Irish Arts Review

20th-Century Architecture in Ireland by Annette Becker; John Olley; Wilfred WangReview by: Sean MulcahyIrish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 15 (1999), pp. 203-204Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493096 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

20th-Century Architecture in Ireland ................................ ... I............................................

EDITED BY ANNEUTE BECKER, JOHN OLLEY AND

WILFRED WANG ...............................................................................

Prestel, 1997 (h/b) ?39.95

192 pp. 100 col. 360 blw ills. 3-7913-1719-9

Sean Mulcahy

PUBLISHED ON THE OCCASION of the exhi

bition, 20th-Century Architecture in Ireland, at the Deutsches Architektur

Museum, Frankfurt am Main in 1997,

(the exhibition was mounted again at the

RHA in Dublin in 1998), this book con

fines itself in the main to the art compo

nent rather than the science of building

design. It comprises, in eighty pages, a

number of essays - four chronological, relating to buildings pre-1900 to 1975, and nine thematic, ranging from archi

tecture in topography to architecture in culture. (Sean O'Reilly, pre-1900; Sean Rothery, 1900-1940; Simon Walker, 1940-1975 and 1970-1995; Orla Murphy, 'in the Landscape'; John Olley, 'in the

City; Frank McDonald, 'in the Suburbs';

Eddie Conroy, 'in Housing'; Paul Larmour, 'in Church'; Loughlin Kealy, 'in

Conservation'; Sarah Cassidy, 'in

Literature'; John Tuomey, Influences; Hugh Campbell, 'in the New State'.)

By and large the essays are interesting

and there are a few wondrous discoveries.

Where most of us here - perhaps not in

Germany - associate de Valera with

dancing en plein-air at the crossroads,

Hugh Campbell finds that 'architecture was assigned a key role in realising (de

Valera's) dream ...'; and Shane O'Toole

sees the 'ancient and sacred acropolis of

Cashel' in Tuomey's Blackwood Golf

club. A photograph of the latter graces

the elegant cover, appropriately celebrat

ing the greatest perhaps of our many

growth industries. There follows, in one hundred pages,

brief commentaries by members of a

panel of architects on some fifty selected

buildings, with very good photographs, mostly colour, mostly exterior, and with

helpful small-scale drawings, similarly free of notation. The buildings range in

age from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast (1900) to Civic Offices, Dublin

(1994); in building scale from

. . . . . ..............ii. ____

I~~~I~~~jEI!L ':rni: 11 p1=. -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. .... . __

THE TONIC CINEMA, BANGOR by John McBride Neill. 1936. From 20th-Century Architecture in Ireland edited by Annette Becker, John Olley and Wilfred Wang. 'It seems that of McNeill Bride's fifteen cinemas in Ulster only

three survive...'

Ardnacrusha Hydro-station to the Goulding Pavilion, Enniskerry; in loca tion from Mizen Head, a foot-bridge in

Cork, to Burt, a church in Donegal.

Buildings and architects in Northern Ireland are well represented. Ulster architect McCormick rightly receives plaudits for Gold Medal-winning Burt and other churches but omission of his and his partner Corr's numerous and

major schools is remiss. Previously noted by Sean Rothery in black and white, Mo

Bride Neill's watercolours of four 1930s McGrath-like cinema interiors are a rev elation. It seems that of his fifteen cine

mas, all in Ulster, only three late ones

survive intact. Works in Ireland by British

architects are well covered - Koralec,

Lutyens, Wilshire, Allies and Morrison. The Polish-born Wejcherts are poorly represented by the Aillwee Caves visitor centre rather than any of a dozen impor

tant and influential buildings. True to

the title of the book, work by Irish archi

tects abroad is not included, material

perhaps for another publication? Engineers, all long dead, figure only in

early projects, such as the powerful

Guinness Store House 1903. The recent

70,000 seat Gaelic games stadium struc

ture is left in the sole authorship of archi

tect McMahon.

It is difficult to appraise selection, easy

to criticise for exclusion but there is over

representation of a few building types (house, school, church) and no represen tation of important others (hotel, shop ping centre, apartment). Similarly some practices are over-represented (Scott Tallon Walker, de Blacam and Meagher,

O'Donnell and Tuomey) and other major

ones not at all (T P Kennedy, Burke

Kennedy Doyle, Keane Murphy Duff, Peter Legge).

Most remarkable in the contrast between the detailed coverage of Temple Bar in the old city - eight of its buildings

by the practices of Group '91 are fea

tured - and the stark absence of any

thing on the International Financial Services Centre, a mile downstream or

on nearby East Point Centre. Temple

Bar buildings there form an outstanding

compact collection of modern architec ture in Ireland. Equally - many would

say more so - the impressive large corpo

rate office buildings of the Financial

Centre are a major element in the city

and warrant comment.

There is a comprehensive Selected Bibliography and some seventy short

biographies of the architects of the

selected buildings. I would have wel

comed biographies of others named in

the essays, such as Manning, Robinson,

and O'Gorman and also of the essayists.

The index names individual architects

plus a dozen attendants, but not buildings.

203

1Rhshi AX iis Ri . IEI

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BOOK REVIIEWS

There are a few typos of German origin

and collectors of word-processed spell cheques will cherish 'the RIAI Toenail Gold Medal'.

The writing suffers a little - but less

than most writing on art - from the use of

words whose meanings are not commonly shared, even among colleagues. The com

mentaries are innocent of words such as 'performance' and 'sustainability'. We are

dealing here with art, not machines; stat

ics, not dynamics; form, not function. Ruskin held that 'architecture is a frame

for sculpture'. Might he now agree with

the panel that architecture is sculpture, walk-through sculpture?

SEAN MULCAHY is an engineer and artist.

Ja~kYeats ............................................................................

BY BRUCE ARNOLD ................................................................................

Yale University Press 1998 h/b ?29.95

432 pp. 24 col. 250 b/w ills. 0 300 07549 9

William M Murphy

IN 1970 HILARY PYLE published the first book-length study of the artist Jack Yeats (1871-1954), and over the years she has

added to our store of knowledge with cat

alogues of his paintings and drawings and

vast hordes of other miscellaneous mate rials. Now Bruce Arnold, the distin guished art critic and joumalist, has made

use of her work and of hitherto unknown

sources (many in the collection of Anne Yeats, the painter's niece) to put together this massive study (356 pages, plus appen

dix and notes) of his life and works.

Jack was the younger brother (by six

years) of the Nobel Prize-winning William Butler Yeats and too often was

looked upon as merely the relative of the

famous poet. In fact Jack Yeats, if he had

borne another name, might have

achieved much earlier the honour that

came to him late in life. He produced

sketches, drawings, water-colours, and oils in astonishing profusion, and even

added plays and novels to his output. His

energy was inexhaustible; not until his

final days as an old man did he cease pro

ducing. And unlike his father, who was a

financial failure and would rather give

away a portrait than be paid for it, Jack

was a shrewd businessman who asked

high prices during his life and got them -

and who would have been delighted to

learn of the enormous sums being paid

for his works today.

Arnold carries Jack through his long life, from birth in London to a long stay

from age 8 to 16 with his Pollexfen

grandparents in Sligo (where old William Pollexfen, his mother's father, was to prove the greatest influence on his life); to London again in the late-eighties,

when, though still a teen-ager, he helped support the family by selling sketches; to

marriage (which lasted till her death in

1947) to Mary Cottenham White ('Cottie'); to his long stay in Devon; to

his visit to New York under the sponsor

ship of John Quinn (the New York

lawyer who played a key role in the lives

of all the Yeatses); to his production of

plays for a miniature theatre; to his long

association with Punch, to which he con

tributed cartoons for thirty years; to his

move to Greystones in Ireland in 1910

and to Dublin in 1917, where he remained

till his death in 1957; and, throughout, to

his relationships with Masefield, J M Synge, Beckett, Thomas McGreevy and many others. It was a rich and fascinating

life and Amold recounts it in detail.

The scholarly apparatus is not as

sturdy as it might be. The source of bor

rowed material is not always acknowl

edged, and though Amold has consulted

almost everything written about his sub

ject he has not consulted all - an in

depth article on the relationship between

Jack and John Quinn published in IAR

(vol 9, 1993) being a case in point - and

he sometimes seems loath to give the

titles of works he makes use of. These

matters are of little interest to readers of

reviews and perhaps should be dealt with

in another place; but the deficiencies are

sufficiently numerous to give rise to dis

quieting doubts about the reliability or

accuracy of the footnotes.*

Such observations aside, the book has

many merits. Arnold covers Jack's long

and interesting life in abundant detail.

We have hundreds of line drawings,

sketches, portraits, and photographs, and

a marvellous collection of coloured plates

in a large volume 27 cm high and 21.5

cm wide. We have names and dates, cat

alogues and lists, summaries of plots and

criticisms. As a lover of all things

Yeatsian, I devoured every word and

hungered for more. The ordinary dedi cated reader who is not a Yeats specialist

may find his appetite satisfied with less. For Amold attempts to give us not only a

biography - more or less chronological -

but at the same time a literary criticism

of Jack's writings and an artistic criticism

of his drawings and paintings. The result

is sometimes to overwhelm the reader with more information than he can

absorb and leave him feeling as if he had

been dropped by parachute into a lush

equatorial jungle of biographical and artistic minutiae, too many trees, too lit

tle forest. By attempting three kinds of books in one Amold limits the effective

ness of each. The problem is not lessened

by the frequent repetitions and occa

sional jumping back and forth from one

period to another. It might have been

wiser to publish the literary and artistic

criticism in scholarly joumals so that the

book could concentrate on Jack the man.

But who was Jack the man? Here,

through no fault of the author, the major

difficulty arises. Like others who have

dealt with Jack Yeats, Amold finds him

remote and mysterious, a thoroughly pri vate person who virtually never reveals his mind. To an interviewer Jack said 'I'm

against the giving of personal details.'

(p.333). Amold himself admits that Jack

is 'tacitum, elusive and retiring.' (p.206). In treating Jack's training at the

Metropolitan School of Art, Arnold writes: 'Jack tells us little' about it (p.41).

Even in the surviving diaries, where we

might expect confidences, Amold notes: 'If he deals with family events he does so

in passing, the touch is light and affec

tionate.' He quotes Page Dickinson: Jack

'was sensitive to a degree, and if he did

not care for his surroundings, never

opened his lips' (p.173). On the success

of William Orpen, a fellow painter, 'we

do not know what Jack's feelings about

this were' (p.186). Jack's drawings for

Punch were done under the pseudonym 'W. Byrd,' and he tried to conceal his

204

IRISht ARTS REVIEW

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