AIB's terrific art collection of art should be handed over to the people of Ireland as a very small and very humble gesture of apology for the bank's fecklessness, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
SINCE WE are impoverishing ourselves, our children and perhaps our grandchildren to bail out the bankers, we may as well get something back. In the case of Allied Irish Bank, which has behaved with contempt for the law and the public for decades, one of the things we should take back is its terrific collection of Irish art. AIB has what is surely the finest collection of 20th century Irish painting in private hands, and one that in some respects rivals the holdings of public institutions. We’ve already paid for it many times over, so we should at least be able to enjoy it.
Indeed, if AIB had managed money half as well as it has collected art, we probably wouldn’t be facing another bill of €7.5 billion for its fecklessness and recklessness. The bank adopted, as early as 1980, a coherent and farsighted approach to buying art. At a time when Irish work was still hugely undervalued (both in monetary and in aesthetic terms), AIB took the bold decision that, instead of just accumulating stuff higgledy-piggledy to cover the walls of its new corporate headquarters, it would try to do one thing right. That one thing was to represent the entire history of Irish modernism, roughly from 1890 to the present. In largely fulfilling that ambition, the bank has ended up with something of genuine importance. There may be duds among the 3,000-odd pieces, but if the artworks were loans, the ratio of performing to non-performing assets would be such that there would be no need for an artistic version of Nama.
As you would expect of a corporate collection, the choice is relatively cautious. There are statement pieces by the big marquee names.
There are at least two superb Jack Yeats paintings. Now or Never(1929) is one of Yeats's most energetic and takes on a favourite subject – horse racing. A Race in Hy Brazil, meanwhile, is a bona fide masterpiece, suffused with mysterious light and mythic gaiety. Samuel Beckett was so struck by it that he compared it (rightly) to Watteau's L'Embarquement pour Cythere.
Among the earlier works, Roderic O'Connor's Red Rocks near Pont-Avenis a superb example of his barely restrained wildness and Aloysius O'Kelly's Corpus Christi Procession(1880) earns its keep as one of the first Irish paintings that can accurately be called Impressionist.
There are top-class examples of the work of the three big figures of post-war Irish art: Louis Le Brocquy, Patrick Collins and Tony O'Malley. The Le Brocquys include the Picasso-influenced early work Irish Tinkers, the numinous 1960 oil painting Presenceand two magnificent and starkly contrasting tapestries: Cúchulainn IVand Cherub. Among the Collins paintings is Travelling Tinkers, in which his ability to imbue figurative art with a haunting, misty abstraction marks him as Yeats's successor. O'Malley's brilliant uses of colour are well illustrated in the examples in the AIB collection, which include the outstanding Old Place, Callan.
Sean Scully is represented by at least two superb paintings. Wall of Light, Summeris both as representative and as good as any of the late Scully works in major international museums. The much earlier Azur(1980), meanwhile, illuminates the development of his visual ideas. (There's also a breathtaking work by a later painter who deserves to bracketed in this company, Hughie O'Donoghue's 1997 work On Our Knees.) As well as these big works, all of which would be prized additions to the national collections, AIB has some lovely little gems and some fine painting and sculpture by less well-known or younger artists. William Orpen, for example, is not well represented in general, but there is a gripping pencil and watercolour sketch of an unconscious boxer being hauled out of the ring.
Two of the best Harry Kernoff paintings I've ever come across are in the collection: a dazed, sun-soaked view of The Forty Foot, Sandycove(1940) and the equally charming Sunny Day, Dublin(1943).
Women artists are much better represented than in most collections – from Grace Henry, Mary Swanzy and Norah McGuinness to Evie Hone, Mainie Jellet and Nano Reid (the superb oil The Backyard), to Camille Souter (again a particularly fine example, Once There Were Boats), Anne Madden, Carolyn Mulholland, Eilis O'Connell, Cecily Brennan, Maud Cotter, Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross and many others.
The neo-expressionists who emerged in the 1970s are represented by some very strong work: Brian Maguire's Revolution, Michael Mulcahy's Ganga IV, Michael Cullen's Shadow Boxing. There are two particularly chilling examples of the use of photography to create strange, displaced images of intangible disturbance – Willie Doherty's Border Roadand Paul Seawright's Horizon Night.
These are just some of the riches of the collection. Not even the most effete aesthete could claim that they would be fair recompense for the billions in direct subsidies and the wider consequences of the bank’s appalling behaviour. But they might offer some relief from the misery that is our collective lot. The bank, as an institution, does not deserve to have them. The least AIB owes us is a little pleasure.
There is little point in trying to flog the collection – the €40 million or so it is probably worth is irrelevant in the scale of the bank’s debts. It should instead be handed over by the bank as a very small and very humble gesture of apology.
Some of the works, like the Yeats or Scully paintings, should go to public galleries. The pick of the rest should be in schools, hospitals, theatres, dole offices, libraries and other public buildings all around the country.
A repository of works could be established, allowing paintings to circulate or responsible groups to borrow particular works for exhibitions, discussions or other events. The living artists whose work makes up the bulk of the collection would surely feel far more honoured to have that work bring a little joy to benighted citizens than hanging in a boardroom where so much harm has been done.