Art: Silent Dean

In Dublin, they have tongues in their heads, and use them. Last week Art Critic Arthur Power, after looking at Jack Yeats’s latest show, spoke up: “His figures look at their worst as though eaten by some hideous disease, or at their best as if they had had an unfortunate encounter with a bacon cutter. . . . His success is tempting young painters to copy his careless methods and so robbing them of all integrity.”

Unlike his late, great brother, Poet William Butler Yeats, Jack Yeats suffers such attacks in dignified silence. After all, he is the unquestionable dean of Irish artists. Almost everything he paints he sells at four-figure prices, and he exerts more influence than any other Dublin painter. His raucous paintings continued to speak for themselves and draw crowds to the gallery. A less well-attended Yeats exhibition opened in Manhattan.

Gallerygoers who tried to deduce Yeats’s personality from his work might imagine him as an angry, half-blind, stammeringly intense young giant, paint-spattered from head to foot. Murky smears sparked with gobs and drippings of candy-bright color, his huge, swirling landscapes, seascapes and reeling street scenes all look as if they are on fire and half burnt-out already. The panting energy in Yeats’s art, and his violent disregard for nature, are impressive and repulsive as well. They are not easy to connect with the wistful-eyed, closemouthed little Dubliner he really is, and with the neat, sweet drawings of Irish scenes he used to do.

The only extraverted thing about Yeats is his clothes. Sixtyish, he generally appears in a grey suit with velvet lapels and sports an emerald stickpin in his wide black tie. When a reporter cornered him last week to ask a few questions, Yeats had an all-inclusive answer. “An artist’s personality,” he said, “should manifest itself in his work. Personally I have always resented any attempt to make copy out of my private life.”

Then he momentarily relented. “You may say that I live in a Georgian house,” he said. Beaming, he added: “Actually, I live in a flat.”