After the weekend, I went with Carol to The National Gallery so we
could see the new exhibition given over to Jake B Yeats. It was the fiftieth
anniversary of the death of this beloved Irish painter and this show was just one
of a number dedicated to him this year. Jack B Yeats was the son of John Butler
Yeats a great Irish portrait painter and draughtsman and brother of William
Butler Yeats - Ireland’s greatest poet. But nearly the whole Yeats family were
talented painters, draughtsmen, embroiders, musician, poets and playwrights – a
strong case for genetics! The Yeats family was central to Irish social history
from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. You
could not understand Ireland if you had not come to terms with this wonderfully
creative Irish family's contribution to painting, drawing, poetry, politics,
mysticism, The Irish Revival, Irish Nationalism, The Easter Rising, The Irish
Republic and the gossip columns of Ireland's newspapers. Ironically this
quintessential Irish family were not Catholics at all – they were Protestant
Anglo-Irish – what were called ‘West-Brits’ in Irish slang. The unrequited love
of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne was such a romantic epic in Ireland,
that I can remember my mother warning me: “Don’t end up like Yeats! He threw
his life away waiting for Maud Gonne to love him!” While W.B. Yeats the poet
had a worldwide reputation his painter brother Jack was sadly known only in
Britain.
As the years passed, I grew fonder and fonder of Yeats’
paintings. I had always liked them since I was a teenager – but I was never
really sure whether my love for his work was critically naïve or misjudged. His
later canvases were some of the hardest works for the conventional art lover to
appreciate. But he only came to his last reckless style after a lifetime of
drawing from life or drawing from memory. At times the late canvases could be
quite awful – a mess. Yeats painted about 2,000 oil paintings so there was
bound to be some dross. But at his best in his late works he set line and
colour free to play across the canvas – and if you looked close – you could see
that the drawing was bold and assured. The magic of these works was the way we
the viewers were encouraged to read the forms and move with them. But then you
need not have taken my word for it - reputable foreign painters like Oskar
Kokoschka (a friend of Jack B Yeats) and Lucian Freud and the Irish playwright
Samuel Beckett were fans of his work.
Over time, I had
grown stronger in the conviction that Yeats was the greatest Irish painter –
one who captured the spirit of the Irish people better than many other artists
some of whom were technically more skilled painters. No he was not a world rate
painter like Picasso, Beckman, or even Pollock but he was a worthy brother to
artists like Georges Rouault, James Ensor, and Oscar Kokoschka. Like them, his
paintings took a hard look at some of the harsher and more unjust aspects of
life. Like them, his work was full of daring colours, lightening brushstrokes,
impastoed paint and a judicious use of black. Like them, his work was animated
and situated in moments of great spectacle - and like them, he lived his life
withdrawn from the world.
Masquerade & Spectacle: The Circus and The Travelling Fair in The
Work of Jake B Yeats, was a beautifully chosen collection of 22 paintings
and watercolours from 1902-1952 about the marginalized and exotic lives of the
clowns, bareback-riders and acrobats in the travelling Circus. The exhibition
space was dimly lit and each painting was spot lit – giving the paintings an
eerie effervescent quality. The lighting brought out his intense colours and
the rich texture of his paintings. Despite the fact that most of the works were
behind glass – they were all perfectly visible – such a change from awful
displays I had seen in the past.
The theme of the
Circus at the turn of the twentieth century was a favourite of many socially
conscious painters like Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, George Rouault and of
course Pablo Picasso. The circus people lived on the margins of society, like
Gypsies but they also drew in the working and middle classes with their exotic
entertainment and proletarian theatre. Many of these artists identified with
the circus people because they too were poor and not in respectable employment
– living for art, truth and beauty – on the margins of bourgeois,
industrialised society. The clown, the bareback rider and the acrobat also
provided artists with pictures full of drama and theatre – allowing them to
speak to the ‘stage of life’ and the tragedy of its actors. So in some respects
their paintings of clowns were in fact self-portraits in disguise.
Many of these
paintings were from private collections and so unfamiliar even to Irish art
lovers. The exhibition covered Yeats slow progression from tight linear black
and white illustrations, to moody pencil drawings tinted with watercolour, into
angular illustrative oil paintings, then into a wonderfully loose yet still
well-drawn painterly canvases and finally into his late almost
abstract–expressionist style – the paint taken straight from the tube and
scrubbed in dry-brush, or glossy glazes or thick impasto sculpted and drawn
with the pallet knife. Although Yeats was never technically on a par with even
Irish Belle Epoch painters like
William Orpen or John Lavery – he more than made up for it with canny insights
into human beings, expressive courage and a little thing called soul –
something sadly lacking in this Post-Modern world.
All his life
Yeats was to benefit from his journalistic background - which sharpened his
eyes to the life around him. His early work was illustrational, even
occasionally comic like. He was thirty-five before he started to paint in oils.
He lived a solitary life in Dublin with his wife – but he loved to sketch in
the streets. His little sketchbooks, watercolours and oil paintings are full of
moments of daily Irish life – caught in all their movement, rituals, and
character. He loved covering sports events, figures in the city, the circus and
the men of the west of Ireland.
Repeatedly
the Irish man in solitude emerges. The man about to write a letter, or alone in
the streets bustling with others, sitting alone in a tram while three women
gossip utterly oblivious of his existence, or as a melancholy clown, or a dwarf
alone and behind the scenes. But at other times he depicted virile Irish men as
fishermen, swimmers, boxers, jockeys, bareback riders or heroes of Irish myth.
Women in Yeats paintings could be elegant, haughty, dainty, kindly or proud.
But he never degraded them - there was hardly a nude in his whole oeuvre. He
showed women as social beings - like exotic beauties in cold Dublin city
streets full of crowds and incident. Women in Yeats paintings are feminine,
self-assured and a vital part of Irish society.
But perhaps his greatest love was for horses. He drew them all his life
and his depictions have a freshness, vigour and anatomical accuracy lacking in
so many stilted equestrian pictures.
This was quite
simply the best exhibition I had seen since the Lucian Freud and it was a
delight to the senses. I would have happily owned half of these 22 paintings.
One of my
favourite rooms in the National Gallery in those days was at the very end of
the English school. Hung against a dark green wall were lovely, modest,
paintings by John Singer Sargent, Alfred Munnings and Augustus John.
Woodrow Wilson
(1917) by Sargent was a truly emptied out and pointless painting even for a
Sargent fanatic like myself. It struck me as soulless, effortless and aloof -
nothing better than boardroom art.
For sheer visual
wattage and painterly fireworks Alfred Munning’s Evening At The Ford (1950) was the winner in this room. His
painting of men on horses wading a ford in the dying light of summertime set my
pulses racing. Munnings pallet of dark mauve's and browns for the background
the figures of the men and horses – contrasted with the lime, lemon and
Sapphire blue of the water made me want to paint.
I was less
convinced by The Red Prince Mare
(1921) – perhaps because the painting as a whole did not seem to fit together.
This was because Munnings had sketched the horse with rider in scarlet jacket,
on top in the paddock. He had painted the sky outdoors. However, he completed the
painting in his studio. This meant the sketchy Impressionistic treatment of the
sky and background – jostled with almost photographic treatment of the horse
and foreground area.
Augustus John’s
Carlotta c1901 was not wholly believable. The drawing seemed somewhat
indecisive and odd-looking. But I liked the nod to Rembrandt and the velvety
brushstrokes that harked back to Frans Hals.
Dr Kuno Meyer (1911) was a much later painting and a far more modern
portrait of a powerful and impressive figure of a man. Here John had used a
quite daring pallet of bold blues, modulated whites and bottle greens. I loved
the bold and summery brushstrokes and the power of the design. However, it was
John’s portrait of Sean O’Casey (1926) – scraped down and repainted over and
over – that was my favourite. I loved the fresh, bold and intelligent -
painterly attack. The readjustments were even more telling - in their searched
for correctness.