A new exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art in Boston challenges traditional notions of Irish history and assumptions about land-based nationalism writes Anna Mundow.
At this time of year in every American city, a Seamus Heaney poem will surely be quoted to select groups of Irish-Americans who mark St Patrick's Day with culture, not green beer. The poet's lines have become the paper ruffle on the rack of lamb at any respectable fundraising dinner. In Boston, however, Heaney's poem, Bogland, is currently employed as more than a decorative flourish. Occupying an entire wall, it greets visitors to the Éire/Land exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College with an Irish demurral. "We have no prairies/ To slice a big sun at evening..." What we have, this fascinating exhibition insists, is watery, contested land that has shaped our idea of who we are and who others think we are.
Presenting over one hundred pieces from public and private collections in Ireland and the US - some on view for the first time - Éire/Land spans seven centuries, ranges from medieval manuscripts to video installations and challenges Irish-America in particular to revise some of its comfortable notions about the Old Sod and, by extension, assumptions about land-based nationalism.
"The danger of creating a too narrowly nationalistic narrative was a concern for me," explains Vera Kreilkamp, editor of the sumptuous Éire/Land catalogue, "but the contributions of an English and European landscape tradition are evident throughout the exhibition. So the imagery itself tells a story not of a nationalist or purely Celtic country, but of a deeply hybrid one." While Irish audiences are re-evaluating Paul Henry at the National Gallery, visitors to the McMullen Museum are asked to reconsider Irish landscape and history as they enjoy some of their favourite images, Henry's among them, and struggle perhaps with modern artists like Dorothy Cross.
Divided into four sections - Mapping, Digging, Possessing, and Responding Today - Éire/Land includes paintings by Thomas Roberts, George Barret, James Arthur O'Connor, Nathaniel Hone, Jack Yeats, Paul Henry, Sean Keating and works by contemporary artists, many of them associated with the Ballinglen Artists Fellowship in Co Mayo. At first glance, this could be another "aren't we great" Irish show. There are replicas of the Tara Brooch and the Ardagh Chalice and some romantic landscapes. But you are instructed to look beneath the surface.
"For urban viewers, especially urban Americans, the appeal of this alternative or 'natural' world is powerful and enduring," Marjorie Howes and Kevin O'Neill write in the catalogue, referring to representational landscapes. "But the material history reveals that, far from being raw or untamed, the rural Ireland we see today is the product of several thousand years of human engagement with the physical environment." The first example of that engagement is a delightful shocker. Topographia Hibernica, an illustrated manuscript by Gerald of Wales, depicts, among other wonders, a woman having intercourse with a goat and a king mating with a mare then drinking its blood. Produced around 1210 and on loan from the British Library, this manuscript is the text's earliest version and one of history's earliest propaganda tracts.
The Irish, Gerald wrote, ". . . live on beasts only, and live like beasts". Portraying the natives as licentious barbarians, he supplied the political and moral rationalisation for Henry II's conquest of Ireland. The required papal bull cited the island's immorality when it approved Henry's annexation.
A later, less raunchy, but equally fanciful case for enlightened rule is made in the Illuminated Address presented to the Earl of Hillsborough by his tenants in 1865, a glorious gilt-tooled volume which confidently invokes the feudal ideal of good stewardship. Vignettes in the illuminated borders depict residences and lodges, mills and workshops co-existing harmoniously within the natural order and pastoral scenes unmarred by disagreeable peasants or post-Famine disruption You could spend hours on the maps, exquisite decorated examples from the British Library, from Boston College's extensive Irish Collection, the University's Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections and elsewhere. From The Drapers' Company of the City of London, for example, comes The Buildings Belonging to The Company of Drapers at Monnemore in Sir Thomas Phillips' Survey of Ulster, 1622.
Rendered in ink and watercolour, bound in calfskin, the manor house, half-timbered dwellings and cottages might have been drawn by a child while the script is elegant and the language precise. "Freeholders" are "resident", "British men" are "present" and "natives" are simply "on" the property.
The question of who belongs where is one that Éire/Land poses cunningly and wisely leaves unanswered, allowing the exhibits themselves to draw you into the identity puzzle. Studying Joan Blaeu's 1654 map Hibernia Amsterdamus, for example, or Herman Moll's 1732 Counties of Sligo and Mayo, Petty's 1685 Hiberniae Delineatio or the 1837 Ordnance Survey Index to Townland and Survey of County Meath, you look for the familiar - a home place or family name. Did we exist then? The wall text explains that maps drawn for exploratory, military or economic reasons invariably erased or replaced peoples and lands to facilitate the particular mission. (Ironically, the Ordnance Survey album on display belonged to Daniel O'Connell and was an indispensable tool in the planning of his rallies). But perusing these maps dramatises that erasure. You find yourself reading the document for what is not there.
In the Digging section, we seem to be back on - or underneath - familiar ground. But it's not that simple. The exquisitely plain penannular brooches from the seventh and ninth centuries are originals. The Tara Brooch, Ardagh Brooch and Ardagh Chalice, however, are 19th century reproductions. That's the point. Éire/Land illustrates how 19th century cultural nationalists reproduced and circulated such objects to promote the image of Ireland as an ancient European civilisation and Irish ground as a treasure repository.
Similarly, George Petrie's watercolours St Brigit's Well and Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise resurrected the idea of a rich Irish devotional culture.
Moving on from Petrie's moodiness, you are pulled up short by a series of political cartoons from the Weekly Freeman.
Dated 1882 to 1888 and protesting eviction, the illustrations seem crudely overt. Like a loud commercial break, they momentarily derail the exhibition's intention to suggest rather than preach.
The detour is short, however, and ideology again yields to subtlety at the heart of the exhibition, Possessing: Irish Landscapes 1750-1950.
The intellectual thread connecting the 26 paintings is strong. These are representations of an Irish landscape shaped by colonisation and beautification, romanticised by landowners and nationalists alike.
A Landstorm with Waterfall, 1769, by Thomas Roberts seems to draw Ireland into the turbulent ruin and decay school of English and European Romanticism while George Barret's Extensive Landscape, mid-18th century, typifies the serene aspect of romantic landscape painting.
By contrast, James O'Connor's The Pleasure Grounds, Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, 1818, and Ballinrobe House depicts an Irish estate organised along English and Continental park ideals which airbrushed unpleasant poverty from view.
Later paintings by William McEvoy, Nathaniel Hone and George William Russell, most from private collections, are intended to illustrate the creation of an "Irish sublime": those of Maurice Craig, Charles Lamb, Paul Henry and Sean Keating to show the mythologising of the west of Ireland.
But the works eliciting the most delighted reactions last week were more modest. The tiny sketchbooks of Jack B. Yeats, from the Cormac O'Malley collection and rarely exhibited, offer an intimate glimpse of the artist capturing an islandview or a kitchen scene. Of the seven Yeats paintings on display, from the J. Connors, O'Malley, Brian P. Burns and Friends of Boston College Collections, perhaps the most surprising is Evening in Spring, 1937, an interior scene of figures at dinner and a radiant landscape that dominates the background and seems to overwhelm the domestic interior.
Downstairs at the McMullen, Responding Today displays contemporary interpretations of the west, chiefly Mayo, with representational images by painters like Eric Aho, Cynthia Knott and Peter Brooke and expressionist, abstract and installation works by artists like Gwen O'Dowd, Davis Brewster, Jane Proctor and Kathy Herbert. Loss in general and the Famine in particular loom large, culminating in a model of Brian Tolle's Irish Hunger Memorial in New York, an ambitious, widely-acclaimed structure which here resembles a mini-golf course.
Far more affecting is Fergus Bourke's photograph Famine Burial Ground/Flight 133 to Boston which shows a stunted tree on a bare hillside and a jet trail in the dark sky above. "Perhaps better than any words, this image invokes the powerful dynamic that Éire/Land was designed to represent," the catalogue observes, "the dynamic that continues to connect, and to distance, the land and the people, the local and the global, absence and presence, past and present."
Éire/Land runs at the McMullen Museum of Modern Art, Boston College, until May 19th. For details about the exhibition see the website at www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/artmuseum/