Beschreibung:

INSIDE NO. 3 AFTER MODERNISATION, 1982 Robert Ballagh (b.1943)
Signature: signed right of centre [in notebook on table]; with Arts Exchange, Madison, Wisconsin exhibition label on reverse [inscribed “Lent by the artist”]; also with inscribed label detailing title on reverse Medium: acrylic and oil on canvas Dimensions: 213 by 152cm., 84 by 60in. Exhibited: Exhibited:‘No. 3: A Series of Paintings by Robert Ballagh’, David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 11 March - 2 April, 1983; ‘Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of Mind: Some New Irish Art’, curated by Lucy Lippard, toured US 1985-87;‘Robert Ballagh: The Complete Works’, Arnotts, Dublin, February 1992; RHA Retrospective, 15 September - 20 October, 2006 Turns of Mind: Some New Irish Art’, curated by Lucy Lippard, toured US 1985-87;‘Robert Ballagh: The Complete Works’, Arnotts, Dublin, February 1992; RHA Retrospective, 15 September - 20 October, 2006 Literature: Literature:Carty, Ciarán, Robert Ballagh Magill, Dublin, 1986, p.222 (listed), (full-page illustration) (republished, 2010 in limited edition box-set with Robert Ballagh Citizen Artist); Carty, Ciarán and Kiberd, Declan, Robert Ballagh - Artist and Designer, A Retrospective, Zeus, Dublin, 2006, p.97 (listed), p.74 (full-page illustration); Robert Ballagh Works from the Studio 1959-2006, Gorry Gallery & Damien Matthews, Dublin, 2006, catalogue no. 63, p.80 (giclée print, illustrated); Carty, Ciarán, Robert Ballagh Citizen Artist, Zeus, Dublin, 2010, p.173 (full-page illustration) One afternoon in May 1982, I climbed several flights of stairs to Robert Ballagh’s attic studio overlooking Dublin’s City Hall. I expected to find him working on Upstairs No. 3 which was to be the fin... nal picture in a series of four paintings featuring his home at 3 Temple Cottages, an artisan’s dwelling near the Four Courts where he lived with Betty Carabini. The series, an articulation of the process by which art happens, was suggested by earlier attempts in My Studio, 1969 and Studio with a Modigliani Print to deal directly with his own personal environment. The initial No. 3 painting in 1977, depicting his family outside their home in a conventional manner structured within the traditional framework of Renaissance perspective, was a radical change in style. The very ordinariness of the setting was a statement on the role of art and the artist in late 20th century society. Art was not for art’s sake as Modernism had decreed. Like everything else it was a social product. Its integrity depended on its ability to respond honestly and accurately to the artist’s experience. Ballagh was reconnecting with a tradition that never died and that continued through the modernist era with painters like Balthasar Klossowski (Balthus), David Hockney Edward Hopper and Lucien Freud. Two years later Inside No. 3 brought us inside his home showing Betty on their spiral stairway, a recurring theme in Western painting inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. It defied the conventional architectural perspective of his previous paintings by using several vanishing points to achieve the effect of pulling the eye around in a circular motion, as with a fisheye lens, symbolising the turning round of his own approach to painting. Upstairs No. 3, reluctantly put to one side for a portrait of Charles Haughey, was to complete the No. 3 series: this time reversing roles with a nude Ballagh coming up the stairway into a bedroom where a reclining Betty reads a pillow book of Japanese erotic art. His intention was to overturn the tradition in Western art of the female nude, frontally exposed to the viewer as an object, something to be admired and owned. But this was not the work in progress on his easel confronting me that day. The redecoration of the interior of their house prompted a visual pun he couldn’t resist on the situation of contemporary art after Modernism. Taking shape amid scaled preparatory drawings and stacks of black and white photographs strewn on his work bench was a self-portrait showing him seated at a tabl