Short description:

This companion contains new and innovative writing on Irish art and its history, from c. 1800 to the present day.

Long description:

This companion contains new and innovative writing on Irish art and its history, from c. 1800 to the present day.

This book critically engages with Irish art in a period linked to key events in Irish history, beginning with the Acts of Union between Britain and Ireland (1800–01)) and the significant social and cultural changes that resulted. The book also provides a precedent for a focus on the significance of art in relation to other subsequent key historical events such as the early twentieth‑century struggles for independence or the role of political conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s onwards and its aftermath. Key themes covered include tradition and innovation; upheavals of history; place, location, and artistic formations; Irish art and the wider world; and embodiment and identity. The book expands the critical discourse around Irish art over this period, both within Ireland and beyond, and encourages the potential for future scholarship in fields and periods not covered.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history, Irish studies, and colonial studies.

"The Routledge Companion to Irish Art focuses on over 200 years of Irish visual culture, from the Act of Union to the present day. Arranged thematically, it provides new contextual, critical and theoretical insights. The 44 essays feature present new research by academics, curators and artists. This impressive compendium is organised across five sections: Tradition, innovation and the discourses of art; Art and the upheavals of history; Visualities; Art and the wider world: empire diaspora and the postcolonial; and Embodiment and identity. The essays span regional, national and transnational issues within the ever broadening discipline of visual culture."

-- Niamh O’Sullivan, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Table of Contents:

Introduction  Section 1: Tradition, innovation and the discourses of art  1. A national body for the visual arts: the early history of the RHA 1823-1860  2. The Irish in the Sculptural Pantheon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1800-1922  3. Erin’s Harp: art and music in the long Nineteenth Century  4. The Cultural Revival  5. Artisans of the avant-garde: Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett and the decorative arts  6. Jack B. Yeats: painter, illustrator, and comic strip artist  7. Magazines and art in the mid-Twentieth Century  8. The Ulster Unit: an avant-garde formation in the 1930s  9. Hilary Heron and mid-Twentieth Century modernist sculpture  Section 2: Art and the upheavals of history  10. ‘A holy union’: James Barry and the 1801 Act of Union  11. Images of the Famine: art, monuments and exhibitions from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-first Century  12. Evictions and the Land Wars: visuality, technology and legacy  13. Painting History: William Orpen and the Great War  14. Photographing women: the Rising and after  15. Unfinished business: Jack B. Yeats, modernity and the avant-garde 16. Art practice and the conflict in the North  17. Troubling the Past in the Present: socially engaged art and the ‘Decade of Centenaries’  Section 3: Visualities  18. The Matter of the Past: modes of antiquarian representation  19. The 1853 Dublin Exhibition and its imperial legacy  20. Photographing Dublin: the street photography of J.J. Clarke and Ephraim MacDowel Cosgrave 21. Tracing the artist-bohemian in Free State Dublin  22. Women of the West  23. The White Stag Group, 1939-1946  24. Expressionism in the 1980s  25. The Orchard Gallery, Derry: public practice during the 1980s  26. Making Strange: the climate crisis and recent art  Section 4: Art and the wider world: empire, diaspora and the postcolonial  27. Southern India, 1800-1816: conquest and contingency: two portraits by Thomas Hickey  28. Poverty, Slavery and Empire: Honoré Daumier’s caricatures of Ireland, Great Britain,
Jamaica and France, 1844-1867  29. The Artist, The Book, and Picturing ‘The Other Country’: Walker’s Ireland (1905)  30. Hugh Lane and the Controversy over a Modern Art Gallery in Dublin  31. Cross-reflections in a Cracked Mirror: trans-Atlantic influences on visual art, 1875-1950  32. Sidney Nolan’s Irishness: a view from the Antipodes  33. Irish Artists in West Cornwall  34. The Optical Illusion: Brian O’Doherty, Ireland and New York avant-garde  35. Global Engagement and Modalities of Looking in the Work of Brian Maguire, Richard
Mosse, and Yuri Pattison.  Section 5: Embodiment and identity  36. Caricatured Bodies and Victorian Mental Landscapes  37. Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Art  38. Hidden in Plain Sight: Estella Solomons’ portraits  39. Embodiments in Feminist Art from the 1980s and Beyond  40. Queer Agency in the Making of Modern and Contemporary Art  41. Gender and Sexuality in Northern Irish art from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit
42. Beyond the Gable Walls: queering the work of Gerard Dillon  43. Sculpture in Transformation  44. ‘Thin as gold leaf’: gender, embodiment, and digital technologies