Sir, - Aidan Dunne's doctrinaire dismissal of one of Ireland's most gifted visual artists, Thomas Ryan, cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged (Arts, March 2nd).
I had the great pleasure of visiting the Gallagher Gallery and seeing this splendid exhibition of the work of Thomas Ryan. It reminded me of an era in which art was still regarded as one of the good things in life, when it was associated with pleasure, excitement, comprehensibility and relevance to human affairs. Indeed Mr Dunne concurs with this view in that he admits that this exhibition has "a distinctly anachronistic air". From this, I take it that Mr Dunne finds Thomas Ryan's work lacking in the progressive, cerebral dimension which drives Modernist art.
He is certainly right. Thomas Ryan's art owes nothing to Cezanne (who abandoned perspective), to Gaugin, Van Gogh or Matisse (who tried to be primitive), to Picasso (who invented Cubism in which few are interested these days), to Mondrian (an eccentric mystic who drew black lines and filled in between them with primary colours), to Kandinsky (a pseudo-scientist with crackpot theories about colour) or to the Surrealists (who experimented naively with the half-baked psychological hypotheses of Freud).
Compounding his failure to be impressed by these experiments, Thomas Ryan failed to notice Andy Warhole, who enlarged the labels of soup-tins, and Lichtenstein, who enlarged cheap comicstrips. And so on and on, up to Tracey Emin's rumpled bed with empty gin bottle. I will not deny that Ryan is guilty of ignoring all these alleged advances in the visual arts. Indeed, I am perfectly willing to confront the Modernist contention that "the representation of nature" in art is an outmoded idea. But Modernism in visual art is now 100 years old. I believe that it is not unreasonable to expect it to account for the incredible litany of grotesque absurdities it has produced, before it assaults the achievements of Thomas Ryan.
In the meantime, I urge those of your readers who love beautiful paintings to hurry and see the remarkable work of Thomas Ryan. The exhibition closes on March 19th. - Yours, etc.,
Colin Brennan, Nutley Square, Dublin 4.