CULTURAL STUDIES: The Yeats Brothers and Modernism's Love of MotionBy Calvin Bedient University of Notre Dame Press, 385pp. $48
THIS IS A difficult book to describe or classify; it is very much a work with a thesis, but in itself is a good deal more ambitious than a thesis. In fact, its very ambition tends to make it rather dense or prolix at times, and so many pundits, thinkers and authorities in various fields are invoked that the quotations from them almost tend to cancel each other out. A central colour section reproduces a number of Jack Yeats paintings, most of them familiar or even, by this stage, relatively over-familiar.
It should be borne in mind, however, that in the US Jack Yeats has not yet attained anything like the degree of canonisation he reached in Ireland at least a generation ago, if not two generations. (In my youth, he was a revered national figure, so much above criticism that there was inevitably a reaction shortly after his death.) In New York or the West Coast, however, he does not bulk large in the consciousness of the average gallery-goer. Though his work was known and bought by American collectors in his lifetime, American art criticism has often been surprisingly cool or offhand towards him; seemingly he is not within its official brief. Museums there have, in general, been rather slow to acquire his work and the tendency, until recently at any rate, was to regard him as almost a fringe figure – a talented, eccentric and neo-romantic whose isolation places him well outside the mainstream of modernism proper.
Prof Bedient, however, has an almost messianic urge to place him firmly at the heart of modernism, along with his poet-brother, and he is surely right in this. The fact is, 20th-century modernism, a mighty movement in itself, became too soon a rigid academic construct when its course was charted historically.
In most art histories a massive emphasis was laid on the allegedly direct line from Cézanne to cubism, and from there to constructivism, abstraction, and various other schools that stressed formal values above all else. It took a long time for expressionism, for instance, to make its way outside Germany and northern Europe. And figures as contrasting as Chagall, Munch, Bonnard, Rouault and Beckmann all stand outside any formal labelling and even represent, in a sense, an alternative tradition in modernist art to the semi-official, formalist one.
JACK YEATS WAS NOT, strictly speaking, an expressionist, but he has more in common with the figures mentioned than he has, say, with Picasso or Braque or Leger. The parallel sometimes drawn between him and Kokoschka is a false one, as this book points out; Kokoschka's art at core is theatrical and neo-baroque, and he was a flamboyant, self-advertising personality, whereas Yeats generally kept his privacy. Yeats stands behind his work rather than in front of it, but is all the stronger and subtler for that. And I regard him not only as the finer, more sensitive artist of the two, but also as the more quintessentially and searchingly "modern". However, this book is about the brothers Yeats, not merely the painter, and a unique pairing they make. As Prof Bedient portrays them, they have a surprising amount in common in spite of being quite radically different as individuals. On the face of it, WB has stolen most of the thunder with his Nobel Prize, his international visibility (and audibility) and his shrewdness in keeping a literary power base in London while simultaneously becoming Ireland's National Bard. Jack B, however, always had his influential admirers, including Beckett, John Quinn, Kenneth Clark and Thomas MacGreevy; he also had Victor Waddington to push his work, though in his own quiet way he was good at selling his paintings. He was certainly not a "public man" like his brother, but neither was he a social recluse or a bohemian living on the fringe, like Modigliani. And while he did not strike public stances, he was a firm Irish nationalist and even a strong republican, whereas WB in later years sometimes showed a pronounced West Brit slant.
THE BOOK'S MAIN THESIS, as I have understood it, is that both brothers embody modernism in the dynamic, free, almost antinomian sense – an art of fluidity and flux, even unpredictability, with a special emphasis on movement in the most fundamental meaning of the word. Movement, in Prof Bedient's view, is what Jack's work is mainly about and he stresses how his late brushwork expresses both energy and a kind of dynamic indeterminacy that makes it central to its time. (It also, in my opinion, reaches out towards abstract expressionism, which lay only a few years ahead; in fact, Yeats and Jackson Pollock died close together.) Yeats the poet, too, shows a similar dynamic, thrusting energy and unorthodoxy behind his relatively circumspect metres, while the strangeness or even grotesquerie of his very late work has too often been played down.
Seen from this aspect, neo-Georgian set-pieces such as his over-anthologised threnody on Coole Park, and on stately homes in general, are probably little more than a sideshow. (It is almost infuriating, as well as highly comical in some respects, to read today the condescending comments of the Auden-Spender generation on the imposing elder figure whom they thought was old hat, when in reality Yeats was light years ahead of them.)
There is no questioning Prof Bedient’s own energy and involvement; he is genuinely in love with his subject and explores it from various angles, which include modern science as well as art and literary history, psychology, social background, philosophy and so on. The range of references is impressive, though it could have been curbed here and there without any loss of authority, while at other times he gets carried away into a kind of breathless prose poetry – a likeable fault, admittedly, considering the decorous aridity of so much contemporary criticism. And in his thought-provoking views on the relationship between art and 20th-century science, he might fittingly have discussed the greatest of the Futurists, Boccioni, who was very aware of the relationship and not only expressed it in his theoretical writings, but superbly embodied it in his work. (He was also, of course, the greatest exemplar of dynamic movement and fluidity.) Nevertheless, the sheer verve and unorthodoxy this book displays in tackling its highly dualistic subject deserve full respect.
Brian Fallon is a writer and critic. He has just completed a book of essays on various 20th-century painters