"Dreamy Women, Balding Men"

by Anthony Haden-Guest

JP Donleavy is known as the author of 11 novels, most notably his first, the cult classic, The Ginger Man. It is less known that he began as an artist and was showing and selling work while still an Irish-American student at Trinity College, Dublin. In his early 80s, he remains a prolific artist. “I don’t think many days go by that I don’t use a brush or a pencil,” he told me. More than a hundred of his drawings and watercolours are currently on show at The National Arts Club in New York.

Donleavy lives at Levington Park, a house on 177 acres of land on the outskirts of the city of Mullingar in County Westmeath in Ireland. Mighty oaks and horse-chestnuts stood alongside the drive. The austere Georgian building was as grey as an Ascot topper.

It’s a fine old house. How many rooms, I asked?

“Twenty-one, twenty-two,” Donleavy said, uncertainly.

Those who obsess on property – and who doesn’t these days? – might note that Donleavy bought the place more than 30 years ago for £40,000.

A flagstone shifted underfoot and some paintwork was peeling but there was excellent furniture and a couple of superb neoclassic mantelpieces. Piled archives included the proofs of The Ginger Man, with annotations by fellow writer Brendan Behan.

And, of course, there was the art. There are fine pots by Karen, the writer’s Idaho-based potter daughter who will also be in the show, and a few pieces by other hands but Donleavy’s work rules, hanging everywhere I looked.

The drawings and watercolours are spidery and spiky. Some depict dreamy women, others fantastic beasts. The influence of modernism’s missing master, Paul Klee, can be glimpsed here and there. They are witty and fanciful, and very much a writer’s drawings. Which is to the point.

The fine tradition of writers who make art would include Victor Hugo, Edward Lear, Max Beerbohm, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Evelyn Waugh. In some cases – Beerbohm and James Thurber, say – the art has effectively submerged the writing. Up on the wall were four drawings by the saturnine American artist/writer Edward Gorey. And during our talk Donleavy threw in another name, Henry Miller.

Here I feel braced to make a generalisation about writers’ art. Which is that, unlike work made by professionals, it tends to be indifferent to art history, non-competitive with work by the maker’s peers and fairly nonchalant in its making. But they aren’t illustration – they are part of the process we call art.

In this tradition, Donleavy plays an honourable part. If the tradition isn’t exactly flourishing, it’s because today’s art world is an efficiently-run mega-business. And in a world controlled by collectors and policed by MBAs, advisers, consultants and what have you, there is sadly little room for the talented amateur.

The gallery, 20 Hoxton Square, the latest addition to the hive of London’s East End, opened last week in a brick building opposite the White Cube. It is run by partners Adam Waymouth, an artist, and Alex Dellal, whose family own the building. The opening show includes 27 artists, all part of Waymouth’s circle. “I was going to call the show Friends and Family,” he says.

It was an immensely successful opening, meaning, of course, that the near-impassable Hoxton horde included pretty celebutantes and a hard core of black-dressed, bald-domed males who looked like a mass break from a French jail.

The following morning, the annual Cork Street open gallery affair was so placid that, walking up the Burlington Arcade, I thought I had the wrong date. But each gallery was offering sticky cakes, coffee, orange juice and fizz. The best spread was at the Medici Gallery, which offered grapes and oatmeal biscuits with slivers of tangy cheddar from the Isle of Mull. The browsers were mostly a generation older than the Hoxton horde. Bald men were just fellows who had lost their hair.

Oh, yes, the art.

Cork Street galleries include bastions of Modernism, quasi-Ecole de Paris, vendors of near kitsch and galleries showing young art. So what is the function of the art breakfast?

“Some people feel a bit intimidated about coming to Cork Street,” says Harriet Bridgeman of the Bridgeman Art Library. “It’s to get people to buy pictures.”

I returned to Hoxton, meaning actually to look at the art. The doors were locked. “We had to,” Waymouth said. “It was too much.” I said I’d get to it later.

The J.P. Donleavy exhibition runs until Wednesday at The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, tel: +1 212-475 3424.