A chameleon rediscovered

He was in his time associated with the likes of Louis le Brocquy, Gerard Dillon and Colin Middleton, but the work of Nevill Johnson rarely figures in accounts of 20th-century Irish art. A new book aims to address this oversight, writes Aidan Dunne

NEVILL JOHNSON IS one of those artists who seem destined to be periodically rediscovered and then forgotten anew. A handsome new book, Nevill Johnson 1911-1999: Paint the Smell of Grass, by Dickon Hall and Eoin O'Brien and published by the Ava Gallery, marks another episode of rediscovery. The foreword is by Johnson's son, Galway Johnson. Although his father, he notes, was one of a small group of painters associated with Victor Waddington's gallery in Dublin in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he is much less well known than the others, who include Louis le Brocquy, Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton, George Campbell and Daniel O'Neill.

Given how well established all of those artists are in any account of 20th-century Irish art, "it is surprising how rarely Nevill's name comes up". All the more surprising because, as Galway correctly points out: "He was no less a painter than the others of the group, no less a participant in his way in the Dublin life of those days."

It is true that Johnson's paintings bear favourable comparison with those of most of his contemporaries. He was an intelligent, well-informed and curious artist, keen to take on board contemporary developments and explore new possibilities. If that meant that a fair proportion of what he did is derivative, the same is true of the other artists of that and indeed any time.

Johnson was also a photographer, and his images of Dublin have become increasingly interesting with the passing of time, offering as they do a highly personal view into a lost world (New York's Museum of Modern Art holds a set of his negatives, and there's a print in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Also an occasional writer, he published a memoir, The Other Side of Six, in 1983. Perhaps memoir is the wrong term, because Johnson's is an unreliable one, a free-ranging narrative in which he plays fast and loose with the facts.

It is, presumably, subjectively true to his own experiences, but one can't depend on it as providing an historically accurate account of his life and times. It does reflect his apparently enduring concern with the way the world perceived him. He was something of an outsider, and saw himself as such. A fiercely independent thinker who was distrustful of authority and disdained many aspects of social convention - "he could be scathingly critical," his son writes - he was nevertheless sensitive and not as arrogant or oblivious as he could at times appear.

JOHNSON WAS BORN in Buxton, in Derbyshire, and although it was intended that he work in the family business, he was temperamentally disinclined to do so. His father didn't view art school as an option, however, and from 1934 he was in Belfast, working for the brake-linings company, Ferodo, and painting in his spare time. He befriended the painter, John Luke, and, in 1936, they and another painter, Charles Harvey, went to Paris, where they encountered Surrealism, Cubism and the phenomenon of Picasso at first hand.

As his subsequent paintings attest, Surrealism made a huge impression on Johnson. He was taken not only with the heightened, dreamlike realism of Dalí and Yves Tanguy but also, and surely in a more beneficial way, with the metaphysically charged painting of Giorgio de Chirico. His Dalí-esque allegories can be unduly solemn. He's much better when he doesn't try to editorialise about the state of the world and gets on with the business of making a picture work.

In time, Cubism, and Picasso beyond Cubism, became more significant influences. As with Louis le Brocquy, he really got the method, and was able to make something of it on his own terms.

Perhaps because he didn't have the chance to go to art school and go through the process of finding his own voice, he did it throughout his working life as a painter. In his painting, there is often a sense of working through an influence. One feels he looked intently at a painting (and he wasn't that pushed about seeing things in the flesh, he was happy enough with reproductions) and then figuratively dismantled it and made it his own by painting it anew.

The excitement of discovery comes across in his work from the very beginning, though at the same time it can seem that each picture is a new beginning, with nothing taken for granted, and that might partly account for the difficulty people have with his work. He's a difficult artist to pin down within the bounds of a personal stylistic identity. One could point to Colin Middleton as an archetypal stylistic chameleon, but he remained oddly himself throughout his changes of gear.

From 1947, Johnson was based in Dublin and painting full-time. As Hall observes, Surrealist allegories gradually ceded to more Cubist-inflected works around the end of the decade, though titles and dates are often problematic with Johnson's paintings. In his more Cubist compositions, he displayed a tremendous ability to take apart and inventively rearrange the picture plane, moving away from a traditional, illusionistic picture space (though he veered between these two basic options throughout his career).

Although his marriage broke up around the end of the 1940s, and he lived apart from his ex-wife, Noelle Biehlman, and their two children, he seems to have been happy in Dublin: "Day-to-day living passed unhurried, inexpensive, and a light-footed sanity prevailed."

In the early 1950s he began to document the impoverished and crumbling Georgian city and its inhabitants systematically, using a Leica camera, and with Anne Yeats as his assistant. The photographs were eventually published as Dublin: The People's City in 1980, and more recently the Lemonstreet Gallery exhibited a selection of them.

FROM ABOUT 1957, Johnson lived primarily in England, though he had done a great deal of work, and perhaps most of his best work, in Ireland. It's not entirely clear why he left Ireland, but he went through a barren, unhappy time. In 1962, he noted in his journal: "my first paintings for six and a half years". From that point on he worked continuously, but unevenly, for the rest of his life. His work was so close to him, so much a part of living, that its reception in the world might have been not only difficult but traumatic for him.

O'Brien provides a very good, vivid account of his rigour and his self-doubt, particularly in his later years. Hall points out that his place in Irish art should be reassessed, and certainly the book represents a strong argument that this latest rediscovery of Johnson should be the one that lasts.

Nevill Johnson 1911-1999: Paint the Smell of Grass, by Dickon Hall and Eoin O'Brien, £30, is available from Ava Gallery, Bangor (info@avagalleryclandeboye.co.uk, 028-91852263) or from James Adam Auctioneers, St Stephen's Green, Dublin (info@adams.ie, 01-6760261)