Word and Image in Irish Modernism

Paul O'Brien examines the emergence of Irish visual modernism in the context of literary modernism and wider European developments.

In Ireland, literature has historically eclipsed the visual arts, partly for economic reasons--pencils and paper have always been cheaper than paint and canvas. This was in a situation where, for political reasons including the defeat of the Gaelic aristocracy and anti-Catholic repression, a 'normal' tradition of artistic patronage never developed. In the twentieth century the international importance of literary modernists like Joyce and Beckett, evidenced by the key role played by Joyce's work in the debates of Western Marxism, overshadows that of modernist Irish painters. This is the case even with the most prominent of the latter, such as Mainie Jellett, with her religious dimension and quasi-representationalism, and Louis le Brocquy, with his Existentialist sense of individual isolation. Irish visual modernism has lagged behind not only literature in Ireland but also behind its visual counterpart on the Continent.

But there are important similarities between literary and visual modernism in Ireland. Joyce's writing has been viewed as having a Hiberno-English linguistic basis and roots in Irish tradition¹, while le Brocquy, who included portraits of heads of prominent Irish writers in his paintings, has been seen as disclosing, in a quasi-Joycean sense, "the pluri-dimensional character of human consciousness."² Dorothy Walker suggests that le Brocquy's "preoccupation with head images and cyclical structures is a distinct borrowing from the Celtic heritage,"³ and relates Mainie Jellett's theories to the circular motifs characteristic of the work of Joyce, Beckett and Flann O'Brien.⁴ Richard Kearney suggests that le Brocquy's work may be "located in the tension between the revivalist and modernist impulses of contemporary Irish culture."⁵

Irish visual modernism, then, may be seen as sharing with Irish literary modernism an element of the archaic, embodying pre- or anti-Enlightenment values, represented for example by the Celtic elements in le Brocquy, the Celtic and religious elements in Jellett, and the Romantic Expressionism of Jack Yeats. There are closer similarities between the poles of "tradition" and "modernity" in Irish culture than might be supposed at first view.⁶

In one sense the tensions between, for example, modernism, Romanticism and realism in Irish culture are a subset of the same tensions in the wider European context. While Irish literary realism is not a serious contender against literary modernism⁷, visual realism, for example in the work of Seán Keating, offered a staunch rearguard action against visual modernism. Keating's work might be said to parallel the work of the literary realists (for example Gorky and Thomas Mann) lauded by the Marxist cultural conservative Georg Lukacs in preference to modernists such as Kafka and Joyce⁸ (though again, one could conceive of Keating's work as falling foul of the kinds of strictures Lukacs launched against the "Romantic" extremes to which socialist realism could go if it was not careful)^9.

Lukacs's anti-modernist attitude derived from his opposition to "irrationalist," formalist, subjective, "decadent," anti-Enlightenment, modernist trends, since he equated irrationalism with fascism.¹⁰ Indeed, partly for political and partly for aesthetic reasons, Keating's national realist paintings are fashionably regarded with something like the same dismissive attitude that, within a Marxist context, the pro-modernist Adorno reserved for the social realism admired by Lukacs.¹¹ In Adorno's view, art provides knowledge of reality by revealing whatever is veiled by the form which reality assumes, and it is art's autonomous status that makes this possible. The "authentic works" of modern literature:

objectify themselves by immersing themselves totally, monadologically, in the laws of their own forms, laws which are aesthetically rooted in their own social content. It is this alone which gives the works of Joyce, Beckett and modern composers their power. The voice of the age echoes through their monologues: this is why they excite us so much more than works that simply depict the world in narrative form.¹²

For Adorno, Beckett's plays deal with a specific historical reality: "the abdication of the subject." However, "The spell they cast, which also binds them, is lifted by being reflected in them." The inescapability of the effect of Beckett (and Kafka) compels a change of attitude to the world (i.e. to capitalism).¹³ This is the crux of the Marxist theoretical defence of modernism.

Visual realism, then, in Ireland in the early part of this century was undercut not just by 'progressive' modernism but also by 'regressive' nationalism and Romanticism--with the same kinds of problematic political implications (one of Keating's paintings is entitled The Race of the Gael) as may be seen in the context of national Romanticism on the continent.

If a major difference between Irish and Continental modernism involved the crucial role of 'archaic" national elements in the former, other differences include the predominance of women, largely Anglo-Irish, among leading Irish modernist painters.¹⁴ Irish women artists, whether modernist or contemporary¹⁵, have never been 'marginalised' like their sisters elsewhere (and are thus perhaps disappointing fodder for the academic retrieval industry). Mention might be made of prominent Irish modernist painters like Letitia Hamilton, May Guinness, Mary Swanzy, Evie Hone, Nano Reid and Norah McGuinness as well as Jellett. Another contrast was the comparative lack of a theoretical perspective in Irish visual modernism, and the absence, as Eagleton points out, of an Irish avant garde.¹⁶ There was also the lingering strength in Ireland of nationalism, with its cult of the West, and Romanticism. (Although Jack Yeats was influenced by Continental modernists like Van Gogh and Rouault, a similar national Romanticism characterises his work as does that of his brother W. B. Yeats. As Kearney points out, a primary purpose of the Irish Literary Revival was to counter the influence of Enlightenment materialism through a sense of spiritual continuity with what had gone before.)¹⁷

To sum up, Irish modernist painting, like Irish modernist literature, may be seen as a field where issues of class, gender, nationality and cultural politics are played out. That is, it should be said, from the perspective of a sociological analysis which is itself multiply problematic. While post-modernism may incoherently deny 'truth' (the statement "there is no truth" is manifestly self-contradictory¹⁸) Marxism lays claim to a truth-content which appears, at base, to have no other grounding than intuitive persuasiveness. In its endorsement of the work ethic and economic values including growth, a 'determining' (whatever that may mean) economic level and a corresponding tendency towards ethical and aesthetic reductivism; in its dedication to the explanatory concepts of material need and use-value, and a crucial blind spot regarding the economic role of women, Marxism can be seen as, in many ways, a mirror-image of the system it ostensibly opposes. (Which is not to say that useful insights may not be gained in the mirror.¹⁹)

But within the unstable spectrum from Marxism to post-modernism that constitutes current theoretical discourse, it has to be admitted that there is great potential for people to write theses, articles and books on the literary-visual connections within Irish culture.²⁰ (The reason why more has not been made of these connections may include labour-demarcations within the academic mode of production, a widespread ignorance of Irish art due to the downgrading of the visual within Irish education, and the general national predominance of a low visual aesthetic, manifest in 'bungalow blitz' and ecclesiastical kitsch.) Such analyses could make productive use of the indications of a general Irish cultural suspicion of the totalising, dominant "scopic regime" of Enlightenment modernity²¹. Modernism, not just in its Irish form perhaps, may be paradoxically, and quintessentially, anti-modern.

Two millennia ago, Julius Caesar chided the Celts--in contrast to the sober Romans--for being (in Jane Gardner's paraphrase) "impulsive, emotional, easily swayed, fickle, loving change, credulous, prone to panic, scatter-brained."²² Ethnic stereotypes are nothing new. But in a way Caesar was right--for cultural not biological reasons I hasten to add. There was little prospect of a Celtic empire ever developing in Europe, even if the Gallic wars had not culminated in the ritual strangling of Vercingetorix in Rome. But, given Celtic cultural values and life-style, there was equally little prospect of a Celtic threat to the Antarctic ice sheet. The current industrial danger to the global environment has its roots in a complex going back to Roman imperialism, Renaissance perspectivalism, the Reformation, Cartesian dualism, Enlightenment instrumental rationality, and industrial capitalism (not to mention its mirror-image in industrial socialism). The revolutionary energies of Marxism, with its roots in Enlightenment rationality, have been supplanted in contemporary political culture by a libertarian ecologism.²³ This in turn, in some ways, resonates with the 'traditional' pre-Enlightenment values that are currently being swamped in Ireland by a rampant petty bourgeoisie--a materialistic culture empathising with its billions.²⁴ The upside of this vulgar prosperity, perhaps, will be an efflorescence of visual culture which, back to 'Marxist' economism, tends to follow the graph of a nation's wealth. But it is to be hoped that in a broad sense Irish culture--and cultural analysis--may have a role to play in resisting the domination and destruction which has been the downside of modernity.²⁵

¹Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork: Cork University Press/Field Day, 1996, pp. 6, 161.
²Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture, Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988, p. 194.
³Quoted in Kearney, op. cit., p. 200. See Dorothy Walker (ed.), Louis le Brocquy, Ward River Press, 1981, p. 44.
⁴Dorothy Walker, Modern Art in Ireland, Dublin: Lilliput, 1997, p. 26.
⁵Kearney, op. cit., p. 202.
⁶Luke Gibbons sees nineteenth-century Irish literature, for example the multiple narratives of Maturin and the "colloquy of voices" in Bram Stoker's Dracula, as evincing a form of proto-modernism. Luke Gibbons, op. cit., p. 6.
⁷As Eagleton points out, in a nineteenth century context, "literary realism requires certain cultural preconditions, few of which were available in Ireland. The realist novel is the form par excellence of settlement and stability, gathering individual lives into an integrated whole, and social conditions in Ireland hardly lent themselves to any such sanguine reconciliation...Classical realism depends on the assumption that the world is story-shaped--that there is a well-formed narrative implicit in reality itself, which it is the task of such realism to represent." Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, London: Verso, 1995, p. 147.
⁸Fintan Cullen juxtaposes Keating and Jellett in a realist/modernist dichotomy. See Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland 1750-1930, Cork: Cork University Press, 1997. See also Georg Lukacs, Realism in the Balance, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. editor Ronald Taylor, London: NLB, 1977, pp. 28-59.
⁹Presentation 4, Aesthetics and Politics, p. 145.
¹⁰See Presentation 1 in Aesthetics and Politics, p. 10. The subjectivity and abstraction of artists like Jellett and Le Brocquy would place them potentially in the same line of fire as e.g. Joyce, from defenders of realism like Lukacs. (See Lukacs, op. cit., pp. 28-59. On Jellett/Joyce etc., see Walker, op. cit., p. 26.)
¹¹See Theodor Adorno, Reconciliation Under Duress, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., pp. 151-176.
¹²Adorno, op. cit., p. 166.
¹³Theodor Adorno, Commitment, trans. Francis McDonagh, in Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., pp. 190-191.
¹⁴In Eagleton's terms, modernism with its formalism, aestheticism and cult of autonomy, offered the Anglo-Irish an ersatz identity. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, London: Verso, 1995, p. 300.
¹⁵In a contemporary context one might mention Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross, Alanna O'Kelly, Alice Maher, Abigail O'Brien, Cecily Brennan, and Gwen O'Dowd.
¹⁶"If there is a high modernism in Ireland, there is little or no avant-garde--little of that iconoclastic experiment which seeks to revolutionize the very conception and institution of art itself, along with its relations to political society." Eagleton, op. cit., p. 299.
¹⁷Kearney, op. cit., p. 11. (Kearney also sees W. B. Yeats as a "proto-modernist," p.20.)
¹⁸If there is no truth then there is at least one thing that is true, viz. that there is no truth, therefore it is not the case that there is no truth.
¹⁹One might also mention, in a political sense, centralism and large-scale production. The replacement of the Soviet system by a kind of criminal capitalism, and the development of China as a reserve of cheap labour for Western capital, may be seen as the final political nails in the coffin of Marxism's utopian aspirations. On a positive note, though, there has been the--welcome--'greening' of Cuba (see Hugh Warwick, Cuba's Organic Revolution, The Ecologist, Vol. 29, No. 8, December. 1999, pp. 457-460).
²⁰One might also cite, in a contemporary context, Seán Scully's visual references to the work of Joyce and Beckett. See Walker, op. cit., p. 163.
²¹See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
²²Julius Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul, trans. S. A. Handford, Revised and Introd. Jane Gardner, London: Penguin, 1982, p. 15.
²³For example, the recent demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle.
²⁴"If in popular parlance it is said of someone that 'he is loaded; he has five million marks,' the 'racial community' [Volksgemeinschaft] itself likewise feels that it is 'loaded' with a few billion; it empathizes with those billions." Walter Benjamin, Reply [to Theodor Adorno], trans. Harry Zohn, Aesthetics and Politics, op. cit., p. 140.
²⁵A phenomenon in regard to which Marxism has been both explanatory key and--historically--disastrous political participant.

Paul O'Brien lectures in Aesthetics and tutors final-year and postgraduate students. His publications have been in the areas of art, culture and technology and he recently edited Thought Lines 3, an anthology of research based on NCAD thesis work. His current interests are in the areas of interactive art and virtual reality.

Article reproduced from From the Edge: Art and Design in C20th Ireland, a special accompanying CIRCA 92, Summer 2000, produced in collaboration with the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.