The art of appreciation

PRINTMAKING:One of the great things about the Hugh Lane Gallery is the way it mixes what is new with what we now see as the great works of art's past

IN IRELAND we're not shy of what you might call "difficult" literature. We do literature very well: Joyce, Synge, Stewart, O'Brien, Banville, Enright . . . the list goes on. There are websites giving you tips on how to tackle Ulysses, but we in Ireland just dive right in. Oddly enough, on the other hand, we get so shy of what Sir Hugh Lane called literature's "sister art" that we become the most shrinking of violets, and often ignore it altogether. The "art" he's talking about is art itself: painting, drawing, print and sculpture; and he was so passionate about it that he moved heaven and earth to found the gallery in Dublin that now bears his name. That gallery, on Parnell Square, is 100 years old this year, and as part of the celebrations a set of 13 prints has been commissioned from some of our finest artists.

Hugh Lane was my age when he died. But by the time he was 40, he had achieved enough for a knighthood, and had he not stepped on board the Lusitania to be drowned when a torpedo hit one night in 1915, goodness knows what he would have gone on to do. The art collection he amassed includes some of the superheroes of art history - Renoir, Manet, Monet and Degas, and he organised the first ever exhibition of Irish contemporary art abroad, at the Guildhall in London. While today it's all too easy to look back and say "imagine having a Renoir", or "everyone can see how brilliant Manet is", back then it was a different story, and the artists Lane was collecting were doing something shockingly new.

That's one of the great things about the Hugh Lane Gallery; the way it mixes what is new (and, yes, sometimes shocking) together with what we now see as the great works of art's past. And it does it in a way that you can still see some of their once-shocking newness, too. The Centenary Print Collection is the first actual commission in the gallery's history, though, and as well as adding 13 works to the gallery's story of art, profits from sales of the edition (there are 40 sets in all) will go to fund the purchase of more contemporary works.

Sometimes print is seen as the Cinderella of the visual arts. Because prints are editioned, you don't get the single unique work of art that we have been taught to prize in the western world. In traditional Chinese art the opposite is true - you are a master when you can produce exactly the same image time and again. But good print edition numbers are relatively low, tens rather than hundreds, and what it does mean is that prints are less expensive, and for many (myself included) it's the easiest way to start buying art.

As the Centenary Print Collection at the Hugh Lane is sold only as a full set of 13, it's not going to be a throwaway purchase (price on application to the gallery), but I can't imagine how else you could come by the work of Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Barry Flanagan and Keith Milow (working together), Louis le Brocquy, Ciarán Lennon, Anne Madden, Elizabeth Magill, Brian Maguire, Brian O'Doherty, Kathy Prendergast, Patrick Scott, Seán Scully and Seán Shanahan as a unique suite.

The first thing that struck me looking at the works was the astonishing variety. Scully's is beautiful, a softer dreamier version of the large paintings you see in the Scully Room at the Hugh Lane. It was printed in New York and was made through the rather alarming-sounding process of "spit-bite etching with aquatint and sugar lift". Shanahan's is simple-seeming, from a distance; a stack of coloured squares and rectangles. Step closer, though, and you see a delicate wood-grain in the brown that brings you into its miniature world for a gentle reverie.

Hugh Lane director, Barbara Dawson, describes Anne Madden's intaglio print as "subtly sexy", and I think she's right. I also like the idea of Madden, a 75-year-old woman, being sexy. Damn right.

Purest magic for me were the prints by Elizabeth Magill, Brian O'Doherty and Kathy Prendergast. "I started print-making only two years ago," says Magill. "And if, like me, you have been painting for years it's refreshing to learn a whole new way of working." Magill's print is a sky scene, except "it looks like it has been wiped out, messed up. It's like my landscapes, except it's a skyscape and, as things get messed up, you start cleaning again."

Brian O'Doherty's print is a grid of coloured 'i's, or as O'Doherty puts it, "fives - as five in Ogham is an 'i', so this is a fever of 'i's, an ordered chaos of 'i's. It's repeated, and repetition can induce a kind of mild hysteria," he adds.

O'Doherty is fascinated by Ogham - "a secret Gaelic language that was written, but never spoken aloud." He had one of the inaugural exhibitions when the Hugh Lane reopened in 2006 with its major new modern extension. "You have good trips and bad trips with galleries," he remembers, "and that one was a very good trip."

"My connection with the Hugh Lane goes back almost 30 years," says Kathy Prendergast of her own work. "The Hugh Lane Gallery bought the first piece of sculpture that I ever made (a work titled Waiting). They were my earliest supporters, so I was very keen to take part in this." Prendergast's print is a map that looks like it could be a tree trunk, or, the artist suggests "a part of anatomy." And that's the magic of this collection. There is reverie, mild hysteria, sex appeal and maps that might even be trees. As Brian O'Doherty might say, "it's a very good trip."

Walking through the Hugh Lane to find the room where the prints are on display, I passed an excited school group, getting their heads around the idea that some of the 19th century artists had once caused their own era's hysteria and riots. Then I got chatting to a Dublin couple who come here once a month. "I don't like all of it," the woman said, as we walked through one of the temporary exhibitions. "But she doesn't have to," her husband added. "The ones she loves are more than enough." Perhaps we're finally losing our shrinking violet status when it comes to art, shrugging off the shyness and becoming as proud of our artists as we are of our writers. Hugh Lane would be thrilled.

• Hugh Lane Centenary Print Collection is on show until February 8th. See www.hughlane.ie The book, Hugh Lane: Founder of a Gallery of Modern Art for Ireland, has just been published (€45).