Jack B Yeats; The Outsider

In Sligo last Friday week I went to see the new exhibition in The Model Gallery, Jack B Yeats; The Outsider which brings together forty Jack B Yeats oils from a variety of public and private collections. Many of the works included have been rarely exhibited in Ireland in the past fifty years while others have never been shown publicly before.

Curated by the internationally acclaimed artist, critic and theorist, Brian O’Doherty (aka Patrick Ireland), and Emer McGarry, Curator of The Niland Collection, the show features work spanning a sixty-year period, from an early Sligo scene completed in 1895, showing a political meeting in Sligo, to a work completed in 1956 the year before he died.

The Model is a great space to see these. Not crowded you can wander through the three or four rooms the exhibition occupies at your leisure. I love those later paintings set in some wild landscape, sometimes near the sea, sometimes a sort of imagined west of Ireland, Paul Henry shaken up, with a couple of characters, standing or walking or talking or meeting or ignoring. The catalogue speculates that Beckett, who was a friend of Yeats, may have based his two characters in Waiting for Godot on such a scene.

Above is one of these painting, The Two Travellers 1942.

The show is accompanied by a new publication with a major new critical text by Brian O’Doherty as well as new texts by Dr. Tricia Cusack and Dr. Thomas McEvilley.

The Irish Times review of the exhibition.