Irish Abstract Art: A Short Guide
In October 1923 two paintings by a twenty-six-year-old Dubliner hung at the Society of Dublin Painters, and the Irish Times ran them under the headline "Two Freak Pictures." Its critic wrote that they were "squares, cubes, odd shapes and clashing colours" and that "to me they presented an insoluble puzzle." The painter was Mainie Jellett, and those pictures are usually taken as the point where abstract art entered the Irish conversation — and lost the first round.
This is a short guide to what came next: what Irish abstract art is, who made it, where the work can be seen, and how to live with it on a wall.
What "abstract" means here
An abstract picture has no recognisable subject. It is built from shape, colour and rhythm, and it asks to be read the way music is read rather than the way a portrait is.
Irish makers had been working without a subject for a very long time. The entrance stone at Newgrange, in a passage tomb built around 3200 BC, carries a triple spiral. That is pattern rather than abstraction in the modern sense — nobody at Newgrange was arguing about painting — but it is a reminder that Ireland's eye for geometry is old. Our guide to Celtic art and what is actually Irish about it follows that thread through the later interlace tradition. The story below is the twentieth-century one, where a handful of painters chose abstraction on purpose and defended it in public.
Why it arrived late
Dublin Castle's account of the period puts it plainly: Ireland was isolated on the western fringe of Europe and took time to absorb the movements that reshaped art elsewhere in the early twentieth century. The Royal Hibernian Academy, the country's established exhibiting body, was seen by the modernists as conservative, and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art was later founded as a counterpoint to it.
So when Jellett came home from Paris with a method rather than a look, there was almost no framework to receive it. The poet and painter George Russell, who wrote as AE, called Decoration "a late victim to cubism." Another critic called it "sub-human art."
Jellett's method
Jellett and Evie Hone travelled to Paris in the early 1920s, having met as students under Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute in London. In Paris they studied first with André Lhote and then with Albert Gleizes, one of the founding cubists and by then its leading theorist.
What Gleizes taught was a procedure, and the National Gallery of Ireland describes it directly: methods of translation of forms, rotation of forms, and how to combine both on the same surface. Take a shape, slide it across the picture, turn it, repeat — and a composition organises itself through interval and return rather than resemblance. Gleizes set out his ideas in La Peinture et ses Lois, published in 1923, the year Jellett painted Decoration.
Decoration is tempera on a wooden panel, 89 by 53 centimetres, and the National Gallery notes that its structure, palette and format evoke the religious iconography of the Madonna and Child. It is also the picture with the best provenance in this story: Evie Hone bequeathed it to the National Gallery in 1955, and it hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland today. The full account of her life is in our article on how Jellett argued Ireland into modern art.
Hone and the turn to glass
Evie Hone (1894–1955) took the same training somewhere different. She largely set painting aside from the 1930s and devoted herself to stained glass, where the image is built from flat shapes of colour held in lead lines. Her My Four Green Fields, made for the Irish pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, is now in the entrance hall of Government Buildings in Dublin. Her east window for the chapel at Eton College, a Crucifixion made between 1949 and 1952, is generally counted among her major works.
Her early abstract paintings tend to be overlooked next to the windows. Our article on the friendship that shaped Irish modern art looks at the two women together, including the 2025 National Gallery exhibition that hung their work side by side.
After 1943
By the early 1940s Jellett was criticising the Academy openly. In 1943 she, Hone, Norah McGuinness, Fr Jack Hanlon, Hilary Heron and Louis le Brocquy founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, an annual show open to work regardless of school. Jellett was its first president. She died on 16 February 1944, aged forty-six, and McGuinness succeeded her.
The Living Art went on for decades and became one of the places where modern Irish painting was seen. IMMA's 2013 exhibition Analysing Cubism gave Jellett and Hone the largest share of its Irish selection, on the grounds of their influence on modern Irish abstract painting.
How abstraction developed in Ireland after that — and who carried it — is a longer story than we have been able to check line by line for this guide, so we leave it there rather than guess. The gallery links below are the better route into it.
Where to see the work
Only places with a published record of the work, and it is worth confirming what is on the walls before you travel.
- National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Decoration (1923) is listed on the Gallery's own highlights tour as displayed in Room 15.
- Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. The permanent collection includes Jellett's Abstract Composition, a small gouache dated 1922, donated by the Bank of Ireland Art Collection in 2010.
- Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. The Crawford holds Jellett's Abstract Composition (c.1931) and Carpet Design (c.1930), and several works by Hone.
- Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Its online collection lists a number of Jellett works, including The Ninth Hour and Deposition.
- Government Buildings, Dublin, and Eton College Chapel. For Hone's glass. Confirm public access with each before planning a visit around either.
Abstract work in the catalogue
The prints here are made from public-domain images of the paintings, on archival matte paper, framed or unframed, made to order with free worldwide shipping. Every print is open edition.
The obvious place to start is Decoration (1923), the picture that caused the trouble. Evie Hone's Composition (1924) comes from the same Paris training. Beyond those, browse the full Mainie Jellett collection, the Evie Hone prints, and the wider Irish abstract art collection. For the older strand of Irish pattern, see Celtic Designs.
Hanging abstract work
Abstract pictures reward room. Give one strong composition a clear stretch of wall instead of crowding it into a gallery arrangement, and keep it away from busy wallpaper, where the geometry stops reading.
Work built on rhythm and repeated shapes, like Jellett's, holds up at a distance, so it suits the far wall of a room as well as a hallway. A plain frame with a generous mount lets the colour do the work. A Jellett and a Hone hung together make a fair argument for how two people can share a training and end up somewhere different.
Sources: Jellett born Dublin 29 April 1897, died 16 February 1944 (Dictionary of Irish Biography); 1923 Society of Dublin Painters exhibition, "Two Freak Pictures" headline, "insoluble puzzle" and George Russell's "a late victim to cubism" (Irish Times, Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: Decoration, by Mainie Jellett); Decoration tempera on wood, 89 x 53 cm, bequeathed by Evie Hone 1955, and the "sub-human art" review (National Gallery of Ireland); Room 15 (National Gallery of Ireland, Through a Lens tour: Highlights); Gleizes on translation and rotation (National Gallery of Ireland, In Focus: Cubism); La Peinture et ses Lois 1923 and Hone's Eton window 1949–52 (Irish Times, 28 June 2025); Hone and Jellett meeting under Sickert at Westminster, Hone's move to stained glass and My Four Green Fields (Wikipedia, Evie Hone and My Four Green Fields, cross-checked with the Dictionary of Irish Biography and Tate); Irish isolation, RHA and Living Art (Dublin Castle, The Birth of Modernism in Irish Art 1920–1960); Living Art founders and first president (Wikipedia, Irish Exhibition of Living Art); IMMA Abstract Composition IMMA.3284 and Analysing Cubism 2013 (IMMA); Crawford holdings (Crawford Art Gallery); Hugh Lane online collection listing; Newgrange, built circa 3200 BC, triple spiral on entrance stone (Heritage Ireland).