Painting through the eyes of a painter

BACK in the 1970s it became fashionable to say that painting was finished, or at the very least had lost its primacy in the visual arts; conceptualism, earth art, environmental art, installationism and roughly similar trends appeared to be carrying the day. Then, in the mid-1980s, came the counterblast of the New Expressionism and certain allied movements which appeared to put painting back centre-stage.

These quickly foundered, however, arid the wreckage of Eighties reputations still lies about and continues to embarrass people who had hitched themselves to names which have worn as badly as old newsprint. Once again, painting seemed in retreat, but at the moment there appears to be another groundswell in its favour - an impression to which the current Venice Biennale gives some qualified support. The recent Braque exhibition in London, for instance, came as a revelation to a new generation, and other events such as the Lovis Corinth show at the Tate have brought home again the fact that good painting does not die.

This is not the time or place to argue the case for painting against other contemporary trends an argument probably as futile and pointless as the abstract-versus-figurative dispute of a generation ago. The wide field of Post-Modernism is big enough to accommodate the most diverse styles, or at least it should be so. What, hopefully, will disappear is the fashionable claptrap that painting has become as obsolete as the horse-drawn carriage - the kind of dogma which is still inculcated in certain art magazines and in numerous art colleges.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art took a bold initiative when it invited Stephen McKenna, a distinguished English-born painter who has already shown there, to curate an exhibition called The Pursuit of Painting. The result is a major event based on the work of 26 artists living or dead, who have been his "cultural mentors over many years. Some of them he knows personally, but the choice is not a personalised anthology. It does, however, include living artists who are outside the fashionable currents, whose names are unfamiliar even to critics in these islands and whose work has never been seen here. The time-scale of the exhibition ranges loom founder-figures of 20th-century art, such as Gris, Leger, Malevich and di Chirico, down to living painters - including Irish ones.

McKenna says he does not view the show as a manifesto for or against anything, "but rather as a clarification of a position - of my own position, and of how painting is placed today." He has included a series of personal choices, but sees a "linking thread" running through it all. He knows, too, that some of the artists included have been influenced by the great pioneers represented - notably di Chirico "who has always, been an important figure for me.

Getting the pictures together - they come from a multitude of sources, public and private - was a demanding task. Incidentally, one of the di Chirico canvases comes from Iveagh House and has been lent by the Department of External Affairs, though few of us knew of its existence. "I was first told about it two or three years ago. It was hanging in an ante-room in lveagh House and had been buried for years before that in the cellars there. Apparently it was presented to the Irish State by the Italian Ambassador in thanks for two Melozzo di Forlis loaned by the National Gallery for an exhibition in Italy a few years before. So far as I know, it was last exhibited in Rome in 1939 and sometime in 1940 it was presented to Ireland. It's in reasonably good condition."

HE FEELS that today we are "bombarded images that we cannot get hold of "so that the painted image has a special importance". "It is something you can stand in front of and go back to again and again. It is not a moving image, and I think this is peculiar to painting, even unique. No, it's not so much about making the moment immortal, but rather of abolishing time. One of the great, unresolved questions of the twentieth century is how we cope with space and time, in an age obsessed with movement and change.

"If one thinks for very long about painting instead of the mechanically produced image there is something which distances the good painter from the bad one. It's a unique quality - and that quality is wrapped up in something between the material of which it is made, and the motif which is painted. You do not measure painting in terms of what it is about, but what it is. Even the best photograph does not have this sensual quality in itself it can only echo something which has.

"The key to painting is always this contradiction - that it is a two-dimensional surface which represents something more than that. It is another kind of light, another kind of nature, its own world. If you stand in front of a Velazquez or a Derain, you are aware of the subject in a real sense, one sees a picture of the real world, but one is also seeing something more.

Turning to a more personal approach: "Both the living and the dead have had a significant effect on my way of seeing, and that was one of the deciding factors. The critic or the curator obviously has to exercise some system of judgment, but the personal judgment of the curator must also be influenced by his personal tastes. I have a personal relationship with every artist in the exhibition. It varies greatly, of course, but it is there."

Asked about the current claim that painting had lost its primacy among the visual arts: "It certainly has lost its primacy for the moment as a subject of fashionable attention, but it lost that in the 1970s too. Who knows what will happen in the next ten years, and what will have relevance to the fashionable market?

"The original brief for this exhibition was painting in Europe, and originally I thought it would be a certain balance between North and South, but Northern painters have come more and more into it. The reason may be that at the moment, painting is more vigorous in the North of Europe than in France or the other southern countries. But that was not planned, it just happened. And than, some of the nationalities are hard to define anyway. Look at Balthus - he is called a French artist, but his ancestry is Polish and he lives and works in Switzerland. American painters are excluded by the brief otherwise I would have included Hopper and Guston."

He is dubious about the talk of a "School of London": "The painters called by that name - I cannot see any real correlationship between them. Lucian Freud is always included, though what he would say to that I have no idea. I was never connected with it myself. Certainly I think that in England and Germany there are a number of good figurative artists who have been working away, out of the limelight. That is less the case in Ireland, where if you are an artist at all, people know about you.

McKenna gives di Chirico a special place among the giants of 20th-century art - "a very important figure, on many different levels. He was one of the original revolutionaries who really did invent something, but as he matured he went on to reject the simplistic ideas of the avant garde. He was one of the greatest intelligences of the 20th century, as well as being an extremely good technician, and he has been proved relevant again and again. I think there are still a lot of people who question the value of a lot of his work. When I was a student, I even thought he was dead, and the idea that he would go on to create some of his best work in old age would have seemed very strange. Di Chirico was one of the figures who was genuinely defining a new position, not just creating novelties or making surprise gestures."

WITH such a strong German presence in the exhibition, including some unfamiliar (and impressive) artists, McKenna explained: "I lived for some years in Germany and got to know German art very well. A lot of German painters of this century - and of the 19th century - have not been seen here, at least not at first hand. Yes, a lot of art there was lost or destroyed, but if one thinks of the 12 years of the Nazi empire, then one is surprised more by how much survived.

"I was in Bonn most of that time, though I also lived in Berlin for a while. That is where I got to know the work of Bruno Goller, for instance. No, I never met him, but I greatly respect his work."

So we shall see an unconventional exhibition, as well as a heavyweight one. (It is, I think, the first time a Balthus painting has ever been seen here). This is something special - 20th-century painting as seen through the eyes of a distinguished painter, instead of the usual art scholars, and pictures chosen strictly on their innate merits, not to illustrate some art-historical thesis.