Invitation To Art; The Art of Ireland; Invitation To Art: The Art of Ireland

BEEP Like every other country, Ireland has its contrasts, but they are crowded into a small area and thus appear more abrupt. Lake Scenery, this is the island of Innisfree and Lockgill, contrasts with stark mountains which rim the country. And the rich, central plains stretching out to the horizon seem another country from the bare and stony walls of the west, where man exists precariously, constantly at war with his environment. No part of Ireland is more than 60 miles from the sea,

and no one can be long in Ireland without becoming aware of that. The thousand miles of coastline are constantly awash, and some of the restlessness of the sea seems to impart itself to the land. But this sense of motion and transience is more truly due to the sky. For here the sky often is more authority than the earth, and it is a sky which is nearly always laden with clouds that shadows moving across the land beneath. Always then there is an island a sense of motion and movement, and movement and motion is also a property of its art, and behind it is the movement of an idea, a mentality that dwells in abstractions and essences, which found one of the most perfect methods of expressing them in the history of art. These quarrels and rhythms again appear 1300 years later in the work of the greatest modern Irish painter Jack Butler yet.

For motion, with his implication of transience, seems to be inseparable from the Irish mind. The Irishman seems to distrust his senses, and this gives his art a fleeting aspect that is a strange mixture of abstraction and warmth. A lyrical warmth, a humorous abstraction. Please appear to me to be the poles of Irish art, and sound the genuine note in Irish art again and again through foreign influences. And this is the Irish contribution to world art. The greatest contribution was made over a thousand years ago, when for a few brief centuries many factors were held in equilibrium. It's an equilibrium which allowed this small country on the edge of Europe to influence greatly the Europe of the dark ages. So much so that an historian such as Arnold Toynbee has said that for a time it seemed that European Christianity might take its source from Ireland rather than from Rome. The Irish influence was carried by monks and scholars and spread across Western Europe.

The remains of this civilization can still be seen in the streets of quiet Irish villages and towns. Here is the village of Kells, with its broken-round tower. This was the time when the names of the Irish universities were a familiar sound on the continent. von Meknoi, founded in 548, is now a small group of ruins by the Shannon, but once it had thousands of students, many of them, from all over Europe. Again, there is the ruined tower, which was used as a bell tower and as a refuge against Danish attack. You don't find this only in Ireland, you also find round towers in the continent, there's one at Ravenna. Vindelog, once a university city founded by Saint Kevin, functioned for 600 years before finally being suppressed. A casualty like much of the rest of the civilization of Danish and Norman invasion. In these rooms and buildings are the remains of an art that is strangely alien to the rest of Europe.

To be brought face to face with it is an unsettling experience. For one is brought back beyond the safe iconography of Christianity to a fantastic pagan world whose breadth seems still occasionally to blow through remote Irish villages and towns, and which occasionally survives, I think, in the paradoxes of the Irish mind. It is something that is a quality more than anything else, I think, of the imagination, a quality that is both antique and subtle. To discover this quality in the art of Ireland, we will go back to Casual of the Kings, the Acropolis of Ancient Ireland, set in a rock over the plains of Tipperary, with its unruft cathedral which was once run down by an Irish chieftain, who when asked why he did it, said quite simply, I thought the archbishop was inside. Here on this rock is a building unique in Ireland and unique in architecture.

It's Cormick's Chapel built by Cormick McCarthy in 1127 and consecrated in 1134. And from this building springs the style of Irish Romanesque, the union of the continental style, with an unbroken native tradition in building. It's a style of decoration in which the human head gradually comes to have a fundamental path. And it is these heads that call us back to a past, a strange and tumultuous and bizarre as the Irish imagination itself. This head, to me, does not recall gargoyles or gothic demons, but rather the alien terrors and vitality of Aztec sculptures. This is the epitome of all that is under the ground in Ireland, of all that persists in the centuries that follow when harsh realities break with civilisation and its fragments give a loneliness to the countryside which any stranger can feel.

Here is that strangeness in the proportion, that fantasy, that is the primary characteristic of the Irish mind, whether it be in the labyrinth of the Book of Kirls, or the labyrinth of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The fantasy and decorative energy of that mind break out in magnificent doors and small churches all over the country, in Plumfort Cathedral, where the Romanesque idea is displaced by a wealth of ornament that records the richness of Indian decoration. Sofist decoration is brought into a more classic balance with structure in the nuns church in the old university city of Plumnecnoids. Zigzag lines and incised patterns, twining and intertwining carry one back to the elementary geometric patterns of Celtic art. Here refined of these archways and doorways, by the same decorative impulse. And the beaded elaboration of the details brings to mind the dotted pinwork of the Book of Kirls.

But nowhere do sculpture and decoration come together with such unity as in the great high crosses. In their early stages, in the first half of the 8th century, they are entirely covered with decoration which is interwoven in elaborate patterns. In this cross at a Henny and County Tipperary, one of the segments of the circle which embraces the arms has been broken off. The great open circle supporting the arms is peculiar to Irish crosses. This type of cross, which translates into stone, a great deal of contemporary metalwork, comes to a monumental perfection in the great high crosses of the 10th century. This one at Monaster Boise is superb, and this represents the closest to the monumental and enduring that the restless Irish mind has ever achieved. The inscription on this cross asks for a prayer for Merida, who is avid at Monaster Boise and died in 923. On this type of high cross, decoration is replaced with scenes from the old and new testament,

intermingle is always with what can only be memories of the Celtic myths, embodied in fantastic animals. In the centre is a figure of Christ crucified, the lands and sponge burrows on either side. The shaft of the cross is divided into panels which each contain a scene from the new testament, three figures to each scene, figures which in their way call forth the Romanesque, which grows out of them and many other sources. This panel shows the arrest of Christ, with two soldiers on either side. The soldier on the right holds a sword and grasps the captive's wrist. These are among the most fascinating little figures in art that at once are cake and symbolic, but yet warmly felt with a sure instinct for the drama of the theme which inspires them. In these crosses, decoration comes into a beautiful balance with what it decorates, the structure of the cross.

In many stones and crosses, decoration runs wild as it does in Indian art, showing one the immense and vital energies which are held in a balance in the best Celtic art. As for instance, in the great metalwork of the 8th century, which leaves us with such objects of rare magnificence as this, the silver and gold of the Ardachalus. The basin floats above a small, joining neck, set on a rimmed and cone-like basin, the surfaces decorated with unbelievable skill. The filigree of gold is made by many diameters of gold wire, soldered together, and then guided into the most intricate interlacing. By an eye that is always softened. The tracks which fix the handles to the bow show again the rhythmic vitality of filigree, rocks and windows, held in place by a rigid discipline in the overall design. But it is the neck itself that shows a sensuousness of decoration that is almost overpowering.

Here are echoes of the early Celtic gold of 2,000 years ago with its quarrels coiling and uncoiling with endless energies. Here too is that slight irregularity and pattern which teases the eye and catches the eye in a maze and sends it searching for a way out. Here again an action is the indirect and subtle Irish mind making visible what might almost be a restless image of the movement of its own thoughts. The other great masterpiece and metalwork from the 8th century is of course the Tara Blurge. It's even more exuberant and decoration than the Chalus. The moving lines of the filigree are separated by raised bands of amber and studs of colored enamel. It's a masterpiece of abstraction which takes bird and animal shapes and brings them under the play of a vital force which gives them a strange half-life like the animal head which plays with eyes and nostrils and horns until they become a memory

and survive merely as a function of spirals and ovals. It is these linear energies that run through all Irish art whether it be on the translarges of ruined churches or in the great stone crosses or whether they are translated into the metalwork we have just seen. The source of these is of course in the early Celtic manuscripts and it is these manuscripts which allow us to get as close as we can to the early Irish mind. To look at these manuscripts and enter into them we enter an art of such nervous tension that it moved only for Cion to call it one of the most astonishing of human reveries, one of the most mysterious caprices of the intellect and in the twinings and intertwinings and twistings and turnings of lines and patterns one can again discern the ceaseless energies of early Celtic art.

Mingle with Anglo-Sex and influences and strangely here in their acoptic Byzantine echo from the continent as in the small and arbitrary figure which resists the pull of the forces in the page to remain relatively understood. In this labyrinth man, animal and bird are sucked out of shape and submit to an energy which gives them another life and here in these pages one fuels oneself very close to the mystery of that remote Celtic art. which perfected not an image of man or the world around but an abstraction which included them at once removed from themselves as ghosts of themselves. It is, as François Henri has called it, a labyrinthine dream, a disciplined, ever-vestance of the imagination and its miraculous intricacies and subtleties haunt one long after one has ceased to look. The humorous abstraction, too, is never very far away as in this picture of St. Matthew

from the Book of Kills. The face is reduced to a Byzantine formula but the scribe is headed jerk with himself and putting in the eyes. One is a pupil, the other is not, and when the two marry as it were in a single glance it is humorously solemn and disquieting. In the midst of all these intricacies we come upon a little miracle now and again and the margin of the manuscripts, a little poem written to explain a point of grammar perhaps. And the poem is so simple that it contrasts strangely with the manuscripts complexity and other paradoxes of the Irish mind. Here is one of these poems from a thousand years ago as the scribe looked up from his manuscript and saw the world around him and recreated for us a moment that we can hear as if it were happening now. The tiny bird whose call I heard I marked his yellow bill. The owls bleed above lochly, shakes golden branches still.

And indeed it does. It's a nature poetry of singular purity. As Robin Flower said, first in Europe day, these months, had that strange vision of natural things with an almost unnatural purity. That was the dream of the early Celtic world and in the 13th century it had a rude awakening. What would have happened to that art had been allowed to develop will never know. Gradually the foreign style, the Gothic, begins to be spoken with an Irish accent and then the Renaissance. But the Renaissance did not touch Ireland deeply for it was a country fighting for its life and with a defeat of Hugh O'Neill, its greatest leader for three centuries. Ireland and the old Ireland came to an end. He left the country with nearly a hundred chieftains and leaders in 1607, a flight of the owls.

And if that was the end of the old world, it was the beginning of modern Ireland. But the regs and tatters as it were of that old world survived into the 18th century and one can hear a neco of its rhythms in the poetry of such men as Unruh, Sulawon. That was the same 18th century in which Dublin was rising in Augustine's splendor in such buildings as James Ganden's Custom House, one of the finest of 18th century European buildings. In 1742 the Royal Dublin society schools were founded, one of the first art schools in Europe. And from this we can perhaps trace the beginnings of modern Irish art. And we can trace to the immigration of Irish talent, in literature such men as Congrieve and Farquhar, Richard Brindley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith. In art there was one talent that could have matched there.

James Barry, he was a corkman who was sent to Rome by Edmund Burke and he came back on fire with enthusiasm. He had a warmly lyrical and romantic streak which ran counter to the ideas of Joshua Reynolds and he eventually found himself allied to fusely and black against Reynolds. He was finally broken by his own irritations and dreams. His tragedy was possessing the sudden and subtle Irish temperament in a world of 18th century elegance which did not suit it. In his way he represented a crucial dilemma in Irish art, felt too by many of the lesser painters who flocked to England and whose colour sense brings a minor harmony into English art. The 19th century produced such writers as Leaver and Lover who used the Irish type to create a new Irish genre. In painting this two-headed equivalent with Fredrik Burton, who spent 20 years in Rome as a young man and returned to paint a scene such as this with some sympathy and feeling.

It's the Aaron Fisherman's brown child and here is a scene from the Aaron Islands such as John Millington Sing might have seen later on when gathering material for his play. And like Sing later, it shows a return to Irish material and subject matter and an attempt to interpret and understand it. It's a canvas that contains at least one rather moving figure, the man staring intently into space, a quite impressive image of grief. The Irish scene was also an inspiration to Nathaniel Holmes, who worked side by side with Diaz and Arpigny at Fontainebleau and returned to Ireland with an eye sensitive to its sudden changes in light. It's vast stretches of sky above the flat landscape around parts of Dublin, here, pastures at Malahide. In canvas such as this, he captures with deceptive economy the fluidity of appearances in Ireland where the flux of light gives the appearance of motion and transience to the land.

This quality perhaps he caught most surely in hundreds of little watercolours which retain the spark of life that is a direct reflex of seeing and which seems to have been worked out of many of his oils. Here, with a few washers and strokes of the brush, he gets the maximum of effect with a minimum of means and seems to anticipate the poetic feeling with which Jack Butler Yates paint to the Irish scene. Hone brought his Fontainebleau training back with into Ireland and Paul Henry, the greatest of the landscape painters who followed Hone, also had a French training. He brought back with him a modified impressionism and a clear eye and he was fascinated by the fugitive play of light and tone in the west of Ireland. The last paintings show small cabins under vast and towering skies painted with such subtlety and delicacy and skill that if one touched them one would expect to get one's fingers wet.

Henry is one of the purest painters that Ireland has produced. These pictures carry no literary burden with them but are simple and translucent records of poetic vision. And they are painted with a subtle and and he's best work with a miraculous skill. The contrast of tones and colours in the west of Ireland aroused in him a joy which gives many of his pictures a certain abstract quality as if the hills and sky existed only to provide these delicate contrasts in tone and colour. Earlier Henry had concentrated a rough jawn of painting and painting of people who had never been painted before. The peasants who lived a life that had not changed for centuries.

And as their countryman with a natural simplicity he did not patronize them in his paintings but recorded with a touch of heroic imagination the everyday moments of their lives. The rough outlines of Ben Gogh's peasants can sometimes be felt in these Irish equivalent and with a turn of the century it was a time for painting peasants and a new industrial age. It was among these peasants that another Irish artist found his great inspiration and more truly in the fantastic folk tradition that they possessed. After the last living oral traditions in Western Europe which gives to the west of Ireland a sense of immense age, old as Greece and with something of the same eucolic plasasism of temper. Jack Butler Yeats painted here by his father in a wonderfully subtle portrait felt himself in contact with an Irish tradition not in painting but in a very air around him in words and thoughts in a vivid and fantastic imagination which transformed the small seaport. In which he and his brother the poet grew up.

John Butler Yeats, their father once said, I will be remembered as the father of a painter. And much as Turner has come to mean to the English, Jack Butler Yeats has come to mean to the Irish. For over 50 years through revolution and war he presented an image of Ireland which is a fact to the way in which his country is seen. And his must be the longest or one of the longest sustained lyrical gifts in the history of painting. His art like the country and the Irish mine seems always in motion never still for long and it is this restlessness that recalls the coiling and done coiling energies of early Celtic art. His colour is as lyrical as any of his brother's poems, predominantly blues and yellows and greens which always seem to have a clarity as if they are between had been washed clear. His pictures keep one on the surface with a great richness of texture and yet allow one to steal quietly through into the spaces behind as we move down the road between the figures.

And the balance between surface and depth recalls one more ambiguity of the Irish mine. And this picture is a memory Jack Yeats wrote of a moment in an evening in the city of Cork when the high spring tide was up along the narrow places by the Mardike walk. The modern movement was brought to Ireland by two young girls who went to Paris in 1920 and they worked and studied with Albert Lays for over 10 years. They were Manie Gelat and Evie Hoag. Manie Gelat was more important as an influence and a teacher than as an artist. But her best work is a lyrical warmth which brings warmth and feeling to Lays rather arid the aesthetics.

In this crucifixion which she called the ninth hour there is an individual balance between recognition and abstraction and she was working towards this when she died in 1944. The shapes and colors transpose the subject into rhythms which deepen its meaning with poetic feeling, a lyrical blend of abstraction and warmth. A stronger sense of design combined with a warmth of feeling again can be seen in Evie Hoag's sketch for a great eaten college chapel window. One of her influences was the early Celtic art of Ireland especially the small figures in the high crosses and it's this influence in her art deeply felt and assimilated that sends one's mind back beyond the renaissance to medieval art to an age of faith. Here is the last supper and a group of rustic disciples are gathered around the figure of Christ and what emerges is a sense of eucolic serenity and strength based on design completely integrated at the abstract level.

The colors of a purity and intensity which would call medieval plus and she was the combination of a local Irish tradition and stained glass. Ireland did not take part in the Second World War and this isolation allowed in the midst of the modern movement the development of the small school of artists which produced Patrick Colum who seems to me to be directly in the Irish tradition and temperament. This picture he called Stephen Hero and its indirect and subtle and glancing a movement of shadows among rich textures which calls on suggestions and feelings that are never explicit like something seen out of the corner of the eye and then fixed. Although the starting point of this picture is explicit and makes a marriage of a kind between modern Irish literature and painting.

Set moment in the night time seen in James Joyce's Ulysses when Stephen says so that gesture not music not odors would be universal language the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first and telekate the structural rhythm. Again the sense of interest and abstraction in the idea of the object rather than the object that distinguishes the Irish mind and places Columns directly in the Irish tradition in which as he says himself everything is hidden and incomplete and underground. It is painting such as this that sound what is to me the genuine note in Irish art the product of a mind which on the one hand reduces realities to abstractions and can thus place them in strangely humorous text to positions and in the other hand the compliment of this a simple and innocent warmth of feeling a directness which is as simple as breathing. These to me are the two poles of Irish art humorous abstraction a lyrical wall the greatest Irish artists whether it is a thousand years ago and now have between these made their own individual synthesis.

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