Mary Harriet Jellett, known as Mainie, was born into a wealthy family living in Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin. Her father was a senior barrister, her mother was descended from a long line of scholars of Irish language and culture – the Stokes family. Mainie showed an early talent for art. Lolly Yeats and other private art tutors taught her and her friends (including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen) at the Jellett home in Fitzwilliam Square.
At sixteen years of age, Mainie attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, after which she transferred to the Westminster School of Art, London. At Westminster, Mainie met Evie Hone, who was later to become her close friend and one of Ireland’s most prominent stained-glass artists. Mainie studied under Walter Sickert, a post-impressionist and pupil of JM Turner. She won a Taylor art scholarship from the Royal Dublin Society in 1917, and a Taylor prize the following year. In 1920 Mainie returned to Dublin. An extremely talented pianist, it was only at this stage that she decided to choose art over music as her career.
The beautiful Sickert-period oils that Mainie produced at this time were what she called the ‘first revolution’ or phase of her art. Her ‘second revolution’ started early in 1921 when she and Evie Hone travelled to Paris and enrolled under André Lhote, a disciple of Picasso. André ran a traditional teaching academy, combining Cubism (abstract art in which objects are represented as geometric shapes) with a study of the Old Masters. In Paris, Mainie fell in love with non-representational art and her life course was set.
Mainie was a fast learner. After a few months she came to feel that André’s work was a ‘compromise’, that it did not go far enough into Cubism. She wanted to get down to what she called the ‘essentials’ of the art form. So, in late 1921, she and Evie tracked down a more extreme exponent of Cubism, Albert Gleizes, who underplayed realism in favour of pure form and colour in his art. Albert was initially unwilling to take on the two Irishwomen, but Mainie and Evie hounded him until he gave in. Every winter for the next decade, they spent six weeks with Albert and other students in his Paris studio, sometimes all working on the same painting. They would then return to Ireland to work out new ideas and develop their individual styles.
In 1924 Mainie and Evie held a joint exhibition of their abstract work in Dublin, which was largely met with derision, both from the Irish art world and from the general public. But Mainie was not going to allow Irish art to remain isolated from the modernist movement – in art, as in politics, she wanted to see less of a link to Britain and more of a link to the rest of Europe.
Around 1930 both Mainie and Evie returned to Ireland full-time. While Evie turned to making mainly representational stained-glass pieces, Mainie channelled her energies into creating new art for what she saw as a new, young Ireland. She saw many similarities between Cubist art and early Christian Celtic art, for example, in the way that simple shapes often contain within them swirling and vibrant abstract forms. ‘If an Irish artist of the eighth or ninth century,’ she said in a 1942, ‘were to meet a present-day Cubist or non-representational painter, they would understand one another.’
According to her friend, the writer Elizabeth Bowen, Mainie’s work fell into three main categories: non-representational art, which is born purely of the mind and based on experience or on nature; realistic landscapes treated in a manner inspired by Chinese art; and non-representational, Christian subjects. Mainie felt religious art was particularly important in Ireland because the lack of religious freedom of the preceding three centuries had led to a stagnation in this field.
In spite of a cold reception to the 1924 exhibition, Mainie felt she had a mission to make modern art more accessible to the public, and to this end she lectured, opened exhibitions, broadcast and wrote tirelessly. Her plea was that viewers should approach modernist works with an open mind – quite apart from the narrative ideas behind more traditional art, the viewer could also experience a strong initial response to colour and form that was valuable. Mainie always took in pupils and was remembered as being selfless and innovative with her time and techniques. If the students could not be in the studio with her, she would teach them by post; if the students did not wish to learn about Cubism, she would help them trace Old Masters. Her teaching style was unique – she often used music to illustrate a point.
Although her work was vocational, Mainie remained open-minded. Her attitude to art was unfussy and workmanlike; the artist was not, as she said, ‘an exotic flower set apart from other people’. She believed art had a role to play in everyday life and in Irish industrial expansion, a belief reflected in the fact that she herself worked with textiles and carpets, made theatre sets, costumes and shop signs and was involved in town planning.
Mainie’s work had a massive influence on modern Irish painting in the inter-war years. Her efforts were slowly recognised by the Irish government, which, in the late 1930s, commissioned her to produce works for industrial exhibitions in Glasgow and New York.
By the early 1940s Mainie was the leading figure of a circle of Dublin-based avant-garde artists, including Evie Hone, Nora McGuinness and Louis le Brocquy. In 1943 this group founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA), of which Mainie was the first chairperson. True to Mainie’s own style, the IELA believed in accessibility, for example, one of its functions was to show work that was considered too unconventional for the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).
Shortly after the establishment of the IELA, Mainie became painfully ill with cancer. She died in a Dublin nursing home the following year, at the young age of forty-seven.