F. E. McWilliam, 1909-1992

By Zachary Vincent

HELP, from The Women of Belfast Series, 1975, bronze, 41.5 x 44 x 22 cm. Irish Museum of Modern Art.

“Our life and death cycle, to which we are geared, is a continual evolvement. To me all art is a protest against this, against death, and an attempt to make something finite and lasting when actually nothing is finite and lasting – only change. Art is a paradoxical activity.”

The words of twentieth-century Irish sculptor F. E. McWilliam may find surprising resonance with the feelings of University of St Andrews students on the cusp of graduation. These themes are familiar – the fear of change, the battle against it. Yet also the inherent recognition that change is impossible to resist. While final-year students may be experiencing the unstoppable pull of paradox as we plan our futures, artists experience such forces every day of their practice.

Having spent the last few years writing and editing artist biographies for the magazine, I have been lucky enough to encounter some of the defining personalities of our world. Those I wrote about taught me much.

Gerhard Richter (1932-present) taught me that representations of the things dearest to you don’t need to be restricted to one style, and that love can be both abstract and sharply defined.

Frank Stella (1936-2024) showed that narratives come in many forms and aren’t restricted to figural representations – they can be poetic, colourful, and committedly abstract as well.

Mary Pinchot Meyer (1920-1964) led a life demonstrating that biography can be more complicated than informing our understandings of an artist’s work, and that they can often do as much harm as good to our ability to understand the art itself.

Building on such complications, Jack Whitten’s (1939-2018) art demands a freedom from narrative as much as the artist demanded freedom from his oppressive upbringing in a country which denied him rights.

Eugène Carrière (1849-1906) similarly defied boundaries, demonstrating that art could be both Romantic and Social Realist, exploring all the dimensions of clear-eyed sight and art’s role in a rapidly changing society.

Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923) proved that light is a medium unto itself, and one perfect for mourning the past and welcoming in the future, and his simple life devoted to his family is the best testament to continuity in the face of change which can be found.

Clarence Hudson White (1871-1925) had no use for the past but pushed the new medium of photography to new places, politicising with finesse and beauty what could otherwise be propagandistic and cold.

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) could also be political but proved that the best form of protest was the perpetuation of a dream beyond a single age and a single generation of activists – something visual art is uniquely suited to do.

One of the fathers of the Mexican Muralist movement, José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), was well-versed in art as enduring protest, and he further demonstrated that the most enduring art of all is that which speaks to a people above any government, institution, or ideology. Art for everyone.

Jacques Hnizdovsky (1915-1985) grappled with and subverted manipulative power structures better than most, taking on the United States government in the midst of the Cold War and advocating for diverse artistic practice in an era of forced homogenisation.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) left an artistic oeuvre as evidence that global exchange, and the same cross-cultural influences built upon by all the artists above, was well under way before any of them were even born.

The lessons I have learned while researching and writing biographies on all these artists are a testament to the power of biographical writing and art historical research more broadly. The interconnectedness of artists born in so many different places and ages and their different approaches to the same paradoxes is rather breathtaking. Even while my choice of artists to write about has skewed American and modern, the number of articles I have been lucky enough to read and edit from the talented Born This Week team have expanded my artistic horizons and challenged my knowledge critically. Biography is, HASTA has taught me, essential to art history as paint, stone, cloth, and film.

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As my final contribution to HASTA magazine, I would like to spend a few moments with F. E. McWilliam, with whose words this article began, to understand what his life and art teach to us as we move about our life with great uncertainty.

McWilliam was born in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, in 1909 and knew quickly that he wanted to be an artist. Studying painting at the Slade in London, McWilliam eventually settled on the medium of sculpture as his life’s calling. His relationship with sculpting was dynamically changed across the course of his long career through his relationships with other sculptors and with his travelling experiences. Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were to become some of McWilliam’s closest friends, introducing him to biomorphic forms and new materials like marble. McWilliam’s travels in India at the end of the Second World War, during which he also taught at an art school in New Delhi, shaped his stylistic approach to sculpting yet further, thinning out the artist’s figures and introducing greater ornamentation to their surfaces. Later, McWilliam became more interested in the representation of movement, a fascination which culminated in his Women of Belfast series (1972-75) as a memorial to those killed by the bombings of Belfast’s Abercorn Tea-Rooms, and all the victims of The Troubles more generally. McWilliam was a well-respected teacher and sculptor, with two Tate exhibitions centred on his work held during his lifetime, and has not ceased to be celebrated since his death in 1992. Today, there is a museum featuring much of his life’s work and a recreation of his studio in his birth-town of Banbridge.

Inside back cover of Tate exhibition catalogue, 1973, bound volume with annotations and sketches. Tate.

Not everyone has been impressed with the variety inherent in McWilliam’s artistic career. In 1989, a review of McWilliam’s second Tate exhibition published in The Burlington Magazine claimed that “McWilliam is no Picasso, jesting with the modernism he once helped define. The fact is that pioneering avant-gardiste and die-hard traditionalists always sandwich between them a sizeable group of artists like McWilliam who take up details or semblances of the newest style, but explore ideas and images only tenuously connected with the formal language they adopt.”

The issue with such a claim is its lack of recognition of the many stages of McWilliam’s career, stages which could only be built on top of one another. For McWilliam, and really for all of us, the stages of our lives are essential to following stages, and those following the next, and the next, and so forth. What the Burlington review fails to appreciate is that the ‘formal language’ used for a given work of art is only one factor influencing the ‘ideas and images’ depicted.

The ultimate evidence of this comes from the pure emotional impact of The Women of Belfast. An Irish Times Review describes the power of the work well, saying each figure “has been turned upside down in every sense, her privacy and dignity violated, the humanity knocked out of her, and yet she couldn’t be more pitifully human. Your eyes want to look away as much as they want to look, and then look away again.” The movement of McWilliam’s later years meet the fragile forms he began to experiment with after India. His sketches for the works demonstrate his understanding and use of two-dimensional media, a relic of his Slade education in painting, perhaps? His use of bronze recalls his fruitful artistic relationships with artists who pushed McWilliam to experiment beyond his early woodcarvings. And, of course, his experiences as a Northern Irishman and his abhorrence of violence led him to the subject of The Women of Belfast in the first place: a group of women killed, maimed, tossed from comfort into chaos by a bomb. The stages of McWilliam’s life made one of the most touching and significant memorials to a vast and bloody conflict possible.

So what can soon-to-be-graduates take away from McWilliam?

Take chances, trust that the stages of life will beget others, accept paradox, express yourself in the ways that matter most to you – not the ways that matter to the critics at a particular moment in time. Because if Born This Week has taught me anything, it is that our lives are as beautiful as art, and often even more significant.

Bibliography

Cohen, David. ‘F. E. McWilliam, Tate Gallery.’ The Burlington Magazine 131: 1037 (1989): 579-580. https://www.jstor.org/stable/884064.

‘Exhibition catalogue “F. E. McWilliam/Sculpture 1972-1973/Women of Belfast”.’ Tate. Accessed 20th April 2025. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-885-1/exhibition-catalogue-f-e-mcwilliam-sculpture-1972-73-women-of-belfast-waddington-galleries/7.

Ferran, Denise. “A Modern Master.” Irish Arts Review (2002-) 25: 3 (2008): 106-109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20493367.

‘Gallery Leaflet.’ F. E. McWilliam Gallery Collection. Accessed 20th April 2025. https://visitarmagh.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/FE-Gallery-Leaflet.pdf.

Gooding, Mel. F. E. McWilliam: Sculpture 1932-1989 (Tate Gallery, 1989).

‘HELP – Women of Belfast Series, 1975.’ Irish Museum of Modern Art. Accessed 20th April 2025. https://imma.ie/collection/help-women-of-belfast-series/.

Meredith, Fionola. ‘” Beautiful failures”: The disturbing power of the art of the Troubles.’ The Irish Times. 19th April 2014. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/beautiful-failures-the-disturbing-power-of-the-art-of-the-troubles-1.1766863.