February Art: politics
There’s no way to keep politics out of art, as many examples from the foregoing month of February Art attest, even if this commentary does not focus squarely on political aspects. It won’t today, either, although this work by Jack B. Yeats for John M. Synge’s The Aran Islands (1907) is very clearly political, depicting as it does one of several evictions on Inishmaan by bailiffs and armed Royal Irish Constabulary police of island tenants unable to pay their rent, and as a consequence left homeless, their belongings seized. Noting the strange physical types of the tall policemen and the ‘heavy rhythm of their boots’, Synge’s commentary focuses on the sullen dignity of the crowd in passive resistance against this ‘outrage of the hearth’, and the comedy of the release of some impounded pigs, knocking over three constabulary, before the inevitable accommodations and compromises reveal the whole thing as in part a staged event.
In Yeats’s picture these three are allowed a human side – it is hot day, and they sit with unbuttoned uniforms – but they must also reckon with the voice of conscience, as a young child glares at them with the force of a saint. The Irish harp on the Erin-go-Bragh mug is conspicuously just in shot, too – and this does have the immediacy of the photographs Synge was taking of the islands, from which, unlike for his illustrations to their walking tours of Wicklow and Connemara, Yeats worked. As at Elizabeth Corbett Yeats’s Cuala Press, though, these bold ink drawings were then hand coloured for this rare first edition, creating an extraordinarily vivid scene with the impact of a Japanese print or Renaissance Biblical tableau, and the humanity of Yeats’s later work in oils.
thebicyclops 