Mainie Jellett — The Painter Who Argued Ireland Into Modern Art
In 1923 a young Dublin woman hung two paintings at the Society of Dublin Painters on St Stephen's Green. They had no subject you could name. The Irish Times printed a photograph of one of them beside its critic's verdict: "to me they presented an insoluble puzzle."
That was the arrival of abstract painting in Ireland, and the country did not care for it.
Taught by Elizabeth Yeats
Mainie Jellett was born in Dublin on 29 April 1897, into a Fitzwilliam Square family that took art seriously enough to arrange lessons for an eleven-year-old. Her first teachers were Elizabeth Yeats — sister of the poet, and later the printer behind the Cuala Press — along with Sarah Cecilia Harrison and May Manning.
She went on to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1914, where William Orpen was the presiding influence and the standard was academic draughtsmanship. Then, between 1917 and 1919, she studied in London under Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute. Sickert taught her to build a picture out of tone rather than line, and she counted it the first of what she later called her three revolutions.
Paris, 1921
The second and third came together. In 1921 Jellett went to Paris with Evie Hone — the two had met at Westminster and would work in parallel for the rest of Jellett's life — and enrolled with André Lhote, whose cubism was still tethered to the visible world.
It was not enough. They went looking for Albert Gleizes, one of the original cubists and by then its most committed theorist, and asked to be taken on. He had never had pupils. He took them.
What Gleizes offered was not a style but a method. A painting, in his account, was built from two operations performed on a shape: translation, sliding it across the surface, and rotation, turning it. Repeat those moves in rhythm, and a canvas organises itself the way a piece of music does — through interval and return, not through resemblance. For the next decade Jellett and Hone divided their time between Dublin and Paris, working through the implications.
She was, by then, doing something almost no one in Ireland was doing, and she knew exactly how it would land.
The argument she kept having in public
The 1923 reception was not a one-off. Hostility to her work ran for years, and what is striking is that she never went quiet or moved abroad permanently. She lectured. She wrote. She took the argument to anyone who would print it, and published An Approach to Painting in 1942, in which she made the case that artists are not decorators of a society but load-bearing to its spiritual health.
She also kept teaching, and a generation of Irish modernists came through her.
The colour turns religious
Her later work moves away from pure geometry without ever going back to description. The paintings organise themselves around a central form — often read as an eye, or a heart — with arcs of colour rotating out from it. Jellett was a serious Christian, and the structure is closer to a rose window than to a still life: a composition built to hold light at the centre.
That is the register of the late religious pictures, and of the Irish subjects she turned to in the 1940s, where the abstract method is bent to carry a specific weight of feeling.
The exhibition that changed what could be shown
By the early 1940s the Royal Hibernian Academy still controlled what got seen in Dublin, and it was rejecting the modernists — Louis le Brocquy among them.
Jellett criticised the Academy openly, and then did the more useful thing: in 1943 she and Evie Hone, Norah McGuinness, Fr Jack Hanlon, Hilary Heron and le Brocquy founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, an annual show that would hang work regardless of the school or style it belonged to. Jellett was its first president.
She held the post for a matter of months. She died of pancreatic cancer on 16 February 1944, aged forty-six.
The Living Art ran for decades afterwards and became the place Irish modernism was seen. Norah McGuinness took the presidency and held it for over twenty years.
What twenty-one years bought
Set the two dates beside each other. In 1923 a newspaper printed her painting as a curiosity, something a reasonable person could not be expected to understand. In 1943 she was chairing the exhibition that decided what modern Irish art looked like.
She did not live to see it settle. There is a plaque now at 24 Upper Pembroke Street, where she lived and taught, and her work hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane and IMMA — the institutions that once had no idea what to do with her.
On the wall
Two Jelletts do more travelling than the rest: Achill Horses, from 1941, and The Virgin of Éire — the late work where the rotating colour is pressed into service for an Irish subject.
The geometry carries well at scale, which is why the larger canvases are the ones that leave here most often. Browse the full Mainie Jellett collection, or the Cubist and Abstract prints alongside her. There is also a guide to her work with a map of the places she painted.
Archival matte paper or stretched canvas, framed or unframed, made to order, free worldwide shipping. Every print is open edition.
Sources: Jellett born Dublin 29 April 1897, died 16 February 1944; early tuition from age eleven under Elizabeth Yeats, Sarah Cecilia Harrison and May Manning; Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1914 under Orpen; Westminster Technical Institute under Walter Sickert 1917–19; Paris from 1921 with Evie Hone, under André Lhote then Albert Gleizes; the 1923 Society of Dublin Painters exhibition and the Irish Times "insoluble puzzle" notice; An Approach to Painting, 1942; the Irish Exhibition of Living Art founded 1943 with Hone, McGuinness, Hanlon, Heron and le Brocquy, Jellett its first president until her death.