Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…There’s so much focus on Joyce and Yeats as writers, but how does Irish modernism differ, in your understanding, if you view it through the lens of the Irish visual arts and painting? Stained glass, sculpture? This, again, is another area of Irish history that has been reopened with a number of analytical treatments of Irish art, putting it in the mainstream of European modernist art rather than as an interesting variant on the British experience, which was far too often the case in the past. That may be true of, let’s say, Irish 18th-century landscape painting, but it’s emphatically untrue of Irish painters of the fin de siècle, great painters like [William] Orpen and [John] Lavery, who are much more like French painters, and also have studied in France in many cases, rather than being variants of the British norm. You mentioned stained glass, Tyler, and that of course is with artists like Harry Clarke and Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. That is another area, a medium in which modernism and cubism even, in the case of Evie Hone, finds its way into Irish art at a time when the British are turning away or averting their faces from it. There’s a great crisis — not crisis, a controversy — in Irish art around the early years of the 20th century when a man called Hugh Lane, a great collector of art, tries to set up a modern gallery in Ireland of impressionist and even early postimpressionist art, and tries to give his great collection to the Irish people to form such a gallery. I can’t go into it now, but it becomes a disputed issue when he dies in the Lusitania, leaving a disputed will, and the paintings are grabbed by the National Gallery in London where they largely still reside, though a new arrangement for sharing them with Dublin has just been recently worked out. The interesting thing is that Lane and many Irish people had an eye for the new French painting, as did some Scottish collectors, long before they became valuable in the eyes of the English art establishment, so I think there’s always been a case for arguing that Irish art looks to Europe in many ways; many Irish artists train in Europe. An exception, someone who doesn’t train in Europe, is perhaps one of the greatest if not the greatest Irish painters of the 20th century, who is Jack Yeats, brother of W. B. Yeats. There is this absolutely wonderful huge exhibition of his work in the National Gallery in Dublin at the moment, where the radicalism and power and poetry of these very expressionist paintings is just mind-blowing. You can’t think of any English painter at the time who’s doing anything like it. You can think of [Oskar] Kokoschka, you can think of some of the German expressionists, some of the colorists, and you can see parallels. But it’s a very definitively un-British kind of painting. So that’s visual art. We’ve long been used to the idea of Irish literature existing in a different — a much more international, a much more radical — framework than English writing of the — certainly of the 19th and early 20th centuries. used to the idea of Irish literature existing in a different — a much more international, a much more radical — framework than English writing of the — certainly of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But I think an interesting development that’s happening now in cultural history and cultural criticism is that Irish visual art is also being seen from this angle as well.…

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