Only Art of Jack B. Yeats by Foley Declan;

Author:Foley, Declan; [Declan J. Foley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1011772
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2012-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

This quote could apply to any Expressionist artist of the time.

Jack B. Yeats, who is considered an Irish cultural icon, was not always received in this way during his lifetime and his work was sometimes considered strange and maybe ‘foreign’. For example, in May 1929 and May 1930 the satirical magazine Dublin Opinion made fun of the accessibility of Jack Yeats’s paintings to the general public. In one cartoon, a man is seen in front of a Yeats painting and contorts himself in different postures to try to understand the exhibit. The police eventually escort him from the Gallery.

Apart from reminding us that Yeats was not always the nationally accepted figure he now is, the Yeats Archive preserves early references to Kokoschka. Significantly, in Jack B. Yeats’s address books there is a note written by Jack himself (under an entry for Oskar Kokoschka) that gives Kokoschka’s address in London, explaining, ‘He sent me, through Victor Waddington, a Crucifixion drawing.’6 This was in 1944–5, already suggesting a relationship of some kind long before the 1950s. Richard Calvocoressi believes that this may be a card Kokoschka had printed and sent to close friends during Christmas 1945 with an inscription in his own hand, ‘Christmas in Vienna.’7

Why would such an internationally renowned artist send such a drawing or card to Yeats? Whether it was a drawing or a card (and Jack Yeats specifically referred to a drawing), unfortunately there is no longer any trace of this in the Yeats Archive. While Victor Waddington’s son, Theo, has been unable to shed any light on this drawing, the entry itself casts doubt on the belief that the two men only met in the 1950s.

In his collected writings, A Sea Ringed with Visions, Kokoschka includes a letter that he sent from Ireland (in 1945) providing more evidence that he was there at that time.8 This note in the address book is important. How did these men know each other by 1944–5? Had they met? Did they meet in 1945? Did they meet even earlier? There is one interesting possibility. Patricia Boylan, in her book All Cultivated People, quotes Harry Kernoff, a well-known Irish painter interested in the avant-garde, as recalling a visit by Kokoschka to the Society of Dublin Painters in 1924.9 However, this seems unlikely, as Kokoschka was in Dresden throughout that year according to his correspondence and diaries, and there is no mention of an Irish visit.10

Given this confusion, it is worth exploring Oskar Kokoschka’s Collected Correspondence in order to chart his movements for any possible opportunity of a meeting with Yeats. According to these sources it can be established that Kokoschka was in London at the same time as Yeats in the spring of 1925. London had always been an artistic link connecting Ireland and Europe, in particular Paris, for Jack Yeats as well as his brother William. While Jack Yeats was living in London, studying, he witnessed Kandinsky’s exhibition in the Allied Artist Association in 1910 and the Post-Impressionist’s Exhibition in the Grafton Gallery in the same year.

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