Sly Modernism: William Orpen and the Making of Modern Irish Art
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Barringer, Timothy
Abstract
This dissertation reexamines the life and legacy of the Irish painter William Orpen (1878-1931). One of the most prolific and commercially successful artists of early-twentieth- century Britain and Ireland, Orpen was trained in at the Dublin Metropolitan School and the Slade School of Art in London before working between London, Dublin, and Paris from 1900 to 1931. Through a highly self-reflexive practice, Orpen’s oeuvre posits questions of individual distinction and cultural belonging across multiple artistic networks and traditions. Importantly, his work navigates a British and Irish cultural project in the period immediately preceding the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.This dissertation investigates three stages of Orpen’s career. It begins with Orpen’s early distinction at the New English Art Club. There, the artist embraced a strategy of varied visual pastiche intended to frame the painter as the inheritor of a realist tradition stretching from Jan van Eyck and Diego Velázquez to James Abbot McNeill Whistler and Édouard Manet. In establishing himself as a formidable new leader in British painting, Orpen placed playful, generative referentiality at the heart of an Edwardian artistic project. Through his interest in mirror reflections and exploration of an extensive self-portraiture practice, Orpen proved himself deeply invested in questions of performance that disclose his shifting artistic preoccupations and sense of national belonging. Following this investigation into Orpen’s early career, I turn to Dublin. Between 1906 and 1916, Orpen established himself as an integral figure in a project of Irish artistic Renaissance. Through his teaching at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and turn to Irish subject matter in his own work, Orpen championed the development of a distinctly Irish school of painting at a moment of keen debate about the presentation of Irishness at home and abroad. Lastly, my dissertation examines Orpen’s status as an official artist of the First World War. Although Orpen’s war work has been condemned by later detractors as incoherent or inept, his expressions of the grotesque, traumatized, and disappeared body from 1916 to 1923 reveal the painter’s sharp critique of accepted visual and rhetorical discourses on death, trauma, heroism, and commemoration. This section remains particularly alert to Orpen’s successful evasions of restrictions imposed on war artists by the British Propaganda Bureau. Together, these investigations into Orpen’s sly modernism shed light on the notable career of an artist who delighted in the trickiness and performativity of representation. I argue that Orpen’s strategies of wry visual humor constitute his most enduring legacy. Above all, this project reclaims the artist as a central figure of both British and Irish early- twentieth-century painting, positioning Dublin and London as linked nodes in an expanded geography of modernism.
Recommended Citation
Stapleton, Judith M., "Sly Modernism: William Orpen and the Making of Modern Irish Art" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1013.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1013
