Can art change the world? Are art centres and galleries about leisure or life? For Michael Kane the answer is definitely the latter.
The artist once described in these pages as truculent and combative – at least back in the 1960s and 1970s – is these days a charming combination of formidably intelligent, intense and serious yet frequently mischievous.
He is also quick to see the absurdities of some previous certainties. Maybe he has mellowed. Maybe it’s just a function of living a long and well-considered life. Marking his 90th birthday with a solo show at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, and with works in exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at Hillsboro Fine Art, Kane is an artist, writer, poet, editor and firm believer in the idea that art truly matters. He lives fully surrounded by it.
We are sitting in the kitchen of the Dublin mews house he shares with wife, the architect Shelley McNamara, fuelled by tea and cake, and darting through time in a conversation that takes in architecture, politics, sport, poetry and literature, but always returns to art.
Kane’s own art fills the walls in a glorious extravaganza of colour, figures and dancing abstractions that always appear to be on the cusp of reminding you of something known or heartfelt.
Farther back, towards the rear of the house, a landing leads to his first-floor studio, which McNamara – principal with Yvonne Farrell of the award-winning Grafton Architects – designed. It is home to a collection of African sculptures and to pieces by James McKenna, his late friend and fellow artist.
Behind Kane is Hard Man, a large painting from 2012 that’s tricky to tear your eye from. In it a figure emerges in sporting strip against a blocked background of reds, blues and greens. Some is collaged with newspaper; a page from a painted-over calendar shows, upside down, the year 2011. And yet, for all that, the figure could easily be a Celtic warrior from deep in mythological time.
The idea emerges that, civilised as we may imagine ourselves to be, we all have our impulses to battle, that organised sport is just another mode of warfare, and maybe that all times continue to meet and coalesce in the present.
This layering of times, ideas, memories and histories is one reason why Kane’s abstractions are so powerful. Another is that they are hard-won drillings down into the essence of things, rather than the aesthetic promptings of idle imaginings. History, poetry, philosophy, architecture and cultural memory all make their way in. One gets the sense that not much goes unnoticed by his incisive mind.
Dublin is as rich a source of inspiration for Kane as it was for James Joyce. In many ways the artist’s new body of work is as thorough an examination of the city as it was for Joyce in Ulysses.
Born on Haddington Road, Kane lived with his aunt and her family on Pembroke Road. “I have always lived within striking distance of this area. I have tried to describe that as it was,” Kane says.
Emerging through many of his paintings, Dublin is what happens away from the major streets. “There’s a greater memory in a lane behind Fitzwilliam Street than on Fitzwilliam Street itself. And a lot of the kind of abstracted paintings that I’ve been doing in recent years are a result of walking around those lanes over the years. It is the ghost: the ghost city that is behind the actual city,” he says.
When Kane smiles the austere lines of his face melt to an unexpected warmth. He smiles as he remembers Patrick Kavanagh walking those same streets and canal-bank paths, and how he became familiar with Kavanagh as a person before he came to understand him as a poet.
Kane also credits the poet with building his idea of what an artist could and should be: “This was a man, as far as I was concerned, who did nothing else but create art. And that was my ideal. I couldn’t abide amateurism, and so he was the ideal symbol of what an artist ought to be.”
Later Kane says, “I remember a magazine that had a selection of his poems in it, and it had the effect of establishing beyond doubt my feeling about his artistic significance. I never looked back after that. And I never ceased to admire him as a person.”
Kane’s 90 years has been peppered with people, admirable and otherwise, and he is gifted with – or cursed by – a phenomenally powerful memory, the contents of which he relays in detail in his 2023 memoir, Blind Dogs, the title of which is from a Kavanagh poem.
There is the singer Ronnie Drew, whom the artist met while the pair were working night shifts at the telephone exchange. The way Kane tells it, nights at the telephone exchange were populated by an intriguing cast of characters biding time and making ends meet while waiting to become something else. Mostly controlled by those in charge, they always seemed on the brink of anarchy.
We also meet the poet, arts activist, biographer, commentator, critic, editor, barrister and admired friend Anthony Cronin, as well as Brendan Behan, Colm Ó Briain, Charles Cullen, John Behan, Seán Keating, Eithne Jordan and those who populated Dublin’s pubs, talking out their ideas and dreams over pints or, in Kane’s case, driven by the urge to do something, to make something happen in the world.
He set up and edited the influential magazine Structure and was a member of the Independent Artists Group, created as an alternative to the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Living Art exhibition. “We were ambitious not just for our individual selves,” Kane writes in Blind Dogs, “but for art itself. We saw the poor state of painting and sculpture in the Living Art exhibition and the annual show by the RHA. There was a drab inertia in both.”
But all that was to come later. First Kane went to art college, surprised, he says, to have been offered a place, and more surprised still to have one of the tutors praise his work. “I was in my early 20s, and that was the first person who ever praised anything I did. It was of tremendous significance to me.”
He was an admirer of the painters Piero della Francesca and Paul Cézanne, whose work he came across in “little colour reproductions, in small books that were available for something like a half crown in the 1950s. They had an extraordinary effect on me”.
“Then,” he says, “when I first saw the originals of Cézanne, it gave me an immense positive shock, because of the struggle that I could see him making, which corresponded to the awful struggles that one puts into one’s own work.”
Struggle and hard work matter. “Perfection is appalling,” Kane says. “It’s a dead hand.” He describes artists working in the Muslim tradition being “expected to put in mistakes, because only God is perfect”.
Hand in hand with Kane’s respect for hard work and struggle comes his dismissal of the contemporary cult of the individual genius. Many people are immensely talented, and many of those never do the work to realise that talent, but, for Kane, artists can flourish only through artistic movements.
“We don’t like movements in Ireland for some reason,” he says, and yet it was a movement that gave rise to the Abbey Theatre, the oldest national theatre in the English-speaking world. It was also a movement – this one established by Kane and his peers – that created Project Arts Centre, in Dublin, one of the very first to incorporate space for all art forms under one extraordinary roof. “Movements,” Kane says, “produce great individuals, not the other way around.”
Moving through to Kane’s studio, the floor is spattered with paint like a Jackson Pollock; framed woodcut prints line one wall at floor level, propped up against other larger canvases, while smaller works on paper pile a table.
These will form the substance of Kane’s upcoming solo show. Their smaller size comes in part of necessity. The artist spent part of 2024 in ill health; he wondered if he would work again. Sitting down at a table instead of standing to face his canvases, he painted, he says, to see what would come.
There’s something delicious about seeing art in all the chaotic glory of its making, before it becomes more coldly final on a gallery wall. Maybe this is its last chance to be truly itself.
Here there are familiar elements from Kane’s work over the years: faces made manifest in a few sure strokes, collaged newspapers, hints of architecture, nudes, some sex here and there, and horses. One horse, in particular, in bold red, reminds how Picasso could get a dog out of a single line. Here the almost crude crimson brushstrokes are pure horse power.
Kane might be amused by the idea of walking all over a Pollock as he goes about his business of being an artist. He is scathing about “the colonisation process engineered by the US state department”, alluding to the CIA-backed project of using art and culture in general, and abstract expressionism in particular, as a propaganda tool in postwar Europe.
It was a project, he writes “that eventually retarded the development of the works of numerous British artists at the time, and has now colonised the world”. To further embitter the pill, money followed, to further colonise how art is made and understood.
This matters because, for Kane, art has meaning when it is a distillation of the stories, legacies and psychologies of a culture, rather than a second-hand reflection of well-packaged imports.
Describing the early days of Project, he says: “It seemed to me that the excitement aroused was due to the fact that young artists could be avant-garde, progressive and articulate in their formulations, and could site their work firmly in their own place and time, rejecting the tendency to tack it on to the tail end of Anglo-American taste and practice.”
He also describes “that component of surrealism that sets out to reduce the whole of art to a sly and shallow joke [that] appeals to the infantile mentality of the media and its public, to governments and the rich, because it offers no challenges, either philosophical or political, no comment but a subservient sneer delivered out of the corner of the mouth, denoting its origin in failure”.
Kane is quick to call out hypocrisy, laziness and the vacuity of art for money’s sake. But he is also a romantic, in that he believes in redemption, truth and love. Aware that part of the human condition is to live between the impulses that underlie both these sets of tendencies, he is also vitally committed to the daily task of getting up and continuing to try to do it again, better.
Maybe these are the essential ingredients for any halfway decent abstract art. Kane’s work is all that, and more.
Michael Kane’s work features in The 1980s: A Return to Painting, at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, until May 30th, and in Staying with the Trouble, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, until September 21st. Michael Kane: Works on Paper is at Taylor Galleries, Dublin, from May 23rd until June 14th
