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Review of Irish Studies in Europe 4.1 Hélène Lecossois
DOI: 10.32803/rise.v4i1.2685 188 | P a g e
Francis Hutton-Williams, Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde (Cork:
Cork University Press, 2019). 148pp, ISBN: 978-1-78205-356-9, €40.10 (hardback).
Review by Hélène Lecossois, Université de Lille.
When cultural historians or literary critics mention the name of Thomas MacGreevy, it is often
in relation to his intellectual friendship with Samuel Beckett. MacGreevy is indeed commonly
pitched as one of Beckett’s favourite interlocutors, their epistolary exchanges regarding the
state of visual art in Ireland, most notably their diverging analyses of the paintings of Jack B.
Yeats, being frequently quoted by Beckett scholars. Anecdotically, MacGreevy is also
sometimes remembered as the one who introduced Beckett to James Joyce at the time when
the three men lived in Paris. MacGreevy’s own literary production, however, has received
remarkably little critical attention. His role as public intellectual and his active engagement
with the development of an Irish artistic avant-garde have similarly remained mostly
unexplored. MacGreevy’s multifarious achievements, as poet, art critic, curator of one of the
biggest Irish art institutions, namely the National Art Gallery of Ireland, are in dire need of
being unearthed. Francis Hutton-Williams’s Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish
Avant-Garde is therefore a timely, and most welcome contribution to (Irish) modernist studies
and Irish cultural history.
Hutton-Williams situates MacGreevy within a wider cultural context than that of Irish
expatriates in Paris and highlights the extent of his intellectual connections with other parts
of continental Europe, the USA and Ireland, pointing out, for example, his correspondences
with people such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, Jack B. Yeats, historian Lionello Venturi or
former Taoiseach Éamon de Valera (2). Beyond this contextualization, the book is also crucially
interested in shedding light on MacGreevy’s influential role in the development of Irish public
affairs during a period which is often glossed over in cultural histories of Ireland, i.e. the late
1920s to the early 1960s.
For the most part, the argument is structured chronologically. The book starts by
looking at MacGreevy’s experimental poetry (chapter 1), which it introduces through a close
reading of Beckett’s 1934 review ‘Recent Irish Poetry’. MacGreevy’s poetry (Poems, 1934) is
then apprehended alongside Beckett’s (Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, 1935) and Denis
Devlin’s (Intercessions, 1937) and read as a new take on the lyric and as ‘one of the most
innovative attempts by Irish poets to dismantle existing mythological archetypes and divest
them of their idealist accretions’ (25). Emphasising MacGreevy’s dissatisfaction with the
conservatism of Irish art, state censorship and, more generally, the authoritarianism of the
Irish Free State, chapter 2 focuses on MacGreevy’s Paris years (1927-33), which it sees as
vitally important for his artistic and critical development. The chapter pays special attention
to his literary activities, especially his writings for the modernist journal transition.
MacGreevy’s critical voice is studied alongside that of other prominent literary figures of the
period such as Beckett, Eugène Jolas, Paul Valéry or Seán O’Faolain. Chapter 3 furthers the
reflection on MacGreevy’s art criticism and the clues it gives as to his own aesthetics. It is
particularly interested in the impact of postimpressionism on MacGreevy’s poetry. An
illuminating analysis of MacGreevy’s defence of cubist painter Mainie Jellett is proposed. It is
followed by close readings of some of MacGreevy’s poems (e.g. ‘Promenade à trois’, ‘Did Tosti
Raise His Bowler Hat’, ‘De Civitate Hominum’), which set into relief the very visual,
Review of Irish Studies in Europe 4.1 Hélène Lecossois
DOI: 10.32803/rise.v4i1.2685 189 | P a g e
postimpressionist qualities of MacGreevy’s poems, in a convincing way. The following chapter,
‘Reconstructing the National Painter’ is mostly concerned with MacGreevy’s study of Jack B.
Yeats (Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation (1938)). It ponders the relation of
art to nationalism, and of the individual artist to the nation. Emphasis is laid on Jack B. Yeats’s
definition of beauty as that ‘which binds people and things to other people and things’ and on
Jack B. Yeats’s ‘ability to direct human sentiment away from fear, sensationalism and
superstition and towards shared activities and amusements […]’ (87). These, Hutton-Williams
argues, were defining elements of the ‘liberated art’ that MacGreevy wished for. The book
concludes on a reflection on MacGreevy’s legacy as curator of the National Gallery of Ireland,
highlighting his incessant efforts to revitalize the institution during his directorship (1950-
1963).
The book proposes close, extended readings of poems, paintings, and letters, but also,
most interestingly, of a great variety of unpublished sources, such as notebooks, memos,
lecture notes, reports, and typescripts. For the most part, these unpublished materials are
kept at the department of Manuscripts and Archives of Trinity College, Dublin and at the
National Gallery of Ireland Archives, but the digital Thomas MacGreevy Archive
[http://www.macgreevy.org] has also proved useful to Hutton-Williams’ s study. The archival
research underpinning the argument undeniably constitutes one of the major strengths of the
monograph. Numerous secondary sources have also been looked at. Given the extent of the
research, a more contextually-aware approach to MacGreevy’s dismissal of ‘Irish Ireland’
would have been welcome, especially given the sterling scholarship of critics such as Heather
Laird or Michael Rubenstein, for example.
The book is beautifully produced. Two paintings epitomizing the experimental Irish
modernism which MacGreevy valued figure at the front and the back: Green Abstract (1927)
by Mainie Jellett provides the eye-catching front cover and a miniature version of Jack B.
Yeats’s striking Humanity’s Alibi (1947) figures at the back. The book also comprises a
magnificent colour plate section, which includes reproductions of visual materials as varied as
a detail from the Book of Kells, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother
(1871) by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Dinner Hour at the Docks (1928) by Jack B. Yeats, or
Judith (c. 1504) by Giorgione Barbarelli.
We need a more variegated, historically-nuanced cultural history of Ireland, and
particularly of the 1930s and 1940s which included the opening decade of the Fianna Fáil
government. Monographs such as Hutton-Williams’s Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the
Irish Avant-Garde, dedicated to what is generally thought of as ‘minor’ figures, are particularly
welcome and Cork University Press is to be congratulated for producing such a beautiful and
affordable volume.