VISUAL ART: FINTAN CULLENreviews The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970sEdited by Enrique Juncosa and Christina Kennedy Irish Museum of Modern Art, 596pp (647 illustrations, 508 in colour). €70
THIS IS A HUGE BOOK. It weighs three kilos, looks beautiful and offers a rich pictorial history of modernist painting, sculpture, architecture, photography and other arts in Ireland from 1900 to the 1970s. It is ostensibly the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art between October 2010 and February this year, yet the book did not appear for some time after the closure of the exhibition.
I presume it was never expected that visitors would have used it while walking around the two wings and 36 rooms of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham given over to the display, so its postexhibition arrival should not concern those who enjoyed what the director of Imma and co-editor of this book, Enrique Juncosa, describes as one of the most ambitious projects Imma has ever organised.
That said, the book is more of a stand-alone publication than a catalogue. It contains 11 essays and a foreword by Juncosa. The nearly 500 exhibits are listed by artist at the back of the book; the real body of the volume includes the essays and the high-quality illustrations. The essays, sensibly, focus on the rich array of material gathered for the exhibition, and the authors constantly refer to the wonderful illustrations. Such frequent reference shows the essays are united in a common ambition to tease out, through material visual objects, Ireland’s relationship with the modern and modernism in the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
They are a mixture of grand surveys, a selection of thoughts on a given topic and then two very close examinations of key modernist exhibits. This mixture offers variety yet can be frustrating. The quality and number of illustrations are such that this book will long serve as a vital resource on informing us about the range of artistic activity during the period.
By contrast, some of the survey essays do not really alter received opinion on issues such as the clash between early 20th-century modernism and the Celtic Revival (Robert O'Byrne), postwar art (Aidan Dunne, of The Irish Times, and Christina Kennedy), modernist architecture (Ellen Rowley) and music (Brian Cass). Other essays are somewhat rambling and do not allow the reader to truly engage with the visual material being discussed (Bruce Arnold on the Yeats family and modernism or Theo Dorgan on poetry and film). The best essays are the very focused discussions of Samuel Beckett's Film (1965), by David Lloyd, and Luke Gibbons on James Coleman's Pheasant(circa 1970). Gibbons contributes two further and longer essays, one that deals largely with the relationship between Ireland and surrealism and another on photography.
In these essays by Lloyd and Gibbons, we learn a lot about the nature of modernism in a variety of art forms, be it painting, film or photography. Lloyd discusses themes of alienation and introspection with sensitivity and care in a fascinating comparison between Beckett’s venture into celluloid and his admiration for the now little-known Dutch artist Bram van Velde. But it is in Gibbons’s two long essays that the extent of modernist interventions into Irish life is brought home to the reader. His observations on the disjuncture between image and reality in 20th-century Ireland are original and deeply reflective. He ends his essay on photography by asking us to look carefully at a 1970 Fergus Bourke print of a couple sitting in Busáras, “tenderly holding on to one another like teenagers, luggage in front, while the giant windows of the Busáras building illuminate the background. De Valera’s dream of a forum for ‘the wisdom of serene old age’ finds its expression, not by the fireside in a thatched cottage, but in one of the iconic monuments to Irish modernism.”
We are not told about the publication history of this volume, and why it appeared after the close of the exhibition; such an occurrence must have been intentional, because it has allowed the volume to contain double-page illustrations of the hang at Imma. These images are wonderfully informative of curatorial considerations. Editorial generosity usually means that the individual art object, be it a painting by Anne Madden, a chair designed by Eileen Gray or a cover for an album of Paddy Kavanagh reading his work, is given a full spread later on. Such a concern with making everything available postexhibition is a most welcome feature of this publication, and such largesse means that we must be seriously grateful to the sponsors for this project: the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport, BNP Paribas, E-Bow, The Irish Times, RTÉ and various anonymous sponsors.
Modernism and Ireland is a subject that has intrigued a range of academic authors in many fields. This exhibition and this publication are unique in the multidisciplinary nature of the Imma project. By allowing the visitor to roam through a wide selection of paintings, sculptures, architectural drawings, films and design creations, the original exhibition offered us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see how modernism broke through the heavy weight of traditionalism.
This book makes the temporality of the exhibition visit permanent, equipped as it is with shots of the Imma displays, individualised images of the art works and its series of informed essays. Through it both the show The Moderns and the Ireland it explored can look forward to numerous further interpretations.
Fintan Cullen is professor of art history at the University of Nottingham. His latest book, Ireland on Show: Art, Union, and Nationhood, will be published by Ashgate in March next year