Jack B. Yeats part 3

It is significant that the stock of all these men has risen sharply in the last decade, as the Neoclassical values of the first half of the century gradually recede, and it is only a matter of time before Yeats too is seen at his proper worth. It may indeed be happening to him already, judging by the rapidly spreading waves of interest in his work which began roughly with the National Gallery of Ireland's major exhibition of his work in 1976, a revival which ended nearly twenty years of eclipse after his death. The 1991 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London has revived his reputation in England. We seem now to be on the threshold of a new kind of Romantic age, and Yeats is one of the great twentieth-century Romantic painters. Incidentally, his very late work plainly comes within close range of Abstract Expressionism, in spite of its relatively small scale and its tendency to hold firmly to some anchoring subject matter, no matter now enigmatic and veiled. He died the year after Jackson Pollock, of whom he had probably never heard.

Whatever his international standing may be, historically one thing seems past disputing: with Yeats, the transition was made from the predominantly Anglo-Irish or Franco-Anglo-Irish art of his immediate predecessors, to an art which had indigenous roots among the Irish national psychology. It is easy to be misunderstood in this context, particularly when Ireland happens to be engulfed in a wave of enthusiasm for internationalism in the most vague and uncritical sense - an enthusiasm which sounds dismayingly like inverted provincialism in some aspects. Yeats was a thoroughly European painter, but he was also a deeply and consciously Irish one.

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From the Appletree Press title: Famous Irish Lives. (Extract from chapter Into the Modern Movement).

Also from Appletree: Irish Art 1830-1990 and Irish Museums and Heritage Centres.