Output details

Art in Ireland Since 1910

This is the first monograph to examine art in Ireland during the twentieth century and covers art practice in the Republic, Northern Ireland and Irish artists working abroad. The book initially attracted funding from the AHRB under the Research Leave Scheme in 2001-2002, with the majority of the picture research, rights and reproduction funded in 2011-2012 by a British Academy Small Research Grant.

The chronological structure is underpinned by a critical awareness of colonialism, post-colonialism, and diaspora, critiques of nation and post-nationalism, modernism, modernity and the postmodern. It situates Irish art within the expanding discourse of global art histories. These contexts – in addition to further factors of gender and sexuality - mediate interpretations of the primary research, carried out in public and private archives and collections in conjunction with interviews with artists, gallery owners and collectors. The picture research was also a major project lasting approximately eight months and included the photography of works either rarely or never before reproduced.

Major figures such as Jack Yeats, Francis Bacon or Louis le Brocquy are considered in relation to other artists less well known outside Ireland. Contemporary artists include Dorothy Cross, Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty. Text and image combine to provide a considered narrative that seeks to rectify the invisibility of most Irish art throughout the century while ensuring its place within the complexity and vibrancy of debates around global visual culture and art.

Reviewed in Irish Arts Review Summer 2013 by Catherine Marshall

Cited in Andrew Stephenson Visual Culture in Britain 14:1, 2013: special edition: Edwardian Art and its Legacies, ‘Introduction: Edwardian Art and its Legacies’ p.4.

This monograph has been the overwhelming focus of my research since 2008, considerably limiting my ability to produce other substantial outputs. An extensive range of primary sources held in institutions and archives or by private individuals in Ireland were first identified and then collected, while the picture research took a further year to complete. The undeveloped field of Irish art history, and the lack of any preceding art historical survey of the same period of intensive political and cultural change, also necessitated the development of methodologies applicable both to the ordering of this material and the processes of its analysis.