Mainie Jellett

Mainie Jellett was born into a prosperous Dublin Protestant family. Like many women of her class she had art lessons at home, but she wished to study professionally and in 1914 she began to attend classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School where she was taught by William Orpen. She subsequently continued her studies with the English artist Walter Sickert at the Westminster School of Art in London, while also availing of the opportunity to see contemporary European art in the London Galleries. In 1921she travelled to Paris to become a pupil of the Cubist Andre Lhote who ran what she described as "the most advanced of the public academies". Lhote's teaching encouraged the study of the human as a series of geometric forms. However, Jellett soon developed an interest in abstraction and in December 1921 began to work with Albert Gleizes who was experimenting with a form of geometric abstract painting. In 1923 she exhibited her abstract paintings in Dublin where they were greated with much derision by the press. In her later years she was mush influenced by the formal qualities of Chinese art and she began to reintroduce the human figure into her work. Throughout her career she also worked as a designer, working in the theatre and also designing carpets. In 1938 she received a major commission from the Free State to paint murals for the Irish pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. Mainie Jellett worked tirelessly for the promotion of Modernism in Ireland, and in 1943 was elected the first president of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, an exhibition forum which offered an alternative to the academy.