on life, music etc beyond mainstream
„The sunlight on the garden“ is a very inspiring poem. First I thought: the right words for the dead Charlie Browns. When I read the comments – a painting came into my mind, from Jack B. Yeats, the younger brother of William Butler Yeats. The name of the painting is „There is no night“ – I often look at it … wonder … struck.
Ciaran Bennett, an art critic in Dublin, President of the International Association of Art Critics Ireland, and presently at work on a first-ever biography of Modern art critic and curator James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), emphasized Jack Yeats’s shift in artistic vision in recent communications with this writer:
“Well, Jack Yeats didn’t get to New York to see and be seen until mid-life, really; and it was not until after the death [from heart disease] of his beloved wife ‘Cottie’, in 1948, that his most memorable work, resounding with contemporary political and cultural significance, began to emerge.
The most arresting canvas of this later period – quintessential Jack Yeats – is There Is No Night [1949; 102 x 152 cm; title from Revelations 22:5]. It offers an evocative moment of the Celtic Twilight, displaying the impasto relish and bravura brushwork of an Abstract Expressionist – and sometimes, in these later pictures, the paint was applied directly on the canvas from the tube. Jack Yeats the illustrator always had a presence, a signature style; but all that changed in the later years, and much for the better. This took time and the heavy cost of personal crises: Cottie’s death and, before that, his long bout with depression.”
The “only art” for Jack Yeats was the ‘art’ of living. But as Paul Valéry famously said, “One must always apologise for talking about art.” Jack resisted all wheedlings; he gave little away. The closest he came to commenting on art was a rare moment in an otherwise testy interview with Eamonn Andrews (Radio Éireann, RTÉ, 1947; transcription, Foley, Yeats, pp. 29-31):
“I dislike the word art as to painting. There is only one art and that is the art of living. Painting is an occupation that’s in that art, and that occupation is the freest of all the occupations of living. There is no alphabet, no grammar. No rules whatever. Many hopeful sportsmen have tried to invent rules and have always failed. Any person or group of persons who try to live life with rules do a disservice to this occupation of living. They forget that painting is tactics and not strategy. It is carried out in the face of the enemy.” [emphasis added]
Where did you find that?
Dunno. Just entered the name of the picture and the painter in my search machine
That is a great painting. Great paintings are like great poker hands. You know in an instant.