Wanda Ryan Smolin - Irish Arts Review:
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Italian Report December 1955
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By Way of Preface
In November 1954 the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of External Affairs in Ireland awarded Patrick Swift (it was Anthony Cronin who entered Swift's name for the award when Swift was abroad) a grant of £500 to be used for the purpose of studying the art of painting in Italy. Swift wrote a report on his return in December 1955 after twelve months travelling in Italy. This is the preface to his report.

I have always felt that painters above all should avoid falling into the attitudes of the Art Historian in their approach to paintings of the past. In particular the comfortable assumption of absolute aesthetic values as a starting point. Since it is necessary to use some books this is not easily avoided, because the aesthetic rules are rarely stated simply or clearly, but rather underlie the interpretation of the work discussed. For all historical purposes these rules are fairly adequate — for instance, Mr Berenson can scarcely put a foot wrong in the whole of the Renaissance, but the cat is out of the bag when we find him unable to appreciate Degas. This is particularly important in relation to scholars of the Renaissance among whom two very dangerous historical-aesthetic notions are commonly found, that of Progress and Experimentation in Art, which involves the idea of visual curiosity and scientific knowledge (in these terms Leonardo da Vinci becomes the great master) and the idea of Ideal Beauty and Style. These notions permeate the writing of art historians everywhere and it seems to me that in these terms the subject becomes a very dull one. It is chastening to reflect awhile on the limitations of Mr Berenson's aesthetic when we see that it leads him in fact to a belief in the death of art, or worse to ridiculous equations such as that of Rossetti and Botticelli. A real painter cannot afford such charming indulgences. For the painter, for whom painting is a vital activity and a way of life — not merely a profession — such attitudes as we find in the histories are deadly. For him the only benefit, at least the deepest and most important benefit which he can get from the study of the Masters comes from his capacity to see the painting in a thoroughly contemporary way. I mean in the present tense — the tense after all in which it was painted. Not for instance as an early this or a late that, nor as a good example of chiaroscuro or some other aesthetic or technical quality but as an immediately important human statement completely relevant to his life at the moment and convincing for that reason. If a work does not strike the painter in this way all further analysis of it will be futile, but if he sees it in this light and it assumes this kind of reality for him, then he will be able to learn from it on all levels, in particular it will repay detailed technical examination. My contention is that the Art Historian so far has made this difficult by assuming as a set of values on which to base his approach, aesthetic principles which act as blinkers to a fresh and personal vision of painting.
There are exceptions to the rule, and I think Sir Kenneth Clarke's book on Piero della Francesca is an example of a first class job. But nevertheless the use of books in the study of painting remains a depressing business. Although I went to Italy merely and humbly to look at the work of the great painters, once I contemplate describing my experience I find myself involved in these questions. My worse suspicions were proved true when I discussed the subject with some art historians of the younger generation in Venice and found that among these young men (one of whom was Mr Berenson's Secretary) the attitude, or rather point of departure, lay in the consideration of painting as a public movement — the emphasis on the social aspects of art.
A more rewarding approach to painting, in my opinion the only valid one, is to regard it as a deeply personal and private activity and to remember that even when the painter works directly for the public — when there is sufficient common ground to allow him to do so — the real merit of the work will depend on the personal vision of the artist and the work will only be truly understood if it is approached by each in the same spirit as the painter painted it. We must be willing to assume the same sort of responsibility and share the dilemma out of which the work was created in order to be able to feel with the artist. Since the deepest and truest dilemma, from which all good art springs, is the human condition we have every right to regard the needs of our own consciousness as the final court in judging the merit of a work of art, we have in fact a moral obligation to do so. This demands the precise honesty from the spectator as was required from the artist in making the painting. It is their common ground, the area within which communication can occur. Art in the end speaks to the secret soul of the individual and of the most secret sorrows. For this reason it is true that the development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development.
Such questions as these which students of art history took very seriously — is it possible to paint a socially realistic portrait today — for example, cease to have any meaning if we view the art of painting as a personal moral activity aimed at clarifying the painter's relationship with reality, and one moreover which will serve the same purpose in the life of anyone who has the honesty to avail of it. It is by deciding what is real for him and portraying it convincingly that the painter serves the true ends of art. The question of 'social' reality does not arise on this profoundly personal level. On the other hand the question of personal salvation and our relationship to God does. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.
The above, I fully realise, is not a completely satisfactory statement, but will serve to indicate my attitude rather than to explain or justify it. I regard as public the acceptance of standards based on absolute formal ideals. These standards are exterior to the world in which art is created and in which it exists, they are in the deepest sense 'post hoc'. Painting is created from within and we must begin from within if we are to understand it.
I do not deny that it is possible to discuss validly the genesis of art in public and sociological terms, but when this is done we should be clear where we stand. If such an attitude underlies a view that presents itself as a full evaluation of art and its development, it seems to me pernicious. I do not know if there are in fact such things as definable social standards of aesthetics that would have any historical or artistic value, but whether there are or not it seems clear to me that for the painter nothing less than complete personal involvement of a moral nature will do.

— By Way of Preface, Italian ReportDecember 1955


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It is not an accident that Histoire de la Peinture en Italie remains readable; as Cézanne found it, who read it many times, or Baudelaire, who borrowed from it. This pleasant and incisive book provides us with an example of a kind of critical writing which is illuminating, instructive, and wholly delectable. And its importance does not depend on the validity of Stendhal's comparative judgements. It is an eccentric personal work full of specific observations and we get the sensation of being in the presence of a temperament and an intelligence* excited by pictures. This is an exciting experience. It is a personal matter. [*In the stricter meaning of the word — a spiritual being capable of choice.]
— X, The Painter in the Press


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Note: many of the reproductions displayed here are of poor quality
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By Swift
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Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
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Main
Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All

By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh

Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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Nano Reid, by Patrick Swift, Envoy, March 1950

Every new artistic genius must be judged according to the aesthetic which he, himself, brings. — Heine

Each work of art is a complete entity existing in its own right and by its own particular logic. It has its own reality and is independent of any particular creed or theory as a justification for its existence. This is not to say that artistic development may be considered as a self-sufficient process unrelated to social reality, because art is always concerned with the deeper and fundamentally human things; and any consideration of art is a consideration of humanity. But it does mean that we cannot apply the principles and logic of the past to a new work of art and hope to understand it. The eternal verities with which the artist is concerned do not change, but our conception of art does, as does our conception of form, and these must be extended if we are to understand fully and basically the meaning of a new work.
It is a complex matter, but the elemental principles are always simple. The mass of modern art theory that developed around the fantastic changes of this century's painting can be largely ignored; only one or two fundamental principles are important. Probably most important in the new aesthetics from the painter's point of view was the statement of Degas, seventy years ago, in his unheeded advice to the Impressionists. He spoke then of a "Transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory... It is very well to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what one has retained in one's memory." Amongst the Impressionist he stands as the most significant painter relevant to modern art. This attitude, and all it implies, underlines the work of practically every painter of importance since 1900. Ultimately, it meant that the day of stage props and models was gone, and that imagination was recognised as the most important quality in an artist. Gertrude Stein records the astonishment Picasso produced by his first pictures without models. It was the beginning of a great freedom for the painter; it revolutionised the entire approach to subject. Beginning with this, the emphasis shifted from representation, and the artist was free to modify or even completely change appearance according to compositional needs. Even painters working in a tradition very different to the Ingres-Degas school were fundamentally affected by it. Bonnard worked completely from memory and composed his pictures in the studio from the slightest sketches. And to-day, after over half a century of revolution and upheaval in the arts, is it this principle which sets modern painting apart from the false traditions which were rejected, including, of course, defunct Impressionism? It is directly in this tradition of draughtsmanship allied with the freed imagination which Nano Reid works. I do not wish to imply that she studies or is even directly influenced by Degas as a painter. What I speak of is a simple fundamental element in the modern artist's approach to subject which, though rooted in French tradition, is not particularly the property of any school. In Ireland there is no tradition of painting. Nano Reid began to work at a time when the first impact of modern art had subsided in Europe. Cubism had already been left behind by its originators and had passed into the hands of the imitators, and young students were turning, without exception, to Paris. Even German Expressionism was under the shadow of the French achievements. The notable thing about the approach of Nano Reid was that she instinctively avoided the too strong, too near influence of Paris, and began with pure and firmly realised preoccupation with drawing, with insistence on line and structure. It is this element, coupled with the freedom of her approach to subject that, places her, I believe, in the great tradition of Ingres-Degas-Lautrec and Picasso (who will always be remembered as a draughtsman above all). It is important that we should understand this basis on which her work is built. Among Irish painters, she is outstanding for her draughtsmanship, and her vitality, so often praised, is rarely understood as existing by virtue of this passionate insistence on the structure of her subject.
Nano Reid was born in Drogheda and came to Dublin to study at the School of Art. Three years later she went to Paris and survived her student days there without falling a victim to the easy seduction of imitative painting after the French manner. Then, after studying in London, she gave her first exhibition in 1933. There is little more to say about this early period. She drew incessantly. Her approach was distinguished by the fact that she was concerned not with the production of pictures as such, but with the struggle to express a reality in paint which was a personal, a painter's reality. It is necessary to stress her concern with drawing, because it has its roots in her essential conception of visual reality. In so far as it is concerned with truth that goes beyond appearance and form, art is transcendental. The consciousness of this is often a snare for the painter who is led by a false preoccupation with some literary or intellectual conception of reality into a time-conscious literary form. Nano Reid realised with the instinct of a painter that for her the whole truth existed in the head, the body, the structure of life: it lay there revealed in the form, the line, a timeless and profound reality. It was a difficult struggle for the young painter who was gradually finding out that nobody else's vision could be substituted for her own. She had a great personal honesty and a great humility in her attitude, and the slow development of her style represents heroic and intense work. In 1933, the year of her first show, the real struggle for personal expression was just beginning. She herself considers this exhibition to have been unimportant and premature. At this point, though her drawing was highly developed, she had not yet discovered the freedom that would enable her to really paint.
New knowledge is only useful in so far as it opens up new vistas for the imagination, and no more so than the old forms which the artist must understand only in order to reject. Nano Reid discovered the liberation she needed in the year after her first show, in the work of an impressive Belgian painter who exhibited in Dublin after two years painting in this country. I have no hesitation in saying that I consider Nano Reid to be the finer artist. It is strange that after Paris and London, with the violent atmosphere of artistic change in both cities, she should encounter, back in Dublin, the work that was to set the spring and give beginning to her painting. But so it was, and it is significant that she did not merely paint pseudo-Howet pictures and work her way out of the influence. In a way it was scarcely an influence for her, but a revelation. Her reaction shows that already she possessed a deep personal vision, and knew that whatever aid she might receive in the expression of it would not come in the form of direct derivation. She thought, on looking at Marie Howet's work, not 'this is what I want to paint' but 'it is with a freedom such as this that I wish to paint.' Therein lay the real value of Marie Howet for Nano Reid. Of the former I may say in passing that her approach to painting was fundamentally expressionistic. She was concerned with more than either the creation of impression or of pattern. At her best, she could invest a landscape with a strongly personal mood and convey really deep feeling. She was an original artist who saw things more in terms of line than colour.
It is difficult to give an exact account of the period immediately following. It is marked by a consistent development of style that is scarcely paralleled outside a handful of the greater artists of our day. Apart from Picasso (who is partly guilty of being what Wyndham Lewis has called him; a great eclectic), such consistency and purposefulness have marked the development of all great artists. It is highly remarkable in our own J.B. Yeats.
Looking now at the picture of this early period, it seems as if her development followed a peculiar logic of its own. One can feel in the general construction of her paintings the germ of her now mature style. It was about this time that circumstances forced Nano Reid to attempt a living by portrait painting, thus complicating her whole existence as a painter by the introduction of the most disastrous discouragement of all, the unsympathetic and exacting patron. But it was inevitable that, painting for a public who want flattery and not portraiture, she could not continue. The final crux came when a sitter demanded money back; and so ended her one unsuccessful effort to compromise with commerce. Also, she had the not unexpected experience of having five submitted pictures thrown out of the Academy Exhibition. Amongst these were portraits, and a notable academician informed her that a head was an object surrounded by light, and she showed no highlights! But Nano Reid was not concerned with light. The Impressionists had said sufficient about that, and in her concept of reality, highlights were purely accidental and superficial, and however indicative of shape or texture, had no importance in her insistence on structure. One is again reminded of Degas' comment on the Impressionists when he said they were slaves to the accidents of nature. In 1936 she exhibited once more. It was this exhibition that revealed the beginning of her real painting. She commanded attention for the vigour and strength of her work and was recognised as a significant artist. In any case, this was the beginning, and from then on she worked with a greater intensity and a more rigorous integrity than even before. To say simply that she worked hard is to leave out of account the most difficult aspect of the progress she achieved in the next few years. One must remember the nature of her essential problems; she was concerned with real seeing, and not simply the nature of objects in themselves, but in the complex relation of things to each other, either in landscape or in interior. I may say that only those who have themselves experienced the tortuous nature of such work can appreciate the gigantic and yet minute development in Nano Reid's painting. Working with courage and great self-criticism, she progressed slowly after the first few years of initial discovery. In 1938, she exhibited in New York. Later, her work was to be seen in London at the Redfern and St George's Galleries, and of course always in Dublin at group shows, and in Victor Waddington's.
But recognition was slow to develop real recognition. Her vitality and originality commanded attention, and, for those who look, her influence may be seen in other important contemporary Irish painters. Tributes from well-known artists like Liam O'Flaherty and John Betjeman, although they drew attention to her work, did not show any appreciation of the really important aspects of her art. Often she had been judged by the standards of painters whose concept of art is wholly different, whose approach to the art is literary and poetic as compared with the much more primal and real attitude of Nano Reid. This is not an attempt to invalidate their work in the exposition of hers, but to point out the profound divergence between them. To some degree, they approached painting as a form through which they could express an outlook, a message, a poetry. With Nano Reid, the essential quality of her work is that it is a painting first, and her poetry is the pure poetry of paint. Outside of the finished picture her painting never existed; within the canvas it exists, a separate entity, a new reality on its own right and by its own original logic.
Throughout her career, Nano Reid has held exhibitions at more or less regular intervals in Dublin, and her position as an Irish painter is secure. But much more important than her merit relative to Irish painters is her position by general European standards. Seeing her work in London at St George's Galleries, one is truck by the tremendous force of her composition. Surrounded entirely by English and Continental work, she seems to emerge with a profound realisation of structure, whether in figure or landscape, which is all the more astonishing since she is a woman. An essential part of her power is a deep understanding of tonal values. She has been accused, in a silly way, of being doleful, because of the sombre quality of her previous work. To-day her painting is becoming more lyrical, less hard, less calligraphic, although still conceived in line.
The painting Men Tarring a Roof, not illustrated here, shows her previous insistence on the lines of her composition. It is essentially a massive conception, and captures the structure of her subject. The opposition of the planes of the roofs and the left space of the street create a strong feeling for the actual scene as it existed. It is a profound thought that in getting at the reality of the structure of a scene, one inevitably produces this individual atmosphere of the place. This is even more clearly demonstrated in portraiture. Nano Reid does not begin a portrait with any ideas about the person she draws. She is concerned with the head, its existence as a structure with certain characteristics. She is so much concerned with this that her portraits are inevitably deep studies of character and personality. The head, the face, the lines and features, contain everything for the painter who understands well enough to put it down. The portrait reproduced here is one of her late works. It is fluent and colourful, showing her thorough understanding of tone. Her last exhibition, a few years ago, included three outstanding portraits and at that time she still conceived her heads in strong, deep lines and in deep, subtly balanced tone. A comparison between these and the present, so much more lyrical work, shows how the painting has progressed from the stage where one could feel the very elemental structure on the canvas, to a style where, as in Portrait of a Young Man, the structure is more in the nature of a strong base for a lyrical conception. Her portraits are always deep, psychological studies, full of meaning, but their real value lies in the fact that they are beautiful paintings. Her portraiture, in particular, marks her as a great draughtsman.



Also reproduced here is a painting which has a great significance in her recent development. It is only recently that Nano Reid has painted Drogheda town itself. The brilliant canvas, bought by the Haverty Trust at the Living Art Exhibition of 1949, was a most exciting study of Drogheda from a hill. Now there are several more pictures of the town itself. Boyne Bridge and Gulls shows a view, through a window, on to the Boyne. It is painted in vivid colours, but with a masterly control of values. It is a small canvas but there is a sweep and precision about the proportions that make it suitable to any scale. I consider it a significant picture because it combines the two elements of her work which seem to be merging more surely in a mature command of colour and composition. The structure is evident and powerful but the colour (and even in the reproduction, the tone shows how balanced and subtle it is) is equally important as a force in conveying the atmosphere of the scene. Her watercolours have for some time shown this new phase of colour. With her unusual understanding of tone values, it is evident that she will make a great colourist.



There are other aspects of Nano Reid's art which deserve consideration: her line drawings, and watercolours, and her mural paintings in the Four Provinces House. But it is evident that her enthusiasm and life are stronger than ever and the vigour and power of her work increase. Everything she paints shows a new searching and a new discovery. Recent illustrations in lino-cut show a new interesting facet of her activity. She works to-day with all the energy and fire that marked her early painting and drew so much comment on the vitality of her brushwork and composition. As a painter, she is still young; her attitude is marked by a modesty and a determination that make one feel she is always just beginning. Such freshness in maturity is again a mark of her greatness. In Ireland, we are inclined to think of our painters as particularly 'Irish', and to readjust our attitude in considering continental or English artists. There is no especial value in attempting to say how great Nano Reid may be in the Irish scene, but one can say, without pretension, that she has her place in European painting.
— Nano Reid, by Patrick Swift, Envoy, March 1950


Later that year Nano Reid was selected to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale


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Note: many of the reproductions displayed here are of poor quality
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By Swift
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Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
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Main
Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All

By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh

Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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The Artist Speaks, Envoy, Feb 1951
John Ryan asked five Irish painters to contribute to a symposium of artistic opinion. Louis le Brocquy, Nano Reid, George Campbell, Gerald Dillon and Patrick Swift all wrote short and succinct pieces.





No real painter ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting. At the same time it is to be regretted that in these days of professional art criticism so much should be written in so boring a manner about the subject. Now, as in the past, the only worthwhile things said about paintings are said by painters, good painters. There is no reason for the issue to be confused by post hoc chat about representation, reality, truth, beauty, abstraction and so forth:

We all know art is not truth — Picasso

And no good painter ever has a message, nor have the themes a painter uses anything to do with the quality of his work:

Grandiose subjects have nothing to do with the
matter but only the talents, the power and love
of whoever treats the subject
— Rouault

Any painter who thinks he has something to say to the people, or anything to contribute to the world of ideas or literature, is treading dangerous ground; the influence of literature on painting is at all times dangerous if not deadly. Painting is a visual art; and the job of the artist must be to create in visual terms the tension experienced. One cannot argue or explain in paint. The aim is not to put in everything that will help, but as little as one can help, so that a picture is in one sense a 'sum of destructions'. It is a question of honesty and courage:

One produces only the necessary — Degas

And there are no rules. Picasso again:

What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop putting them into a picture because they did not go with the basket of fruit.

In this respect technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be. And the idea of technical progress has caused great confusion, especially among the young who imagine that they should take up where Picasso left off:

The several manners I have used in my work
must not be taken as an evolution or a step
towards an unknown ideal of painting
. — Picasso

The fallacious idea that a painter 'experiments' is harmful to the simple-minded, who conceive painting to be a game in which one casts about in all directions in a effort to hit the jackpot. The only indication of an individual vision is an individual style:

What I seek above all in a picture is a man
and not a picture
— Zola

It is also a mistake to imagine that such a thing as the stupid genius exists, or did at any time. Good painting is not produced by any unintelligent following of inspiration or temperament. Every genius is a great intelligence:

Of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know
nothing
— Degas

You may know a good painter by his habit of work: a good painter works constantly.
And finally, everything written about art is profoundly unimportant; most of it, unfortunately, is also boring, except for the statements of a genius about his art, which always have interest because of his work. For this reason I may, I think, be excused the quotations. A last word from Degas: 'Art is deceit'; and Van Gogh: 'to be simply honest'.


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Dublin Oil - Dublin Watercolour/ Ink - Italy - Oakridge/ Ashwell Watercolour - Oakridge/ Ashwell Oil - London Oil - London Watercolour/ Ink - France - Algarve Oil - Algarve Watercolour/ Ink - Self-Portraits - Trees - Portraits I - Portraits II - Porches Pottery - Books - Misc - Algarve Studio
Note: many of the reproductions displayed here are of poor quality
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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By Swift
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Main
Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All

By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh

Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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Some notes on Caravaggio, Nimbus, 1956

Caravaggio speaks to us out of a consciousness that is brooding and obsessive, and affects us in a way that is not simply artistic. By this I mean that he comes close to presenting us with a sensation of amorphous and desperate desire unredeemed by an authoritative vision. It can be felt in the apprehensive boredom of the unsuccessful pictures and in the oppressive intensity of the best. If this sensation were deep enough it might have destructive effects, since we all live within that margin of order which we succeed in imposing on life, i.e. on the unfulfilled longings of the heart, and his work might then be truly diabolic. His genius operates in that world of antithesis where the conflict between ideal and reality rages, and the moral victory, i.e. the ultimate affirmation of the goodness of life, is always so tenuously won that we feel the dread of chaos intensely —  even when he is completely successful. If there could be such a contradictory phenomenon as the uninnocent artist he might be it. He indicates the sort of sensations we might expect from such a monster. But since he is wholly innocent beneath the apparent evidence of corruption he ends by moving us in a profound and religious way. It is the difficulty he experiences in standing outside his situation that creates the impression of an impure involvement. For the same reason there is no trace of the comic in his work, for that depends totally on detachment. On the other hand everything he does is tempered by a deep seriousness, and it is this seriousness that is his most attractive quality.
His work is full of the signs of those two cardinal sins from which (as Kafka pointed out) all the others spring: impatience and laziness. The work of every artist is conditioned by the way in which he resists or yields to these temptations, although it is possible to see clearly whether we are faced with a small talent well served or a great talent sinned against. From the walls of the Church of St. Luigi dei Francesi a great talent mysteriously glowers at us. These enormous paintings seem always to preserve their mystery sufficiently to shock me again with the grotesque and intimate nature of Caravaggio’s sensuality. All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity. Perhaps it is for this reason that it attracts so often the irrational, who fail to see that its purpose is moral, that is, the evaluation of experience; in the deepest sense, the development of taste.
The eroticism of Caravaggio is special because it exists in that area between the simple sensual appreciation of the object which produces the desire to posses it, and the passionate but detached concern of the Observer, which also seeks to posses but to posses through understanding.
Caravaggio frequently painted out of the first, and less intense eroticism, and thus left us with representations of desirable things, yet failed to move us on the more exhilarating plane of true art. The failure is one of energy and it robs the observation of that last illogical step that would carry it into the realms of wisdom. I believe that if the representation is good enough there is a kind of enjoyment to be got from an art that attempts no more than to show how lovely, ugly or whatever else certain aspects of life can be. It is a form of expression that attempts to go no further than the obviously definable qualities of the object described, those qualities apprehensible on a level where love is not involved but merely curiosity. The interest that such art may have is limited by the degree of our curiosity in the objects involved, when these objects bore us, we are as unmoved as we would be by an art that described nothing. It is wholly on the level of deep and passionate concern that I wish to consider Caravaggio. For this reason it appears to me as wrong to labour such aspects of this extraordinary man as, for instance, what is called mannerism to-day, or what previously was called cellar painting. Both labels, like all labels, are useful only to the servants of the Goddess of Dullness in reducing the true significance of the art to boredom.
I have said that the paintings in the church of St. Luigi shocked me by the intimate sensuality that they emanate, or rather the atmosphere of sensual intimateness that they create. But of course these pictures are not shocking; good painting never is. What I am shocked at is not the sensation itself, which is deep and convincing precisely because it illuminates an aspect of my consciousness and brings into play emotions which have dimly sought just such a fusion with the concrete world for as long, it seems, as I have existed. Now that they are released they have the familiarity of an old possession; but I am shocked to find on each recurrent contact that it still works; that these rhetorical fulsome compositions have this quality so strongly. I feel that it is grotesque in so far as it combines the form of the large public blood and thunder painting (Michelangelo) with the deeply personal tender and profound indoor feeling for objects that we find in Giorgione. The intimacy has a stronger sharper flavour, there is a brooding quality in the observation that makes one feel that all is not well. At least I think that something may easily happen in the picture; and am consequently surprised to find, each time I return, that the characters are still transfixed in the same fateful moment of action. Although the gestures remind me of Michelangelo the characters are no longer the loose types with which Buonarroti inhabited his painting, but convincing individuals, with a unique personal existence. They achieve this quality through the sensation of surface textural reality that is so strong that I find myself unable to avoid touching the canvas or at least wanting desperately to do so. Looking at them I become acquainted with their quality of existence in an intensely sensual way, and this carries with it a feeling that they are in some way threatened. They are at least very vulnerable. There is another dimension to their existence besides their own being. It seems that the presence of Caravaggio still haunts them. He has given such absorbing obsessional attention to the clothes and the flesh that he does not merely convince us of their existence but seems himself to remain restlessly hovering in the atmosphere that surrounds them. The mirror is not held up to nature but to the secret breaking heart of Caravaggio. The world of his longing and despair is intimately laid bare.
The quality of the indoor private revelation is also to be found in Rembrandt but with a significant difference. Although a greater painter by far he attracts me less. The particular quality I seek to explore is of course part of the technical device of chiaroscuro. But it will easily be seen that this explains nothing if we turn to any of the thousands of dull technical experts who have used it, and in whose work there is no atmosphere of any kind. In Rembrandt we find always the keen detachment of the supreme Observer. We see the object cornered and shivering under the scrutiny of the artist. On the other hand in these paintings of Caravaggio the object seems to expand, if somewhat apprehensively, in the less critical eye of the lover. This is an overstatement, but will serve the purpose of clarifying the special nature of the intimate quality of these paintings. They verge on the realm of the confession —  hovering on that vital line between the simply revelatory and consequently vulgar, and the honest statement that is moral and consequently dignified. It might further define their existence to say that Rembrandt’s vision could only have been produced from a Protestant point of departure, whereas Caravaggio is conspicuously catholic and Latin in temperament  —  the dago — so suspect to the English, or more correctly, to the puritan mind. There is no element of righteousness in Caravaggio’s vision. In terms of the painting this is difficult to define, technical examination only brings us nearer to a rebuff from the Mystery, the paint that is not paint, the object that is made profoundly important only to be lost in a transcendent sensation more fabulous still. Since the point at which a painting becomes important to us is that at which it transcends the nice qualities of paint and material, close technical criticism is always likely to impose another barrier, except when used by the painter himself who is concerned with the business of pushing paint about in order to observe its accidental effects and to learn from the manner of their occurrence how to direct them towards an understanding and a statement. It is clearly not the business of the spectator to approach painting in this manner precisely because it presupposes a desire and intention to paint a more relevant picture than the one in question. Thus the spectator will find himself making criticisms in terms of a picture which he would have painted or would have someone else paint for him, but which he can do nothing about; a ridiculous position and one that will endanger his peace of mind —  one in which art will play the opposite of its true role of integration and catharsis, producing frustration, not fulfilment. I feel that it is in the difference in emphasis in the paintings of the individual detail that the righteousness in Rembrandt, and its absence in Caravaggio, can be observed. Not to add confusion to a difficult point, I will simply concentrate on the element in Caravaggio that gives me the sensation of a generous commitment that is catholic and Latin in its fullness. When I speak of the emphasis I mean the form of the head or figure as it exists for me when the illusion is absolutely convincing. I am not interested in breaking down the illusion to its material components. But I am anxious to pin-point the character of the illusion.
To begin with it is rhetorical. Each gesture is slightly more so, and if we look at the figure surrounding of St. Mathew in the painting of his vocation, we see how expectation can be a crucifixion of expectancy. These are elements in the illusion, and when all is said not the important ones. Yet if we look at any final and simple conception of the object here, I mean a head or a single figure, a hand or a foot, the same quality is to be felt in the same manner — the rhetorical placing of emphasis in terms of the feelings that dominated the artist. But which precedes which, the feelings or the object? Does Caravaggio attach his fantasy to the hand and the head, or do they provoke the emotion? I think we are near the secret of this harrowing work if we see in it a profound declaration of the sacred importance of the innate character of each particular Thing to the painter. It is a real genuflection to the fact that the artist lives dependently in the world of Things. In a bad painting of Caravaggio it is possible to see this gone wrong and to learn how tenuous and fine is the relationship on which these pictures are built. The involvement is very much concerned with the touch, smell, taste, and presence of the objects, it is a deeply complete commitment. In the bad pictures it is merely an involvement and fails to achieve Vision: preoccupation without triumph. Yet (and this is the point about this painter) when he succeeds in raising himself above the mire, of going through with the relationship until he has come out the other side, as it were, we get something as specially valuable as these paintings in the church of St. Luigi dei Francesi, something that is moving in an intimate and a nervous sensual way. And this gives it a stronger impact than is achieved in more rhetorical or more realistic art. Caravaggio is finally rhetorical about the so called realistic aspects of the Object. In this way he goes deeper than the rhetorical realism which does not attach itself to the loved individual detail. If for instance his concern was merely for the great effect (in the way in which we later find it in Tiepolo) he would not interest us as he does. It is the fact that no detail is unworthy of his love that affects us deeply, in painting the gesture in full rhetorical flower he is at the same time in love with the very simple existence of the object apart from its significance in action.
This dualism, where we have a tiresome rhetorical composition that in itself is boring but contains exciting passages of vivid observation, is what we normally find in Caravaggio. Frequently the disparity between the conception as a whole and the manner of execution in the details makes it difficult for us to appreciate the profound love that is there behind the facade. For instance it is difficult to accept the painter’s understanding and love for a sensual Roman porter from Trastevere if it is presented to us as a conception of Christ —  and how often does Caravaggio grotesquely inhabit his religious pictures with debauched faces. It is a quality of this work that its reality is never a religious reality in the sense bestowed on that word by the great tradition of Italian religious painting. It is religious in so far as it presents a deeply honest and passionate view of man, but as for the conventions of religious painting they will not contain these portraits in sensuality. The sensation I get in this respect is that of finding myself intensely present in a studio where a group of people are posing for a religious painting. It is a fair criticism of Caravaggio to say that he fails to move us in terms of the religious belief behind his subject, and that the subject when it is a religious one is never what it seems to be. The painter’s love for the earthy and sensual aspect of his subject in nearly every case dominates. Yet in spite of this it would be wrong to try to reduce Caravaggio to the status of a “realist” who has strayed into the world of rhetorical religious painting by accident and to his detriment. It is certainly a reasonable speculation whether Caravaggio would have painted these subjects for choice (the sort of thing that the latter mannerist derivative painters, especially the Dutch, chose to paint seems nearer to the true taste of the man who painted the Vocation of St. Matthew). But when the two lines cross, that is on the one hand his concern for the physical sensual existence of the object, and on the other his sympathy for the circumstances in which it is to be painted, and when this crossing is focused dead on in relation to the composition, we get a painting that is superb by the highest standards. And moreover we get a picture that is doubly religious, religious in the deep respect for the object, in its profound love of life, and also in the manner in which it presents a situation full of religious significance. In such a picture it becomes impossible for us to divide these two elements, so profound is the simultaneous focus of both these kinds of love and respect.

It seems to me that in the Vocation of St Matthew this happens. Consequently my remark about the taste of the man who painted it is only valid in terms of those other paintings where this does not happen. Perhaps this is the great weakness of all criticism, that it tends to take facts derived from the examination of unimportant works and applies them in making a judgement about a man whose whole importance rests in the successful work, where these facts do not exist —  such as the dualism in the attitude of Caravaggio in his religious paintings. Faced with this masterpiece I can simply say that he is a great religious painter and a great realist rhetorical painter as well. I gratefully acknowledge a debt to a great and mysterious genius. We must be prepared to acknowledge the “perversity of the poetic imagination”, because that is what we are up against here: the sensual earthy rhetorical realist has painted the superbly transcendent religious picture.
Having said this, however, I would like to return to my original view of Caravaggio the supreme sensual realist. Because it is in so far as he achieves this transcendence which I find in the Vocation of St. Matthew (through submitting himself to the physical presence of objects) that he is particularly interesting to me. I am only too aware that this painter is just now the subject of fashionable revivalism, but like most revivals and rediscoveries its true roots lie in the relation that Caravaggio has to contemporary painting. There can be no doubt that the brooding quality imparted to his canvases by his sensuous and disturbing feeling for texture and presence is very much of our time. We can see the quality of his work because it is of a kind that we have been made aware of as relevant through the work of such painters as Max Ernst and Francis Bacon for instance, Bacon’s horrific sense of texture as something not just a matter of paint but as a gateway to sensations that belong to a level of our consciousness where our real life goes on, by this means revealing to us what Proust called “that reality far from which we live, from which we get further and further away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable” is very close it seems to me to the intense awareness of texture that we find in Caravaggio. The disturbing presence that Ernst in his best pictures can impart to Things, both human figures and still life, has a close relation to this very quality in the older painter. In any case to me his importance lies in the fact that he moves me in a direct personal way very much relevant to the sense of doom, and the desperate need for a clarifying vision of the mess, that is at the heart of our present dilemma. The nervous tenor of his work, and for that matter of his disordered and tragic life, can only be sympathetic to anyone burdened with the deep sense of chaos, injustice and despair inherited by those born in the twentieth century. It is by no means an accident of fate that Caravaggio had to wait till now to be rediscovered.
I have referred principally to the paintings in the church of St. Luigi dei Francesi and especially to the Vocation of St. Mathew because for me this is the supreme expression of Caravaggio’s genius, but of course Rome contains many other important pictures by this painter. He is perhaps nearer to Rome in spirit than any other painter of the Renaissance. There is none of the lightness of the Etruscan character in his painting, but there is that beautiful seriousness of the Roman mind, the cultured enquiring mind (in his case tortured and obsessed) of the highly conscious and sophisticated. Still, we feel at last the value of that heavy sensuality (here serving a deeply valuable human purpose) that elsewhere seems more often to serve the degradation of the race.
 —  Some notes on Caravaggio, Nimbus, 1956


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IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue
Patrick Swift, by Aidan Dunne

In his introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of work by Barrie Cooke at The Hague's Gemeentemuseum in 1992, the then director Rudi Fuchs discerned a kind of alternative tradition of modern painting, a tradition of outsiders, within which he included Cooke. He listed off several others: Kokoschka, Soutine, Rouault, Yeats, Asger Jorn, Eugene Leroy, Per Kirkeby.
What the work of these various individuals share is a disinclination or inability "to surrender to" the lure of "pure painting". They have not, that is to say, embarked on the road to abstraction opened up by Cézanne, the "classical consequences" of Cézanne's art. They are observers, reporters, "experiential" painters who stand apart from the central Modernist enterprise.
A moment's thought will furnish many more contenders for this particular Salon des Refusés. For it is a fact that, while the advent of abstraction is the most salient fact about painting in the 20th century, vast numbers of estimable artists have, contemporaneously, pursued a diversity of representational strategies...
Undoubtedly Patrick Swift lines up with Fuchs's outsiders in his passionate attachment to providing descriptions of the world...
His own portraits, and he was an outstanding portrait painter, have a great deal in common with that distinctive Kokoschka directness whereby the painter is indifferent to awkwardness that might arise in the image because that's the way it is. And the most important consideration is a Hemingwayesque imperative to tell is like it is...
To say that much, however, provides nothing like a full account of Swift's scope or interests. As a painter, Kokoschka has a restless, omnivorous eye. He's an optical predator who must keep moving, a shark. Each sitter is a new personality to be consumed. He snaps up whole people and whole cities, always new people and new cities, all the time.
Swift, by contrast, has a side to his character that is ruminative, even obsessive, and he is, like many 20th century painters, addicted to the series. He'll worry about a single face, a single view, over and over again, going beyond immediate description in two respects. He'll enter into a structural analysis of what is in front of him, and he'll address the mechanics of its representation. If fact, more than once throughout his career you'll see him take a purposeful stroll some way down Cézanne's road of painterly "purity", and sometimes he seems to go even further along the road, seems to arrive at some specific destination.
Does this contradict his antipathy towards abstraction? Perhaps that's the wrong question to ask. Perhaps we shouldn't, at this stage, too meekly accept the notion of the mutual exclusivity of figuration and abstraction. Lars Nitve, a curator... remarked during the course of an interview that he is always drawn to those segments of an artist's oeuvre that go against the grain.
You could, he said, always find it if you looked, the works that were in apparent contradiction to the, again apparent, trend, but that were, puzzlingly from the point of view of the academic who sorts artists into schools and categories, made without any acknowledgement of contradiction...
Swift's work, though it always finds its way back to the representational mainstream, frequently allows elements that lead potentially in radically different directions.
Art in Europe after the Second World War was dominated by abstraction, whether geometric abstraction or, especially in the decade immediately following the war, informal, organic abstraction. This was still the case when Swift began exhibiting in Dublin... and it largely accounts for the rueful, even aggrieved tone of his essay, "Official Art and the Modern Painter"... A barbed meditation on the problematic relationship between the individual artist and the cultural establishment, it was in all likelihood prompted by reports of Documenta II at Kassel that year, the painting section of which concentrated on non-figurative work, and perhaps by the touring exhibition, New American Painting, from New York's Museum of Modern Art, which was seen in London that year...
Writing in X, Swift also expressed concern about the perceived shift of focus from Paris to New York. We've seen all this before, he suggests, and it means very little. All that is proclaimed as new, was invented and explored before 1920. In many respects he was quite right, but the avant garde race was by then well under way.
The 1950s were a time of exceptional dynamism in British art, characterised by what Bryan Robertson has called "a sudden expansion of awareness", a great "making up for lost time": that is, of course, the lost time of the Second World War. Swift was a perpetually restless artist, but there is a consistency of approach in his work, and to the extent that one can speak of him as employing a style, it was one formed in the crucible of the 1950s in London, as various movements vied for pre-eminence. His own personal style, reduced (unfairly) to the sum of its constituent influences, might be best described as a compound of Kokoschka, Cézanne and Bomberg: Kokoschka's attack, Cézanne's analysis and Bomberg's tactility.
He clearly possessed an ability to absorb and understand ideas in art, but when he moved to London in 1953, he entered a complex artistic scene in which his own position was practically predetermined. From the mainstream and thoroughly competent academicism of his early work he moved into a meticulous though strongly subjective realism close to that of his friend Lucian Freud. Of Irish painters, he admired Nano Reid...
While the issue is open, and chiefly of academic interest, it is tempting, in the light of his and Freud's subsequent development, to see Freud's influence on Swift as being more significant than his on Freud. This is not to disparage his achievements of the early 1950s, when he produced many portraits, figure paintings and still lifes, usually charged with an atmosphere of wistful melancholy, that are really exceptional by any standard, but to suggest that these pictures represented just once facet of a complex, sophisticated artistic personality.
His work of this time was certainly instrumental in shaping the mature style of the portrait painter Edward McGuire, as Anthony Cronin, who knew both, and the painter's widow, Sally McGuire, have acknowledged, and as any number of his paintings from the early 1950s demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt.
When he voices his disappointment, his unease about the course of art practice, he is in part reiterating a long-standing, intermittent rivalry between figurative and non-figurative art. More than this, perhaps, he is echoing the deep seated British antipathy to the frightening flexibility of Post-Impressionism...
Abstraction in British art had a similar genesis to abstraction in Ireland, that is as an import from Europe (if we ignore, for a moment, Celtic art)... And in a curious way, Swift's work came to embody, in its development, the ambivalence and contradictions of the tensions and play between figuration and abstraction, modernism and regionality.
In Britain, the division between abstraction and figuration, though often emphatically and passionately delineated, was in reality less clear-cut than it might appear at first glance...
The 1950s saw the energetic resumption of interest in various strands of both figurative and abstract art in Britain. But it wasn't just a question of picking up where things had left off. The mood was radically changed...
It is hardly surprising that he and other figurative artists felt that the rug was being pulled from under their feet. But that is not the whole picture.
Nicolas de Staël, who died in 1955, unflinchingly combined abstract methodology with figurative subjects, and his attractive, vibrantly coloured paintings were enthusiastically received in England. As was that of the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, a major retrospective of whose work was held in London in 1955... Giacometti was during these years a hugely popular and influential figure whose spindly figures embodied, like Bacon's paintings, existentialist philosophy and the post-war gloom and uncertainty about the human subject, and it seems likely that he influenced the development of Swift's work.
It is not so much the sculptures, however, but the paintings, which cumulatively hedged in isolated figures or heads with a dense linear scaffolding, that made an impact on Swift. Giacometti worked obsessively with the same few sitters all the time. They were invariably people close to him. There is an echo in this procedure of Freud's attitude to his subjects, and it holds true of Swift as well.
In the light of his own work and background, there is a logic to his championing the work of David Bomberg, then an unjustly neglected painter whose career extended back to Vorticism. Though he never consistently heaped on the pigment in the way that became the trademark of Bomberg and his students, particularly Auerbach, Swift was certainly influenced...
Those painters associated with Bomberg had, with a certain justification, an embattled, defensive attitude to the rest of the art world. Swift aligned himself with them in the pages of X. Their work was not a million miles removed from that of many other socially-aware painters, a collective trend that culminated in the Kitchen Sink School, a visual equivalent of literature's Angry Young Men. Kitchen Sink realists like John Bratby made rough hewn images of workaday, deglamourised subjects. In many of Swift's studio still lifes of the time, a similar concentration on and celebration of the mundane is apparent...
He made, at virtually every stage of his career, many paintings of trees. For much of the time the trees are part and parcel of some naturalistic scene, like those, for example, seen from the window of his studio in London. But many paintings zoom in on the motif itself, delighting in the hectic rhythms established by the orderly but profuse curvilinear sweep of the branches. Even earlier studies of back gardens reveal him to be drawn to the abstract qualities of tangled stems and foliage.
But when he gets into his stride in the London tree paintings, we can see not only the influence of Giacometti's spidery line, but also unmistakable echoes of Mondrian's remarkable, sustained deconstruction of the image of a single tree which, with one or two other fixed motifs, were subjected to a withering geometric analysis, and carried his art from involvement in several naturalistic styles to the most rigorous abstraction...
Swift, who admitted to respect, perhaps even admiration for Mondrian, did not subscribe to the idea of inexorable, linear progress towards formal abstraction...
...his approach to Cézanne, the artist of greatest relevance to his work after he moved to Portugal, is close to Coldstream's: rewind the film to some moment before Braque and Picasso reach the point of no return and devise an alternative line of development. Similarly, he followed Mondrian's analytical instinct, but he wanted to retain it within an expressive, representational framework, stopping short of treating the underlying geometric structures and processes, remaining committed to the object itself. It seems fair to say that his abiding belief in the descriptive and expressive possibilities of painting never wavered...
The catalogue of his work suggests that there followed a hiatus on his output as a painter. The merest acquaintance with the range of his activities in Portugal suggests why this is so and marks him out as a man of exceptional energy and determination. However, his painterly energies had by no means been spent and when his position in Portugal was consolidated, he returned to his old levels of productivity. He had though, like Cézanne, removed himself from the art world per se. Again, it was not a unique resort among figurative painters of the day...
The London painters Swift had left behind generally stayed the course, building a public for themselves and, slow burners all, eventually achieving some sort of breakthrough in the 1980s, as the climate became more receptive to expressionism, figuration and painting generally. But, despite his exhibitions in Portugal, or appearances in group shows in Ireland, Swift interacted only sporadically with the art world...
But in the Portuguese work, we find him endlessly, and, it must be said, often inconclusively refighting the same old battles of allegiance...
These things, however, are constants: his enduring interest in describing the world around him, people, things, landscape, his structural curiosity as he rehearses the same subjects, whether Monte Gordo, the fig tree or George Venn's blocky head, and his exploration of physical gesture. His world is rural, even bucolic, and his subject matter is his world...
He likes sketchy first impressions. And sometimes the gruffness, the anti-elegance, the urgency combine to make images that are effective, telling and eloquent... He clearly feels the need to push each picture to its limit, but there is an inconclusiveness to a great deal of the later work.
Much the same thing could be said of Cézanne, who was no natural. He struggled desperately with the mechanics of picture-making and it is no exaggeration to say that his greatness lies in the measure of his failure to be an academician. Such "failures" can open up areas of exploration, can ask awkward questions of official art.
There is another kind of outsider with which Swift might usefully be identified, and that is the breed of Irish painter who, having gone and worked in France, finds him or her self cut adrift from Ireland, Britain and even France itself. Mainie Jellett, Nathaniel Hone the Younger and Roderic O'Conor are just such awkward customers... O'Conor in exile, a bristling presence closely in touch with developments in the art world, working steadily but rarely exhibiting, remote and unaccommodating. There are obvious parallels with Swift, who seems always to have wanted nothing more than to be allowed to be himself.
Aidan Dunne, IMMA Patrick Swift (1927-83) Retrospective Catalogue, 1993



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Patrick Swift In His Time, Anthony Cronin (IMMA Retrospective Catalogue, 1993)

Patrick Swift may have been a night-time student in the College of Art when I first met him in the late forties, but I never thought of him as an art student. To me he was a painter; and already someone whose certainty of purpose was as remarkable as his talent. Of course he had a job, but it was understood that this was a temporary inconvenience; and within, I think, some months of our first meeting he had in fact given this up in order to do what he wanted to do most and did best.
Looking at his early work now I am amazed at the maturity and self-possession that was already evident in it. And there is not only a clear grasp of technique and purpose, but his principal subject matter has already been decided on.
He was never in any doubt that painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw: in his own case at least not what the painter had seen or could imagine, but what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of this sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art. In conversation he — we — associated this faithfulness, this "truth" which might be possible in painting with an equivalent truth or honesty to experience which might be possible in literature, even in poetry, generally speaking the least faithful and the most false of the arts...
But this truth of which we spoke had nothing to do with description... Description is usually illusionism of one sort or another, the quickness of the hand supposedly deceiving the eye. What was at stake was a faithful re-creation of the truth to the artist of the experience, in the painter's case the visual experience, the artist being admittedly only one witness, one accomplice during and after the fact.
Of course this faithfulness did not rule out expressionist overtones. The truth was doubtless subjective as well as objective. Swift's blues and greys were usually properties of what he was painting. They were also part of his vision of things, properties of his mind.
We felt then that time could only find its full expression through an art that was frugal, ascetic, puritanical even... In faraway Paris, Samuel Beckett felt the same thing, writing the trilogy that was to give asceticism, frugality, puritanism and the bitter humour that lies at the heart of the joke that is life, their full expression. Swift's avoidance of warm colours... was born in that time and afterwards harked back to it...
He had met Freud by 1949... My grasp of chronology is not always accurate, but certainly the acquaintance was well-developed by 1950 when we shared the ground-floor of a house in Hatch Street together. Lucian, who was staying in Ireland, used to come around in the mornings to paint, so that sometimes when I would surface around ten or eleven I would find them both at work in the studio next door...
Certainly the influence of Lucian was strong, as why should it not be?... But there is, it should be said, an inevitability in such conjunctions which is part of the zeitgeist for those who feel it intensely enough. The obscure psychological alchemy which brought Swift to the painter's art in the first place brought him also to the requisite acquaintance and the requisite influence.
There is in both painters an intensity which may at first not seem justified by the actual subject matter, a sense of life as always, even in its banalities, perhaps especially in those, verging on horror and partaking of tragedy, something which overtly surrealist painting often aims at and misses. There is the same unwavering regard for the object, an entelechy which has somehow come into existence in a manner that supersedes time and abrogates all space except the space in which it now stands. Doubtless such a painting as Interior in Paddington had a profound influence on Swift (though I see it is dated 1951 when he was already painting works whose manner would seem to have been affected by it... But beyond a certain point influence is really no more than an indication of possibility; and some of the differences were apparent to me even then. He is for example less concerned with surface and texture than Freud was at that point and less obsessional in his painting of it...
In the pages of X and in his writings generally, may be seen also the influence of Charles Baudelaire, which was profound. In what I believe to be his only imagined work, painted from the Nadar photograph to which I directed him, he has acknowledged this influence. Baudelaire stands in Swift's own studio, behind a table strewn with his brushes and jars, the workaday clutter of the space in which art is created. Swift was a literate, but not a literary painter. His judgement of literature was usually very sharp and accurate, though this sharpness is not reflected in some of what he wrote about it.
The influence of Cézanne was lifelong... Because his only show took place in Dublin in the 1950s, an impression was created in these parts that he had given up painting. For the decreasing number of those who knew or cared anything about him, he had somehow disappeared off the map. We live in a time when all activities take place in the shadow-land of media publicity... Swift of course went on painting and paying homage through his work to the trees and foliage of the natural world. His painting became not less austere or less ascetic but more affirmative. In the contemplation and re-creation of these woody, self-supporting stems and trunks with their abundant leafage he found a happiness which was not dependent on human response or the satisfaction of ambition.
Anthony Cronin, IMMA Retrospective Catalogue, 1993


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By Swift
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Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
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Main
Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All

By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh

Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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