Anticolonial Wilde

During his 1882 lecture tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde reminded audiences of the violence done to the Irish people and to Irish art by the powerful forces of imperialism. He acknowledged that conquest, colonisation and coercion had done much damage to a culture that continued to resist the superimposition of “alien English thought” on his country. Wilde also complained that the British empire was now fostering an artificial political consciousness that was “far removed from any love or knowledge of those wrongs of the people”.This chapter illustrates how he supported the insurgent peasantry that fought the Land Wars of the 1870s and 1880s and sympathised with workers in the United States and Britain.

Source – Uncovering Stories of Art in Ireland: digitizing Irish art research collections in the National Gallery of Ireland

In 2017 the National Gallery of Ireland was awarded funding from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (DCHG) for the development of an online resource, focusing on its Irish art research collections. Entitled Source – Uncovering Stories of Art in Ireland, this multi-annual project aims to catalogue and digitise the collections in the ESB CSIA and ensure that these valuable collections relating to Ireland's artistic history and memory are preserved and can be easily accessed by researchers. Now in its penultimate year, Source will be launched in 2021.

Researching Irish art in its educational context

Documentary sources for Irish art are widely scattered and vulnerable. The art library of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts was destroyed by bombardment during the Rising of 1916 against British rule. The absence of degree courses in art history delayed the development of art libraries until the 1960s when art history degrees were established at University College Dublin, and Trinity College Dublin. In the 1970s the state founded the Regional Technical Colleges all over Ireland with their art and design courses. Modern approaches to art education had transformed the education of artists and designers with a new emphasis on concept rather than skill acquisition. This led to theoretical teaching and the growth of art sections in the college libraries. Well qualified graduates and staff led the way in the universities and colleges to a greater emphasis on research. Archive centres of documentation on Irish art opened at the National Gallery of Ireland, Trinity College and the Irish Architectural Archive. At NCAD the National Irish Visual Arts Archive (NIVAL) became the main depository for documentation on 20th century Irish art and design. Many other libraries exist with holdings of relevance to the history of Irish art, notably the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Dublin Society, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the National Archives.

New terrains: ‘Northern Irish art’ in the wider world

Chapter two asks how ‘Northern Irish art’ of the post-Troubles era might be critically approached and appraised in light of broader contemporary conditions. The relation of shifts in Northern Ireland’s art to wider developments in the global art world are addressed and the chapter discusses the ways in which artists from Northern Ireland have been positioned and presented internationally in the post-Troubles years. This chapter takes the 2005 exhibition of art from Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale as the departure point for an extended examination of how the representation of ‘local’ concerns is shaped in relation to wider cultural and economic forces.