The selected paintings from each of the EU accession states represent national self-portraits of a sort, writes Aidan Dunne
If you are at all curious about the 10 states joining the European Union, you could do a lot worse than visit the National Gallery's New Frontiers, which marshals paintings - and just one sculpture - from the national collections of each state.
Curators were invited to choose works they regard as significant in terms of individual artistic identity, so the results amount to a series of cultural snapshots. Each of the 10 mini-exhibitions is a kind of national self-portrait.
Although the mid-20th century was the cut-off point, most of the work predates that. It is concentrated at the end of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century, a period of artistic and political flux, when a preoccupation with emergent nationalism was reflected in artistic production. It was also a period when Paris was the artistic capital, and the European nations surrounding this cultural hub, Ireland included, tended to produce time-lag versions of Parisian innovation imbued with a local flavour.
The result is that there are throughout Europe a number of national collections of works that, while historically significant in the context of particular countries, do not come across as being as accomplished or compelling as their exemplars. This is something of an over-simplification, but anyone who has visited museums around Europe will have witnessed the phenomenon.
If you look at a map, the entrant states cut a broad swathe from the Gulf of Finland to the Adriatic Sea, linking the Baltic to the Mediterranean, with Malta and Cyprus further afield. Writing in the catalogue, art historian Steven Mansbach, an expert on modern art in Eastern Europe, takes issue with an exclusively Paris- centred view of modern art history.
Arguing that contemporary visual culture stems from eastern and south-eastern regions - "from Vilnius to Valetta" - he points to the relatively brief flowering of independent states following Poland's 1863 Winter Insurrection until the fateful intervention of Nazi Germany, and then Soviet Russia, as a period of remarkable artistic activity.
More, he describes a state of affairs strikingly close to the European ideal to which we currently aspire, with a lively interchange of ideas and influence across the expanse of the European landmass. In the east and southeast, though, Mansbach suggests, progressive artistic movements fuelled by nationalism, with revivalist agendas, promoted "cultural expression and preservation rather than the revolutionary political action and social reconstruction that occurred in the west". Modernity was desirable, but with the aim of defining and consolidating autonomous national identity.
This explains the more conservative emphasis, the elements of folklore, foundation myths and national character married to the idioms of the avant garde evident in much of the work on view in New Frontiers. Paradoxically, as Mansbach sees it, the need to meet such local responsibilities led to a level of flexibility in the art of the peripheral countries not open to the artists of the mainstream avant garde. The latter, in other words, despite their privileged position, were more susceptible to the dictates of stylistic orthodoxy.
It's a good, persuasive argument, though it side-steps the obvious possibility that art produced with the aim of serving these varied constituencies may turn out to be not so much admirably promiscuous in terms of its stylistic identity as a bowdlerised or academicised Modernism, traditional representation with a gloss of modernity. And this certainly happened. It happened in Ireland and it happened elsewhere.
Indeed, Mansbach's outline of the complementary demands of modernity and national self-identity could be and has been applied to Ireland throughout exactly the same period, from the Celtic Revival to the fledgling Free State.
Given the separation of Eastern from Western Europe for much of the 20th century, it is hardly surprising, and it is no slight, to say that relatively few of the names in this show will strike a chord - although some certainly will.
Thadeus Kantor, for example, may be better known for his theatrical work than his paintings, but he was a creditable painter. The perennially popular, dreamy Art Nouveau posters of Alfons Mucha mean his style is instantly recognisable, and the example of his work here is as lush as you might expect. And Frantisek Kupka, like several of the artists featured, a Symbolist, went on to become an avant-garde pioneer of abstract painting.
There are some pleasant surprises. In a particularly coherent and homogenous exhibit, Lithuania homes in on just one home-grown movement, from the 1930s, as encapsulated in paintings by just three artists. With a nod towards German Expressionism, the vigorous, earthy expressionism of all three reflects a passionate need to find their own voice on the part of these Paris-influenced, artistically literate artists.
Their palette is muted, even downbeat, but they reward patient viewing. Writing in the catalogue, Aldona Tamonyte outlines the rationale for the selection very clearly.
The Lithuanians geographic neighbour, Latvia, runs through the first three decades of the 20th century with its selection, a stylistically diverse though consistently lively and engaging one. Not least in the work of the tragically short-lived Jekebs Kazaks. Valdemars Tone also looks like a thoughtful, interesting painter. There's a similar breadth to the Estonian work, which includes a classical Constructivist composition by Arnold Akberg and a bold, Jospehine Baker-like nude by Johannes Greenberg.
The Slovenian selection focuses on the controversial development of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting there - "the first truly modern generation in painting". As demonstrated by Ivan Grohar's The Sower, there was also a nationalist agenda. This simple sun-drenched composition features a single, monumental figure, "the image of the enduring, hard working peasant folk who had preserved the Slovene language and, thus, Slovene identity through a millennial history of ethnic assimilation." This link to the land is evident in the Slovak Republic's Marin Benka composition To the Fields with its "monumentalising pathos," and there is some major nation-building going on in Ludovit Fulla's ambitious Song and Labour. The range of the Polish work is striking, from the quirky surrealism of Jozef Mehoffer's aptly titled Strange Garden with its outsize dragonfly to the stylised, theatrical realism of Jacek Malczewski and the audacious Surrealistic Execution (Execution VII) by Andrezej, which recalls a particularly Polish visual sensibility familiar from graphic design and cinema.
Hungarian painter Gyula Derkovits' gentle, exceptionally inventive Winter Bridge opens up some marvellous spatial effects. Inevitably Cyprus and Malta stand apart somewhat. The eclecticism of the Maltese representation reflects the island's history as a Mediterranean crossroads.
There is a sense of sturdy independence running through all the Cypriot work, including a sunny, Morandi-like landscape by Telemachos Kanthos and a big figure composition by Loukia Nicolaidou-Vasiliou's from the 1930s.
A large proportion of the work in New Frontiers has a hard-won, even rough-hewn look about it. That has to do with the time and circumstances in which it was made, when style was vigorously contested and expressive freedom brought with it the responsibilities of national self awareness.
With a few exceptions, it is not a show you will visit to encounter familiar names and images, but it rewards attention and you will learn a great deal.
• New Frontiers is at the National Gallery of Ireland Millennium Wing until May 30th. Entrance is free.