Nobody familiar only with the candy-coloured landscapes of the late, great west Cork-based colourist William Crozier would have had him pinned as a dark existentialist in origin. At the West Cork Arts Centre, the first of a two-part venture to reassess his significance starts with a self-portrait, painted aged 30. It’s an image of a skeletal figure in a hellish vista. Here is Crozier, a head with a hollow eye socket, red-raw lips pulled back to reveal a gaping maw; a figure recoiling, like a frightened animal.
This bony form rears back in a landscape of fiery red and yellow, a portent of the richness of colour to come in his work. A black hollow lurks behind the skull. The curve of bone above the neck is stained red, while the shoulder is bare and white.
This isn’t the Crozier to be found in most of the rest of the show, at least not overtly, but Self-Portrait (c 1961) has been placed at the start to tell us this horrified figure is also the hand that held the brush that painted the pink-and-yellow Morning (2005), the golden The Ripe Field (1990), and the deep blue pool at the centre of Departure from the Island (1993), which hangs beside it.
It’s intended to hint at the dark impetus behind a working life later filled with paintings of luminous land and sea. And it tempers the reception for the rest of the show with a promise that remains unfulfilled. We are told the rest of the story is yet to come. In fact, the full picture is being kept for the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) follow-up in October.
There is no doubt that Crozier is best known, in Ireland, for his west Cork landscapes of the 1980s onwards. This makes Uillinn, in Skibbereen, an ideal venue for showing his work. The last major Crozier survey, in 1991, was also a two-venue offering, at the Crawford in Cork and the RHA in Dublin, which consolidated his reputation 10 years before his death in 2011.
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Glasgow-born and raised in Scotland — of Irish (Antrim) grand-parentage — in the 1950s and 1960s Crozier spent time in Dublin, Paris, London, Glasgow, and Malaga (with the poet Anthony Cronin). In Dublin in the 1950s, he worked as a theatre set designer, meeting Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh. He adopted Irish citizenship in 1973 and 10 years later he went to live in west Cork.
This show’s tantalising taste of Crozier noir is followed immediately, as if to quickly salve a wound, by Departure from the Island, a big blue painting of an ocean bay edged with foliage-filled headlands and bordered by low mountain peaks. As if to anesthetise any bleak feelings that might be inappropriate to a west Cork holiday audience, it offers a quick shot of entrancing, invigorating colour. It is carnivalesque and rich, as unlike the Irish landscape recorded by other artists, or visible outside the gallery, as could be imagined. We do not have lapis seas or Caribbean harbours. We do sometimes have yellow fields, but seldom quite as glowing as in Crozier’s paintings. The sunsets are remarkable but they do not fizz taupe-green and dayglow pink. This is an Ireland hidden somewhere within the real landscape. It is not what Ireland actually looks like, except perhaps in our hearts and our souls.
And yet, what is also striking about the death-in-a-valley opener of 1961 is the colour connections with Departure from the Island. This Bahamas-hued scene has something in common with the horrified cranium nearby: a toothy fang of headland that points its orange-green-black point into the blue bay, a darkness that always — even in Crozier’s most colourful work — exists in contrast with the bright. The exhibition is called The Edge of the Landscape, the title of an Essex painting from 1959, which is not part of the Cork show. That composition offers a stony, blackened scene of a boundary wall looped with brambles or maybe barbed wire.
We are told that the imagery of the First World War, including photographs of trenches, had a profound effect on Crozier; that he had seen the remnants of concentration camps in 1969, and footage of the liberation of Auschwitz, which led to the skeletal figures in his earlier work. We are told, too, that he decided to take the human figure out of his paintings in the 1970s because he felt it represented a too-easy manipulation of the viewer’s emotions.
“It is not what Ireland actually looks like, except perhaps in our hearts and in our souls
The only other skeleton here is a fallen Icarus, a near cousin of the self in the opening portrait, and therefore a kind of Everyman as well as a particular man: the painter, crestfallen, grounded by the horror of war and its aftermath. Winged Figure (1970-75) has useless wings instead of hands. He is sitting, legs splayed, in a landscape of golden yellow, rich greens and a thin river of blue. Chalky haycocks behind lead to a red-stained horizon, the edge of the sky. What we learn from this show is that the place where edges meet, where toe touches green, where mouth touches air, where feather touches ground, where water meets land, or foliage meets any kind of boundary, human or climate made, is the site of Crozier’s most intense thinking about the nature of living and life.
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Crozier found a kind of spiritual home here. This show wants us to know that his work was always an existential love song to a feeling or a place. Even his winter west Cork paintings are oddly warm. The Winter Garden Kilcoe, No 1 (1984-5) is filled with a minty frost, and trees that seem to have grown out of an ice-blue lagoon. He was not afraid of yellow or pink. It is as if he used the brightest hues as a defence against the darkness.
At the Crooked Bridge II (1989) was sparked by a story of a 100-year-old murder near Ballydehob. The Styx (2006) is a magnificent, simplified painting about the death of a friend; a black Crozier, still with a glow. There is always darkness living side by side with the light, and vice versa.
The Imma show promises to bring to life the London art world of the 1950s, Crozier’s early socialist politics, and the influence of the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus as well as the work of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh and Munch. Imma will host dark, early works including angled-looking early landscape paintings, and more of the skeleton images.
Crozier once said: “Art must have its roots in where you come from.” It was clearly a philosophical as much as a geographical position.
William Crozier — The Edge of the Landscape is at the West Cork Arts Centre until August 27