80
Robert Ballagh (b.1943) THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF T
Currency:EUR
Category:Everything Else / Other
Start Price:NA
Estimated At:12,000.00 - 15,000.00 EUR
Auction Date:2005 Feb 22 @ 18:00 (UTC)
Location:Ireland
Robert Ballagh (b.1943) THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN signed lower right in the last of nine canvas panels oil and acrylic on canvas (a polyptych in nine parts) 61 by 434cm., 24 by 171in. Provenance: George and Maura McClelland, Dublin; Trinity Gallery, London; Bonham’s, Chelsea, 23 April 1991, lot 101; Private collection, Dublin; Sold through the Frederick Gallery, Dublin, to the present owner, Co. Wicklow, in 1992 Exhibited: ‘Robert Ballagh’, Lunds Kunsthall, Sweden, 29 January - 6 March 1983, catalogue no. 26 (larger version exhibited) Literature: Ciaran Carty, Robert Ballagh, Magill, Dublin, 1986, pp. 120-125, 200 In 1975 D.E. Williams Ltd, owners of the 5 Star Supermarket chain, commissioned Robert Ballagh to paint a large mural for their newly-built supermarket in Clonmel. The mural was to be on a theme of local interest, and after a friend mentioned that Clonmel was the birthplace of writer Laurence Sterne, Ballagh began reading Sterne’s eighteenth century classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. He was captivated. Ballagh discovered he shared many similarities with Sterne in terms of artistic approach. According to Ciaran Carty, “Sterne had trained to draw before he ever wrote”, so he appreciated the importance of external detail as an index of his characters’ personalities. Readers formed an opinion of a character through the accumulation of descriptive details, rather than any attempt on the author’s part to get inside the mind of the character. In short, surface appearance was everything. Kieran Hickey, who had earlier written a film script on the life of Sterne, recognised the bond between the eighteenth century author and the twentieth century painter: “If ever a writer expressed the nature of writing and the consciousness of being a writer writing for an audience reading what one is writing, it was Sterne, [and] if ever there was a painter who paints pictures about the consciousness of a painter as he paints pictures for an audience who are looking at a painting he has painted, it is Ballagh”, he said (quoted in Carty op. cit, p.123). With Ballagh enthused about the writings of Sterne, his client agreed upon two works relating to the author and his Clonmel roots. The first work was a triptych portrait of Sterne and the second was a 5 foot by 36 foot mural based on Tristram Shandy. The present work is an identical but smaller version of the mural, which Carty has described in detail: “Sterne, spitting blood when he coughed [he was consumptive], had an obsession about time. All his writing was an attempt to depict its passing with ever increasing exactitude. To suggest this in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Ballagh resorted to a movie image: the Hollywood convention of illustrating an elapse of time by flipping the pages of a book. The painting took the format of a strip of pages from the novel which appear to be blowing away like leaves in the wind of time. Tristram is shown in surreal close-up, his head a drooping clockface, about to be guillotined by a window, a reference to his mother’s untimely remark (”Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?") which condemned him to a life of misfortune. Ballagh also works in an allusion to an unfortunate incident when, as a child wanting to pee in a hurry, he had gone to an open window, forgetting his uncle had removed the sash weight to make a toy cannon. This same uncle Toby, on being asked once where he had been wounded during his war years, replied that there were two answers, “Outside the walls of Namur” or “in the groin”. Ballagh frames each of these images in a window, in keeping with Sterne’s speculation on the consequences of there being a window in every human breast through which could be seen his soul. The final ‘page’ in the sequence, entitled ‘Moral’, shows Ballagh bending down to sign the corner, a mocking reference to his gesture in the last of his pictures of people looking at paintings. Having signed off Modernism, he was now signing on as a figurative painter" (Carty, op. cit., p.215).
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Tuesday 22 February (day of sale) 10am to 2pm.
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