CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/17/2019

'Mary Swanzy: Voyages' revives a pioneer of Irish Modernism

We're celebrating Women's History Month and St. Patrick's Day with this image from Mary Swanzy: Voyages, the first comprehensive monograph on the pioneering Irish Modernist. Produced during her Paris years, during which time she was embraced by Gertrude Stein and her coterie, "Flowers and Lighthouse" (c. 1927) is among Swanzy's Cubist paintings. But she was an artist of fierce independence and ever-evolving curiosities, whose work also flirted with Post-Impressionism, naturalism, Futurism, Symbolism and Surrealism. To settle with one style, or even one person, was not in her DNA. "She talked about her art being her consuming passion and how much better it was that it should be art, and not a young man, for it was something that she could keep control over," Seán Kissane writes. "Artists should keep their life-force for the easel for if they wasted it on relationships there would be nothing left for the art."