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Mainie Jellett (1897 - 1944)

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​Mainie Jellett (1897 - 1944)
"Seated Nude"
​Watercolour, 8¾” x 11¾” 
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Mainie Jellett was one of the most important Irish artists of the twentieth century, who alongside her fellow Irish artist and good friend, Evie Hone was responsible for introducing Cubism to Ireland. Her early teachers included Irish artists, May Manning and Norman Garstin, and the English painter, Walter Sickert. She studied art in London at the Westminister School of Art, and it was there, as a student of Sickert, that she first met fellow Irish artist, Evie Hone.The setting for this watercolour painting of a nude has been identified by Irish art historian, Bruce Arnold, as being the life drawing room in the Westminster School of Art, where Jellett was a student from 1917 to 1919. 

Together with Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett travelled to Paris to study with French artist, Andre Lhote, who was a renowned teacher and theorist who practiced a modified version of Cubism. In 1922 Jellett and Hone both began studying with Albert  Gleizes, one of the original members of the Cubist group of artists. They then went on to collaborate with him for the next ten years in his development  of principles for abstract painting. 
 
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone were instrumental in introducing modern art to Irish audiences, and are credited with holding the first ever exhibition of abstract paintings in Ireland. Mainie  Jellett's  paintings did  not  receive  a  favourable  reception  when  she  first exhibited in her native Dublin in 1923. The  writer and painter, George  Russell attacked  her work,  describing  it  as 'artistic  malaria'.  In  association  with  Albert  Gleizes  she had  developed  the  theory  of 'translation  and  rotation',  where  the  viewer  was encouraged  to  see  the  logical  progression  of  colours  and  forms  within  the painting.  During  the  1930's  Jellett's  style  evolved  from  the  complete abstraction  that  she  had  practiced  in  the  1920's  to  become  more  semi-abstract  and  slightly  more  realistic.  Even  so,  she  rarely  used  titles  for  her paintings.
 
Jellett  returned  to  Ireland  to  teach  and  to  promote  modernism  in  Irish  art.  She travelled  widely,  giving  many  lectures  and  broadcasts.  She  was  a  founder member  of  the  Irish  Exhibition  of  Living  Art in 1943 , a group which included fellow Irish artists, Norah McGuinness, Evie Hone and Louis le Brocquy, and which was established to promote abstract expressionsist and modern art in Ireland, in reaction to the more traditional art forms favoured by the Royal Hibernian Academy and the National College of Art.

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