WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

THE ERNIE O’MALLEY COLLECTION · 25 NOVEMBER 2019 AT 6PM 89 88 In his earlier work he is a draughtsman who stresses illustrative content directing it in a vital sense of line to a personal idiom. Later, in watercolour he uses watercolour with this same illustrative content not as a medium but as flat colour tones to give vitality to his drawings. It was, I think, a lucky chance when he found a number of his early watercolours destroyed by damp. This accident made him think more in terms of oil and he began to experiment. Then continued a long period in which definition became gradually more colourful and his essential bent, that of a colourist, more emphatic. By the year 1921, he had reached the limits of his expression in this manner. When the artist reaches his spiritual limit in any one method of expression, he follows either of two ways. He continues to reproduce his impressions in a manner he has outgrown until the individual painting is no longer a problem for the sum total of what constitutes his being, but is related to hand and eye alone; or he experiments until he has created a new way of approach to his problem. Jack Yeats found his world in a greater feeling for the emotional use of paint, as it were, escaped its mould to become an end in itself. It is hard to explain a change in direction, but one of the factors may have been the heightened sensibility which could result from the tension of life during the struggle for freedom in Ireland then, and the new note of intensity felt by a sensitive observer. As he enlarged his experience as a painter, he also enlarged his vision. His work no longer dealt with his perception of countrymen in relaxation or at ease in a folklore tradition. His figures now enter a subjective world in which they are related to the loneliness of the individual soul, the vague lack of pattern in living with its sense of inherent tragedy, brooding nostalgia, associated with time as well as variations on the freer moments as of old. Visionary worlds of Tir-na- nOg, California, palaces, are opened to us with persuasive paint, and all action is subordinated to thought. Aspects of Dublin workers are searched for inherent character or nobility. Anna Liffey gets its due tribute from one who has the Dubliner’s realisation of its significance; reflective mood floods people and furniture in light-splashed rooms; or light itself is the subtly dramatic force. He had always a strong sense of man in relation to the impersonality of the Irish scene; isolated figures never dominate the landscape, but they are now more related to it in symbolical significance which increases their stature to bulk in the mind. One departure of his was completely new in Irish painting, the depiction of national events. The memory of the dead makes for a tragic understanding in Ireland. It evokes a feeling of dead generations who served or have died for a common cause, their struggle echoed in each generation. The Batchelor’s Walk incident is shown as a simple, but hieratic incident of a flower-girl who casts a flower outside a doorway where men might have been shot down. There is restrained dignity and grace in the movement of her hand and a tenderness that evokes a sense of pity. He has used the funeral or burial as a symbol. The death of a man who has suffered in the national fight has often been one of the few public tributes that a people could give to one whom some of them recognised only in death. A sense of ceremonial, which had seemed to disappear from consciousness, would emerge and an impressive ordered intensity show understanding and devotion. The memory of the dead has changed its meaning when seen as a political artifice, or has become outworn in verbal misuse, but in Jack Yeats’ pictures it holds an eternal significance. For over twenty years he has been painting in this new manner. For a time he worked in philosophic isolation amongst an indifferent audience who resent an artist’s new direction in implementing his vision. This has always been the attitude of a world of punditry, which, becoming complacent, does not risk disturbance except in terms of what it regards as its own interpretation of creative work. A true artist’s vision is directed by a keener mental and physical eye, trained selective capacity, contemplative detachment, and inventive technical sense, which is used to rebuild the microcosm architecturally, descriptively, or emotionally. Gradually, however, people came to recognise his genius and originality, his unusual color sense and his absolute integrity. Of late he has himself been the major factor in the training of our eyes to understand what is indeed a school in itself, his quality of mind in paint. In Ireland the visual sense is not strongly developed in terms of creative painting, but there is a fine feeling for colour, well expressed in small towns where white-wash is mixed with paint powder to give house fronts a fascinating texture of tender pastel shades. Irish atmosphere softens and blends the clash that might have ensued from the individuality of the owners in selection of colour. There is, as well, a peculiar unliterary affection of landscape, but the manner of looking at paint is too often determined, not by this corrective, based as it is on evasive colour and the inherent structural sense of line and form in bare mountain, but by thinking of other paintings. Due to the destruction of the arts by conquest there is but one continuous tradition, the literary tradition; we are inclined to see paint in a literary way as if the implied title should continue as a story on the canvas. In Jack Yeats we have a painter who is as much concerned with what he has to say in paint as with his manner of saying it. He brings a fresh experience to each canvas he paints; his individual work cannot be judged in terms of previous work but in the individual canvas one looks at. That demands alertness of mind and an unprejudiced, innocent eye. He is a romantic painter who through memory has made notes all his life of material which has stirred him by its emotional significance. Those notes may remain unused for years, but they have been sifted in his consciousness. When he calls on them, he can recollect his original impressions, organise his perceptions through an enlargement of that experience, and create a work of art. With him colour is an emotional force and his method of using it varies in regard to its substance as pigment and as texture. He may create homogeneous surface with his brush, improvise an absorbing study in chiaroscuro, or use the priming of the canvas to aid luminosity of light and shade. At times, impatient with the brush to communicate his feeling for the richness and charm of pigment and his sheer joy of its expressive power, he employs the palette knife to give swiftness and vigour to the immediacy of his emotion. Seemingly unrelated colours directed by this urgency create an orchestration due to his unerring taste in colour harmony; and in a form of evocative magic, make a direct impact on the mind. Even a casual glance at a small collection of his work shows how inexhaustible is his colour invention. As he experiments in technique he reaches a point in mastery where his handling of knife or brush seems to be by instinct. In this exhibition as his development is studied from his earlier stages to his more subjective and symbolical work, his steady growth can be seen. The new Ireland, still fluid politically and socially, has found in Jack Yeats a painter of major rank, whose vision is used to make us aware of inherent characteristics, psychological directives and eternal verities. In return for this understanding of us it is pleasant to realise that Irish art lovers should, over the years, have made it possible to bring together a collection of his pictures that show his development in its completeness, and thus bring about the present tribute from the whole nation. This text was reprinted in Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters edited by Cormac K. H. O’Malley, 2011, pp391-395