“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...