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Prompted by the centennial commemoration of the 1922 Paris Exposition d’Art Irlandais, Seeing Ireland explores the intersection of art and politics in the century that followed.
While the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century is often associated with literary figures such as Joyce and Yeats, Seeing Ireland’s focus on visual arts sheds new light on a pivotal era of Irish cultural and national development. The collection explores the 1922 Paris diaspora congress and its associated art exhibition, the development of an Irish school of art, official visual representations of post-independence Ireland, and the continued intermingling of art and the state in subsequent decades. The Paris exhibition happened at a pivotal moment in Ireland’s history, and the administration used Irish art to present for international consumption a self-defined identity of the new state. This collection reflects on that event and on the recent Decade of Centenaries commemoration of the Irish revolutionary period.
Academics and practicing artists alike contribute thought-provoking analyses of the exposition, Irish visual culture, and Irish diaspora politics. The collection ends with an exploration of the constantly negotiated relationship among the state, the arts, and memory.
“A superb collection of essays, this book makes a highly original contribution to the study of Irish art.” —Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, author of Exotic Dreams in the Science of the Volksgeist
Ciaran O’Neill is associate professor of nineteenth-century history at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-director of the Trinity Colonial Legacies Project. His most recent books include Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland and Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean (co-edited with Finola O’Kane).
Billy Shortall is a research fellow at the Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin, and co-developed a virtual re-creation of the 1922 Paris World Congress and art exhibition (www.seeingireland.ie). He recently contributed chapters to the Routledge Companion to Irish Art and Hilary Heron, A Retrospective.
Foreword by Professor Joe Cleary (Yale)
Introduction: Irish Art in Transnational Context, Billy Shortall and Ciaran O’Neill (TCD)
1. The International Treaty debates: the Irish Race Congress, Darragh Gannon (UCD)
2. Exhibiting Ireland. Art and culture on show in Paris 1922, Billy Shortall. (TCD)
3. Dublin, London, Paris: Exhibition Culture and the Shaping of an Irish School, 1842 – 1922, Kathryn Milligan (UCD)
4.The Irish Race Congress of 1922 and the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, Paul Larmour (QUB)
5. ‘Searching for Truth’ From realism to materiality: Visual art in the Post-independent Irish state, Roisin Kennedy (UCD)
6. Illustrating the Saorstát Éireann Irish Free State Official Handbook: meaning, making and materiality, Angela Griffith (TCD)
7. Artwashing the Nation Brand: the instrumentalization of art during the Decade of Centenaries in Ireland 2012-23, Ciaran O’Neill (TCD)
8. A conversation about arts and culture during the Decade of Centenaries, Vera Klute and Martina Devlin