Art: Dublin’s Dean

Jack B. Yeats, younger brother of the late great poet William Butler Yeats, is the silent dean of Irish painters. He generally refuses to discuss his art and, when pressed, retorts that his paintings speak for themselves. In a retrospective show in Manhattan last week, 36 of his canvases mutely testified to his long love of misty forms and lavish color.

As usual, the critics called his pictures strange. Yeats is used to this. In one rare burst of discussion of his work, he insisted on a distinction: “I never go in for strange pictures, although it sometimes happens that what is in my mind is strange.”

Ireland is very much in Painter Yeats’s mind, and he takes his subjects from Ireland’s mythology, her countryside and cluttered city streets. His colors come from the purple-brown of Irish bogs, the emeralds and slate greys of Irish seas, the blues of the hills and heather. “An artist may travel the world and paint every imaginable scene,” he said once, “but he will never succeed in painting a masterpiece until he takes it out of his own country, out of the place where he was born & bred, the place that is in his blood.” The pictures in the Manhattan show dealt with lonely beaches, carnival players and street vendors, and bore such titles as Low Tide, Morning in the City, Queen Maeve Walked upon This Strand.

Aloof and austere at 82, Artist Yeats has lived alone in Dublin since his wife’s death in 1947. An old man, and a Protestant in a Catholic land, he has few close friends now. Dublin knows him best as a lean, stooped figure in a navy blue jacket, cut sea-captain style, and black string tie, who is sometimes to be seen rambling through the city.

No one can tell if he is still painting. He uses almost no models, works mainly from recollection in his small studio, and in jealously guarded secret. His custom is to put every picture away for six months to a year, then decide whether to show it or destroy it. This year, for the first time in Dublin memory, the annual exhibition of the Royal Hibernian Academy had no new Yeats to show.