Cornelius McCarthy, “The Great Façade”, 2007, Oil on Canvas
Cornelius “Neal” James McCarthy was born in 1935 into a family of Irish Catholic and Eastern European immigrant stock.
McCarthy’s earliest artistic influence was probably through the artifacts and images used to promote Catholic devotion with which he grew up. Through these he became familiar with the compositions of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Formal study was completed in the 1950s at Goldsmith’s School of Art, London, followed by a tour of Italy visiting all the principal art collections and monuments.
McCarthy was greatly influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso after seeing the first post-war exhibition in London in 1960. Later he was influenced b British artist Keith Vaughan. Always painting, McCarthy developed his own style, alternating between a near cubist approach to soft, almost two-dimensional handling of the paint strokes. He painted both individual portrait-like images as well as groups of men, clothed and unclothed.
McCarthy’s paintings are sensual yet not erotic as though his drive was to maintain a dignity in the genre of male figurative painting. Many of his works included somewhat brittle statements of addressing the manner in which the stigma of admiration of the male nude by ‘corporate types’ carried a message beyond the canvas. While McCarthy’s paintings are for the most part tender and sensitive interactions between men, he was unafraid to make some important ‘political’ statements. And his importance as a twentieth-century painter is heightened by this discovery.
In 2007, the book “Cornelius McCarthy” was published by Adonis Art in London, with introduction and commentaries written by American actor Peter Dobson. Now widely regarded as a true master of paintings depicting the male form, Cornelius McCarthy is widely collected in England, the rest of Europe, and especially the United States.
He died unexpectedly in November of 2009.