Robert Ballagh b.1943

Man, Woman with a Jackson Pollock belongs to an important series of pop-inspired works executed in the early 1970s that was crucial in establishing Ballagh’s international reputation.  Stemming from the artist’s ongoing fascination with narrative, his series of people looking at paintings marks his obsession at the time with the complex relationship between the viewer and the work of art and more specifically, with the growing cult of viewers who perceived art as sacred-like objects. The prominence of the viewers in the foreground also highlights their vital importance in relation to a work of art and as Declan Kiberd has propounded, ‘…if a story always needs listeners, then a painting is nothing without viewers’ (D.Kiberd, ‘Robert Ballagh: Activism and Art’, Robert Ballagh – Artist and Designer, exh.cat., Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 15^th September – 22^nd October 2006, p.9). 

The large yet uniform scale of each work from the series, each consisting of similarly sized square panels, enabled them to be exhibited as a cohesive whole to maximise their visual impact whilst at the same time making up individual works of art (see fig.1, installation shot at the David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 1972). The panel format was also a practical solution for the young artist whose diminutively sized studio above his parents’s flat on Elgin road could not accommodate large sized canvases.

The central focus on each work in the series is a painting by one of the International Modernists such as Barnett Newman, Roy Lichtenstein, and in the present work, Jackson Pollock, as well as his Irish contemporaries such as Cecil King and Michael Farrell. Each new work enabled Ballagh to come to terms with another artist’s techniques and theories allowing him to develop his own critical opinion of them. Indeed, as Ciaran Carty has pointed out, ‘his Jackson Pollock was ranked by the American artist’s biographer as the best of the many forgeries of his work, quite apart from being a striking work in its own right’ (Ciaran Carty, ‘The Object of Art’, quoted, ibid., p.21).  Although the series was widely acclaimed, ‘by the time I’d finished it, I’d more or less lost faith in a lot of the dogma’ (Ballagh, quoted, ibid., p.21) and the series culminated in a commission for an 80 ft wide mural for a supermarket in Clonmel taking Frank Stella’s abstract idiom as its subject (People and a Frank Stella, 1975, now in the South Tipperary County Museum, Clonmel).