss the point that without very resolute action, even by a flawed and fallible person such as Lane was, much of this might never have happened.
On the other hand, one could not fail to be struck also by the fact that the manner in which Lane’s vision has been fulfilled has diverged very far from his original purposes. To put it simply, the art that his vision has enabled in Ireland, is very different from any definition of art he would have recognised, or indeed from the kind of art he actually enjoyed. His conception of art, the love of which aroused such a sacrificial devotion, was centred in clear values, even for contemporary art, deriving from in his conoisseur’s passion for beauty, form, and fine painting and workmanship. Art, for him, did not just go anywhere, but had distinct boundaries, and a centre from which its value came.
Humanism and Modernism
The contrast between Lane’s kind of art and that which his vision has enabled to be seen and admired today could not have been more pointedly demonstrated than in the sculptural display in the entrance hall of the Municipal Gallery at the time of this lecture. Placed side by side were a Lane Gift sculpture, Rodin’s Age of Bronze, and a modern work by Eilis O’Connell
The contrast between Lane’s kind of art and that which his vision has enabled to be seen and admired today could not have been more pointedly demonstrated than in the sculptural display in the entrance hall of the Municipal Gallery at the time of this lecture. Placed side by side were a Lane Gift sculpture, Rodin’s Age of Bronze, and a modern work by Eilis O’Connell
. Rodin’s work, though revolutionary in its time for its naturalism, is the embodiment of humanist values. The person and the human being are still centre stage for any serious statement as to life’s meaning. It is true, as contemporaries realised, that we are already seeing the removal of the classical ‘skin’, the idealisation of man by which so many achievements, and probably not a few crimes, were legitimated. We are beginning to see the distinctly modern conception of man as left on this planet to fend for himself, his gods gone, but here with his beauty and some of his idealism still intact. But in O’Connell’s work, we have reached something like the end of that track, more like the situation in public religion today, where the human has sunk back into nature, technically superb (as nature itself is), but as far as consciousness goes, no longer feeling able to bear the burden of separation from nature, but wanting only to merge with it. Her work, we are told, relates to old standing stones; and she does indeed capture the sense of a mystery beyond, her polished pyramid pointing like an antenna to an unknown world or being in space. Of classical proportion and harmony her work knows nothing, because there is no external world of ideas, no ideal based on transcendent gods, or on the transcendent creator God, to keep them in place. There is a certain uncanny presence in her work, but its form is by necessity somewhat arbitrary.
Lane, however, stood for beauty of form, and it seems deeply ironical that the movement for contemporary art to which he devoted so much of his strength has given rise to an art which has virtually reversed the good which he intended. One cannot look at Lane’s life, moreover, or come into contact with his personality and beliefs, without seeing the need to face up to questions arising from this. Where Lane’s values simply the product of time and place, to be by-passed by the road of history?
In facing this nagging issue, one can, of course, practice historical evasion. One could argue, for example, that Lane begot essentially two streams of thought, that of his own personal values based on his love of art, which issued in purchases around his own taste, and a slightly different set of values based on his love of artists, for which he was willing to widen his taste and to be open to the possibility that the future would see things differently. So the two different streams could be labelled the ‘beauty’ stream, and the ‘modernity’ stream, and one could say correctly that Lane believed in both. One could then go on to say that the vision for modernity has been the most successful, going far beyond what he himself had planned. The stream of his own taste, the ‘beauty’ stream, one could then label simply as the taste of ‘a man of his time’, whose taste has been outmoded today. In this neat historical relativisation, modernity is the convenient and comfortable winner.
Now it is true that Lane, living in a time of artistic ferment, died before fully having ever to face these issues. We do not know what things he was pondering on the Lusitania, having talked to John Quinn in New York about modern art. It is hard to imagine someone of his aesthetic delicacy even setting eyes on a Picasso, but apparently at that stage he was confident that what Picasso was doing was ‘rubbish’. But he must have been aware of the earthquake beginning to shake the world of art, and that his own era of confident aestheticism was about to end. At his death, his library contained books of reproductions of Cezanne and Gauguin, so evidently he was starting to acclimatize himself to the new art. He had been offered a Cezanne to buy, but had not yet bitten. Whatever his concerns at the end, what is certain is that the two streams to which he had devoted his life were diverging, and that had he lived he would have had to face some very difficult decisions. How far could this Old Master dealer continue to commit himself to the very best of contemporary art? For certainly he was not someone who would have been long satisfied with anything meretricious or second-rate, simply because it accorded with the styles he liked.
Lane’s taste: of period and class, or of conviction?
The assumption that one might make, then, is that had Lane lived, he would have adapted, and switched his energies from the pre-war Beauty stream, into the post-war stream of Modernity, which has carried the day. His taste for beautiful objects would then be relativised as the product of period and class, and not something of permanent commitment and importance, unlike the stream of contemporaneity, in which being up to date and authentically of its time is always the priority.
The assumption that one might make, then, is that had Lane lived, he would have adapted, and switched his energies from the pre-
However, to relativise Lane’s taste in this way is almost certainly to fail to come to terms with Lane the man, and to assume that his taste had no grounding beyond temporary fashion. And yet we cannot spend very long in his company, whether in Robert O’Byrne’s, or the earlier biographies, without realising that taste for him was nothing superficial, but was of the very integrity of his being, which affected every aspect of his life. My favourite story of him is one which O’Byrne quotes from Bodkin’s account, about his visit to the hypnotherapist.
In the last few years of his life, Lane sought treatment for a nervous condition, brought about by stress, then known as neurasthenia. On one occasion, Bodkin accompanied him to an expensive specialist, and sat in the car ‘while the patient was supposed to be undergoing hypnosis. At the end of the session, his friend emerged and told Bodkin the experience had been “ineffectual as far as he could judge, and yet rather funny”. It transpired that after talking to Lane for a while, the specialist had left him alone with instructions to count to one thousand. But “when he went out I just popped up and arranged his beastly mantelpiece for him, and when I heard him coming back, I lay on the couch and pretended to be asleep”.’ (O’Byrne, p 192).
This story shows that for Lane, correcting and redeeming bad taste, bringing order into disorder, was more important to him than his own health. Clearly the love of beauty was for him something at the core, not the surface, and it was for this cause that he was prepared to persuade and cajole, give and threaten, and bear notoriety and abuse.
So far we have used words like ‘love of art, of beauty, of good taste’, very loosely, hoping that we are indicating an idea which will be familiar to us from Lane’s own patronage and activities. However, if we are going to consider what Lane was really about in making this concept of art his cause, we will need to try to be a bit more definite. What was this ‘art’ for which he was prepared to expend his life and fortune, and yet which, as we have seen, has not been seen by subsequent generations as in ‘the true line of descent’ which has given us the official sequence of modern art? And to put it even more sharply: if Lane was a man of conviction rather than of fashion, were his convictions simply wrong, or was there something in his beliefs which is of importance today?
In considering this issue, I am sure that we are enormously helped by historical distance. For example, it is far easier today to begin again to look at the art of the period on its own terms and without the prejudice of ‘Progressive’ and ‘Conservative’ party labels. For example, Wilson Steer was a painter, a friend and supporter of Lane, who was not ashamed to paint somewhat in the style of Constable, and later to drop historical anchor somewhere in late Impressionism. That is to describe his paintings solely in terms of how ‘advanced’ they were. But in terms of the content of the pictures, what they were trying to convey in whatever style, here is a painter who did not lack fresh vision or a certain integrity in
