Hugh Lane Research Articles

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Francis Bacon painted pictures based mostly on photographs published in encyclopaedias, popular magazines, the tabloid press, posters and packaging. He was interested in reproductions of paintings by great masters. He used photographs by Muybridge. Photographs, treated by Bacon as tools, were later “worked on” by the artist, becoming the canvas for his paintings. The scenes he chose – often drastic, depicting rape and violence – were painted into his canvases, creating a deformed image of the world that “emerged” from the horrors of both world wars. He painted portraits based on his photographs of friends. These were usually people with whom the artist was emotionally connected. He painted self-portraits base on a series of photographs taken in automatic photography, from which he selected several to form the basis of his paintings. Real things and persons should exist in the fictional space assigned to them. By destroying literalism in painting, Bacon wanted to find the similarity desired in painting as its principal, so to rediscover realism. When painting a portrait, he tried to capture the appearance of the figure. After Francis Bacon’s death, his London studio (7, Reece Mews), restored by conservators, was “repeated” in the space of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. It contains about 7,500 objects, among them numerous photographs which had been torn up by the artist, photographs of his lovers and friends, black and white reproductions. The Bacon ‘archive’ collected in Dublin is now a silent hint of the creative process of the artist, who despite numerous studies devoted to him and recorded conversations, still remains one of the most inscrutable artists of the 20th century.

Clúdach / Cover

Clúdach / Cover Angela Griffith Click for larger view View full resolution Cover. The cover image is from a series of prints produced by the Northern Irish artist Mark Francis (b. 1962). The cover image is from a series of prints produced by the Northern Irish artist Mark Francis (b. 1962). This new body of work has been made in collaboration with the Graphic Studio Dublin and will be exhibited in the Graphic Studio Gallery in June 2020. The GSD has a long tradition of working with artists primarily known for media other than print. These partnerships have led to the creation of some of the most experimental and dynamic image-making produced at the studio. Looking at a Francis composition one recognizes a modernist concern for structural abstraction, elements presented in grid forms, an imposed order, yet one that is not geometrically rigid but constructed intuitively. Painterly manipulations of media offset any initial mathematical imposition; ink is layered, edges are blurred and allowed to bleed, presenting discombobulating optical effects. Compositional order is in fact a barely contained state of flux. Francis presents the dichotomies of life in visual form. His work is at once about order and disorder. The sources for his abstractions are readable as scientific—they range from the microscopic, in his imaginings of biological cellular structures, to the macro, including mapping, global communication systems, sound and light waves. These systems can be represented as a constant universal grid, but one that fluctuates, responds and reacts, from within and without. Work from this series has been acquired by the British Museum. Francis's work is held in national and international collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; TATE, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, Miami. He is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. [End Page 159] Angela Griffith Trinity College Dublin Copyright © 2020 The University of St. Thomas

The atemporal mirror

Abstract As a museological genre proliferating in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the posthumously reconstructed artist’s studio is synonymous with the information age’s impulse to store and retrieve data. Accordingly, historic studios presented as museum artefacts might be thought of as symptoms of ‘a new breed of temporality whereby nothing ever dies’. This article examines the coalescence of present and historical contexts operating within the reconstructed studio of Francis Bacon, relocated from its original location at 7 Reece Mews in London to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Bacon’s blemished, circular mirror is conspicuous amid the detritus in the artist’s chaotic studio. From a sleek object originating in Bacon’s early design career, to its apparent role as a prop in the Reece Mews studio, and its current status as a museum artefact, this mirror has borne witness to the shifting contexts of Bacon’s studio. It can be understood as a portal through which spatial, material and temporal phenomena appear reconfigured. As such, Bacon’s studio mirror will be considered in terms of its potential to exert posthumous influence, and provoke contemporary art practice predicated on atemporality.

Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora (review)

{ 153 } BOOK REV IEwS \ Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora. Edited by John P. Harrington . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xix + 226 pp. $24.95 cloth. Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora, edited by John P. Harrington, features thirteen essays from the third conference of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora Project, held at NewYork University’s Glucksman Ireland House in April 2006. In his introduction, Harrington asserts that these essays contribute to the “evolving subject area on how Ireland’s relationships with the world have been more complex than they are often represented and how the ‘wider world’ is already developing new relationships with Ireland”(xiv). In addressing such a field, specifically relating to America, the anthology can boast a number of important essays. Mick Moloney opens the collection with an insightful essay on the latenineteenth -century Harrigan and Hart phenomena with their comedic and musical Mulligan Guard shows. Moloney traces the history of the Ed Harrigan and Tony Hart (Cannon) partnership with the songwriting foundation of Harrigan and David Braham. The essay notes that the Harrigan and Hart depictions of contemporary urban working-class immigrant life “affords us a unique window not just into the evolution of Irish America but into America itself” (18). Harrigan and Hart are complemented by Maureen Murphy’s“From Scapegrace to Grasta: Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American Drama,” which traces Irish drama in America from 1830 to 1965 as it mirrors immigration and assimilation. Murphy attempts to define the difference between Irish drama in Ireland and Irish drama in America: the former grew from a “legacy of colonialism” or “want of work,” while the latter grew from the premise that the Irish in America found work; hence, the appeal of Harrigan and Hart–type entertainments (21–22). Murphy eventually touches on the Abbey Theatre’s 1911 U.S. tour, which influenced the American Little Theatre movement, leading her to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night as an example of Irish American drama’s“legacy of emigration”(32). Unfortunately, neither Murphy nor any other scholar in the anthology writing on Irish American drama makes mention of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet—that most Irish of Irish American plays. Two essays that are well coupled are Deirdre McFeely’s“Between Two Worlds: Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and Its New York Audience”and Gwen Orel’s“Reporting the Stage Irishman: Dion Boucicault in the Irish Press.” McFeely explores the Irish audience that rejected The Shaughraun’s imaging, despite the { 154 } BOOK REV IEwS play’s New York success, as expressed in a debate of letters in the Irish World. The paper’s correspondents “wanted an Irish drama to . . . establish the Irish race as culturally different from both the British and Anglo-Americans,” with Catholicism, abstinence, and nationalism as ideals (59). Orel provides further context on the overall Boucicault debate in the Irish American press in the 1860s and 1870s by recalling the fact that Boucicault’s Irish plays were not admired by Catholic American papers. One of the highlights of the collection is Lucy McDiarmid’s “The Abbey, Its ‘Helpers,’ and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913.” The essay explores the efforts of Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats to raise funds for the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art during the Abbey Theatre’s early 1913 American tour, using performances of Gregory and Yeats’s The Pot of Broth, Gregory ’s Hyacinth Halvey, and G. B. Shaw’s American work, The Shewing­up of Blanco Posnet. McDiarmid relates Gregory’s efforts in courting wealthy Americans , the“helpers”who assisted in the fund-raising, and the controversy that resulted when Dublin Corporation voted in September 1913 not to proceed with establishing the gallery to house Hugh Lane’s modern paintings (which he was giving to Dublin provided the city build the gallery). Contextualizing her essay through 1913, McDiarmid reveals that the Abbey actors, with the Dublin Lockout as their backdrop, petitioned Gregory and Yeats for the money raised through their performances of the above plays in America. Gregory and Yeats had wanted to retain the money until a later date when the...

Aristocratic Patronage and the Commercial Logic of Yeats's <em>Responsibilities</em>

This article challenges the longstanding critical assumption that the poems in W.B. Yeats’s Responsibilities (1914) offer a categorical rejection of modern consumer society. Although Yeats is clearly disdainful of middle-class culture and nostalgic for a pre-modern community unified by the arts, the poems, I argue, strategically exploit the logic of the modern marketplace. By looking at the poems in rhetorical terms, as cultural productions designed to convince people in the present to spend money on the proposed Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, I suggest that Yeats exploits commercial logic in three specific ways: by associating mundane consumer exchange with hoarding, as if the true capitalist is a miser; by tapping into the modern advertising strategy of equating choice of purchases with self-worth; and by rendering the object for purchase in abstract terms, such that the “product,” again in good advertising fashion, always promises something more than it can deliver.

Francis Bacon's Studio

Francis Bacon's Studio M. G. Stephens (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph: "Interior of 7 Reece Mews" By Perry Ogden Collection Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane C The Estate of Francis Bacon/ All rights reserved /DACS London [End Page 154] Francis Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews in 1961 and spent the next thirty years living and painting there. Reece Mews was a London block of Victorian coach houses in South Kensington, former horse stables transformed in the twentieth century into homes that, however cramped, were deemed quaint and artsy. The mews house was a small warren of rooms up a narrow flight of stairs, where some of Bacon’s finest paintings were done. At the time, he was already considered one of the greatest living artists. In 1961, the building had two floors, but the ground floor was a garage for storage. To get to [End Page 155] the living quarters, one climbed a narrow staircase so steep that a rope was strung alongside it in order to hoist oneself upwards. The top floor consisted of the studio—separated from the rest of the space by a door—and a living area with a small bedroom, a kitchen with a bathtub, and a water closet. The living space resembled a ship's quarters, with low ceilings and small windows. But the studio had high ceilings and a skylight, and it was a workable space. By contrast, the kitchen was modest, with a bathtub and a bathroom sink located in it. As to the wash closet, Bacon made it famous in several of his paintings, showing a man sitting on the toilet, looking as if he were about to throw up. The bedroom also served as a living room, where he drank in the evening with friends. The "bedsitter," as he called it, was furnished simply but also included a circular bed, which figured in many of his paintings. Bacon found the claustrophobic atmosphere to be part of its charm, almost like being inside a closet. He told the story of a nanny who had locked him in a cupboard when he was a boy. "That cupboard was the making of me," he often said. Reece Mews was his bolt-hole, the place where his paintings were made. It was Francis Bacon's cupboard in London. Bacon used to say that the door and the walls to his studio were the only places where he was an abstract painter. The door, the walls and old, discarded canvases were his palettes where he mixed colors before becoming, if not realistic, then figurative on his canvases. He mixed the colors on the door, creating a profusion of pastel shapes, blotched, dripped and scumbled on. The pinks, blues, reds and greens dripped over the door frame and down the walls, appearing almost like a field of abstract flowers in bloom. But the studio suggested a space inhabited by a lonely, even desolate drinking man who had finally lost his bearings. Besides the clutter of paintbrushes and cans and artist's materials, there was an extraordinary number of photographs everywhere. The photographs were like aide-mémoire, but they also are reminiscent of the spools of tape in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape, in which Krapp tries to recall his forgotten past by playing back tapes he made earlier in his life. This is done despite his inability to remember the definitions of a lot of the words he used in the recordings. This sense of impending doom that the mess in the studio created was ameliorated by high ceilings. Amid the profusion of discarded objects, the room was full of an inviting light from the skylight. [End Page 156] "I cannot work in places that are too tidy," Francis Bacon once said. "It's much easier for me to paint in a place like this, which is a mess. I don't know why, but it helps me." Art is a game of light and shadows, and the studio was a place of such chiaroscuro. The shadows were filled with an assortment of objects: a Rembrandt pastel set, a thousand little colorful chips of crayons...

Act without Words, "Unique Act", an Exhibition of Nonfigurative Painting at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane

Act without Words, "Unique Act", an Exhibition of Nonfigurative Painting at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane

Tacita Dean, Declan Long, Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, Dublin, March - June 2007

Tacita Dean, Declan Long, Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, Dublin, March - June 2007

The Irish Art of Controversy (review)

Reviewed by: The Irish Art of Controversy Julian Hanna The Irish Art of Controversy. Lucy McDiarmid . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii + 280. $29.95 (paper). "Great hatred, little room / Maimed us at the start," Yeats mourned in "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" (1). But, as Lucy McDiarmid argues in her delightful and meticulously researched book, the Irish have taken the curse of controversy and remodeled it as a blessing. Controversy has become "a type of dúchas or heritage," a form of "national cultural capital" (211). Moreover, controversy has remodeled Ireland: the national disputes described in these five chapters are disputes over national identity, and "not Irish Ireland or English Ireland, but whose Irish Ireland? Whose version of Ireland would dominate when independence was finally achieved?" (3). McDiarmid discovers the drama of national identity enacted on the "small site[s]" of particular [End Page 580] controversies (7). Her case, built on finely detailed examples that blend fieldwork and archival study, is extremely compelling. "The available evidence is enough for an entire book on any single controversy," (8) she admits, and at times the book reads like a sampler of Irish history. The book transcends its putative subject matter, however, to take on the larger history of modern Irish identity, eventually finding "the Ireland of Mary Robinson and Sinéad O'Connor" in the pre-1916 Ireland of Casement, Yeats, and others (199). The compact timeline of the controversies' origins, 1908–1916, belies a project of far greater scope. In most cases, the controversy outlives the controversialist, and McDiarmid traces the posthumous history of each case right up to the present day. This pattern gives the chapters a slightly predictable feel, but it allows new light to be shed on old arguments, and indeed much of the book's freshest research is to be found in these "afterlives." The book begins with the story most likely to be familiar to readers: the Hugh Lane bequest of paintings for a municipal gallery in Dublin. In this first chapter, the controversy surrounds proposals for a suitable building to house the paintings. Lane stipulated that it had to be somewhere central, to attract passersby; a corner of St. Stephen's Green was suggested, but after that fell through Lane grew more stubborn, insisting on a plan by Sir Edwyn Lutyens to build the gallery over the Liffey, no less. This move turned an initially welcoming public against him and lost him the support of Sinn Féin and other organizations, and the project became a white elephant. When Lane went down with the Luisitania in May 1915, the already eventful history of the thirty-nine impressionist paintings was just beginning. A codicil to his will reversed the rash (or strategic?) decision to send the paintings back to London, but the document, though initialed on each page by Lane, was never witnessed. (Even without this formality it would have been legal in Scotland, or if Lane had been killed at the Front instead of torpedoed at sea.) When the British government officially refused to return the paintings in 1926, Lane's unlikely journey to Irish sainthood was underway. Unlikely, because at the height of the controversy many Dubliners saw Lane, a fussy aesthete whose only "militancy" was his taste, as a snobbish title-seeker at best, and a neocolonial landlord figure at worst. De Valera sang Lane's praises in his introductory remarks to a state-commissioned biography in 1932. Then in 1956, one of the paintings, Berthe Morisot's Jour d'été, was temporarily "liberated" by two Irish students, who arranged to have their photograph taken with the national treasure on the steps of the Tate Gallery. Complicated arguments for joint custody of the paintings finally settled the matter in 1959, and the first paintings were returned to Dublin in 1961. By 1991, the year Dublin was voted European City of Culture, Lane's vision of a cosmopolitan capital inhabited by "Irish Europeans" had come true (18). Readers will find themselves reluctant to leave the Lane controversy behind, but other chapters reveal a similar depth of research and strong sense of narrative. The book progresses through an overlapping chronology of provocations, public martyrdoms...

‘Old Ireland and Himself’: William Orpen and the Conflicts of Irish Identity

The Irish painter William Orpen (1878-1931), defined here as Ireland’s most ‘Spanish’ painter, was out of fashion for fifty years after his death; but he has recently been dramatically revalued, with his works fetching huge prices in salerooms and an unprecedentedly large exhibition of his work being mounted in London and subsequently Dublin. Best known for his Edwardian portraits and his devastating paintings of the First World War, he also produced a series of allegorical paintings of his native Ireland. These are discussed in this article, and linked to his admiration for J.M.Synge, his dislike of clericalism and repression in Irish life, and his celebration of sensuality. The same themes lie behind ‘Homage to Manet’, a celebrated group portrait which includes the Irish novelist George Moore and the art collector Hugh Lane —a close friend of Orpen’s. Orpen knew other figures of the cultural Revival, and his relation to them is discussed; as is the conflict of identity he experienced (like other middle-class Irish Protestants) when the radicalisation of Irish politics and the outbreak of the First World War put a new strain on the allegiances of people who had previously thought of themselves as both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’. After the trauma of the War, and Irish separation, Orpen opted for Britain; but, it is argued, he was closer to elements of the Irish cultural revival, and more involved with Irish politics and Irish history, than is usually accepted.

Dublin: "Offside" and "Offsite Live" at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane

Dublin: "Offside" and "Offsite Live" at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane

Dublin: Lorna Simpson at IMMA and Laura Gannon at Hugh Lane

Dublin: Lorna Simpson at IMMA and Laura Gannon at Hugh Lane

Books and Catalogues in Brief

Books reviewed in this section are:Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German ModernismLouis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn RandAshok Roy, (ed) National Gallery Technical Bulletin Volume 21Mary D Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic IdentityElizabeth Valdez del Alamo ,(ed) Memory and the Medieval TombDavid Lomas The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, SubjectivityAlexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, Yes: Yoko OnoHelen McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in ArtAnita Fiderer Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture c.1250–c.1450Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney: PaintingsPeter Kennedy Scott, A Romantic Look at Norwich School Landscapes by a Handful of Great Little MastersPaul Hayes Tucker, The Impressionists at ArgenteuilNancy Spector, (ed) Guggenheim Museum Collection A to ZPhilip Nord, Impressionists and Politics — Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth CenturyLisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and WestStephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein and Ilene Susan Fort, (eds) Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000Mary Rogers, (ed) Fashioning Identities in Renaissance ArtCarmen Bambach, et al Correggion and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the RenaissancePierre Francastel, Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesIsabelle Frank ,The Theory of Decorative Art. An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–1940Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska, Feminist Visual CultureRobert O'Byrne, Hugh Lane: 1875–1915 American University Presses Directory 2000–2001 Foreword by John Edwards, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio

Napoleon in a Dress: Robert O'Byrne: Hugh Lane

Napoleon in a Dress: Robert O'Byrne: Hugh Lane

Sensing the Sculpture of Kathy Prendergast: A Portrait of the Female Life Cycle

SENSING THE SCULPTURE OF KATHY PRENDERGAST: A PORTRAIT OF THE FEMALE LIFE CYCLE SHEILA DICKINSON when irish artist Kathy Prendergast left the 1995 International Venice Bienalle with the prestigious Premio 2000 Award for best artist under forty years of age, she was already accustomed to accolades. Her future success might have been predicted as early as 1980, when the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery purchased a selection of her undergraduate artwork from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. A sample of Prendergast’s recent sculptural work is included in the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s current traveling exhibition, Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political . Exploring a range of media and styles, Prendergast’s art moves with dexterity from plaster to pillows, from chalk to bronze, from tent fabric to cloth, from maps to engineering drafts. As she works with various media, she also provides movement within individual pieces, allowing each medium to metamorphose into something new. “If there is no transformation ,” Prendergast claims, “there is nothing” (qtd. in McBratney 187). In her past work, Prendergast excavated surfaces. Her 1983 Body Map Series maps the female body as an island by creating a mock engineering diagram to explore a body/land image (see figure 5, page 276). Transformation is key to these intricate drawings. As we observe the engineer drilling, pumping, and tunneling through the internal cavities of the body as land— in order to discover water to irrigate the earth—the artist momentarily suspends our perception of her drawing as a woman’s body. Instead she compels us to look beneath the surface of the object itself, to examine our associations with her materials and objects. Prendergast’s work challenges us to question social assumptions as she offers alternative ways of looking at women, their bodies, and their lives. I offer this prelude as a guide to the persistently abstract sculpture Prendergast has produced since the late 1980s—the body of work that is the subSENSING THE SCULPTURE OF KATHY PRENDERGAST 227 ject of this essay. Abstract art denies us directions; instead, we must explore multiple perspectives, aware always that rather than providing a single “correct ” interpretation, each perspective adds layers of meaning. Reviewers of Prendergast’s abstract works often describe them as if they inhabit an imaginative netherworld defying interpretation. For Aidan Dunne, for example , a “work by Prendergast . . . presents itself as a puzzle, and it is usually impervious to definitive interpretation, it preserves a sense of its own mystery” (36). But as the viewer interrogates the contexts of Prendergast’s sculptures, their seemingly elusive meanings begin to reveal themselves. Stack (1989) (plate 7) hovers in a nebulous mystery zone. Multiple layers of cloth are piled into a twelve-foot stack, larger at the base and then tapering off as it rises above the head of the viewer. Its perimeter appears as the shape of a ship, with a flat stern and pointed bow. The frayed and unhemmed cloth is covered with a light coat of a deep indigo paint, with detectable specks of red and white cloth appearing throughout. Stack speaks of the internal made external, for the compressed layers of cloth metamorphose into strata of the earth. The deep blue color expresses wetness, the dampness of dirt. The sculpture appears as a topographical quasi-landformation but simultaneously asserts itself as part of the earth raised above ground—with its depth achieved through a layering that evokes millennia of built-up strata in the earth’s crust. Standing before this tactile form that seems to ooze and drench us in its depth, we do not just view landscape ; we are, rather, transported into the land itself; we feel the damp coolness beneath the ground. In this work, Prendergast invokes the Irish bog, grown wild and ravenous in her imagination, feeding on the exile’s nostalgia. As an artist working in exile, she turns to the national landscape through familiar images such as stone walls and cairns, as well as the sea-stacks on the west coast of Ireland. Viewed in a gallery space, Stack looms monumental. It exudes a marooned sense of isolation, like the sea-stack worn away from the cliff...

Return to Sender, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery and Arthouse, Dublin, January 1998, and Subsequently in Adelaide, Melbourne, Darwin, Brisbane and Belfast

Return to Sender, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery and Arthouse, Dublin, January 1998, and Subsequently in Adelaide, Melbourne, Darwin, Brisbane and Belfast

“When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland: A Review Essay

“WHEN TIME BEGAN TO RANT AND RAGE”: FIGURATIVE PAINTING FROM TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND: A REVIEW ESSAY ROBERT TRACY “When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth -Century Ireland. Exhibit organized by the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum. Curated by James Christen Steward. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (October 1998 to January 1999); Berkeley Art Museum (February 1999 to May 1999); Grey Art Gallery, New York University (May 1999 to July 1999); University of Michigan Museum of Art (September 1999 to January 2000). “When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth -Century Ireland. Exh. Cat. Ed. James Christen Steward. London: Merrell Holberton (in association with the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum), 1998. with seventy-five paintings, this is the largest exhibition of Irish art ever shown in Britain and the United States. James Steward makes no excessive claims about the artistic merit of his selections, though in fact many of them suggest that Irish artists can more than hold their own if art were judged competitively. Steward has given himself a different, indeed a double , mandate: to make us aware that Ireland has produced some impressive painters since 1900, and to suggest how Irish painting interacts with, indeed interdepends on, the political history of Ireland during the century we are about to leave. The exhibition is supplemented by a splendid catalogue, which provides a critical history of Irish painting in the twentieth century, and to some extent a political history of Ireland as well. James Steward has assembled an impressive band of scholars, and together they establish the FIGURATIVE PAINTING FROM TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND 288 theme of the exhibition, “the Irishness of Irish art.” In his own essay, Steward rightly argues that Irish art is intimately connected to Ireland’s political and social development. Few Irish writers or artists have enjoyed the American luxury of feeling free from history. Colm Toíbín, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, and Aidan Dunne emphasize the art-politics nexus in their searching essays; Bhreathnach-Lynch is particularly good on certain painters’ response to the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War. In “Irish Women Painters and the Introduction of Modernism” Marianne Hartigan rightly stresses the central role of Mainie Jellett, but also comments perceptively on a number of other women not represented in the exhibition. Paula Murphy explores, with wit and tact, the iconography of Ireland-as-woman-as-victim in “Madonna and Maiden, Mistress and Mother: Woman as Symbol of Ireland and Spirit of the Nation.” These essays set the paintings in their political context. The other critics generally confine themselves to aspects of Irish art history. Bruce Arnold, fresh from his monumental study of Jack B. Yeats, gives us an overview of that artist’s long career, analyzing Yeats’s “careful crafting of an Irish identity” and his self-engendered project, to “represent Irish people and the life of the nation.” Kenneth McConkey uses Sir William Orpen’s “Homage to Manet” (1909) to discuss Hugh Lane’s 1904 Impressionist show in Dublin and its part in liberating the Irish visual imagination to create its own “image community.” Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith focuses on two more recent exhibitions, one at Trinity College’s Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1990–1991, the other the Irish entries at the 1995 Venice Biennale, to comment on Irish painting since the end of the 1980s, shrewdly and generously appraising some of the younger painters. Peter Murray looks at the small group of artists who worked in the thirties and forties to develop a modern Irish school, at a time when many established Irish artists were hostile to “modern art,” and the Advisory Committee to the Municipal Gallery twice rejected a proffered gift, Roualt’s “Christ and the Soldiers”; ironically, the Catholic bishops of Ireland, Maynooth’s governing board, accepted it gladly. Long after the exhibition has ended, this catalogue and its essays will continue to be essential for anyone interested in Irish painting. “When Time Began to Rant and Rage” ironically takes its title from a poem in which Yeats declared himself no less an Irish poet than those who chose conspicuously “Irish” themes, specifically defending his interest...

Charles Cullen, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, March - April 1997

Charles Cullen, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, March - April 1997

Ed & Nancy Reddin-Kienholz, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, May - October 1996

Ed & Nancy Reddin-Kienholz, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, May - October 1996

Michael Warren, Douglas Hyde Gallery & Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, September - October 1995

Michael Warren, Douglas Hyde Gallery & Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, September - October 1995