Culture Shock: The Jack B Yeats exhibition at the National Gallery is a reminder that his influence on Irish theatre was comparable to that of his brother, writes Fintan O'Toole.
One of the first things Sean O'Casey did when he got money from the London run of Juno and the Paycock was to write to Lady Gregory asking for the address of Jack B Yeats so he could buy one of his paintings. The young Samuel Beckett spent £30 he couldn't afford on a Yeats Sligo skyscape called Morning. John Synge, of course, collaborated with Yeats on articles for the Guardian about his travels in Ireland. For a painter, Jack Yeats had a big influence on Irish playwrights. One of the many interesting things about the National Gallery's fine exhibition of Yeats's paintings of circus and fairground performers, Masquerade and Spectacle, is that it helps you to see why.
Given that his brother was its dominant figure, it seems remarkable that Jack had little to do with the Abbey Theatre. His brother asked him to design the sets for Synge's The Well of the Saints, but his actual involvement seems to have been minimal. Yet, as the National Gallery's exhibition shows, performance and theatricality were huge themes in his work. He connects theatre and the visual arts in a way that no one else in Irish culture has ever quite managed.
At one level, Yeats's circus paintings can be seen simply as an Irish version of a European vogue. They follow or parallel the images of circuses, harlequins, clowns and show people created by Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Kokoschka, Chagall and Picasso.
But they have a humour, a dynamism and, especially in the later works, a mystery that makes them vastly more than localised versions of an international fashion. Yeats is not copying an idea but exploring a genuine obsession. Masquerade is not, for him, just another subject. It is the key to his art.
What Yeats got from his interest in theatre, spectacle and performance was a way of being a realist without being a literalist. His realistic impulses were strong and they made him a brilliant illustrator. But they might also have trapped him, cut him off from an artistic modernity that was increasingly less interested in figurative representation. Painting performers helped him to solve the problem by providing him with a subject that was both real and metaphorical.
In a brilliant early work in the show, The Barrel Man, for example, Yeats gives us an almost journalistic representation of a real scene, with a recognisable west of Ireland sky and a tousle-haired man who could be met at Puck Fair today. But the man is up to his chest in a barrel, performing a fairground trick, in which he fends off the sticks that punters throw at him. In a great late painting, such as They Love Me, with its thick impasto and blurred images, the style is vastly more complex and self-consciously painterly, but the same use of performance as a state halfway between the real and the metaphorical is evident.
If Yeats gained greatly from theatricality, what did the theatre gain from him? A vast amount, evidently. Yeats's painterly grasp of the visual details of costume can be seen in his letter to Synge, who had inquired about the proper dress for the jockey in the racing scene in The Playboy. Yeats was able to give him three precise suggestions, all drawn from his own visual memory banks.
But his sense of spectacle may have been even more important than his direct visual inspiration. It was Jack Yeats who introduced Synge to melodrama when he took him to the Queens Theatre in Dublin in 1906, and Jack's love of vulgar showmanship was probably a far more healthy influence on Synge than WB's more refined aesthetic.
More than that, though, Yeats's circus pictures were hugely important in providing Irish images that were utterly free of local colour. Circus is a universal (or at least Europe-wide) language, and Yeats is superbly skilled at making his clowns and tricksters into placeless, timeless figures who represent, without pretension, humanity itself. The performers in the paintings are de-nationalised and indeed (in the case of the clowns with make-up hiding their skin) deracinated. Samuel Beckett valued Yeats above all because he was an "artist from nowhere". Whereas Thomas McGreevy hailed Yeats's paintings as emanations of the Irish soul, Beckett revered them for the opposite reason.
When he reviewed McGreevy's book on Jack Yeats for The Irish Times in 1945, Beckett wrote that "Mr Yeats' importance is to be sought elsewhere than in a sympathetic treatment . . . of the local accident or the local substance. He is with the great of our time . . . because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence". It is not for nothing that The Barrel Man, were he not quite so exuberant, could be an image from Beckett, or that the stunning 1945 painting, The Entertainers, with its perfect balance of the antic and the grotesque, could be used to illustrate either Synge or Beckett.
Gordon Armstrong has written that "to know the art of Jack Yeats is to understand the art of Samuel Beckett", and if this is an exaggeration, it is a reasonable one. Yeats showed Beckett how to place figures in space and make them universal without making them abstract.
Masquerade and Spectacle reminds us that Irish 20th-century theatre happened on canvas as well as on the boards.