Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 21st October 2019

72 50 Nevill Johnson RHA RUA (1911-1999) The Wall signed with monogram lower right and titled verso oil on canvas 41 x 51cm (16x 20in) Provenance: Private Collection €5,000-7,000 (£4,424-6,194) Probably painted in the mid-1940s, The Wall demonstrates a number of qualities that often define Nevill Johnson’s painting from this period. The exemplary draughtsmanship and highly-finished paint surface recall his friendship with John Luke, alongside whom he often painted in the 1930s, while the sense of detachment, mystery and ambiguity is a characteristic of much of Johnson’s early surrealist painting. The human presence is often implied through certain objects and the narrative around them, rather than actually shown. It is tempting to think that The Wall is a response to Belfast, where Johnson arrived in 1934 and where he lived at various times before moving to Dublin in 1946. Another painting of this period, Belfast, creates a repeated flat abstract pattern from the orderly red brick terraces of the city; he recalled in his autobiography (The Other Side of Six, University Press of Ireland, 1984) the ‘pew- brown paint on those Presbyterian facades’. In the present painting, the red brick wall cuts at a slight angle across the lower third of the canvas, with a tall factory chimney behind continuing the verticals established between bricks and suggesting the industry that dominated the city. In contrast to this abstraction and austerity are the muted and delicate signs of life expressed by the butterfly and the dried-out growth in little mounds of earth on top of the wall and between bricks. While Johnson seems to suggest that the rigid, industrial city stifles the individual and the renewal of the natural world, the butterfly remains a symbol of hope and freedom. Emily Genauer, an American art critic who won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, wrote some lines on another Johnson painting of this period, The Balloon, which also seem appropriate to The Wall. ‘No one but a poeté... would have seen in such prosaic shapes the symbols of soaring aspiration and dream. And no one but a sensitive and gifted artist would have been able to communicate a romantic, metaphysical concept through shapes that are as precisely balanced and as austere and uncompromising as a calculated geometrical abstraction.’ Dickon Hall, September 2019

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