Mainie Jellett (Irish, 1897-1944) Composition, 1936 96.5 x 81.2 cm. (38 x 32 in.)

Mainie Jellett (Irish, 1897-1944) Composition, 1936 signed and dated 'M Jellett 36' (lower right); further signed and inscribed with title 'M. Jellett COMPOSITION 36' (on the canvas overlap) oil on canvas 96.5 x 81.2 cm. (38 x 32 in.) Footnotes: Provenance Private Collection, Ireland A hundred and one years ago, Mainie Jellett caused a sensation at the Society of Dublin Painters' 1923 group exhibition with two abstract paintings that marked a radical new departure for Irish Art. The critical response ranged from bewilderment and mockery to stark outrage. One Irish Times reviewer acknowledged his own limitations in engaging with her pioneering artworks: 'They may, to the man who understands the most up-do-date, modern art, mean something; but to me they presented an insoluble puzzle.' Poet, painter and critic George Russell demonstrated significantly less self-awareness in his harsh condemnation of the paintings. Writing in the Irish Statesman, he described cubism as an 'artistic malaria' and Jellett's work as 'sub-human', concluding that 'the real defect in this form of art is that the convention is so simple that nothing can be said in it.' In reality, Jellett's art is complex and process-driven, with a strong intellectual foundation. She was an academic modernist, whose style was influenced by the European developments she herself participated in, and whose practice was grounded in the theory she helped to develop with Albert Gleizes and Evie Hone. Jellett is now rightfully regarded as a pioneer of modern Irish art and one of the most important Irish artists of the 20th Century. After initially studying under André Lhote in Paris, Hone and Jellett felt compelled to delve further into 'the extreme abstraction of Cubism' (Jellett quoted in Mainie Jellett, The Artist's Vision, ed. Eileen MacCarvill, Dundalk, 1958 p.54). They approached Gleizes, a Cubist painter who rejected arbitrary and accidental processes in favour of establishing elementary laws for creating abstract art. As his students, Jellett and Hone supported Gleizes in the process of developing new principles for abstraction, which he published in early 1923 as La Peinture et ses lois. Gleizes' new methodology was based on two simple methods; taking the shape of the canvas as a basic form, and moving it up, down or sideways (translation) or pivoting it (rotation). While Jellett's early abstract work is characterised by a severe linearity and simplicity of form, by 1923 she was already complicating this process with the introduction of surface patterning, as seen in Decoration, one of her contributions to the 1923 exhibition. By the 1930s, a softer, more expressive compositional style emerged. As her confidence grew in the abstract mode, Jellett discarded the most rigid limitations of Gleizes' method, while retaining the original emphasis on harmony, cohesion, and her evident joy in finding new ways of expressing the two-dimensionality of the canvas. This is exemplified in the present work. The assurance and experimentation of her work during the 1930s may originate from Jellett's association from 1932 with a group called Abstraction Création: Art Non-Figuratif, which brought the Irish artist into closer contact with leading European abstract painters, including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and El Lissitzky. We are grateful to Marie Lynch for compiling this catalogue entry. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing