Robert Ballagh b.1943

Ciaran Carty, Robert Ballagh, Magill, Dublin, 1986, pp.94-6, the larger version illustrated.

Robert Ballagh paid posthumous homage in 2003 to Michael Farrell with the unveiling of a major portrait of his one-time mentor, at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. The link between the two artists is strong, and twofold. Firstly, it was Farrell who initially introduced Ballagh to art, employing him in 1967 as an assistant to help complete two large abstract canvases for the Bank of Ireland on College Green, Dublin. Secondly, Farrell is famous for his Madonna Irlanda, and the picture carries an explicit political message, a fact underscored for anyone who may have missed it by the alternative title, The Very First Real Irish Political Picture. Farrell’s painting makes its political point through appropriation of an earlier, iconic work, François Boucher’s The Blonde Odalisque. In his earliest works, Ballagh was to do the same. As Peter Murray has observed, Ballagh was ‘inspired by nineteenth century artists Jacques Louis David, Théodore Géricault and Gustave Courbet… [holding] that politics and culture are inextricably linked, and that in order to be meaningful, art must address the problems and challenges facing society’ (intro., Portrait of the Artist Michael Farrell and other Works by Robert Ballagh, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, exhibition catalogue, 2003). In 1969, just two years after the first meeting with Farrell, and eight years prior to Madonna Irlanda, Ballagh embarked on a series of paintings that used these sources to comment on the situation as he saw it in Northern Ireland. He began with The Rape of the Sabines (After David), going on to include Delacroix’s Liberty on the Barricades in the major My Studio also painted that year, before completing the Hugh Lane Gallery’s Third of May (After Goya) in 1970.

Painted after Ingres, The Turkish Bath belongs to this significant early series (a larger version of the present work is in the collection of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art). However, Ballagh was rapidly becoming as interested in art, and the history of art, as he was politics. While the political inspiration of the earliest works was key (Ballagh claimed that Seamus Heaney was one of the few who "understood very early on what my painting was about: that it wasn’t just classical pastiche"), the artist took an increasing painterly pleasure in producing images such as The Turkish Bath. Feeling his way technically, Ballagh’s early style betrays a love of silhouette and dark outline, not dissimilar to that of Patrick Caulfield, who had himself already painted Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi, after Delacroix (1963, coll. Tate Gallery). Ciaran Carty explains that Ballagh ‘felt drawn to the whole neo-classical tradition. There was a cleanness and purposefulness about it that attracted him. With growing confidence he took on the challenge of one of the tour-de-force works of the period, the huge circular Ingres Turkish Bath in which the 80-year-old painter remembered with sensual relish all the women in his life’ (op.cit.) Deliberately executed with a ‘pop’ sensibility, Ballagh found it odd that one contemporary critic should choose to label his work as overly ‘schematized’, given that the automatic look is one of the essential hallmarks of Pop Art. Such humourless criticism also ignored a tradition of visual puns and literary allusions that traced a direct line to Magritte. Ballagh has expanded: "I’ve always had this hatred of style. Other painters deliberately cultivate brush strokes to give character to their painting. I feel compelled to remove them" (quoted in Carty, op.cit., p.115). His pleasure in juggling references – an early post-modernist magpie – led to his later paying homage to Pop within the context of his ‘figures at an exhibition’ series (a sell-out when the first versions went on view at the Hendriks Gallery). The series views unwitting gallery visitors from behind, absorbed in contemplation of various other masters, and we have come right up to date, leaving the nineteenth century behind for the twentieth: principal amongst those on view are Warhol and Lichtenstein.