A White Stag in France

Irish Arts Review

A White Stag in FranceAuthor(s): Peter MurraySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 96-101Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503630 .

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A WHITE STAG IN FRANCE PAINTING

A

White Sta

in France PETER MURRAY investigates a key period in the career of Thurloe Conolly, a one-time member

of the White Stag group, who emigrated to France in the mid 1960s

1 Thurloe Conolly 1948

2 Thurloe Conolly (b.1918) Juggler 1953 oil on board 60 x 40cm

In recent years, the White Stag Group, led by the Hungarian artist Basil R?kc?z?, has become identified as one of the key move

ments in 20th-century Irish art. The Group flourished during the early 1940s, when, seeking refuge from the War in Europe, a

variety of artists and intellectuals settled in Dublin. Bringing with them an interest in psychoanalysis and the subconscious, the

new arrivals introduced local artists to developments in central European Modernism. Several of the key figures associated with

the White Stag Group, notably Irish-born artists Patrick Scott and Thurloe Conolly (Fig 1), and ?migr? Stephen Gilbert, are still work

ing today. Pat Scott has lived in Dublin for many years and is a respected figure, having recently been elected a Saoi of Aosd?na, Gilbert

lives in Paris and continues to paint and exhibit. However, Thurloe Conolly, who moved to rural France in 1967, has become somewhat

distanced from the insular world of Irish art, notwithstanding close family ties in Dublin, and Cork, where his son Simon has an archi

tectural practice. Although mentioned in S B Kennedy's Irish Art and Modernism, information on Conolly's life and work is sparse. The ? -

l _ White Stag retrospective exhibition, held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2005, included a

K I 'iB numDer of paintings by Conolly, but again the biographical entry is tantalisingly brief. An earlier

?fcs?_ 4 8 exhibition, at the European Modern Art Gallery in Dublin in 1993, had a short catalogue essay by

^HH! '

i I I Bruce Arnold, who pointed out that the quality of Conolly's paintings, particularly works dating

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l| S from the 1940s and 1950s, warranted far greater recognition for the artist (Figs 2 & 5).

^^^B ; ; *r ?*\ h Born in Cork in 1918, the son of a structural engineer, Thurloe Conolly spent the first year of

j^^Hv^?F^f i? **f I M his life in that city. The family lived at 6 Egerton Villas, off Military Hill, not far from the city

I^B^pftllfa ^ v"?^KI W centre. As a child, his father introduced Conolly to the drawing techniques used in engineering

IBmS?* " #;M&&M$fi$.i if and architecture, an influence that remains evident in his painting to this day. His mother was

^ ^K^fekE^JL '?^B^f r I Constance Elizabeth Jeffares, and Thurloe grew up in a close family network of uncles, aunts and

^^^^^k^Hfl?^^S^SL J cousins on both sides of the family.1

^^^^^^^JQ?|h3H^^|^| There is a tradition that the Conollys are descended from William 'Speaker' Conolly, the son

^^^^^^H^^BS^Hp^^^l of a publican who, after taking up law and politics, in the 1720s built Castletown House in Co

^^^^^^^^^^^^^HB^^^I Kildare. Thurloe remembers being taken, as a young child, to be interviewed by an elderly rela

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ tive who lived at this Palladian mansion. A less speculative ancestor is one Patrick Conolly, rec

tor of Dromore in the 17th century. The persistence of the name Owen in the family may derive from the Inishowen peninsula in

Donegal, while the artist is proud also of his Christian name: 'There have been Thurloes in the family since 1550.' The artist believes

the spelling of the name Conolly (as opposed to Connolly) preserves an old Irish form, as in Conghaile. When Thurloe was one year old, the family moved to Dublin, to Zion Road in Rathgar. Their next-door neighbours were Albert

and Sybil le Brocquy, who had three children, Louis, Noel and Melanie. Thurloe's mother and her brother Cecil were old friends of

the le Brocquys. Two years later the Conollys moved to Newbridge, Co Kildare to a house the artist remembers fondly for its apple

9 6 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW WINTER 2007



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3 Hall's Barn and Dovecote 1945 oil on board 63 x 65cm

4 Western Rim mid 1940s oil on canvas 62 x 75cm

5 Crusader 1953 oil on board 60 x 40cm

orchard. They then moved on to Limerick, Thurloe attending a

school at 20 Barrington Street, where 'Miss Emily Fitt taught children of the Protestant gentry because . .. there was nowhere

else for them to the be taught. It was either there or at home. I

was put there with 17 boys and girls to be taught by 'Miss Em'

who was the most brilliant teacher of my school days'. His school

report for 1929 survives: At the age of eleven, out of a possible

one hundred marks in Irish History, Literature, Poetry and

Geography, Conolly was awarded full marks in each. His grasp of

English History, French, Arithmetic and Scripture were a little

shakier, but he got top marks in 'Eyes and No Eyes', a test based

on his Nature Study book 'about a child who never used her eyes

properly, and her friend who looked and examined every small

est detail of a flower, a beetle, or a worm.2 After six years in

Limerick, the family returned to Cork, where Conolly attended

Cork Grammar School, on Wellington Road. However, after

only a few terms, his father became frail and it was decided that

the family should return to Dublin. 'I remember only a few

names of many friends in Cork, Booth, Mattson, Moffet, Cotter,

Hobson, Garret, Wiley, Atkins, Buchan . . . others have become

nameless memories'. He remembers holidays in a house called

Inglenook, at Crosshaven, where gunnery practice at the har

bour defences at Camden, Carlise and

Templebrady caused the windows of

the house to be opened 'so the glass

would not be broken'.

The death of his father when he was

just fourteen left the Conolly family without means of support. 'My father died leaving me aimed at

becoming a civil engineer, with all the right books, but the dear man left very little money and nobody could discover where it

had gone'. After leaving school, Conolly worked for a short time

as an assistant to Harold Leask, Inspector of National

Monuments, before moving on to the construction industry, cal

culating loads for reinforced concrete structures, such as were

being used in the new airport terminal at Collinstown, while

Although there were White Stag exhibitions in Dublin in 1940 and 1941, it was not until 1942 that Conolly became associated with the group

98 I




A WHITE STAG IN FRANCE PAINTING

continuing to write poetry and paint in his spare time. On the

outbreak of World War II, Conolly found himself unemployed. However, encouraged by his friends Elizabeth Rivers, Evie Hone,

Ralph Cusack and others, he began to paint full-time. 'I would have liked to write poetry - and maybe I thought I did, but now

I know I did not, except for an occasional rare flash of words that seemed to come from nowhere.' Paintings from this period

include Untitled (Peasant's Dancing), inspired by Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) an his torical novel set in Classical times.

Although there were White Stag exhibitions in Dublin in 1940 and 1941, it was not until 1942 that Conolly became associated with the group. On 17 April ofthat year, he participted in a poetry

reading, organised by Herbrand Ingouville-Williams, that

included Valentine Iremonger, William Clare, Nora McLoughlin and Bruce Williamson.3 Another writer associated with the group

during this period was Maurice Craig, the future architectural his

torian, who lectured on 'Problems in Communication', while

Ralph Cusack organised a series of gramophone evenings, and

James White, later director of the National Gallery of Ireland, gave a talk on 'Ballet and Painting,' 22 May 1942.

Conolly occasionally worked in theatre, and had small parts

in plays at the Gate Theatre such as Richard of Bordeaux and

Judgement Day. Along with Ralph Cusack and Anne Yeats he

painted sets for The House of Cards, a satirical comedy written

by Frank Carney, with music composed by Brian Boydell, who also painted surrealist-inspired works during these years.

Inspired by Dublin's Bohemian artistic life, The House of Cards,

produced by Shelagh Richards at the Olympia Theatre in October 1942, told the story of Yvonne Artois, a young painter.

On the night of the opening of her exhibition, shunning a circle of admiring young men in corduroy jackets, Artois sets off, in the

company of a tinker guide, on an odyssey through the docks,

pubs and tenements of Dublin. In the programme notes, the

admiring circle of young men are, somewhat unkindly, referred

to as 'first beard', 'second beard' and so on.

Although the play was not a success, the discarded canvas

backdrops were useful to Conolly, who, due to wartime shortages,

had been unable to buy artists' canvas for his paintings. However,

he remembers the rough canvas was far from ideal: 'A mounted

and primed canvas could be dried in front of a fire, where it

would become as tight as a drum. But it soon sagged again. Louis

le Brocquy suggested I use panels of Masonite [made from com

pressed wood pulp, also known as waflboard] and since then I

have never used anything else'. Conolly primed the Masonite

with gesso, made with chalk and rabbitskin glue, applied hot to

the panel. In terms of subject-matter, he was inspired by an exhi

bition of John Piper's work, held at the Victor Waddington Galleries, and began to include buildings in his landscapes. 'My first attempts to paint seriously tried too hard to achieve what I

thought I should do. In time I realised that I should have to learn how it should be done, so I made landscapes echoing my delight at the poetical way Christopher Wood handled his subjects.'4

Conolly also collaborated with his friend, composer and

painter Brian Boydell: 'I enjoyed writing words for a short song

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WINTER 2007 IRISH ARTS REVIEW | 9 9



^B A WHITE STAG IN FRANCE PAINTING

cycle, while Brian worked on the score at the piano. Much of

my writing at that time was influenced by Eugene Jolas, Andre

Breton, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and others who wrote for

the quarterly review Transition, where Finnegans Wake first

appeared.' Conolly's song cycle The Feather of Death, with music

by Boydell, premiered 30 January 1944, at the Shelbourne

Hotel in Dublin. During these years, influenced by artists such

as Paul Klee, Conolly began to move away from Romantic rep

resentation and towards a more disciplined abstraction. The

influence of the White Stag Group was also important:

'Meeting and seeing what Basil Rakoczi, Kenneth Hall, Stephen Gilbert, and Nick Nicholls were doing brought me back to

something I originally thought I should like to do, which was, to

paraphrase John Donne, "To paint things invisible to see". Paul

Klee clearly showed the right direction, although I was seeing

only the superficial surface of what he was doing, the abstract

nature of music slipped easily into place with painting, where

music and painting remain together indivisibly ever since.'

In January 1944, assisted by Kenneth Hall and Rakoczi, the

painter Margot Moffett organised an 'Exhibition of Subjective Art', While some of the earlier White Stag exhibitions had been

held at Hall's rooms at 30 Upper Mount Street, by 1944, the

exhibitions had transferred to 6 Lower Baggot Street, to two

large white-painted Georgian rooms, with floorboards painted

an austere gloss black. Patrick Scott had his first exhibition in

this gallery later that same year. For the Subjective Art exhibi

tion, Hall and Rakoczi selected fifty-six works, by thirteen

artists, including Thurloe Conolly, Ralph Cusack, Nick Nicholls, Brian Boydell and Patrick Scott. The works ranged from quasi abstract to surrealist, while the illustrated catalogue had a fore

word by the art critic Herbert Read. In keeping with the

philosophy of the Group, the exhibition emphasised personal

expression, causing some controversy with public and critics in

Dublin, more accustomed to the conventional fare handed

down at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Read had been sched

uled to attend the opening and lecture on 'the subjective in art'

but was prevented from travelling and instead had to content

himself with forwarding an essay Art and Crisis', that was read

on his behalf. The text of his lecture on the subjective in art

appeared the following month in The Bell Hall and Rakoczi were included in the exhibition, as were Jocelyn Chewett, Paul

Egestorff, Doreen Vanston, Bobby Dawson and Stephen Gilbert

and Phyllis Hayward. When Read did visit Dublin, Michael

Scott loaned his car to Conolly, who brought the critic, Sybil le

Brocquy and Norah McGuinness on a tour of Wicklow, during

which they called on Ralph Cusack at his home at Annamoe.

In 1946, Conolly married Yvonne, sister of Brian Boydell.

They were to have two sons, Simon and Berris. The previous

year, Conolly had his first one-person show, at the Dublin

Painters Gallery, on Stephen's Green. Among the paintings

shown were Spawell House, Templeogue, a moonlit scene, and

Hall s Bam and Dove Cote at Rathfarnham (Fig 3). Thanks largely to the support of Victor Waddington, the exhibition was a sell

out and four years later, Conolly had a one-person show at the

Waddington Galleries, on South Anne Street. In the years fol

lowing, Waddington was both agent and 'most faithful friend' of

the artist, organising a series of successful exhibitions in Boston,

Chicago, Rhode Island and at the Marion Willard Gallery in

New York. Conolly also had a shared exhibition with Alan Da vie

in London. Walter Gropius and Carola Giedion Welcker were

among the collectors who visited the Waddington Galleries in

Dublin and acquired works by Conolly. Between 1947 and 1953,

(with the exception of 1948) he showed each year at the Irish

Exhibition of Living Art, while also participating in 1947 and

1948 in exhibitions, with Ralph Cusack, Patrick Scott and

Phyllis Hayward, at the Dublin Painters Gallery.5 In the 1948

exhibition, Conolly won the Mainie Jellett Scholarship with his

painting Reclining Figure and White Horse. Other works from

these years include Old House at Bray dated April 1947 and

Deserted Rectory 11 (Fig 7), from the following year. In December 1949, Conolly had his second one-person exhi

bition, a private view prior to a New York show, at the

Waddington Galleries in Dublin. One critic praised the artist

for developing a personal approach to non-figurative painting,

rather than following the 'Continental Abstract'. The painting

Dwelling of the Mind revealed a love of architecture, with its

100 I




Suggestion of a house 'with rooms and windows which twist into

the hint of a head and carries a suggestion of certain ideas in

symbol.'6 The same writer was less impressed by Bird Cage and

Botanical Gardens, where Conolly had attempted to unite 'the

objective with the subjective' although this was considered to be

a success in the case of Cobbler's Bench. 'He has a series of very

attractive hunting scenes which may be said to be pure pattern

with a touch of the Primitive School - which is not as unsophis ticated as it looks - and of these I particularly liked The Hunter, The Royal Hunt and in the Forest.' The reviewer did not know what to make of A Very Powerful Queen, but was more taken by

Painting IV, Painting V, Holiday and Dark Abstract 11, comment

ing that Conolly had 'ventured into the cool, complex land of

abstraction.'7 Another reviewer of this same exhibition consid

ered that Conolly's move from representational painting into

abstraction, put him 'in the very first rank of our advanced

painters' and praised the artist for his quiet and delicate colour

ing and 'extraordinary sensitivity'.8

In 1950, an exhibition of new Irish painting was shown at the

Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. Selected by the director of the ICA, the exhibition included works by Gerard

Dillon, Daniel O'Neill, Louis le Brocquy, Nevill Johnson and

Colin Middleton, in addition to several works by Conolly, all of

which sold. This exhibition was followed by a one-person show

in New York, at the Willard Gallery, at 32 East 57th Street.

Conolly's paintings were now more geometric and abstract. In

Winter Landscape (Fig 6) buildings and pine trees are rendered in

geometric flat colour, while a muted orange disc represents the

sun. In Ecalpon (1953), the colour range is lighter, with patches of bright green and yellow. One might read this painting as being

inspired by the roofs of houses and farm buildings in a rural land

scape, but the title, a Beckett-like anagram of 'no place', reveals

a more complex intention on the part of the artist.

In 1953, at the request of Herbert Read, and with support from the Irish Arts Council, Conolly set up a 'Design Unit for

Ireland' office in Dublin, along with co-directors Senator Edward

Maguire, Dermot O'Regan of CTT (Coras Tr?cht?la Teoranta) and Alan Nolan of the publishers Brown & Nolan. Essentially an

Irish branch of the Design Research Unit - DRU - a European design consortium founded by Read, Misha Black and Milner

Grey, the Dublin office survived for several years, but Conolly

found it difficult to convince Irish industrialists to invest in new

or innovative design. After running the Dublin office for some

years, Conolly moved to London, to work with Read in the cen

tral DRU office, where Margot Moffet also now worked, as librar

ian. In addition to working for the Unit, and doing consultancy

work for the British Council, Conolly attempted to keep his own

painting career moving forward. However, when DRU work

brought him to France, Conolly seized the opportunity, and set

up his own design and architectural practice near Bordeaux. He

continued this practice until 1995, when he retired, to concen

trate full-time on painting (Fig 8). Having returned to art full

time, Conolly is now reluctant to theorise about his paintings (Fig

9). In many ways, like Louis le Brocquy, he has deviated relatively little from the approach to art he adopted half a century ago.

Perhaps the fact that both le Brocquy and Conolly are largely self

taught contributes to this sense of inner confidence. Although

Conolly states that his past life has 'little or nothing to do with what I am trying to do now', in reality, his recent work can be

read as a direct progression of his surrealist-inspired paintings,

dating from the outset of his career, over six decades ago.

PETER MURRAY is Director of the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

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6 Winter Landscape oil on board 25 x 45cm

7 Deserted Rectory II oil on board 46 x 58cm

8 Grey and White with Red 2005 mixed media on board 93 x 75cm

9 Thurloe Conolly in his studio, 2007

1 Correspondence with the artist, July 2007 2 Correspondence with the artist, July 2007 3 S. B. Kennedy The White Stag Group, p. 158

4 Correspondence with the artist, July 2007 5 As note 3, p. 162 6 Press clipping, c. Dec. 1949, a review of Conolly's

1949 exhibition, by 'P.H.Q.', artist's archive. 7 As note 6 8 As note 6

WINTER 2007 IRISH ARTS REVIEW | 1 0 1



A White Stag in France

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