Born: May 26th, 1935
Died: May 23rd, 2025
Michael Kane was an artist who made works of astonishing power and his life was driven by an absolute belief in the power of art. Kane, who died just three days shy of his 90th birthday, leaves more than a legacy of extraordinary paintings. He championed the idea of the importance of art in society and was a founder member of Independent Artists. He was also one of the group who established the Project Arts Centre, a then ground-breaking space where multiple art forms could thrive under one roof.
Born in Dublin, Kane grew up in Wicklow before returning to live in the city, in an aunt’s house on Pembroke Road. It was there that he would see Patrick Kavanagh on his daily walks. “This was a man, as far as I was concerned, who did nothing else but create art. And that was my ideal,” he said of Kavanagh. “I couldn’t abide amateurism, and so he was the ideal symbol of what an artist ought to be.” It was an ideal that would guide Kane throughout his own life.
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Kane made his life and career significant through his unswerving conviction that people and art can make change for the better, if only we could make the commitment to see things as they really are. Art, for Kane, was not separate from politics and life.
This, in postwar Ireland, was a vital viewpoint. The urban realities of Dublin became the subject of much of his work, rather than any romantic rural ideal. Nonetheless, as his work shows, he could still find beauty in the natural world. Sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, he could capture a portrait in a few lines, while his more abstract drawings, paintings and collages let ideas emerge, and shapes form in the imagination.
Described by many, including close friends, as uncompromising, truculent and combative, Kane was also, to those who got to know him, charming, loyal, witty and kind. He believed in the power of collective movements, rather than championing any idea of individual genius, and he described the daily hard work and struggle it took, and would always take, to make meaningful art. He held his opinions strongly, but didn’t mind if you disagreed, so long as there was sense in what you said.
His resonant voice, focused stare and his physical stature lent a power to what he said, undiminished by the passing of time. While this led those who did not know him well to initially find him aloof, his irreverent mischievous streak lay only half-hidden behind his more formal facade, and he was capable of great warmth and delight.
Art fascinated him, so long as it came from a place of honesty and truth, and he reserved his anger for what he described as “the colonisations” of art, by money, by the glib jokes of surrealism, and by the more deliberate projects of bodies such as the CIA, which promoted abstract expressionism in postwar Europe. This, he wrote, “eventually retarded the development of the works of numerous British artists at the time, and has now colonised the world”.
These missteps mattered deeply to Kane because, for him, art was the form of expression that enabled us to get behind language, and discover the workings of our own cultural imaginations, meeting our histories in the process. Art, politics, philosophy, architecture, current affairs, sex, sport and the substance of dreams all coalesced in his work. In the 1970s, he published Structure, a journal of art and thought, which ran to 10 issues, and was described by his close friend Anthony Cronin as “a rampageous anti-establishment voice”.
This range of passions lent Kane’s own work its extraordinary power, which affected many who experienced it, including his friend the late poet Paul Durcan, who having lingered at Kane’s New Paintings exhibition at the Octagon Gallery of the Irish Georgian Society in 2016, wrote a poem: Kane at the Octagon, which includes the lines “After a lifetime of combat, […] He has freed himself of mirage.”
[ Paul Durcan: ‘Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others’Opens in new window ]
Kane was widely read, and had a phenomenal memory, as evidenced in his memoir, Blind Dogs, published by Gandon in 2023. There, he describes working nights at the telephone exchange, alongside a cast of characters including Ronnie Drew, who remained a friend.
Accepted to the National College of Art and Design, he said he was surprised to have been offered a place, and surprised again when a tutor praised 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.”
Artist friends from that time, and throughout his career, included Alice Hanratty and Mary Farl Powers, whose work he published in Structure; James McKenna, Pauline Bewick, Charlie Cullen, Brian Bourke, and many more of the major figures in recent Irish art, who will mourn his passing.
Kane travelled extensively, in France, Spain, Switzerland and Britain, although his affinity and intimacy with Dublin flows most deeply through his work. “There’s a greater memory in a lane behind Fitzwilliam Street than on Fitzwilliam Street itself,” he said. “A lot of the kind of abstracted paintings that I’ve been doing […] are a result of walking around those lanes over the years. It is the ghost: the ghost city that is behind the actual city.” Suspicious of marketing attempts to rebrand parts of Dublin, he believed that authenticity emerges through lives lived, rather than the gimmicks of naming.
A trove of works marking the years were carefully stored in his paint-bespattered studio, which was designed by wife, Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. “You see the world in different pictures, every day and every season. It’s a sort of cinematic imagination one has,” he said, in a video interview with Bryan O’Brien for this newspaper, made shortly before he died. There is, he also noted, a remarkable power to be found in fuelling the imagination: “If [people] observed more, they would enjoy living a lot more.”
Kane exhibited for many years with Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, and had a major retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1995. His work is held in Ireland’s major national collections, including Imma, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, the Arts Council, the Contemporary Irish Art Society, Government Buildings, and the Abbey Theatre; as well as significant international public and private collections. At the time of his death, he had works in two major group exhibitions: at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and at Hillsboro Fine Art.
A solo show of his recent, smaller works on paper had opened at Taylor Galleries the day before he died. Paying tribute to Kane, fellow artist Cecily Brennan, chair of the Toscaireacht of Aosdána, of which Kane was a member, described the “life-filled beautiful works” in the exhibition, and wrote that “in many ways, this is what artists dream of, not only being able to work until the end, but to be able to make better and better work until the end”.
While Kane himself had said that he had very much hoped to reach 90, he had lately become content to live in the moment, experiencing each day without dwelling on a future.
Kane’s first wife, artist Ruth Brandt, died in 1989, and he is survived by his widow, Shelley McNamara, his children Aoife and Oisín, and his brother Tony.
