Roisin Kennedy – författare

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks.

Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader is an anthology of literary and critical sources for the study of visual art and Ireland. It is a completely new version of the 2000 publication, Sources in Irish Art with an additional editor, brand new texts with the historical range stretching from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Divided into four sections, Art historiography, Nationalism and identity, the Wider world, and Art and text, the sources included are taken from letters, travel diaries, antiquarian writings, art dictionaries, accounts of collections, memoirs, essays, exhibition catalogues and reviews, and government enquiries. The sources range from the letters of Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century regarding the conservation of funerary monuments in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin to a 2010 essay on the impact of the sexuality of the modern Irish artist, Gerard Dillon on his practice. While many of the earlier sources refer to art produced in the colonial period, those of the twentieth and twenty-first century relate to art produced in an independent Ireland and in the newly created Northern Ireland. In recent years there has been a dramatic upsurge in research and publishing on Irish art that has produced new writings and new approaches which has furthered the rediscovery of forgotten or overlooked texts. This anthology aims to make such texts easily available to the general reader, the student or teacher. While well-known names in Irish art from Jack B. Yeats to Alice Maher feature in this anthology, the editors also offer commentary from international voices such as Gustave Courbet, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Thomas McEvilley. The diversity and broad chronological range of texts offer unique and exceptional insights into the issues and ideas that influenced the production and responses to art in Ireland.

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on art works, media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators including Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Clement Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney, Herbert Read and Brian O’Doherty, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modernist art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of national Irish identity. Through an analysis of major controversies, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Debate about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O’Connor, the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault, the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly British, artist Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on art works, media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators including Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Clement Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney, Herbert Read and Brian O’Doherty, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modernist art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of national Irish identity. Through an analysis of major controversies, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Debate about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O’Connor, the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault, the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly British, artist Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.