Travelling fairs and the circus fascinated Jack B Yeats - along with that well-tried cultural icon, the tragic clown, writes Aidan Dunne
Showing at the Yeats Museum in the National Gallery of Ireland, Masquerade and Spectacle is a small, concentrated exhibition. Comprising works drawn from the gallery's own collection, and other public and private collections, it explores Jack B Yeats's long fascination with the circus and the travelling fair as thematic concerns. This interest stemmed from the happy, formative years he spent with his maternal grandparents in Sligo, when he came to appreciate the exuberant, colourful nature of communal events in the west, celebratory entertainments expressive of a vibrant, characterful populace. That's character, incidentally, in the clearly-drawn, Dickensian sense.
Yeats's regard for hardy, self-reliant types was heightened during subsequent visits to the west and, though he never went back there later in life, such individuals became central to the cast of protagonists that inhabits his paintings. The exhibition's curator, Dr Róisín Kennedy, notes that when, aged 16, he moved to England with his parents, he became an enthusiastic visitor to the circus. After many years in England, he moved back to Ireland, though this time to the east coast, and visited the circus in Greystones, Co Wicklow - but western archetypes remained a dominant presence in his work. It's interesting that one of the earliest pieces in the exhibition, dating from 1903, is a watercolour based on a visit to a Wild West show at London's Crystal Palace in 1892. Often his evocations of the west of Ireland evoke images of the other Wild West.
The Native American on horseback he depicts turns out to be, on closer inspection, manoeuvring a hobby horse while tearing around on roller skates. An essential aspect of the many theatrical displays that intrigued Yeats is their artificiality, which is not to say that they are in any way bogus. They are all about skilled performers transporting an audience by generating a certain level of illusion or suspended disbelief. Just like a painter, in a way, and for Yeats the circus and the entertainer are emblematic of the artist or, arguably, a political or moral leader.
HE'S NOT AVERSE to devising many of his own versions of a well-tried cultural icon: the tragic clown. The clown is a "painted smile", a figure who, despite willing, apparent ridiculousness, can be viewed as a heroically defiant enactment of comedy against the reality of existential tragedy. This grand conversation was happening in secret and could be interpreted as being about the mismatched infatuation of a circus clown for an haute école rider. They are both in character but, Yeats surely implies, her character - in life as well as art - precludes her from seeing him as a plausible suitor. In Alone, a pensive clown collects his thoughts, perhaps between performances. He looks like someone who is facing up to the way things are. That is: not too good for him. But everything about the picture intimates that he is also, in the sense of the term elaborated in Howard Hawks's films, a professional who will, despite his personal troubles, do his job, another Pagliaccio. Perhaps Yeats alludes to the other side of the coin, the performer's vanity, in They Love Me, in which a clown turns away from his receptive audience. But again the countenance of the white-painted protagonist is troubled.
Every performer needs an audience, and the audience, the crowd, is a constant presence in Yeats's painting. It could be that, like de Valera, he tended to view the crowd as a populace reassuringly imbued with and expressive of his own views. Though you do get a cumulative sense of a biddable multitude who might go either way; they could turn nasty. Michael Cullen is a contemporary artist who recognisably takes on aspects of Yeats's iconography and palette. He has painted autobiographical allegories featuring various alter egos, including clown and chimpanzee. The circus also features in Cullen's work, and in many of his paintings the crowd takes on distinctively negative connotations, becoming a mob out for blood.
There are elements of grotesquerie in Yeats's simplified, contorted figures, at times reminiscent of the distortion evident in Munch's The Scream, and what is in many respects its movie spin-off, the film Scream, with its Grand Guignol theatricality. Occasionally he does explicitly touch on questions relating to the cruelty of the mob. The related figures of The Barrel Man and The Maggie Man refer to a cruel, perhaps cathartic fairground act in which visitors pay to throw sticks at a man in a barrel, as he goads them, ducks and deflects their missiles. Lower down the pecking order still is The Maggie Man, who collects the sticks, a figure of ridicule. The latter painting is odd in several respects and positively invites Freudian interpretation - unusually for a painter who steers determinedly clear of sensual or sexual connotations. Such marginal and sacrificial figures as the Maggie Man recur in the paintings.
A CLOSE LOOK reveals just how weird his way of painting not just figures, but representations of anything, became. Rough twists and turns of pigment evoke form and features in a distorted, skeletal fashion. Colour is often used arbitrarily, without any naturalistic connection with the subject. Passages of thick impasto are brusquely applied over grounds that look as if they have been scraped back repeatedly. This odd, semi- descriptive approach has been described as symptomatic of a crisis of representation, or of Yeats's faith in representation. The contrast with his early painting is all the more marked given his initial predilection for almost overly-emphatic, dark, heavy outlines, a device carried over from his extensive experience of commercial illustration.
In fact, the gestural method of painting he came to employ progressively from the mid-1920s meant that conventional representation became a problem. The painter Barrie Cooke once observed that, in gestural abstraction, the detail is the brush-stroke. You can't contrive it. If you do, you are making a representation of a gesture, which is not uncommon on the part of artists who don't get that point. Oddly enough, far from the cliche of "free expression", it takes great skill to work effectively with representation and gesture at the same time.
FOR A CONTEMPORARY example of an artist who does so well, you could look to Diana Copperwhite, who has consistently worked with both abstraction and representation. Her fast, almost offhand way of building images from gestures (evident in her current Limerick City Art Gallery show, Blind Spot) bespeaks great skill, and has echoes of Yeats's pictorial strategy. Though not, it must be said, his idiosyncratic palette. Often, looking at the later Yeats, you could be forgiven for asking just what he was thinking in engineering those acidic clashes of colour.
He gets away with it in terms of pictorial coherence and the heightened drama he was so fond of, but, for all their virtues, there are many paintings one wouldn't particularly like to live with.
The current Yeats Museum is the second in a series of stopgap moves towards the establishment of a Yeats Museum proper. It is located in the rooms that previously housed the gallery shop, prior to the building of the Millennium Wing. With its dark walls and localised lighting, the installation is effective, though the space is very limited. Still, National Gallery of Ireland director Raymond Keaveney promises that a permanent home for the museum is on the way as part of the National Development Plan- funded Master Development Plan. In the meantime, this is a show worth seeing.
Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B Yeats is at the Yeats Museum, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until Nov 11. Admission is free. Tel: 01-6615133. www.nationalgallery.ie