The culture of art in 1880s Ireland and the genealogy of Irish modernism

ABSTRACT

The emergence of Irish modernism over recent decades as a distinct sub-field within modernist studies and Irish studies has frequently seen the alignment of advanced aesthetics with various quests for cultural progress. This emphasis on the socio-political origins and ends of many art works and artists from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century, however, largely draws on a narrow characterisation of late-nineteenth-century Ireland as a terrain of cultural turmoil and fracture, marked by linguistic decline and agrarian conflict. This constitutes a partial evidential and ideological basis for tracing a genealogy of Irish modernism. Among various occlusions, such a construction elides the ideology of the aesthetic itself, as well as its attendant cultures and institutions, as they operated in Ireland. Focusing on the institutionalisation and mediation of the nineteenth century’s culture of art, this article considers the specific terms in which aesthetics and politics were already imbricated in writing on the visual arts in Ireland during the 1880s. It seeks to illustrate how aesthetic ideologies and desires also constituted, alongside other social and political conditions, the field of cultural production from which Irish modernism emerged.

KEYWORDS:

• Art writing
• aestheticism
• museum culture
• periodical culture
• modernism
• cultural nationalism

Notes

1. Eileen McCarvill, witness statement, Bureau of Military History 1913–21, WS1752, Military Archives, Ireland.

2. O’Malley and Dolan, Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley, 451.

3. Lloyd, “On Republican Reading,” 80.

4. Ibid., 94.

5. Shanahan, “Prehistory of Irish Modernist Fiction,” 33.

6. McDonald, “Irish Revival and Modernism,” 51.

7. Eagleton, Heathcliff, 297, as quoted in McDonald, “Irish Revival and Modernism,” 58.

8. Such an opposition has been formative to much anglophone Marxist cultural criticism concerned with modernism, not least through the wide influence exerted by the New Left Review compiled anthology Aesthetics and Politics (1977), which reprints a series of interconnected debates made along such lines in relation to the “persisting influence of Expressionism among the writers of the German Left in the 1920s and 30s” (Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” 196).

9. Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry, 29–30.

10. Wilson Foster, Colonial Consequences, 51.

11. McDonald, “Irish Revival and Modernism,” 59.

12. Lloyd, Ireland after History, 37.

13. Carville, Ends of Ireland, 98.

14. Deane, Strange Country, 53.

15. Frazier, “Irish Modernisms,” 118, 121.

16. Armstrong, Radical Aesthetic, 54.

17. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 4.

18. Bourdieu, Distinction, 483.

19. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 37.

20. Deane, Strange Country, 74.

21. Davis, Literary and Historical Essays, 160–161. For more on Davis’s writings on Ireland’s art institutions, see Cullen, Ireland on Show, 11–16.

22. Deane, Strange Country, 207–8; Lloyd, “Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller,” 162.

23. Siegel, Desire and Excess, xxiv–v.

24. Davis, “Spirit of the Nation,” 248.

25. Bourke, Story of Irish Museums, 223–4.

26. Turpin, School of Art in Dublin, 167.

27. Somerville-Large, Story of the National Gallery of Ireland, 90–106.

28. Dublin International Exhibition of Arts and Manufacture, 87–186.

29. Cullen, Ireland on Show, 14.

30. Bourke, Story of Irish Museums, 193. On this institution’s formation, also see: Crooke, Creation of a National Museum in Ireland, 100–128.

31. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 35.

32. Hayley, “A reading and thinking nation”; Kearney, Navigations, 76.

33. For example: Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture, 137–158; Nic Ghabhann, Medieval Ecclesiastical Buildings in Ireland, 106–35, 204–221.

34. Kiberd and Mathews, Handbook of the Irish Revival, 484–5.

35. Yeats, Autobiographies, 169.

36. Kelly, “Parnell and the Rise of Irish Literature,” 4.

37. Levitas, Theatre of Nation, 2–3.

38. “Introductory,” 1.

39. “The Irish Industrial Movement: 1.–The Exhibition of 1882,” 1–2; “South Kensington in Ireland,” 2; Pentland [John Pentland Mahaffy], “Aesthetics and ‘Aesthetes’: No. 1,” 8–9; “Half-hours in the Dublin National Gallery,” 9–10; John Todhunter, “Art and the Stage in London,” 10–11; “Recent Publications on Art,” 15; “Ceramic Exhibition at Cork,” 16.

40. Johnston, “Introductory: The Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, 1823–1885,” 1–4.

41. “Figure Subjects,” 6–9.

42. Dublin University Review: Illustrated Art Supplement (March 1886).

43. Bagenal, “Edward Smith, an Irish Sculptor”; Chaloner Smith, “James Macardell.”

44. Jones, “William Mulready,” 135.

45. Chaudhry, Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print, 64.

46. Kennedy, “Flamboyant, Gothic, Romanesque,” 17.

47. Pentland [John Pentland Mahaffy], “Aesthetics and ‘Aesthetes’: No. 1,” 8.

48. Irish, “A man called Mahaffy,” 846–65.

49. “South Kensington in Ireland,” 2.

50. Bourke, Story of Irish Museums, 194.

51. Eagleton, Heathcliff, 285.

52. Chaudhry, Yeats, 47, 273–4.

53. “The Royal Hibernian Academy.”

54. Dublin University Review: Illustrated Art Supplement (March 1886), 28.

55. Poynter, Ten Lectures on Art, 115–34.

56. “Must Irishman be Irish.”

57. Eagleton, Heathcliff, 285.

58. Morris, “Socialism in Dublin and Yorkshire,” 43. For an account of the trip, see Lane, Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 129–31.

59. Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art & Signs of Change, 90–1.

60. Gwynn, Experiences of a Literary Man, 43–4.

61. Morris, Earthly Paradise, 2.