Endorsement

Abstract

The dramatic rise in the exhibition of modern art in Ireland during the Second World War and its consequences on the reception of modern art is the focus of this chapter. The emerging art market interacted with the aspirations of the political establishment in its public approval of modernist Irish art. Close relationships with the London art world helped disseminate knowledge of contemporary Irish art in Britain. A new way of thinking about art as unique and individual, rather than communal or nationalist, is reflected in the critical backlash against academic representations of rural Ireland and by the debate generated by the cosmopolitan White Stag group (1940-46), the first manifestation of a self-proclaimed avant-garde in Dublin. In contrast the discourse generated by the Jack B. Yeats National Loan Exhibition (1945), asserted the idea that modern art could evoke a shared national history and associated collective memories. The response to the exhibition provides insights not only into Yeats’s reputation but more crucially into the conflicted state of cultural debate in Ireland at the end of the war.