William Crozier

The Scottish Gallery, London, where purchased by the present owner in 1991

Edinburgh, Scottish Gallery, William Crozier, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, 1989;
London, Scottish Gallery, William Crozier, 1990

Tony Godfrey (introduction), William Crozier, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, Scottish Gallery exh. cat., 1989 (illustrated on the front cover);
Peter Murray, William Crozier Paintings 1949-1990, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, 1990, exh. cat., p.15, 27;
Katharine Crouan (ed.) William Crozier, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2007, illus. pl.103, p.134;
Enrique Juncosa, ‘The End of The Modern World’ in William Crozier, The Edge of the Landscape, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2017

Unlined canvas. The work appears in good original condition. Some light craquelure and paint separation in upper left corner - stable and inherent to the paint drying process. There is a light layer of surface user and it may therefore benefit from light clean, otherwise ready to hang. Unframed.
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'Let the city be spectacle, circus, arena this evening,
Its justification sensation, its poetry wonder,
And let it cling fast to its colours, unholy and gaudy,
Forgetting the facts of its life, its grimness of purpose.'
Anthony Cronin, excerpt from The End of the Modern World

The title of the present work was taken from Anthony Cronin's epic poem of the same name which the poet worked on for three decades and runs to 3,000 lines. An elegy to 'modernity', it is, Cronin wrote, as much a celebration of what is past and passing as it is a lament.

Crozier and Cronin were long-term friends since meeting in Dublin in the 1950s. It is wholly appropriate that the artist chose the title of Cronin’s poem for his own seminal painting, concurrent to Cronin's original publication of the poem. Tony Godfrey described it as Crozier's 'valedictory' painting; the artist bidding farewell to an era, and in tone and execution it evokes Cronin's sentiments. Peter Murray expanded upon this further, writing that with Crozier's painings at the end of the 1980s, the artist had 'summoned up his resources of superb technical skill, pictorial inventiveness and a strong philosophical interest, to create a joyous celebratory art. Nevertheless, it is an art which bears the marks of his earlier, more sombre mood.' (op. cit., p.27). In rendering this duality, Crozier felt he produced his greatest works: 'The Gaelic mind produces an optimism which is based on sadness or a sense of loss or longing, it seems to be a quality of Gaelic culture. I think my best pictures are the ones in which that is contained.' (Crozier, quoted in Art Line Special Supplement, Summer 1989, p.3). In The End of the Modern World this peculiar spirit is emphatically realised, and in turn holds up Crozier's standing as one of the most original British or Irish landscape painters of the 20th century. Re-assessing the work in a contemporary context, as Enrique Juncosa writes in the 2017 exhibition catalogue for the artist's retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin: 'It is not difficult to see in this work, as well as in the Cronin poem, nostalgia for a certain way of viewing the world. As we have seen, Crozier’s painting is far from the irony, games and parodies of Postmodernism which questions and topples everything. His is an art which emerges from fervour and gravity and one in which things still have importance.'

We are grateful to Professor Katharine Crouan for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.