Encounters with Jack B. Yeats; Episode 4 - The Visitor
For the fourth episode of ‘Encounters with Jack B. Yeats,’ The Model, home of the Niland Collection presents ‘The Visitor.’ A radio play directed by Isabel Claffey, with the roles of the visitor and the artist, played respectively by Yuji Shimobayashi and Ultan Burke. This short radio play was adapted from an essay by Shotaro Oshima (1899-1980), a Japanese scholar-poet and later professor of English Literature in Waseda University, Tokyo. In this essay, Shotaro described a visit to Jack B. Yeats’s studio in Fitzwilliam Square on a rainy summer’s day in 1938.
Jack B. Yeats in his Devon home, c.1900, with his dog, Hooligan. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, ©Yeats Archive. From the late 1920s, Jack’s artistic style was to change radically, and Jack compares these changes to the similar wayward revolution in the use of language by James Joyce. During the inter-war years, the artist’s line becomes subsumed within a torrent of rich impastoed paint. He was drawing in colour, even though he had begun his artistic career as a draughtsman, earning his living as a comic artist and illustrator from the 1880s, where he used the pseudonym, W. Bird for the cartoons he drew for the satirical magazine ‘Punch'.
Two years before the interview with Shotaro, Jack painted a series of visionary works underpinned by mythological themes: ‘California,’ ‘A Race in Hy Brazil’ and ‘Helen.’ This latter work is discussed in the interview with Shotaro, as is another important oil painting by the artist, ‘Death for Only One,’ which the writer, revolutionary fighter and close friend to the artist, Ernie O’Malley purchased after seeing the work in the artist’s studio. The composition of ‘Death for Only One’ suggests the civil war period in Ireland, and was possibly one of the reasons, why Ernie O’Malley was initially drawn to this darkly painted and emotive work.
The stylistic changes that took place within Jack’s work during these years were out of step with French and English trends, and as the art historian, E.M. Gombrich wrote, they were ‘…irrigated neither by the Seine nor by the Thames.’ Jack was going his own way – carving out his own path, as his work became increasingly experimental and expressionist in the application of paint and in his way of capturing light, but he never goes towards complete abstraction, as the figure always remained ‘somewhere’ within the perspectival plane, whether ephemeral, temporal or rooted in the landscape – these figures of blasted humanity were subsumed within flares of quavering electrified colour, where the artist carried out the high-risk balancing act between representation and materiality, as he described himself, in what sounds very close to a personal manifesto - or a ‘way of being’ - in his radio interview with the young broadcaster Eamonn Andrews in October 1947: ‘There is only one art and that is the art of living. Painting is an occupation within that art, and that occupation is the freest of all the occupations of living. There is no alphabets. No grammar, no rules whatever. Many hopeful sportsman have tried to invent rules and have always failed. Any person or group of persons who tried to legalise such rules do a disservice to this occupation of living. They forget that… that painting is tactics and not strategy. It is carried out in the face of the enemy.’
In the 1938 interview with Shotaro, Jack talks about his work not selling well in Ireland, as it wasn’t until 1942, that his career had a firm foothold within the English art scene, and this was with the joint exhibition between the artist and William Nicholson at the National Gallery in London. By 1945, his reputation as Ireland’s leading modern artist was fully confirmed with The Yeats National Loan Exhibition in the National College of Art in Dublin. By this time, Jack was 74 years old.
