Stephen Mckenna
Figurative artist compared to de Chirico who was a surprise contender for the 1986 Turner Prize
STEPHEN MCKENNA, the artist, who has died aged 78, placed himself firmly within the grand tradition of European figurative painting, citing influences ranging from Stubbs to Picabia: despite his avoidance of fashionable movements and trends, he was shortlisted for the 1986 Turner Prize.
Mckenna studied at the Slade School of Art in the early 1960s, but found himself out of sympathy with pop art and conceptualism – the dominant artistic trends in London at the time – and disillusioned with an education that had imparted no drawing skills. He even claimed to have learnt to paint from one of the Slade’s porters.
He took his inspiration from the great European painters of the classical past and his work, which ranged from still lifes to landscapes and cityscapes, graceful interiors to allegorical scenes, could seem almost eccentrically old-fashioned. Yet there was also an idealised, dreamlike quality to his work, often featuring strong, pared-down architectural elements and awkwardly placed hybrid objects, reminiscent of the metaphysical reveries of the early 20th-century surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, an artist to whom Mckenna was often compared.
“Painting,” he once said, “is the art of decoration and representation, of making images of ourselves and the world surrounding us, and making them visible to the senses and intelligences of others.”
Stephen Francis Mckenna was born on March 20 1939 in Ashford, Middlesex, to a father originally from Co Tyrone in Ireland, and a Scottish mother. His father was in the Army and the family’s whereabouts depended on his postings, which included postwar Oslo, Austria and Hong Kong.
After attending the Slade School of Art, Mckenna went on to teach at Canterbury College of Art while he struggled to define his own artistic identity against the prevailing orthodoxy of abstraction. When he decided to go back to the classical European figurative tradition, he recalled later: “Friends and colleagues thought I’d lost it.”
Things began to look up in 1971 when he moved to a studio in Germany and found that people on the Continent could see the value in what he was doing. He was much influenced by Italian metaphysical painters such as de Chirico and Carlo Carra, a colleague of de Chirico’s who had argued the case for employing Renaissance pictorial techniques while exploring such contemporary notions as, for example, the unconscious.
After Germany, Mckenna spent several years in Belgium and then in Italy, where he lived and worked with the Korean-born abstract artist Chung Eun-mo.
Although he remained resolutely uninterested in fashion, towards the end of the 1970s Mckenna found himself being championed as an artist whose work defied the contemporary trend of pursuing novelty for its own sake, and by the mid 1980s a number of solo exhibitions had put him firmly on the map.
But there were some critics who found his work too impersonal, complaining that it told the viewer nothing about the artist himself. “There is always a sense,” wrote a Sunday Times critic in 2005, “that Mckenna is putting forward a cerebral rather than heartfelt argument. The work often feels forced; occasionally it risks being overwhelmed by the very task it has set itself.”
“Success in the art world is a peculiar thing,” Mckenna reflected. “Any painter who says that he does not enjoy praise, recognition and respect is a liar, but anyone who believes that it is of more than passing significance is a fool.
“If one concentrates on those matters which one believes to be important, maintains one’s own position, then fashion will come and go.” Although he spent much time on the Continent, from 1973 Mckenna paid frequent visits to Co Donegal, where his father had retired, and in 1998 he bought a converted convent school in Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, on the banks of the River Barrow and settled there permanently. But he remained deeply committed to the idea of Europe as a cultural entity with a shared past and a shared humanity. Asked by an interviewer in 1990 whether he considered himself “English, Irish or European”, he replied simply: “Yes”.
Mckenna was the subject of several major exhibitions in Ireland and in 1997 he curated The Pursuit of Painting, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition that was seen by more than 100,000 people during its four-month run. This featured works by 26 artists who perpetuated the classical tradition, and who Mckenna described as his “cultural mentors” – including Balthus, Bonnard, Gris, Leger, Malevich, Freud, de Chirico, Jack B Yeats and Sean Scully.
Mckenna was less well known in Britain, though examples of his work can be found in the collections of the Tate Galleries, the British Council and the Imperial War Museum.
A tall, commanding presence, Mckenna was a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, serving as its president from 2005 to 2009.
He is survived by his wife, Beth Ann, by a son and a stepdaughter.
Stephen Mckenna, born March 20 1939, died May 4 2017