The culture of art in 1880s Ireland and the genealogy of Irish modernism

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe emergence of Irish modernism over recent decades as a distinct sub-field within modernist studies and Irish studies has frequently seen the alignment of advanced aesthetics with various quests for cultural progress. This emphasis on the socio-political origins and ends of many art works and artists from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century, however, largely draws on a narrow characterisation of late-nineteenth-century Ireland as a terrain of cultural turmoil and fracture, marked by linguistic decline and agrarian conflict. This constitutes a partial evidential and ideological basis for tracing a genealogy of Irish modernism. Among various occlusions, such a construction elides the ideology of the aesthetic itself, as well as its attendant cultures and institutions, as they operated in Ireland. Focusing on the institutionalisation and mediation of the nineteenth century’s culture of art, this article considers the specific terms in which aesthetics and politics were already imbricated in writing on the visual arts in Ireland during the 1880s. It seeks to illustrate how aesthetic ideologies and desires also constituted, alongside other social and political conditions, the field of cultural production from which Irish modernism emerged.