The Visual Arts in Ireland

Extract

Michail MacLiammoir has recently referred to the lack of visual sensitivity in the Irish people ‘whose ears had always been its strongest point of aesthetic perception’. Naturally, the storyteller’s art had been the only one to survive the long enslavement. Only the ‘Ascendancy’ had time or money to dabble in the fine arts, and the very nature of the ‘Ascendancy’ clan (those who collaborated with the ruling civil service appointed by England) led them to seek the most superficial portraits or stereotyped landscapes. Nevertheless, way back in our past we had a flourishing school of illuminators and sculptors, and it could not be held with much confidence that we are inherently colour-blind or immune to the suggestivity of lines or forms.

It is a fact worthy of reflection that Catholic clergy and people instinctively reacted against the lovely Georgian styles of architecture in which many of the towns and cities of Ireland were built during the past two centuries. For instance, the Hiberno- Romanesque style owes its popularity in no small degree to the fact that it resembles so little the Georgian manner and, of course, also because it revives the ancient pattern of Cormac’s chapel and other remains of the early Celtic era. It is also felt that the Royal Hibernian Academy carried with it into the 1920’s not only the taint of its origin as a facet of the life which revolved around the society of the Ascendancy, but possessed too, the air of decadence natural to an Irish society which by every artistic standard could only be judged as if it was situated in a suburb of London.