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Born at 23 Merrion Square and educated in Dublin, Freiburg and Paris, Mary Swanzy (1882-1978) was the first Irish artist to adopt and adapt the Cubist technique. Working at almost exactly the same time as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), whom she knew through Gertrude Stein from her time in Paris, and indeed having her work exhibited in Paris alongside artists such as Paul Signac and Gina Severini, Swanzy both witnessed and participated in the birth of Modern Art.

The IMMA’s current exhibition Mary Swanzy, Voyages, curated by Seán Kissane, seeks to act as a vital corrective in reinstating Swanzy as a Modern Irish Master. The first substantial exhibition of Swanzy’s work in some 50 years, this is a reappraisal long overdue.

Swanzy’s position at the very heart of the radical artistic developments which emerged throughout the first half of the twentieth-century is not widely known. It is perhaps best to look to Swanzy’s own self-reflective words for explanations as to her current status relative to some of her contemporaries: “If I had been born Henry instead of Mary my life would have been very different.”

Mary Swanzy, Voyages itself is split into six different sections which describe several interconnected stages of progression through her wide-ranging artistic career: ‘Early work’, ‘Hawaii 1923, Samoa 1924’, ‘Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism,’ ‘Symbolism and Surrealism’ and ‘Voyages in the Imagination’. As is the case with such all-encompassing retrospectives, there is a pleasure to be found in observing the stylistic progression across time, as well as the shifts in mood and subject occasioned by the significant changes of the outside world, which in turn can be glimpsed through the artist’s lens.

In terms of technique and artistic reference points, this development is starkly apparent in the radical shifts that can be seen between the earliest piece in the collection, a portrait of her father Sir Henry R. Swanzy, which presents Swanzy’s mastery of late Victorian formal academic style at only 23 years of age, and the works which from 1914 through her Paris years display Cubist explorations of simultaneous multiple perspectives. With regard to the changing world which her pieces reflect, no better example of this can be found than in the tragic contrast between Swanzy’s two portraits of her sister Muriel, from the exuberance of her 1907 portrait to the gloom of her 1942 portrait, with the latter depicting her sister’s gaze into distance as she waits for her son to return from war.

Seán Kissane has said that one of the fascinating things about Swanzy is the way that ‘she takes all of these movements – whether it be Fauvism, or Cubism, or Futurism, she quickly analyses the rules – and then breaks them.’ Interpretation, transformation, rereading: these are all processes which are central to Swanzy’s journey through these various schools. Hers is a path which at once offers an account of these practices as traditionally defined and, through transgressions beyond those lines, traces out her personal reconfigurations of such key Modernist experiments.

In Swanzy’s work, which in pieces on display such as ‘The Storm’ led critics to see her as an artist blending Surrealism and Cubism, there is evidence to suggest that written into her method was already that which approached an act of re-writing, through adjustments and combinations that took the contemporary movements in arresting new directions. As Gilbert of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’ has it, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

This exhibition provides a useful context too in building up a picture of Swanzy herself as an Artist as Critic. In the final room, the lighting is lowered and an RTE radio interview of hers from 1977 is heard playing. Though she was 95 years old when giving this interview – and indeed though she died only a year later – her voice offers lively, forthright, incisive and elucidating insights on her own life and the cultural and political changes through which she lived.

Voyages ultimately calls for those engaging with the work displayed to become Viewer as Critic. This critical stance does not just in each case, on a small scale and conventional level, denote an alertness to the performances and the effects of the artwork at hand. Rather, and with a far broader scope, the critical stance that should arise out of engagement with Swanzy is one which turns its attention not only to the position which her body of work should be placed in relation to the position into which, due to politically hegemonic forces, it was predestined to fall, but also the way in which this exact fate must have befallen many other significant if not pioneering Artists. Over years, decades and centuries, across countries, continents and cultures, the development and renewal of creative approaches and the ceaseless attainment of new artistic milestones has coalesced canonically as a story of Great Men. This story will only persist in being retold if we decide to shirk our responsibilities to intellectual integrity by continuing to read it as such.

‘Mary Swanzy, Voyages’ opened at the IMMA on 26th October 2018 and runs until 17th February 2019, before moving to the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork over the spring and Limerick City Gallery of Art over the summer.