For some months now I’ve been subscribing to Apollo magazine. This might well seem a bit odd because clearly it isn’t aimed at people like me. For a start its strap-line, “The international art magazine” might well prompt the question as to what on earth I think I’m doing reading that. What is more, it clearly expects that a substantial segment of its readership will be involved in art as a business. In relation to my own experience the obvious response to that is a hollow laugh. Each edition I read, however, convinces me of its real value and interest to me as an artist.
It is so easy to fall into a very parochial frame of mind bounded by one’s own contacts, and at its widest by the situation of art in one’s own country. It has been good over the past few editions to be made to realise that the tradition of African art, for example, isn’t just something that is to be discovered in anthropological museums. There are creative artists out there, all over the continent of Africa, for whom their own cultural tradition is still a living context. What is more, so many of the things we have become used to in Europe as the “cutting edge” of art today are actually very boring and not particulate remarkable in comparison.
Then I find that I am compelled to look at the history of art in different ways. I suppose that I should be ashamed to admit this but the overall framework in terms of which I have come to understand art was installed in my head while at school. The development of painting, however, has produced so many figures who are passed over in the telling of that story. This month’s Apollo, for example, has a really interesting piece about an Irish painter called Jack Yeats, who flourished during the early part of the twentieth century.* Whoever heard mention of Irish painting in a syllabus that insisted that, at that time, the only interesting things happening in painting were to be found in Paris? Wake up! Look around!
*His work is currently the subject of a large retrospective at the National Gallery Dublin, until February 2022.