Legacy edit
Her art had been primarily unknown in Ireland for a long time until retrospective exhibitions of it at Dublin's Gorry Gallery in 1995 and The Molesworth Gallery in 2001 reignited attention among critics. Gordon Brown's wife, Sarah Brown, picked one of her paintings, Still Life - Flowers, to be shown at the British Prime Minister's house. The Tatha Gallery in Fife, Scotland, is where you may view her artwork.[1]
At the Dublin Painters' Gallery in Dublin (December 1928), the St. George's Gallery in Dublin (April 1930), the Dublin Painters' Gallery (June 1930), and the Leicester Gallery in London, Steyn displayed solo exhibits of her paintings, sketches, etchings, and lithographs (1951). In 1954, she and Ivor Hitchens showed images at the Leicester Gallery. Her paintings were displayed at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1927–30) and the Royal Academy, London (1952, 1954–1959); individual pieces also featured in shows in Paris, Liverpool, Bradford, Pittsburgh, and other cities in addition to London.[2]
The only Irish artist who is known to have attended the Bauhaus school of art in Dessau is Steyn. It was established in 1919 in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius to rethink the physical world "to represent the unification of all the arts."
However, the year at Dessau caused her to become hostile to the Bauhaus rather than a follower (or at least in the later stages of the movement).
Her time at the Bauhaus, in her opinion, was "a misguided turn," but she said that it had taught her to value "painting with traditional roots".[3]
The British Museum has six lithographs, including abstract compositions based on type, 1931-2. Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery has a 1953 image of a naked man lying down. She is represented in Dublin in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art with the works Sunlight, Jardins du Luxembourg (watercolour), and Rue San Antoine (pen and ink), both from Paris. Up to a few days before she passed away on July 21, 1987, she painted in 33 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, London. The Gorry Gallery in Dublin had a retrospective show with an autobiographical narrative in the catalogue in 1995.[4]
Death edit
Stella spent the remainder of her life in England after marrying Professor David Ross in 1938. Stella Steyn passed on 21 July 1987 (aged 79) in Dublin, Ireland. Some of her most notable work was illustrations for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, a well-known novel published on 4 May 1939.[1]
References edit
- ^ a b "Search | Dictionary of Irish Biography". www.dib.ie. Retrieved 2022-11-22.
- ^ "Stella Steyn 1907 - 1987, Irish Artist". adams.ie. Retrieved 2022-11-22.
- ^ "Stella Steyn". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2022-11-22.
- ^ Snoddy, Theo (2002). Dictionary of Irish artists: 20th Century (2nd ed.). Dublin: Merlin Publishing. pp. 633–5.