Abstraction and empathy: the life and art of Evie Hone

This lecture is part of the series of lectures delivered as part of the Mainie Jellett & Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland.

In this lecture I considered how only a matter of months after Evie Hone’s death in 1955, when C.P. Curran commented that her turn to stained glass in the 1930s was a result of her dissatisfaction with abstraction, he set in motion a framework of interpretation of Hone’s art that has lasted up to the present day. Many of the radical and complex ideas and sources that underpinned her work have, as a result, gone largely undetected. This talk will map some of the key events and influences that shaped Evie Hone’s life and art, and account for the international reputation she enjoyed during her lifetime but that has now fallen into eclipse.