www.thepanicartist.com Today I went with my girlfriend to The
National Gallery so we could see the new exhibition given over to Jake
B Yeats. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this beloved
Irish painter and this show is just one of a number dedicated to him
this year. Jake B Yeats was the son of John Butler Yeats a great Irish
****trait painter and draughtsman and William Butler Yeats - Ireland's
greatest poet. But nearly the whole Yeats family were talented
painters, draughtsmen, embroiders, musician, poets and playwrights - a
strong case for genetics! The Yeats family are central to Irish social
history from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the
twentieth century. You cannot understand Ireland if you have not come
to terms with this wonderfully creative Irish family's contribution to
painting, drawing, poetry, mysticism, The Irish Revival, Irish
Nationalism, The Easter Rising The Irish Republic and the gossip
columns of Ireland's newspapers. Ironically this quintessential Irish
family were not Catholics at all - they were Protestant Anglo-Irish -
what are called 'West-Brits' in Irish slang. The unrequited love of
William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne is such a romantic epic in
Ireland, that I can remember my mother warning me: "Don't end up like
Yeats! He threw his life away waiting for Maud Gonne to love him!"
While W.B. Yeats the poet has a world wide reputation his brother Jack
is sadly known only in the United Kingdom.
As the years pass I grow fonder and fonder of Yeats' paintings. I have
always liked them since I was a teenager - but I was never really sure
whether my love for his work was critically naive or misjudged. His
later works are some of the hardest works for the conventional art
lover to appreciate. But he only came to his last reckless style after
a life time drawing from life or drawing from memory. At times the
late canvases can be quite awful - a mess. Yeats painted over 2,000
oil paintings so there is bound to be some dross. But at his best in
his late works he sets line and colour free to play across the canvas
- and look close - the drawing is bold and assured. The magic of these
works is the way we the viewers are encouraged to read the forms and
move with them. But then don't taken my word for it - reputable
foreigner painters like Oskar Kokoschka and Lucian Freud and the Irish
playwright Samuel Beckett were fans of his work.
Over time I have grown stronger in the conviction that Yeats was the
greatest Irish painter - one who captured the spirit of the Irish
people better than many other artist some of whom were technically
more skilled painters. No he was not a world rate painter like
Picasso, Beckman, or even Pollock but he was a worthy younger brother
to artists like Georges Rouault, James Esnor, and Oscar Kokoschka.
Like them his paintings take a hard look at some of the harsher and
more unjust aspects of life. Like them his work is full of daring
colours, lightening brushstrokes, impastoed paint and a judicious use
of black. Like them his work is animated and situated in moments of
great spectacle - and like them he lived his life withdrawn from the
world.
Masquerade & Spectacle (The Circus and The Traveling Fair in The Work
of Jake B Yeats) is a beautifully chosen collection of 22 paintings
and watercolours from 1902-1952 about the marginalized and exotic
lives of the clowns, bareback-riders and acrobats in the traveling
Circus. The exhibition space was dimly lit and each painting was spot
lit - giving the paintings an ere effervescent quality. Despite the
fact that most of the works were behind glass - they were all
perfectly visible - such a change from awful displays I have seen in
the past.
The theme of the Circus was a favorite of many socially conscious
painters like Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, George Rouault and of
course Pablo Picasso. The circus people lived on the margins of
society, like Gypsies but they also drew in the working cl***** and
middles cl***** with their exotic entertainment and proletarian
theater. Many of these artists identified with the circus people
because they too were poor and not in respectable employment - living
for art, truth and beauty. The clown, the bareback rider and the
acrobat also provided artists with pictures full of drama and theater
- allowing them to speak to the 'stage of life' and the tragedy of its
actors. So in some respects their paintings of clowns were in fact
self-****traits in disguise.
Many of these paintings were from private collections and so
unfamiliar even to Irish art lovers. The exhibition covered Yeats slow
progression from tight linear illustrations in black and white, to
pencil drawings tinted with watercolour, into angular illustrative oil
paintings, then into a wonderfully loose yet still well-drawn
painterly oil painting style and finally into his late almost abstract-
expressionist style - the paint taken straight from the tube and
scrubbed in dry-brush, or glossy glazes and thick impasto sculpted and
drawn with the pallet knife. Although Yeats was never technically on a
par with realist painters like William Orpen or John Lavery - he more
than made up for it with canny insights into human beings, expressive
courage and a little thing called soul - something sadly lacking in
this Post-Modern world.
All his life Yeats was to benefit from his journalistic background
which sharpened his eyes to the life around him. His early work was
illustrational, even occasionally comic like. He was thirty-five
before he started to paint in oils. He lived a solitary life in Dublin
with his wife - but he loved to sketch in the streets. His little
sketchbooks, watercolours and oil paintings are full of moments of
daily Irish life - caught in all their movement, rituals, and
character. He loved covering s****ts events, figures in the city, the
circus and the men of the west of Ireland.
Time and again the Irish man in solitude emerges. The man about to
write a letter, or alone in the streets bustling with others, siting
alone in a tram while three women gossip utterly oblivious of his
existence, as a melancholy clown, or a dwarf alone and behind the
scenes. But at other times he depicted virile Irish men as fishermen,
swimmers, boxers, jockeys, bareback riders or heroes of Irish myth.
Women in Yeats paintings can be elegant, haughty, dainty, kindly or
proud. But he never degraded them. There is hardly a **** in his whole
oeuvre. He shows women as social beings like exotic beauties in cold
city streets full of crowds. Women in Yeats paintings are feminine and
self assured. But perhaps his greatest love was for horses. He drew
them all his life and his depictions have a freshness, vigor and
anatomical accuracy lacking in so many stilted equestrian pictures.
This was quite simply the best exhibition I have seen since the Lucian
Freud and it was a delight to the senses. I would have happily owned
half of these 22 paintings.
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