ST Ives in Cornwall, it has been often said, was the real art capital of Britain and Ireland between 1940 and 1960.
With founding fathers such as Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson - not to mention the founding mother, Barbara Hepworth - it became an international centre for abstract art, respected even in far off New York. Giants of American painting such as Mark Rothko visited there, and leading Parisian avantgardists such as Pierre Soulage were in close touch.
The art ethos and legacy of St Ives lie behind the exhibition called "Denis Mitchell and his Irish Friends", which opens to the public from next Friday in a new gallery on Dublin's quays, the Bridge. The friends in question are Breon O'Casey, painter, jeweller and weaver as well as being the son of the great playwright, and two husband and wife teams: painters Tony and Jane O'Malley; and sculptor Conor Fallon and painter Nancy Wynne Jones. All of them knew and respected Mitchell personally, and it was largely on his advice that Conor Fallon abandoned painting for sculpture.
Well, who was Denis Mitchell then? The name still lights few fires, at least in Ireland yet many rate him as possibly the finest sculptor active in St Ives in its great days. Recently the painter critic Patrick Heron is reported to have said that he regards him as superior to Hepworth - for whom, incidentally, he worked for years as an assistant. Another Hepworth assistant was Breon O'Casey, and together they did much of Hepworth's carving for her. By most accounts, she was a very tough taskmaster.
A serious, self sufficient, rather private man, Mitchell stayed out of London's hectic and sometimes backstabbing art politics and preferred to get on with his work. How good that work is, will soon be generally recognised. In spite of a superficial debt to Hepworth and Gabo, he forged his own style and was a magnificent craftsman, a perfectionist in all he did. Meanwhile, this exhibition is not just about him; it involves other, highly gifted artists who are a living proof that the spirit and example of St Ives lives on both in Cornwall and in Ireland.