Jack B. Yeats part 2

There is a mystical side to Yeats, though he left mythology in the stricter sense to his brother, and in his art if not always in his life, Jack was far the earthier of the two. Some commentators have claimed to find him too whimsical and escapist - but that is to miss the point. He has, in fact, a Dionysiac side to his psyche, and his singers and musicians, in particular, seem possessed by some demonic force or ecstasy. Yeats frequently draws his imagery from the music-hall and the circus, but there is no sense of any aesthetic toying with life at a safe, bookish, sedentary remove, in the old nineties manner. Though he is capable of great poetic refinement, his race-course scenes reek of sweat, horse dung and leather, and his Dublin street scenes bring back the old sour smells and raucous voices of the slums. Like Joyce, his imagination is impregnated by the mud and trivia of reality, and he finds his own emotional world where an aesthetic sensibility would retreat in disgust.

His favourite and most potent image, however, is probably the horse, which becomes a symbol of the life energy itself, creative and destructive by turn; a symbol of reckless abandon and perhaps, too, of spiritual freedom and imaginative release. Horses and the thud of hooves haunt his whole output, from the very early watercolour of a Devon horse fair, to some of his last enigmatic masterpieces such as There is no Night (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) which is supposed to refer to the death of his wife and may have some message of reunion and resurrection. In Grief (National Gallery of Ireland) a mounted figure on a white horse appears to be ordering a group of men, women and children into captivity or exile, or perhaps even to execution, against a fiery blaze of red that seems pregnant with blood and carnage. This may be some condensed recollection of the bloodier moments in Irish history, but Yeats might also have had the Second World War in mind, and the massacre of the Jews. In spite of his apparent isolation, he was as alive to the hopes, fears and agonies of his time as the great continental Expressionists; and the time cannot be far off when Ireland's finest painter is numbered as their equal. Histories of twentieth-century art have been oddly reluctant to 11 grant Yeats his place in the hierarchy of great painters. He always had powerful admirers, including Kenneth Clark and Kokoschka (who called him the last painter in the great tradition and wrote him a letter of homage during Yeats's last years), Thomas McGreevy, Samuel Beckett and many more. Certain Modernist critics preoccupied with formal values could not admit that he was anything more than a figure on the European fringe. Seen objectively, Yeats is only one of the various major but isolated modern figures who bypassed Cubism and the more formalist aspects of Modernism, tracing their real descent from Impressionism or Symbolism, or both - Munch, Bonnard, Rouault and Chagall among them.

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