Art In Ireland Research Articles

Digital Art in Ireland: New Media & Irish Artistic Practice ed. by James O’Sullivan (review)

Digital Art in Ireland: New Media & Irish Artistic Practice ed. by James O’Sullivan (review)

Nelson Paine, Experimental Theatre, and Puppetry in Ireland, 1942–1952

In 1942, a young Dublin architect, Nelson Paine, formed the Dublin Marionette Group on foot of an international re-appraisal of the potential of the puppet theatre as a form of expression. This Group became the nucleus of experimental theatre in the Irish capital and influenced several well-known Irish creative artists over the decade of its existence and beyond. It attracted the involvement of actors, artists and dramatists of the period and performed in professional settings, including eight seasons at the Peacock Theatre and for each of the first four years of the Wexford Opera Festival. This article examines the context of the Group’s formation, its long-forgotten experimental approach, and its considerable contribution to the development of the arts in Ireland.

Review of Art & The Nation State, The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland, by Róisín Kennedy

Review of Art & The Nation State, The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland, by Róisín Kennedy (Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2021), 292 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78962-235-5, $105,49

Frameworks and Boundaries: constructing a curriculum armature for art

This paper addresses some of the theoretical and practical implications of the Common European Framework of Reference for Visual Competency (CEFR-VC), developed through the European Network for Visual Literacy (Envil), in the context of international trends in curriculum design. Empirical application of the Framework is examined through the specific experience of designing a national programme for art in Ireland, for a high stakes public examination. The paper reflects on the issues that the Framework raised in that context. The paper suggests that a useful lens through which to view the framework might be that of activity theory and proposes that the framework itself might best be understood as a ‘boundary-object’ that can help inform the complex negotiations between art education and schooling.

“I Cannot Do Abstract Art”: An Interview with John Behan

“I Cannot Do Abstract Art”: An Interview with John Behan Adrian Frazier and John Behan (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 19:4. john behan was born in 1938 on Sheriff Street in Dublin, where his family ran a corner shop. From early childhood, he showed a love of drawing and painting. At fifteen, he started a seven-year apprenticeship as a metalworker, and soon began to use his skills in making sculptures. His first was of a bull, and it is for bulls that he has become famous. It is fair to say that Behan is a maker not just of art but of the conditions for making art in Ireland. Behan was a force in the Independent Artists, a founder of the Project Arts Centre, and a board member of the Design Studio. His public advocacy for the social value of art played a part in the reconstruction of the Arts Council in 1973. His leading role in the establishment of the Dublin Art Foundry made it possible for him and for other Irish sculptors to produce work in quantity and in quality at reasonable prices. A great reader in a generation of great Irish writers, Behan has often been inspired by motifs in poetry or drama. After the publication of Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin, he produced a series of figures and scenes from the Irish epic. His graphics and bronze figures of crows follow from Ted Hughes’s Crow. In the comic spirit of Ulysses and Don Quixote, he has illustrated dozens of characters and scenes from these masterpieces. Writers have often returned the favor: John Behan’s sculptures are held in the private collections of Brian Friel, Tom Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Gerry Dawe, and others. From the 1990s onward, Behan took on epic subjects, works of massive public remembrance. He produced the National Famine Memorial in Mayo, the Arrival (on the theme of Famine-driven emigration) for the United Nations in New York, the Liberty Tree in commemoration of 1798 in Carlow, and the Flight [End Page 103] of the Earls in Donegal. Key images in his work include birds, crows, fish, boats, Icarus, and Dedalus. But the iconic figure for him is the bull. He has done bulls of many sizes and breeds, in various castings and styles, bulls that are anxious or angry, contented or fighting. Sometimes his bull is the king of his herd, and sometimes he is being led to slaughter. Behan’s hundreds of bronze bulls amount to a meditation on the fate of the male, and particularly the Irish male, at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. The following interview took place on October 20, 2014, at Behan’s house on Canal Road, Galway. ________ AF: When you were first introduced to sculpture by Paddy McIlroy, was that to modeled pieces, or an open steelwork form? JB: It started off as an exercise in making functional things out of copper, like bowls. Then Paddy realized that my talent lay in making figures, and hammered steel pieces, semi-abstract. So I went on from making copper objects to making hammered steel and welded steel figures of animals. The first successful piece I made after a two-year course with Paddy in the North Strand Technical School was a welded steel bull. This happened in the late fifties. Between 1957 and 1960 I was with Paddy. That was the beginning of my career as an artist. After exhibiting that piece in August 1960 in the Living Art Exhibition, my career just went on, from public exhibitions, to private exhibitions, to commissions. AF: That first bull was prominently mentioned in the Irish Times review of the show in August 1960. JB: Yes, James White wrote it up; he said it was one of the best pieces in the exhibition. He was the leading art critic at that time. AF: Did it give you a sense of purpose when you read those words in the Irish Times? JB: It did, because it made me realize that I could make work that would communicate...

Three stories (from performance art teaching and learning)

Aine Phillips compiled three stories of teaching and learning performance art in Ireland, spanning three generations from the 1980s to the present day. The stories highlight the inter-subjective na...

Source – Uncovering Stories of Art in Ireland: digitizing Irish art research collections in the National Gallery of Ireland

In 2017 the National Gallery of Ireland was awarded funding from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (DCHG) for the development of an online resource, focusing on its Irish art research collections. Entitled Source – Uncovering Stories of Art in Ireland, this multi-annual project aims to catalogue and digitise the collections in the ESB CSIA and ensure that these valuable collections relating to Ireland's artistic history and memory are preserved and can be easily accessed by researchers. Now in its penultimate year, Source will be launched in 2021.

Social Smoking and French Fancies: The Dublin Art(s) Club, 1886–98

Abstract ABSTRACT The Dublin Art(s) Club, which operated in the Irish capital from 1886 to 1898, offers an intriguing case study for modes of artistic networks and cultural exchange between Ireland and Britain in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the history of the Club has been little explored in historiography to date, often confused with other ventures by artists in the city. Examining the rise and fall of the Dublin Art(s) Club, along with its members and activities, this article retrieves its history and posits that it offers an example of an aspect of art in Ireland which was conspicuous for its cosmopolitan outlook and active engagement with the wider British art world, which then spanned across both islands. The history of the Dublin Art(s) Club poses a challenge to the extant scholarship of this period in Irish art history, which to date has been largely understood to be focused on themes of national identity, the cultural revival, and artists who left Ireland to train in Belgium and France. This article posits that by re-engaging with the activities of art clubs and societies, a more complex reading of artistic life in Victorian Dublin can emerge.

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

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.

Water tracing in Ireland: a review with special reference to the Cuilcagh Karst

As approximately half of Ireland is underlain by Carboniferous Limestone, streams which loose their water underground and which have their origins in or are supplemented by risings, are common. In many instances it may be of scientific and economic interest, and of practical value, to know the origin of a rising's water or the destination of water which is lost underground. As surface and underground watersheds rarely coincide this can only be achieved by tracing experiments using artificially marked materials. The purpose of this paper is to review the state of the art in Ireland, to suggest modifications to the most widely used tracing technique, and to provide suggestions for future work. Most experiments have been undertaken in the mid-west and the majority appear to have been somewhat simplistic, so that few data are available on underground velocities or subterranean drainage systems. In order to demonstrate the ease with which greater amounts of data may be obtained the results of recent research in the Cuilcagh karst of Cos. Cavan and Fermanagh are also presented. These experiments provide a pattern which might form a basis for future work in other areas.

Crisis and the Visual Arts in Ireland

The global economic crash of 2008 had a particularly severe impact in Ireland, including on the funding and the practice of the arts. This paper examines contemporary responses to crisis in Ireland as refracted through arts practice. It focuses on the work of two contemporary visual artists, Anthony Haughey and Deirdre O’Mahony, both of whom see ethics and politics as intrinsic to their work. It asks whether some of the underpinning rationales for artist engagement, particularly in the field of relational aesthetics, can empower artists to meet expectations that their work can, or should, be capable of decisive interventions at historical moments of crisis. A related objective is to ground a theoretical understanding of the nature of crisis in the evolution of an artist’s work, to gain some sense of its temporal manifestation in the life-long, everyday practice of making art.

Moi, Ruben, Brynhildur Boyce and Charles I. Arjmstrong (eds). The Crossings of Art in Ireland.

Moi, Ruben, Brynhildur Boyce and Charles I. Arjmstrong (eds). The Crossings of Art in Ireland.

Going Round in Circles? (Or Revisiting the Relationship between Megalithic Art and Landscape Art in Ireland)

This paper seeks to revisit the relationship between Irish megalithic art at sites including Newgrange and Loughcrew, County Meath, and rock art found in the landscape on natural open-air outcrops and erratic surfaces in Ireland. Traditional approaches have had a tendency to treat the traditions in isolation; however, the two traditions arguably share similar timeframes and draw upon related motifs. In reference to the demonstrable importance of certain geological trends in the distribution and form of rock art in the landscape, this paper shifts the focus of research to variability in stylistic expression and the treatment of the stone surface, and offers some alternative insights.

Musical Legacies: The Contribution of the Music Association of Ireland to an Irish Musical Infrastructure

Drawing on archives preserved in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, this article examines the history and significance of the Music Association of Ireland (MAI). During its sixty-year lifespan, from 1948 to 2007, the association contributed considerably to the musical life of Ireland, particularly in its educational initiatives and its efforts to influence national music policy and create an infrastructure for composers. Its voluntary efforts, especially its initiatives such as the Composers’ Group, Country Tours, Coming Out recitals, the Schools’ Recitals Scheme, the Irish Youth Orchestra and the Dublin Twentieth-Century Music Festival, grew into or influenced many of the independent, professional organizations prominent in Irish musical infrastructure today. At a time when government funding of the arts was limited, the MAI filled an important niche and acted as a voice for classical music, particularly in Dublin. The association’s initiatives, particularly the Schools’ Recitals Scheme (1967) and the Irish Youth Orchestra (1970), thrived in a climate which experienced pioneering developments in the arts and increased educational opportunities and leisure time. The times were marked by remarkable transformations in cultural, social and pedagogical practices which resulted in the opening up of access to the arts from the 1970s. The MAI benefitted greatly from this surge in cultural activity and the association became the Arts Council’s model in its pursuit of professionalizing the arts in Ireland. However, the MAI was unable, or unwilling, to make the transition from a voluntary organization to a professional one, and gradually went into decline. The long-term nature of a number of its projects meant that the MAI’s six objectives could not be achieved by one voluntary organization. Some sixty years later, many of these objectives are only now being realized through professional, government-funded agencies. The evidence of the MAI archive shows that the association played a valuable role in developing music and music education in Ireland—a notable achievement that deserves to be remembered.

Review: Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention by Roger Stalley, ed.

Roger Stalley, ed. Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention Dublin: Wordwell, 2012, 226 pp., 75 color and 75 b/w illus. €29.99 (paper), ISBN 9781905569700 The marginalization of the study of late medieval architecture in Ireland results from a series of coincidences, including the treatment of Ireland as peripheral to mainstream European developments; the perception of the Gothic style as a foreign imposition when compared to indigenous forms of earlier eras; the relative unfamiliarity of scholars outside Ireland with the complexities of Irish history; and the limited scale of Irish Gothic construction in a discipline that has traditionally prized technological achievement. In the past, architectural historians structured the field to elevate the great French cathedrals as the standard for Gothic form and meaning, but the spread and popularity of Gothic design elements throughout late medieval Europe in innumerably varied circumstances mean that most Gothic deviates from the “rule.” Recent scholarship—for example, Colum Hourihane’s survey of late medieval artistic production, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550 (2003)—has attempted to reassess the situation, but the subject of Gothic architecture in Ireland still provides much to explore.1 Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention contributes to that process of exploration. The volume was produced by a team affiliated with the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, and its title implies a survey, but the book is a series of connected studies that follow the erection and subsequent fate of Gothic buildings on Irish soil. The authors have the stated intention of producing a multifaceted study of Gothic, incorporating ideas of reception and postmedieval change. The consideration of the longue duree as it relates to buildings has become a useful methodology for scholars of medieval architecture in recent years, but given the political and religious oppression in Ireland since the Middle Ages, Irish buildings can assume charged but shifting symbolic functions that make this approach particularly fruitful here. Roger Stalley’s introduction provides a historiographical grounding …

Changements d’horizon : Circa, une aventure éditoriale traversant les frontières

From its creation, in 1981, to the present day, Circa art magazine has played a crucial role in the evolution of the visual arts in Ireland. It has contributed to disseminating contemporary aesthetic forms as well as postmodern theories, and has widened the scope of criticism. It has also fostered a vital interest in the international avant-garde which geared artists towards a better understanding of their role in society and a greater awareness of artistic experimentation. The magazine’s agenda does not shun political issues. Circa has favored cultural reconciliation with Great Britain and has set common goals for Northern Ireland and the Republic. It has initiated connections with other marginal countries. The authors have also repeatedly avoided the pitfalls of cultural nationalism and promoted a fruitful dialogue between the local and the global. The evolution of this magazine testifies to Ireland’s growing openness to foreign influences and its desire to be on a par with other European countries in terms of artistic endeavours.

(Lecture de) Art in Ireland since 1910

The first history spanning the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, this richly illustrated (266 ill., 222 in colour), indeed superb volume is a very welcome, long-awaited contribution to Irish art historiography. It is also the first substantial attempt at contextualizing developments in Irish artistic practice against a background of political and social change in relation to issues of nation-building and modernization. So far, Irish art histories had offered either a formalist ap...

Art in Ireland since 1910

Art in Ireland since 1910

Women’s art in Ireland and Poland 1970-2010: Experiencing and Experimenting on the Female Body

In Poland through the 1970s alternative spaces enabled the flourishing of a feminist artistic avant-garde. In Ireland, in the 1970s and 1980s the artists were primarily concerned with the Troubles, the persistence of cultural nationalism and its impact on their identities. In both countries, the 1990s were a time of heated discussions, putting the female body in the limelight: as the Church took on a considerable role in the debates over abortion, contraception, and divorce, feminist artists addressed the denial of the corporeality of the women’s body and took over its representation. The Europeanization and secularization of the two countries spurred these artists to evoke sexuality more openly and to challenge the perceptions of femininity and womanhood.

'Museum With Those Goddesses': Bloom and the Dublin Plaster Casts

'Museum With Those Goddesses':Bloom and the Dublin Plaster Casts Fintan Cullen (bio) During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Dublin established its own public art gallery and museum, the display of white plaster casts of well-known Greco-Roman statuary dominated the visitor's first encounter with the collections housed in these new temples of art. The National Gallery of Ireland, in Merrion Square, opened its doors in 1864 while a Museum of Science and Art, which eventually became the National Museum of Ireland, situated only a short distance away on Kildare Street, was accessible to visitors from 1890. Both of these state-funded institutions, in the early decades of their existence, displayed classical casts in their entrance halls or first rooms and such an introduction coloured the whole visiting experience. As museum culture developed in the nineteenth century, many art institutions in Europe and North America displayed authentic classical statuary or casts in their entrance halls or rotundas so as to assuage contemporary fears that the art viewer would be bombarded with the new and/or the unknown. In 1828, the architect of Berlin's Altes Museum, Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the Museum's first director, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, were of the opinion that such a display would 'first delight, then instruct.'1 By the end of the century, such a philosophy extended as far as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This museum opened in 1876 and the classical greeted the visitor there well into the early years of the twentieth century.2 The story is no different in Ireland. This essay will chart the display of Greco-Roman casts in Ireland from their early nineteenth-century appearance in Cork to the National Gallery of Ireland's acquisition of casts in the eighteen sixties. It will end with a consideration of Leopold Bloom's fictitious visit in 1904 to the Kildare Street 'museum with those goddesses' (U 13.1215). The aim is to convey a sense of what was actually available as one wandered into a gallery or museum and as one participated in the newly accessible era of cultural consumption. [End Page 24] Cast Culture Over the winter of 1818 and 1819, under the patronage of the Prince Regent and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, an exhibition of 115 casts taken from antique statues, busts, and reliefs went on display in the converted Apollo Theatre on Patrick Street, Cork.3 Although temporary art exhibitions had being mounted in both Dublin and Cork since at least 1780, it could be said that this collection of casts warrants credit as one of the earliest permanent displays of art in Ireland. Many of the casts, made from renowned icons of antiquity owned by the Vatican such as the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere stayed on display throughout the nineteenth century and some are still visible today in Cork's Crawford Art Gallery. The casts were the gift of the Prince Regent, patron of the Cork Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts through the good offices of Lord Ennismore (later, Lord Listowel), President of the Society and at the time Whig MP for County Cork. The Prince had originally been offered the casts by Pope Pius VII in recognition of Britain's help in restoring Napoleon's stolen loot taken from Rome some decades earlier. Antonio Canova (1757-1822), the most celebrated classical sculptor of the day, had been appointed by the Pope to supervise the casting and as an astute propagandist for his own work, the artist included some plasters after his own sculptures such as an allegorical portrait of Marie-Louise, Napoleon's empress, as Concord. Given the fame of the classical and contemporary pieces involved, the gift was indeed a major coup for the city. Within a decade of the gift, that rather over-enthusiastic art critic William Paulet Carey commented that the casts 'form an inestimable treasure for the advancement of his present Majesty's anxious desire, the cultivation of painting, sculpture, and architecture, in the Sister Island'.4 Many years later, the Dublin University Magazine echoed Carey's praise for the gift of the casts: Whatever of dullness had...