IMPORTANT IRISH ART · 27 MAY 2024 AT 6PM

44 The distinguished London-based art critic, John Berger, who visited Jack B. Yeats in Dublin in September 1956, wrote to him about this painting a few weeks later. ‘In your canvas called Discovery, the explorer has to enter the cave, walk past the last lights that circle and fly as though they were moth and candle in one, and go even further, trailing a scarf of shadow – but then suddenly in the explorer’s close-up face it is the spectator who makes the discovery. Perhaps all art’s rather like that. But many must be richer for the discoveries that are made through your being the explorer – I among them’. 1 In this large, late work, a male figure dressed in theatrical costume with a naked torso, blue jacket and cummerbund rushes through a cave-like structure. The sea and sky are visible through its narrow entrance. The figure holds his hands in a strange gesture as if trying to find his way through the darkness. Above his head, a floating bird-like form of white, blue and red suggest, as Berger wrote, ‘the last lights that circle and fly as though they were moth and candle and one’. The use of this form is comparable to Yeats’s 1950 painting, The Truth, The Whole Truth which deals with a similar theme of revelation. 2 The intense expression of the man’s face, sculpted out of thick white and green pigment, registers a sense of deep curiosity as if he were searching for something in the depths of this new environment. The complex shadows cast by him on the walls of the cave to the left have an almost anthropomorphic quality. One wonders if Yeats was thinking of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave when he painted this work. Could this be the returning prisoner who can no longer see after being exposed to the light outside? The discovery that Berger refers to relates to Yeats’s ability to manipulate paint to suggest specific forms but also to allow them to remain evidently works of art. The bare walls of the cave are composed of raw canvas while the figure is created out of thick paint with flashes of light and shadow indicated by strokes of pigment across the surface of the canvas. His hands are remarkable for the complex mixture of colours and texture used in their creation. While intrigued by the subject the viewer remains aware of the physical construction of this as a work of art and by the ability of the artist to enable us to see or to discover this metamorphosis in such tangible form. Dr Róisín Kennedy, April 2024 1 John Berger to Jack B. Yeats, 30 September 1956, quoted in Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Deutsch, London, 1992, II, p.1027. 2 Ibid.