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MAINIE JELLETT
I don't think Jellett was ever commissioned to do a work to be installed in a church but throughout the thirties she produced a number of paintings based on Christian iconography.(6)
(6) The definitive account of Mainie Jellett's career is Bruce Arnold: Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland, Yale University Press, New Haven and London,1991.
This beautiful Mother and Child, for example, from 1937, much more obviously faithful to Gleizes's principles of rhythmic circular movement than the contemporary work of Evie Hone:
Another one, from 1936:
And here is a more or less contemporary Mother and Child from Gleizes.
What I'd like to observe is Gleizes's attempt - not very successful in my view - to render the faces. In relation to this painting based on ocular movement the face with its tendency to concentrate attention to itself, can be a disruptive element. Gleizes is attempting to incorporate the face into the overall rhythmic movement - to devise what we might call a rhythmic face. Jellett on the other hand obliterates the face. Which is the more interesting when we know that she was in fact a very fine portrait painter.
I have to admit to feeling uncomfortable with this faceless figuration. the more so because in her last work - she died very young, in 1944 - there is tendency for this rather robotic figure to detach itself from the overall rhythmic construction and acquire a life of its own, as here, one of her last paintings - I trod the winepress alone, a painting whose very real impact is dramatic rather than contemplative:
Or in this Crucifixion - The Ninth Hour - from 1941:
This is a magnificent painting. The means that she had developed with Gleizes are deployed with real mastery, but they are subordinate to the overall dramatic effect. Put crudely, we have insisted earlier on the quality of flatness, and this isn't flat. The perspective effect is back, as is a colour that conveys an impression of lighting, of light and dark. The contrast with the Lenz St Maur chapel which we took as our starting point for a consideration of what an abstract liturgical art could be is telling.
We can perhaps explain this by her consciousness of her own approaching death and also by her horror at the outbreak of war and especially the fall of France which affected her deeply. I am reminded of Gleizes's reaction to the First World War in the portrait of his brother in law Jacques Nayral after he learned of his death.
Mme Gleizes tells us that at the outbreak of the 1939 war Gleizes was making little papier maché monsters, clearly an outlet for his feeling with no intention of exhibiting them. His principle works done during the war are triumphs of tranquil contemplation, of silence.