Graham Knuttel had a personal life as colourful as his paintings
After his large-scale mechanical assemblages Graham Knuttel turned to figurative painting. File photo: Billy Higgins
Graham Knuttel, who died aged 69 at his home in Dublin, was one of Ireland’s most colourful artists. He is best-known for his paintings of underworld characters, animals and fish. He also worked as a sculptor and designer.
Knuttel’s father Frederick was a German Jew who settled in England, serving in the RAF in World War II. His mother Margaret was a Unitarian from Northampton, and was related to the Hollywood actor Cary Grant. The couple had two children, Peter and Valerie, before moving to Dublin from Bedford in 1947. They settled on Whitebeam Avenue, Clonskeagh, where Graham Knuttel was born in 1954.
Knuttel attended secondary school at Sandford Park in Ranelagh, and claimed to have deliberately failed his Leaving Cert so he could attend art college. He studied fine art painting and sculpture at Dun Laoghaire College of Art & Design.
On graduating, Knuttel worked variously as a butler, house painter, grave digger and manager of a battery chicken farm. He also taught at Alexandra College for Girls.
As an artist, Knuttel was initially best known for his large-scale mechanical assemblages, which won him the Royal Canada Trust Award for Sculptors in 1976. Later, he turned to figurative painting, peopling his canvases with shifty-eyed gangsters and politicians, and the lowlife characters he had come to know around Dublin.
His earliest success came when Hugh Charlton of the Apollo Gallery began showing his work in 1987. Around the same time, his work was shown at La Stampa restaurant, which was at that time frequented by guests at the Shelbourne Hotel.
Among those who discovered his paintings at La Stampa were the movie actor Sylvester Stallone, who became one of his biggest collectors, and the film director John Herzfeld, who acted as Knuttel’s de facto agent in Hollywood, buying work directly from the artist, and selling it on all over Los Angeles.
Stallone commissioned Knuttel to produce work for his Planet Hollywood string of restaurants, and encouraged him to move to LA. Knuttel, having visited, declared he couldn’t stand the place. He later bemoaned his association with Stallone and his reputation as ‘Artist to the Stars.’
As his fame grew, Knuttel branched into designing tapestries, bronze sculptures and chess sets. In recent years he collaborated with Tipperary Crystal in producing a range of household items that included oven gloves, tea cosies and egg-cups, all bearing his distinctive designs.
Knuttel was highly protective of his brand. In 2004, he won a High Court action against a Dublin art gallery that had begun trading as the Knuttel Gallery. He argued that he had no formal association with the gallery, which sold work by his brother Peter and his nephew Jonathan Knuttel. The proprietor agreed to change the gallery’s name.
Knuttel also won a case against the Turk’s Head public house, which had exhibited copies of his work as originals.
Knuttel’s personal life was as colourful as his paintings. Aged 26, he had a daughter, Kate, with the sculptor Anna McCloud. Soon after, he began a 10-year relationship with the artist Rachel Strong. They split up in 1992. Her heroin addiction led to her early death in 2003.
In the Celtic Tiger years, he enjoyed a long relationship with the Sunday Independent social diarist Gayle Killilea, who invariably referred to him as ‘Filthy’ in her columns, an abbreviation of the nickname ‘Filthy Rich’ given him by friends. Killilea later married the controversial property developer Seán Dunne.
It is fair to observe that Irish art critics and serious collectors were bewildered by the extent of Knuttel’s success. Despite his claims to be influenced by the likes of Picasso, Cezanne and Van Gogh, his paintings had a cartoonish quality. Nonetheless, they regularly sold for four- and five-figure sums.
The OPW were once offered a suite of 12 satirical paintings of Ireland’s Taoisigh, but declined to buy them on the basis that they portrayed the country’s leaders in an unflattering light. When the same paintings came up at auction at Mullen’s sale rooms in Bray, Co. Wicklow, in March 2007, they were bought for €250,000 by the Fitzgerald Group for display at their new hotel at Newland’s Cross, west Dublin.
Financial success allowed Knuttel to acquire a Georgian townhouse, directly across from Renard’s Nightclub, on South Frederick St in Dublin city centre, where he lived and worked for the past few decades.
As a young man, and particularly throughout his relationship with Strong, Knuttel drank heavily. He then gave up alcohol for some years. By 2007, however, he had begun drinking again. In a Hotpress interview that year, he described how he would work from 6.30am to 6.30pm six days a week, and then consume a bottle of vodka each Saturday night, losing Sunday to his hangovers.
In recent years, Knuttel suffered ill health. A liver transplant in 2020 was followed by a kidney transplant in May last year, the latter organ being donated by his wife Ruth Mathers, whom he married in 2012. Knuttel described it as “the perfect match.” Knuttel’s death on Saturday, May 27, was announced through his official Facebook page on Tuesday.
President Michael D Higgins sent his condolences to Knuttel’s wife and family, observing how “throughout his life, he made such a valuable contribution to Ireland’s artistic community.” Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin TD praised “the bold colours and themes in his work” and spoke of how he had “made an immense contribution to Ireland’s artistic landscape.”
- Graham Knuttel (1954 – 2023) is survived by his wife Ruth Mathers and his daughter Kate Newman.
