The Hunt Museum side-steps the obvious by including little seen works in its Jack B. Yeats show, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
The simplest ideas are usually the best. Last year Limerick's Hunt Museum assembled a collection of work by Irish artist Roderic O'Conor for its summer exhibition. O'Conor, who spent most of his working life as an expatriate in France, was a post-impressionist painter. His intensely coloured, strongly patterned work is popular with collectors and with the public. The idea behind the Hunt exhibition was simple: find examples of his work that are for the most part not on public view, via private collections and other sources, borrow them and give people a chance to see them.
It worked so well that it formed the template for this summer's show, Jack B. Yeats: Master of Ceremonies. It's quite audacious for a small museum to take on Yeats, who is probably the most famous Irish painter of the 20th century.
On the one hand he is a glaringly obvious choice, but on the other it's bound to be difficult to mount a significant show that has anything new to offer on the subject. But by including works not normally accessible to public view, the museum has side-stepped the risk of being too obvious.
At the same time, it is clear from the presentation that it is intended to be a populist show, which is no bad thing.
The earliest work included, a no-nonsense illustration depicting sheep-shearers at work, dates from 1896; the latest, the extravagantly expressive The Violence of the Dawn, is from 1951.
The exhibition amounts to a compact retrospective and, in a sense, a potted history, albeit an alternative potted history, of Yeats the artist, from his beginnings as a prolific commercial illustrator to his final years as a highly individualistic painter.
The show's title is taken from one of the Hunt's own pictures, acquired from the painter's solo show at the Goodwin Galleries in Limerick in 1945. The M.C. is a mustachioed showman, pictured in a boxing ring between bouts. The interest in character and the theatricality of the subject are typical of Yeats. So too is the sheer flourish of the delivery, which is wildly expressive, and the way thickly applied paint alternates with almost bare canvas.
While the temporary exhibition space in the Hunt is limited, the show itself is quite substantial, and rightly so.
Although the hanging is dense as modern taste goes, Yeats's paintings are surprisingly easy in each other's company, and it's better for visitors to see a lot of his work than a little. As it is, with some help from a number of people, including auctioneer John de Vere White, Yeats biographer Hilary Pyle and various corporate and individual collectors, there is a lot to see.
Four diminutive sketchbook pages, lightning sketches of aspects of the west of Ireland, provide an example of his staple working method. There are several pieces from the Model Arts and Niland Gallery's very good Yeats collection, including A Political Meeting, Co Sligo. One of his earliest oil paintings, Simon the Cynerian, shows him applying graphic methods to oil. A Dusty Lane in Kerry should be too sweetly picturesque but he somehow gets away with it.
Via the Waddingtons, his loyally supportive dealers, many of Yeats's paintings ended up on the far side of the Atlantic. One, The Mail Car, Early Morning, was recently rediscovered in Canada and makes its first public appearance in more than 50 years. It's thought to depict J. M. Synge waiting to board the mail car in Ballina.
Working as an illustrator in England, and in his early paintings, Yeats served a long apprenticeship as an observer. Like Paul Henry, he could conjure up a painting from a thumbnail sketch and a few scribbled notes recorded in one of the tiny sketchbooks that he always carried with him. The years spent growing up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, the Pollexfens, and his subsequent travels in the west, including his 1905 trip with Synge, to provide illustrations for The Aran Islands, provided him with a fund of imagery on which he continued to draw - for what he termed his "half-memory" sketches - to the end of his life.
But eventually, by the time he had developed what might be described as his signature style, he was looking decisively inwards rather than outwards.
In his anecdotal accounts of Dublin city life in the 1920s, of which several fine examples are included, or of various communal and sporting events in the west of Ireland, such as Market Day, he was a gifted reporter. And his pictorial acumen, honed by the experience of crafting innumerable magazine illustrations, contributed to the creation of such iconic images as An Island Man, comparable to the National Gallery's The Man from Aranmore - images that prefigured Keating and Lamb and became central to the way the emergent Free State was to visualise itself.
Yet even in post-independence Ireland, Yeats retained a romantic identification with the outsider, exemplified in the way he yearned for the west with the ardour of an exile, though settled in Dublin's Donnybrook and later Fitzwilliam Square. He made forays to the western seaboard, from Cork to Donegal - and he could, of course, have lived there if he chose. It was surely more an attachment to a paradise lost, an ideal elsewhere that was an Ireland of his imagination and folk myth: Hy Brazil, Tír na nÓg.
As time went by, the protagonists in his paintings, the proud horses and riders, the lone wanderers, tended to blend physically into the expanse of the land and sky in unbroken swathes of pigment, sometimes appearing as ghostly, semi-transparent presences. Yet even when the paintings celebrate communal rituals, there is often a sense of loneliness or apartness. The clown in They Love Me, for example, appears unconsoled by the approval of the audience and nurses a private grief.
In terms of colour, Yeats's paintings are rarely naturalistic. Increasingly, he displayed a preference for heightened, luridly acidic colours smeared across the canvas in ragged bursts. The surfaces of his paintings are typically broken and agitated.
John Berger once plausibly suggested that their agitation might derive from the restlessness of the weather and the light coming in off the Atlantic in the west of Ireland.
Some years ago, Brian Kennedy, then at the National Gallery of Ireland, wrote about the curious lack of sensuality in Yeats - curious given the nature of much of his subject matter. That struck a chord. I'd always felt a distinct coldness emanating from his work, even at its most impassioned, and perhaps that coldness has a lot to do with his astringent palette, as well as his status as perennial observer, a stranger in the paradisiacal Ireland of his dreams.
In a nice touch, Master of Ceremonies includes Yeats's paint box, a three-drawer cabinet with, at the top, both leaves flung open, liberally paint-stained, but empty. An empty box of tricks, like a conjurer's hat from which the bird has flown.
• Jack B. Yeats: Master of Ceremonies is at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, until September 26th. Telephone: 061-312833 www.huntmuseum.com