Brushstrokes of a restless spirit

A retrospective of the eccentric artist Markey Robinson is reopening the debate about his merits as an artist, writes Aidan Dunne.

MARKEY ROBINSON is something of a phenomenon in the context of Irish art. An outsider artist who developed a signature style of simplified representation and a repertoire of standard motifs, he built up a loyal following among collectors who prize his paintings.

The mythology surrounding Markey, as he was generally known, was indistinguishable from the reality, particularly as he became increasingly eccentric and withdrawn - though he was to some extent always secretive and elusive. His work, which consistently features in the auction rooms, was long championed by the Oriel Gallery during the years when Oliver Nulty, himself an independent spirit, was at the helm. Now, with Mark Nulty in charge, the gallery has organised a Markey retrospective, which is accompanied by a new monograph on the artist written by Paul O'Kelly.

There is a perception that Markey was an outsider in more senses than one, that the wider art world, or academia, or critical orthodoxy, refused, and refuse, to give him his due, to recognise his legitimacy as an artist of resource and worth. A sizeable body of opinion suggests that Markey is an artist whose achievements merit serious critical and scholarly attention, that he can be creditably viewed in the context of Irish and European art history - so O'Kelly argues in his text.

It was, he says, Mark Nulty who won him over to the cause, and he now feels that Markey has been unjustifiably neglected and should rank alongside the major names in 20th-century Irish art.

Markey was born near the Ardoyne in Belfast in 1918 and signed on as a deckhand when he was 19 years old. O'Kelly recounts how artistic acquaintances at home were habitually skeptical about his claims to have been in Paris or elsewhere in Europe, and indeed about his claimed encounters with French artists and his identification with the School of Paris, but if his own accounts are to be believed he does seem to have been an inveterate and resourceful traveller.

O'Kelly is generally inclined to take him at his word, though partly because of Markey's penchant for secrecy, he notes the scarcity of documentary evidence.

On the whole, it's fair to presume that Markey was a restless spirit who did get around a great deal, something that may have contributed to the break-up of his marriage in the 1960s.

From about 1942, Markey had begun to exhibit. From 1972 he was based in Dublin. Oliver Nulty and, later, in Belfast, Michael Flanagan, were supportive of his work. Wearing a hat and a voluminous trench coat, he became known as a street character around Dublin, often hauling around a shopping cart laden with materials, sketchbooks and paintings. Eventually he got into the habit of moving between Dublin and Belfast and he was in Belfast, at his home on the Crumlin Road, when he died early in 1999.

O'Kelly devotes considerable energy to tracking Markey's movements and placing him physically in Paris and elsewhere as a means of substantiating his connection with the School of Paris and mainstream European tradition. But this placement is largely beside the point. The real issue has to do with artistic, rather than geographical, proximity. After all, Markey could have been a regular dinner guest chez Picasso without absorbing one iota of the artist's creative brio. He could have haunted the Louvre for years without emerging with anything useful. The work that he produced is the ultimate arbiter in assessing his relationship to tradition and his peers.

Much of the discussion surrounding Markey has to do with the trappings of being an artist, or a certain view of being an artist: the flavour of his own interest in and conception of art, the idea of the artist as a romantic, bohemian outsider, an inscrutable being in thrall to the muses. Hence the importance of the myth.

He clearly did have a measure of conventional ability as an artist: a sense of form, colour, composition. His work is undated, but the evidence suggests that there was a greater feeling of openness and possibility in what appear to be the earlier pieces.

His pictorial repertoire was limited and repetitive. It included rustic figures, whitewashed thatched cottages and sailing boats in mountainous seaside landscapes. Clowns featured recurrently, nudes rarely. Street scenes often included flowers. Figures and settings were rendered in blobby brushstrokes, with minimal modelling, and often defined by a heavy black outline.

There are occasional passages in specific works that recall paintings by Picasso and perhaps other artists. For someone so well travelled, one would have to say that Markey traded a great deal in pictorial clichés. Rather than reflecting the impact of places and personalities, his work reduces everything to a leaden stylistic formula, with only passing references to anything beyond its dictates. He apparently derided Paul Henry, but his own numerous views of cottages and peasant women come across as being nothing more than glib caricatures of Henry's West iconography of Ireland.

Limerick painter Jack Donovan is a good example of an artist who has developed a stylised language of pictorial allegory to comment on life, relationships and history. He uses the figure of the clown as part of this process. Again, Markey can only come out badly from any comparison, appearing woefully uninventive and constrained.

No doubt Markey will retain his popularity. People who like his work really do like it. But all the evidence suggests that, whatever his early potential, his abilities rapidly declined into the dull reiteration of a set of hackneyed stylistic mannerisms. It is dispiriting to encounter piece after piece lacking any spark of pictorial life, any hint of development. Perhaps Markey's personality and psychological problems ensured that he was unable to develop, that he would remain confined on his own obsessive treadmill.

It's hard to avoid concluding that there is a lack of critical engagement with his work not because of some sort of establishment conspiracy but because there is simply not enough in the work to engage with.

Markey at the Oriel is at the Oriel Gallery, Clare Street, Dublin 2 until June 30, 01-676 3410