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New Hibernia Review 7.3 (2003) 159



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Clúdach: Cover




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The McClelland Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art features some ninety examples of the Belfast painter Colin Middleton (1910-1983), whose 1958 oil painting Woman: Carnmoon, Portrush is featured on the cover of this autumn issue of New Hibernia Review. Like the Ulster sculptor F. E. McWilliam, Middleton mastered the Surrealist idiom of late 1930s British art. Middleton's work—from the canvases of the Belfast Blitz through his late Australian and Northern landscapes—employs motifs notable in works by Dali, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Klee, Magritte, and De Chirico. Middleton's postwar exhibitions in such Dublin venues as Waddington and Hendriks galleries carried manifold Continental influences into Irish painting. The size and pose of the image in Middleton's Woman monumentally counters the usual Romantic, nationalist image of the allegorical female image of Ireland. Middleton's coloring of the gaunt figure and the background curve of shoreline states a bleak melancholy verging on unspoken anguish. A believer in liberalizing social structures, Middleton was a political idealist and ally of the poet and curator John Hewitt. Honored by an MBE in 1969, Middleton was a prominent figure in Irish artistic life in the 1970s. For helping us bring this striking example of Middleton's influential painting to our readers, we thank Catherine Marshall and Riann Coulter of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.



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