Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…Why is Jack Yeats still so undervalued in international art markets? You can still buy a top one for what, a little more than a million British pounds? If you compare it to prices for, say, continental artists, it could be 10 or 20 million pounds or euros. A million pounds is still a lot of money, Tyler, in my book. [chuckles] I think he is underestimated, but — well, there is one very practical reason, which is that Jack Yeats didn’t prepare his canvases, and they’re fragile things. Sometimes when you look inside the glass along the bottom of a Yeats painting, there are flakes of paint that have fallen off. That’s a very practical reason for perhaps not hitting the very highest values. But during the boom of the Celtic Tiger, I think a million would have been cheap for a major Jack Yeats. They were hitting large prices. And recently they’ve been hitting them again. I think to compare them — if you’re thinking of the tens of millions, you’re thinking of Picasso and Matisse, and I think that’s a different ball game, really. I don’t think Jack Yeats — I think what you’re buying with a major Picasso or a Matisse is a statement of a change in the history of art that affects the entire artistic world. I imagine, though I’m by no means an expert, that that’s one reason for the astonishing prices that these command — as with, to take a very different example, Andy Warhol. If you’re buying a Jack Yeats, you’re not buying into a work that has changed the practice and effect and achievement of world art. You’re buying something very special and, if you like, idiosyncratic, and I think every bit as beautiful as a Matisse or a Picasso — but that’s perhaps a biased opinion. Do you think it’s fair to say that Ireland is not a country of utopian theorists?…

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