Letter from Roderic O’Conor to Clive Bell regarding the Salon d'Automne

Part of the Irish Archive

Description

Handwritten letter, addressed from 102 Rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris, in which O’Conor renews his criticism of the review of [Gerald Faustus Kelly’s] work in the Athenaeum. O’Conor has been ‘jogging along as usual…though the results seem small when I look back’. He did not send to the Albert Hall this year; ‘commercialism swallows up art everywhere but less here perhaps!’ O’Conor is on the jury of the Salon d’Automne ‘a nasty job and a tiresome one’. The show is ‘poor’. Matisse has two still life studies, Morrice, Barne and O’Conor are represented along with Kelly whose two portraits are ‘probably the worst things there’. Kelly’s other works are ‘a disastrous product of photography’. O’Conor has been employing a model who worked for [Augustus John]. Thanks Bell for drawings which he sent. O’Conor found them interesting but ‘overlaid with so much reminiscence. It seems to be impossible for the British artists to be contented with painting…without trying to drag in something else...’ The sculptor [Aristide Maillol] is sending to the Salon d’Automne, ‘I rather think he has come to the end of his tether’. [La Prade] and [Jean Puy] have the best pictures this year. O’Conor is glad to hear that Gauguin is being discovered.

Creator

O'Conor, Roderic

Related topics

O'Conor, Roderic