Lust for life

William Laffan reviews William Orpen's Politics, Sex and Death,
running at the National Gallery until 28 August

Even to those who think they know his art, the current William Orpen exhibition at the National Gallery will be a revelation. It is perhaps the finest exhibition devoted to an Irish artist in recent years and gathers together pictures from around the world, many familiar to a Dublin audience only from reproductions. Orpen was the most prodigiously gifted artist of his generation. However, it has long been debated whether he squandered his talents. By the time of his premature death, alcoholic and embittered, his art had long been eclipsed by the younger generation of the School of Paris. The well-selected showing at the National Gallery triumphantly demonstrates that, in addition to his technical facility as a painter (and particularly as a draughtsman), Orpen engaged with the great themes of art and life with a powerful intellect and emotional depth.

The exhibition's subtitle, 'Politics, Sex and Death', is, for once, not altogether inappropriate, not just an attempt to sex-up a monographic show – something the crowds descending on the Gallery suggests was hardly necessary. Orpen's works command more at auction than any other artist, even Jack B Yeats. Compared to Paul Henry, subject of the Gallery's last major Irish retrospective, Orpen is elusive, difficult to categorise and provocatively questioning. The mirror that Orpen held to his age is strangely relevant to Ireland today.

Orpen was born in Stillorgan in 1878 into a prosperous Protestant family. Towards the end of his life he recalled in his memoirs a defining childhood incident. "I remember once, by mistake, overhearing a conversation between my father and mother about my looks – why was I so ugly and the rest of the children so good looking". Although he exaggerated his facial ugliness and diminutive stature, it is a recurring theme in his life and art which is defined by mirrors and masks, devices to explore the world obliquely. He continued: "I began to think I was a black spot on the earth and when I met people on the country roads I used to cross to the other side." The artist as an outsider is a cliché. With Orpen it is more complicated. He engages with the world but has a sense of removal from it. He revels in viewing "through a glass darkly", suggesting that there is no single perspective which allows for a clear and certain vision. These strategies of perception make his work difficult to categorise, but at the same time deeply rewarding for the multiple viewpoints from which he looks at the comedy of life.

Orpen studied in Dublin and at the Slade School in London. He was precociously successful achieving acclaim with early works such as 'The Mirror'. From 1902 until 1914 he had a seminal role at the Metropolitan School of Art, introducing radically new teaching methods and inspiring a whole generation of Irish artists. Although wealthy from his early success, he was not content with the comfortable life of a society portrait painter in London, at the same time mocking the more absurd aspects of the Celtic Revival at home. The tedious question of whether he should be seen as part of the British School or as a distinctively Irish artist is a fundamental category error – though Orpen would no doubt have enjoyed the heated debate it has engendered. Instead, throughout his career he adopted many, often conflicting, roles which he explores in his masterly series of self-portraits, one of the highlights of the exhibition. He painted himself both as a "Man of the Aran" and a British soldier setting off for the front (see page 60). Orpen took to heart the advice given to him by, of all people, the Fenian, Michael Davitt, whose portrait he painted: "Don't take any sides, just learn to live and learn to understand the beauties of this wonderful world". His sense of detached observation allowed him to straddle fault lines of national (and personal) identity, which both his critics and most fervent admirers still stumble over today.

One of the greatest revelations to a Dublin audience will be the work Orpen carried out in France during the First World War. Although an official war artist, supposedly engaged in creating British propaganda, his depictions of the horrors of the trenches are among the strongest indictments of the conflict – and war generally – ever painted. Contemptuous of the generals whose portraits he was commissioned to paint, works such as 'Soldiers Resting at the Front', show his admiration for the dignity of the ordinary soldier. At the same time his 'Dead Germans in a Trench' demonstrates deep compassion for the enemy too. None of Orpen's war works are in Irish public collections. They are mostly rather inaccessible in the Imperial War Museum in London, giving another compelling reason to make the trip to the National Gallery's Millennium Wing in Nassau Street.

In complete contrast to these pictures of death and destruction the exhibition gives a rare opportunity to see two of the greatest nudes of the twentieth century, 'A Woman' from Leeds Art Gallery and 'Early Morning' from a private collection. The admission price is justified by this picture alone. A portrait of his mistress, Yvonne Aubicq (who later married his chauffeur), it is deeply intimate rather than overtly sensual. However, its frankness makes it quite unlike anything previously painted by an Irish artist and its quiet acknowledgement of female sexuality would have made its exhibition in the Ireland of the 1920s problematic, to say the least.

As in all great art, individual themes are at their most powerful when they combine. Politics, sex and death coalesce in different permutations in several of Orpen's works. A further picture of Yvonne, also included in the show, was entitled, quite literally with gallows humour, 'A Spy'. Orpen invented a story that it depicted a German woman caught spying in France. Before the firing squad, she let fall her fur coat. Notwithstanding this naked plea for clemency, she was shot. Orpen's army superiors were not amused by this fabrication, involving an official war artist's mistress. A strange coincidence links these events in France back to Ireland. Orpen's friend and superior in the propaganda department, Major Lee, had been the officer responsible for organising the execution of the 1916 leaders, while stationed in Dublin two years earlier. Included among these, was, of course, Joseph Plunkett, who the night before his death, married Orpen's friend and pupil Grace Gifford, who is portrayed in the exhibition in a painting entitled 'Young Ireland'. One of the stars of the show, it demonstrates Orpen's very personal take on the national cause. His continuing friendship with Gifford (she wrote to him from Kilmainham Gaol when interned during the Civil War, asking for cigarettes, sweets and, more bizarrely, roller skates) shows that categorisation of Orpen according to party lines is neither helpful nor appropriate. His art, while certainly engaging with the new Ireland, transcends narrow issues of politics.

Orpen's lack of fixed belief in political, artistic, even moral positions attunes well with the relativistic Ireland of today. Not for him the dogmatic certainty of his pupil Sean Keating and the artists of the Free State Realism school. Whether this is a sign of his postmodernity, or superficiality, is another matter. His nephew noted: "I have never known any man, and never a man of superior talents, with so little intellectual curiosity, and so feeble an intellectual grasp." This, however, confuses the mask with the man, and the man with the art. The schoolboy humour of his letters was simply another persona he adopted and behind which he hid, and is belied absolutely by the profundity of canvasses such as 'Armistice Night, Amiens' a glorious if grotesque celebration of life in the face of death.

Like any subtitle, Politics, Sex and Death, limits as much as it explains. Those topics do not give justice to all aspects of Orpen's art. Like many a philanderer, Orpen was also a loving family man. 'On the Beach, Howth' (a rare foray by the artist into an impressionist manner) and the beautiful drawing of his wife Grace and young daughter Mary on holiday at Howth, an idyll before the outbreak of war, are potent images of maternal love, and the quiet domestic pleasures of family life. The latter is nicely juxtaposed with 'The Orpen Air Life Class' where he has learnt the lesson from Manet of exaggerating the perceived eroticism of the female nude by depicting her male companion fully clothed. Strangely, but appropriately, the former image of his fully clothed wife is the far more sensual image.

There is a breath to Orpen's work equalled by few artists of any nationality. While his portraiture is rather played down in the current show, at its best (particularly when he paints himself) it is acute and penetrating, Again, his rare but very fine landscapes are hardly represented in the exhibition. However, in addition to the main show, a cleverly curated exhibition of Orpen's drawings is on display in the print room. Entitled Yours Very Sincerely, William Orpen, it comprises some 90 illustrated letters and drawings, which were donated to the Gallery by Vivien Graves, daughter of an earlier Orpen mistress Evelyn St George (whose magnificent portrait, formerly on display at the K Club, is the most telling lacuna of the main exhibition). The Gallery's Centre for the Study of Irish Art has performed the invaluable task of digitising these letters and they can be viewed through the ArtseArch illustrated database installed at two kiosks at the entrance to the Print Gallery. Orpen's illustrated letters, in their self-deprecating wit, provide a telling commentary on the great themes of the main exhibition. Some things, such as love and war, are just too important to be taken seriously. Combined, the two shows make for a rare, thought-provoking treat for Dublin art lovers. In addition to the sheer visual delight of the exhibition, a dazzling display of painterly bravura, it abounds with wit, gaiety and the love of life. More importantly, Orpen's ambivalence to labels of nationality, class and gender still have truths to tell us about what it is to be Irish, what it is to be human. p

?More www.nationalgallery.ie. Also see page 70 of this issue