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Artefact 8: Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians.pdf

Artefact 8, 2016

Nancy Princenthal's biography significantly broadens the narrative on Agnes Martin's life and art from the perception of " desert sage " or " modern mystic, " a discursive thread that undergirds much of the art criticism and past curatorship on Martin. Princenthal intricates the myth of Martin's persona with the undeniable ambition and pragmatism of her character that led to her becoming one of the most important figures amongst twentieth-century artists pursuing pure abstraction. The artist led a long and full life in her ninety-two years, and Princenthal orchestrates an impressive weaving together of biographical records with insightful analyses of Martin's paintings, drawing upon her critical expertise on the tensions between abstraction and the semantics of representation so central to Martin's output.

Painting Print: Reading in the Irish Cabin

The visual evidence of the era testifies both to the availability and the various uses of print objects in domestic settings. If we look closely at paintings depicting Irish rural life, we may discover, for example, a book or broadside tucked away on the margins of the canvas, barely visible among the many other things in the cabin. Given the relatively small visual archive of Irish interiors, the occasional appearance of such printed material-a broadsheet tacked to a wall or a chapbook on a table-suggests the growing role of written texts in shaping the nineteenth-century popular imagination. Developments such as stereotyping, lithography, and the steam-powered press revolutionized reading by increas-ing the volume and variety of available reading material and decreasing its price. The organization of mass education in the early decades of the nineteenth century coupled with a new supply of inexpensive literature fueled a rise in literacy among the laboring classes. 4 Such evidence of an Irish culture in transition appears in both visual and textual sources.

‘[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives’: An Interview with Emma O’Toole

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2019

The National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin recently mounted an exhibition entitled '[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives' (19 July 2018-3 March 2019). 1 It showed material from two little-known but highly important repositories: the ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art, and the Yeats Archive, both of which relate to Irish women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From these archives, letters, scrapbooks, and photographs, as well as some works of art, including embroideries, were put on show, all made by women artists including Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, Mainie Jellett, Susan Yeats, and Evie Hone. The aim was to shed light on their education and artistic practice and to think further about the contribution they made both to major exhibitions and longer lasting artistic initiatives and movements. This interest in their lives and legacy is new; despite being some of the most progressive people in Ireland before and after independence-the suffragette movement and Revolutionary period were contemporaneous-they were overlooked by the Irish arts institutions of the day which were male dominated.