Art and Architecture of Ireland has been compiled by a community of scholars committed to overcoming any view of the visual arts as the poor relation in a country celebrated for its literature – a country where, in the words of one contributor, "Irish artists remained in the wings".
Overseen by its general editor, Andrew Carpenter, and supported by private donors – principally the Naughton Foundation – and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Art and Architecture of Ireland is enormous. In two million words and almost 3,000 pages, its five volumes cover 1,600 years of visual culture, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. With 10 independent volume editors and hundreds of additional contributors, the complexity of this project is reflected not only in the range of areas and periods covered but also in its tolerance of differing points of view and organising principles, some far more reader-friendly than others.
And it is accessible: this scholarship responds not just to the need of professionals in the visual arts for a comprehensive resource in their areas but also to the curiosity of ordinary citizens too often shut out by a hermetically sealed international arts criticism.
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The problem of the substantial cost of these handsome and amply illustrated volumes was somewhat mitigated by the news that copies will be given to 32 county libraries and that a digital version will be made available to the country's schools. Teachers and researchers will undoubtedly find that Art and Architecture of Ireland is a valuable reference resource as well as a text for students, but it would be good for lots of other people to discover ways of exploring this scholarship.
A goal for the arts community in its promotion of Irish visual culture might be to ensure that these volumes eventually become available to modestly budgeted students and art lovers in Ireland and abroad. Comprehensive Art and Architecture of Ireland seeks to be fully comprehensive, offering both wide-ranging and more narrowly focused thematic essays, as well as more than 700 detailed critical biographies of Irish artists.
That category is inclusively defined as those Irish born and working at home or abroad, as well those foreign-born artists producing important work in Ireland. In the medieval period, when so many remain anonymous and chronology is uncertain, information appears through detailed thematic essays, with an appendix listing the names of more than 800 artists and craftsmen, along with their scant available biographical details.
Volume I, Medieval Art and Architecture, with its account of Ireland's golden age of early Christian art, extends its reach fully to encompass the Norman period, one neglected by the 19th century's nationalist-framed scholarship that found in the pre-Norman "Celtic" era's art (today retermed "insular art") a valuable sourcebook for its version of Irish identity.
Volume III, Sculpture 1600-2000, offers a comprehensive view of what *Paula Murphy presents as the most neglected genre in the fine arts, one that has deconstructed itself more radically than any other art medium. Taking its cue from international styles, contemporary Irish public sculpture no longer necessarily constitutes a three-dimensional or relief object of lasting material. Instead of John Henry Foley's 19th-century bronze and granite monument to Daniel O'Connell presiding over O'Connell Street, we encountered, for less than a month, Dorothy Cross's ephemeral Ghost Ship, haunting the night-time waters off Dún Laoghaire.
Volume IV, Architecture 1600-2000, with its comprehensive coverage of Ireland's built environment, explores not only the country's infrastructure of roads, walls and canals but also rural domestic cabins and urban housing stock, as well as its more celebrated neoclassical big houses and interiors. Reviews in scholarly journals are needed for each volume, but there is much to celebrate in this extraordinarily ambitious undertaking.
Each volume offers something for specialised interests – see Banner Painting in volume II or Wayside Monuments in volume III – as well as essays on more familiar genres, such as landscape and portraiture or nationalist memorial and Celtic revival sculpture. Throughout, entries track the development of the visual-arts establishment since the 17th century: the creation of exhibition spaces, schools of art, workshops and outlets for criticism, as well as assessments of the shaping role of such criticism on the production of art in the period. As a genre this is an encyclopedic resource, but many essays include so much lively analytic writing addressing unresolved issues that Art and Architecture of Ireland stretches the ordinary conventions of its own form.
Contributions by so many of the country’s major art critics led me to question the decision to follow the standard encyclopedia tradition of burying the identifications of authors in small type at the end of individual articles, with listings of specific contributors available neither in the table of contents nor in the individual index of each volume.
Enlarged scope This project leans on but also vastly enlarges the scope of The Dictionary of Irish Artists, by Walter Strickland, a 1913 achievement creating what one contributor calls the first database of Irish art. Updating that foundational work was an initial goal of Art and Architecture of Ireland, and Strickland's focus on retrieving figures, offering biographies and establishing a canon of fine arts has been now much expanded to encompass a full commitment to medieval art, sculpture and architecture, with some limited exploration of material culture and design. (A full volume addressing the applied arts, including Ireland's impressive contributions in the decorative arts, might be a valuable future project.)
As Strickland excluded living artists, the project's final volume, Twentieth Century, vastly expands the scope of this new print database of Ireland's art – including consideration of postmodernism, photography, performance art and film. Yet if Strickland is the respected predecessor, these volumes insistently move on from his conservative tradition of connoisseurship and retrieval, often turning to newer approaches focusing on the social, economic and political contexts for the production of art.
On occasion the project echoes the work of Irish-studies scholars in the 20th century who reclaimed, from the category of “British” or international modernist literature, the work of William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. Irish-born painters such as Hugh Douglas Hamilton or Daniel Maclise, working for long periods in London and still described as British in some museum signage, are here firmly positioned as part of Ireland’s cultural heritage despite their long careers abroad contributing to an imperial culture. (We are told that even today a Jack Yeats work is labelled British by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)
But claiming Irish identity for locally born artists is not the same as finding, as Luke Gibbons notes in volume V, the availability of indigenous forms to give foreign influence a local habitation. Clearly Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, in their invocations of a “Celtic cubism” with connections to Ireland’s ancient Celtic and medieval art, sought and achieved such habitation through a continental avant-garde style and form in early 20th-century painting. For many other artists working under British and continental influence in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the achievement of a specifically Irish national art was less certain.
Inherent tensions Reading through these volumes, especially volumes II – Painting 1600-1900 – and III, reveals the tensions inherent in creating a national narrative of visual culture for a country colonised for much of its postmedieval, art-producing history. From the conclusion of the final Tudor conquest through the late 19th century, many Irish artists and most private patrons emerged from political and social groups that were alienated not only from the majority population but also, increasingly, from the growing imperial power that they uneasily represented in Ireland. As Tom Dunne asserts in volume II, all art is political by nature, inescapably "expressive of current ideologies and power relations". In what might be its most compelling moments for many readers, Art and Architecture of Ireland makes clear how fully a narrative of visual culture is tied to cultural contexts shaped by political and social history.
The information offered by many essayists implies that a vision of a national art is more an imagined or desired construct than a reality; indeed the very concept of "Irish art" as a distinct category was almost absent from 18th- and 19th-century writing. Gifted local artists travelled to Britain and the Continent for economic and aesthetic reasons; the art they produced there and at home was, for the most part, not particularly national at all but reflected British or continental stylistic influences even when the content might (or might not) be Irish. The editors and many contributors to Art and Architecture of Ireland persistently wrestle with the reality that Thomas Davis's 1843 call for an Irish school of painting was rarely answered, except in forms of visual culture generally excluded from a hierarchical canon of fine art.
Local aesthetic Responses to such failure vary. Explanations for Ireland’s dependence on foreign models in the arts generally focus on a repressed economy and social and political turmoil over centuries of colonial occupation. But equally insistent here are refusals of any apologetic explanations for the island’s assumed belatedness in the visual arts. In counterclaims, editors argue that Ireland was not, in fact, aesthetically “insular” but, rather, far more cosmopolitan and innovative in the sphere of visual culture than assumed.
One of the strongest arguments supporting a strong local aesthetic surfaces in volume IV, on architecture, a volume deeply embedded in historical and social contexts. Its editors assert the uniqueness of Ireland’s built environment as a “vast memory bank” shaping national identity, remarking that, “far from a backwater, Ireland’s architecture constitutes a dynamic stream of concerted creative endeavour that is distinct from the architecture of Britain and Europe.”
Although Rachel Moss can confidently assert that the visual arts, not literary production, dominated Ireland’s medieval period, contributors and editors of subsequent volumes must insistently account for the general perception of a subsequent reversal of the status of the island’s visual culture.
For example, seeking causes for the relatively belated acceptance of modernism in late 19th- and early 20th-century Irish art, voices in several volumes cite a nationalist leadership’s hostility to foreign innovative movements. They register the new state’s promotion of a Celtic revivalism as an inward-looking force long thwarting the Irish arts community in gaining recognition from an international arts community already deeply imbued in modernist practice. Yet Catherine Marshall in volume V is steadfastly upbeat about the pre-eminent role of visual culture by 2000. Since the 1970s, she declares, Irish art has “come of age”: if the literary renaissance dominated the first few decades of the century, an Irish artistic renaissance dominated its end.
Vera Kreilkamp is a professor of Irish studies at Boston College, in Massachusetts.
*This article was amended on 19/01/2015
