Sean Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland

Edited by : Eimear O'Connor

Publication Date 24th, June, 2009

ISBN 9781904505419

Cost €25.00

Irish artist Seán Keating (1889-1977) was a controversial and provocative figure in the quest for national identity in the early years of the twentieth century. He was a member and former President of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Art, and his professional life spanned seventy years during, which time he was renowned at home and abroad for his ability to paint forceful images that were at once emblematic of his own cultural and political nationalism and analogous to that of the nation at large.

Keating was a keen cultural commentator with a wry view of contemporary developments, evidenced in his work as an artist. When afforded the opportunity, Keating published and broadcast his challenging thoughts on a series of subjects including bad art criticism, snobbery in art, the consequences of governmental lack of support for the arts, and the negative aspects of consumerism and greed.

Although Keating's paintings survive, his stimulating contribution to the discourse on the development of Irish culture through articles and broadcasts has been, to date, forgotten. Seán Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland offers, for the first time, a comprehensive compilation and contextual analysis of Keating's articles and broadcasts between 1924 and 1972. The book examines Keating's thoughts on culture, politics, economics and several other issues in the context of his both his artistic output and the social conditions of the time. In doing so, the narrative serves to better describe the extent of Keating's contribution to Irish art and to public life. Moreover, given the present economic conditions in Ireland and further afield, the content of Keating's articles and broadcasts is prophetical and poignant.

Thus the book offers a new perspective on the life and work of Seán Keating which should appeal to students, collectors, art historians and gallery owners alike.

Reviews

Sean Keating in Context

Reviewed by : Ciaran MacGonigal, The Irish Arts Review

"Dr. O'Connor's work on Keating is an invaluable series of documents on an artist of importance at a time of shifts in the tectonic plates of art practice in Ireland, the personalities involved and the riveting accounts of the internecine strife in the Irish art world. I commend it to the specialist and non specialist alike".

About the Author(s)

Eimear O'Connor

Éimear O'Connor received her PhD from UCD in 2008 for her thesis on Seán Keating. She has since co-curated, with The Hunt Museum in Limerick, an exhibition of the artist's work titled 'Keating in Focus', for which she also wrote the catalogue. For the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD, O'Connor has lectured on twentieth-century Irish art, and on developments in European and North American art O'Connor is presently Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at triarc – Trinity Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin. Her research interests include the life and work of little-known Irish women artists; the contextual development of Irish art and visual culture in the twentieth century; visual art and the Irish theatre; the representation of Ireland abroad – with an overarching emphasis on the development of identity in the twentieth century and its meaning in a now globalized world.

There are no Table of Contents for this publication at present.

« Back