An Introduction to Bernard Shaw's “On the Municipal Gallery”
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.41.2.0442
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
ResumoOn 12 April 1913, a day after Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw departed Ireland for Ayot St Lawrence after a fortnight visit with Horace Plunkett at his Kilteragh home outside Dublin, an interview with Shaw appeared in the Irish Times.1 The interview was likely a self-interview, which had been a journalistic device Shaw had employed, if not regularly, then at least on occasions.2 The interview ran with the header “MUNICIPAL ART GALLERY” with a succession of subheaders: “THE BRIDGE SITE / INTERVIEW WITH MR. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW / THE DANGER OF FIRE / THE POOR AND PICTURES.”3 The article is not listed in Dan H. Laurence's Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, nor in Laurence's “Supplement” to the Bibliography (SHAW 20). In addition, it is not included in Laurence and David H. Greene's The Matter with Ireland, yet it represents a significant example of Shaw's direct involvement in Irish affairs that began after the death of J. M. Synge in March 1909, which included Shaw's journalistic efforts. Specifically, the interview was part of Shaw's public advocacy for the Dublin Municipal Art Gallery during its critical debates that ranged, then raged from November 1912 to autumn 1913.4The Municipal Gallery had been envisioned by Hugh Lane, a young successful art dealer born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1875. When only twenty-two, Lane became a self-employed dealer based in London, where he rose to prominence with a series of successful art transactions. During a trip to Ireland in 1901 that included a visit with his aunt Lady Gregory, Lane attended a contemporary art exhibit in Dublin that included works by Irish artists John Butler Yeats (father of William Butler Yeats, artist Jack B. Yeats, Elizabeth Yeats, and Lily Yeats—the latter two of Cuala Press) and Nathaniel Hone. In the next year, Lane organized a Dublin exhibit of Old Masters paintings, loaned for the occasion from Irish estates (perhaps through introductions from his aunt).5 Simultaneously, Lane had been acquiring nineteenth-century French and continental paintings, mostly impressionists, and exhibited them at Dublin's Royal Hibernia Academy in 1904, during which he promised the gift of said paintings, along with contemporary Irish paintings, for a new gallery of modern art in Dublin, should such a gallery be established. In the following year, Dublin Corporation (then Dublin's city government, now Dublin City Council) committed funding for a Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. A former Georgian residence on Harcourt Street was acquired as a temporary home for the gallery, which publicly opened in January 1908 with Lane as its director. Nine months after its opening, Shaw visited the gallery during his first return to Dublin since emigrating in 1876.6 The Municipal Gallery featured the contemporary Irish works and continental impressionist paintings Lane had collected and was the world's first museum of contemporary art. In the year of its opening, Lane received numerous accolades for his services to art in Dublin and in London, and then a knighthood in 1909—the year when James Larkin formed the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) in Dublin.7Lucy McDiarmid notes that by spring 1912, Lane had established a competition for the design of panels to be installed in the eventual permanent home of the Dublin Metropolitan Gallery, reflecting Lane's optimism that a permanent location would soon be realized.8 The Dublin park St. Stephen's Green was proposed by some as the location for a new museum, which appealed to Lane. He commissioned London architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose mother was Irish, to design a gallery for the site. However, permission for the park was controlled by Lord Ardilaun, since his family, the Guinness family, had originally donated St. Stephens Green to Dublin for a public park, and Ardilaun had had it refurbished in the 1880s. As for adding the gallery to the Green, Ardilaun refused (though guaranteed five hundred pounds for the gallery in mid-December).9 On 5 November 1912, Lane wrote to the Dublin City Clerk in which he stated that he would turn over to Dublin Corporation the Irish paintings part of the Harcourt Street Gallery, “on condition that they are always on view free to the public,” but also threatened that the thirty-nine continental paintings “would be removed at the end of January 1913 if no decision about the gallery's permanent site were made.”10 The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Lorcan Sherlock, held a public meeting on 29 November to form the Citizens' Provisional Committee with the purpose of raising funds, according to McDiarmid, to purchase a site for the gallery since Dublin Corporation was “promising to pay for a permanent building.”11 Lady Gregory wrote to Shaw for help. He obliged with a letter to the Lord Mayor, which was read during the above meeting.In support of finding “a suitable gallery,” Shaw emphasized the importance of the “collection of the modern French school” together with works from other painters, “especially Irish painters, who assimilated its technical discoveries and responded to that French audacity of spirit which is so congenial to our own national temperament.” Shaw then related the importance art played in his development: “The taste and knowledge of fine art which I acquired as a boy in the National Gallery of Dublin not only made it possible for me to live by my pen without discrediting my country, but are built into the fabric of the best work I have been able to do since…. A few of us must spend our boyhood in this way if Irishmen are to keep and extend their share in forming the mind of the world.” Shaw closed with: “And as your Committee may be curious to know whether I am sufficiently in earnest to back my opinion, I shall be glad, if contributions are invited from private sources to assist the Corporation in providing a suitable gallery, to put down my own name for one hundred guineas.”12 The letter was published in the Irish Times on 30 November 1913.Also on 30 November, Gregory wrote to Shaw in response: “That letter is splendid, it ought to do a great deal. And then that final and inspiring sentence!” Gregory also asked if Shaw had copies of the letter, which he had had printed for the Dublin meeting. She would soon embark on the Abbey Theatre's second American tour, where some performances were used to raise money for the gallery. She added that in the “Philadelphia row [from the Abbey's 1911–12 American tour when the company was charged with indecency for performing The Playboy of the Western World] we were told ‘there is no one Americans feel but Bernard Shaw.’” However, Gregory's letter also hinted at the gallery stance that Yeats and herself were forming: “One is not afraid of R. C. [Roman Catholic] intolerance, for as I quote from Cuchululain ‘Good as the attack is the defense will be as good,’ but one might as well say there will be no whisky.”13 While Yeats's 1913 contributions toward promoting the gallery would carry the inference of being a stand for Protestant Ireland, Shaw's position, as already evident, was more geared to the cultural and educational value of the art.14 And at roughly the same time, the end of November 1912, a Dublin architect named Frank Craig suggested the River Liffey as the location for the gallery, in the form of a bridge. A bridge appealed to Lane and his architect Lutyens, but as publicly raised money was slow to accumulate, it began to appear that the gallery had little public support—or so it was, at first, quietly insinuated by those turning against public money being spent on Lane's Gallery.15By 30 December 1912, Gregory was in Chicago with the Abbey Theatre's second American tour, where it had been decided, by Gregory and Yeats, that select performances during the tour, mainly of Shaw's The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, would be used for raising funds for Lane's Municipal Gallery.16 As McDiarmid details in “The Abbey, Its ‘Helpers,’ and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913,” Gregory launched quickly into cultivating wealthy Chicago socialites into supporting the Lane Gallery. On 5 January 1913, the Chicago Tribune published Gregory's “Appeal for Art in Dublin,” and on 21 January, after much publicity, the box office receipts for a special matinee performance of Blanco Posnet, with Gregory's Hyacinth Halvey and Gregory-Yeats's The Pot of Broth, was set aside for the gallery.17 As Gregory was under way with fundraising in America, Yeats was contributing in different ways while splitting time between Dublin and England.On 11 January 1913, Yeats published the first of a series of poems written on behalf of the Municipal Gallery in the Irish Times, published as “The Gift.”18 The timing of the publication was critical as Dublin Corporation was to debate the gallery on 20 January. R. F. Foster suggests that while the publication was meant to argue in favor for the gallery, it “actually was counter-productive.”19 Foster further argues that the poem's content was “offensive,” while the poem portrayed “a fantasy of Renaissance Italy and noble patronage [it] was set against [Lord] Ardilaun's frugality [despite Ardilaun's five-hundred-pound contribution]; the tone of aristocratic disdain was compounded by the Olympian references to ‘Paudeen’ and ‘Biddy’—symbolizing, through diminutives of the patron saints Patrick and Brigid, the Irish ‘people.’”20 Despite the target of Ardilaun, with his Guinness wealth, the poem incensed Cork-born, Dublin-based Catholic capitalist extraordinaire William Martin Murphy, whose public response escalated the debate, making him the gallery's “chief antagonist.”21In 1913, Murphy “was the most important businessman in Dublin.”22 In the previous century, he had amassed great wealth through railways in England, Africa, South America, and Ireland, where he remained on the board of the Great Southern and Western Railway that had utilized the lockout strategy against the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1911.23 Murphy chaired the Dublin United Tramways Company, owned the Irish Independent (the first paper to denounce Synge's In The Shadow of the Glen in 1903) and Irish Catholic newspapers, and owned Dublin's luxurious Imperial Hotel. He was also president of Dublin's Chamber of Commerce. When an Irish Parliamentary Party MP, Murphy played a significant role in pitting the party against its leader Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant, in 1890—a defining historical moment that fueled many of Ireland's early twentieth-century writers and artists, including Yeats and, to some extent, Shaw.24 Seven days after Yeats's “The Gift” was published, Dublin's Daily Express published a letter from Murphy, in which he wrote “‘from Paudeen's point of view,’ asserting the right of the ratepayers to say where their money went and declaring that he, Murphy, ‘would rather see in the City of Dublin one block of sanitary houses at low rents replacing a reeking slum than all the pictures Corot and Degas ever painted.’”25 Two days later, on the day Dublin Corporation voted in favor of providing twenty-two thousand pounds toward building a permanent gallery, the Irish Times published another letter from Murphy in which he argued that those in favor of “the shrine of Saint Sir Hugh Lane” should “moderate their ecstacies [sic]” by considering Dublin's deplorable housing conditions.26 The irony of Murphy again expressing concern for the housing of Dublin's poor, given his 1911 formation and leadership of the Dublin Employers' Federation to oppose organized trade union representation, would not be lost on James Larkin, the ITGWU, and advocates for Irish labor, who no doubt understood the callousness of Murphy's use of the poor to attack the Municipal Gallery. In another two days, on 22 January, Murphy extended his tactics within his Irish Independent, stating that only a “handful of dilettante [sic]” favored the gallery “for which there is no popular demand and one which will never be of the smallest use to the common people of the city,” dismissing Yeats's efforts, but also, seemingly, Shaw's letter from the previous November in which he had expressed the value of art for the poor and disenfranchised.27A little more than a month after the death of his mother on 19 February 1913, Shaw and Charlotte departed England on March 29 for a fortnight visit with Horace Plunkett at Kilteragh, Foxrock, County Dublin.28 The visit for Shaw would include writing numerous articles, climbing Three Walk Mountain, and holding talks with Plunkett and other visitors to Kilteragh, all before the backdrop of Shaw's relationship with Stella Campbell that was reaching crisis mode with Charlotte.29 It was also during this time that Hugh Lane made the River Liffey location, as a gallery to span the river, a new condition for his gift of paintings to Dublin. His position had become entrenched as opposition to the use of public funds increased as it was joined by opposition to the bridge plan. Since Lady Gregory was in America with the Abbey, it is unlikely she wrote to Shaw asking for more gallery help. According to Charlotte Shaw's diary, she visited the Municipal Gallery on 9 April at its temporary Harcourt Street address, where she may have encountered Lane or was moved by the collection's importance and nudged Shaw to action.30 Or Shaw was aware on his own of the growing Dublin opposition against the gallery and the bridge site. Whatever his immediate impulse, Shaw provided his “Municipal Art Gallery” to the Irish Times, which published it on 12 April, a day after the Shaws departed Ireland and almost a month after Yeats strongly advocated for Lane's preferred bridge site for the gallery on Saint Patrick's Day, also in the Irish Times.31 Plunkett noted in his diary for 11 April, “Bernard Shaw & wife left. They were ideal guests.”32 On the 12th in Boston, Blanco Posnet took another turn at fundraising for Lane's gallery.33Shaw's “Municipal Art Gallery,” while making a strong argument in favor of the gallery, reveals his astute reading of the debate, being that Lane's insistence on a bridge site threatened the entire gallery as it overshadowed the cultural value of the paintings—the real “Gift” to Dublin. Shaw quickly aimed at the bridge gallery idea over the River Liffey: “Has Sir Hugh Lane ever smelt the Liffey!” On the notion that a bridge gallery would be safe for the paintings (most viewed the temporary Harcourt Street location as being unsafe), Shaw added: “A bridge site is the most dangerous in the world…. There is always wind up and down the river. That would be under the Gallery. The place would burn furiously if it once caught fire.” Moving to the question of whether the gallery was valuable to Dublin, the real issue, Shaw stated, with a hint of responding to William Martin Murphy's claim that the gallery was supported by only a “handful of dilettante[s]”: “It is valuable. Is anybody in Dublin so stupendously ignorant as not to know it will be one of the most precious collections of the kind in Europe?” Shaw then suggested an alternative location, Merrion Square, where Ireland's National Gallery and Museum of Natural History abound, “I should make the [Merrion Square] centre an Acropolis.”34 On the idea that the poor do not live near the square, Shaw stated: “Our object is to preserve good pictures for ever and to get rid of the poor at the earliest opportunity. You must level up the poor to your pictures, and not level down your pictures to the poor.”35 Shaw's article, which follows in full, appeared at a crucial moment, not only for the gallery debate, but for the coming events in which William Martin Murphy would be a catalyst.While the Abbey Theatre was engaged in its nearly monthlong run in Boston in April 1913, Gregory organized the production of a souvenir to raise further funds for Lane's gallery, being a linen handkerchief designed by Yeats's father John Butler Yeats.36 The souvenir featured a photograph of the full cast of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, from the play's trial scene, along with J. B. Yeats's line drawings of the cast's principal actors, two verse quotations from Gregory and W. B. Yeats with their signatures—but not Shaw's name, nor the title of his play.37 The souvenir, on hand at Boston's Plymouth Theatre, was “sold for $1 apiece in aid of the gallery building project.”38 At roughly this time, according to Robert O'Byrne, Lane wrote to Gregory: “If the pictures are saved for Dublin, … it is entirely owing to you and the generosity of your America friends.”39A month later, the newly formed Dublin Repertory Theatre, with the experience of producing Shaw plays among two of its three directors, staged The Devil's Disciple for a week at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre.40 Given the coming events, it was a timely production. Staged by Casmir Markievicz, a painter and theater practitioner who publicly campaigned in favor of Lane's gallery, cast numerous newsboys as the American extras; the newsboys had recently joined the ITGWU under Larkin. The gallery debate and the coming Dublin labor war were converging, with William Martin Murphy at center stage.In July, Murphy became aware that the ITGWU was successfully recruiting members from the workers of the Dublin United Tramways Company, which he chaired.41 Nearly simultaneously, Murphy called a special meeting of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, of which he was president, where Lane's gallery was denounced as a “white elephant” amid voiced objections to building the gallery over the Liffey. Near the end of July, Larkin introduced a motion to the “Dublin Trades Council supporting the building of the gallery” and added that Murphy “should be condemned to keep an art gallery in Hell.”42 On 31 July, Lane moved his pictures from the temporary Harcourt Street location to the exhibition room of the Mansion House, the residence of Dublin's Lord Mayor. At that time, Murphy sacked six known ITGWU organizers from the Tramways workforce and told that force that if there was a strike, the company's shareholders “will have three meals a day…. I don't know if the men who go out can count on this.”43 On 9 August, the Dublin Repertory Theatre announced it would stage John Galsworthy's play Strife, set within a protracted labor strike, and the Abbey Theatre named a new company manager, A. P. Wilson, a regular contributor to The Irish Worker.44 By mid-August, William Martin Murphy informed workers of his Irish Independent that they had to choose between their jobs or the ITGWU; Larkin responded by calling on newsboys to stop selling and handling William Martin Murphy's papers, a number of whom had recently been in Markievicz's The Devil's Disciple staging. On 12 August, Murphy published a letter in the Irish Times attacking Lane and Lane's use of an English architect for the Bridge Gallery (despite the architect Lutyens' Irish mother): He figuratively wipes his boots in the architectural profession of Ireland, and a committee of Irish gentlemen are so obsessed by Sir Hugh Lane and his handful of pictures that they meekly swallow all his conditions, and are prepared if they can succeed in doing so to place the citizens under his feet. It is a case of “no Irish need apply” for any job besides digging the foundations in the Liffey mud.45 Murphy was not so subtlety attacking Lane on the count of accepting an English knighthood, something that Murphy had refused in 1907.Two days after Murphy's Irish Times letter, Gregory wrote privately to Lane in effort to steer him away from his bridge site condition, echoing Shaw's views: “In my mind I see two great dangers, one that Ireland may lose the pictures—the other and more personal one that you, after your Great patience and Great Generosity—may put yourself in the wrong by getting away from your original promise.”46 Labor events escalated in Dublin when Larkin called for all trams to stop at 9:40 on Tuesday morning, 26 August, on the day the annual Dublin Horse Show Week commenced. When the trams stopped, Murphy led the Dublin Employers Federation in locking out ITGWU workers throughout the city.47 In turn, Larkin called for sympathy strikes from trade unions sympathetic to the ITGWU. Nearly twenty-five thousand workers and their families were impacted and without income. The 1913 Dublin Lockout had commenced, and Dublin Corporation began planning for its vote on Lane's condition that the gallery be built spanning the Liffey.On the weekend of 30–31 August, hundreds of Dublin Metropolitan Police constables baton charged lockout workers to clear the streets, resulting in two workers being killed and hundreds injured, many with severe head injuries. The 31st came to be known as one of Ireland's Bloody Sundays. On 2 September, two dilapidated tenement buildings collapsed on Dublin's Church Street, killing seven, including two young children, and leaving eleven families homeless. Yeats now moved to publish his latest poem on the gallery debate that took direct aim at Murphy, but with the lockout, the poem took on further meaning. It was published on 8 September, the day Dublin Corporation voted on Lane's preferred bridge site for the gallery, in the Irish Times under its first title, “Romance in Ireland.” It would be retitled “September 1913” in a private October 1913 reprinting in Poems Written in Discouragement. The poem insinuatingly accused Murphy of objecting to the gallery—before the backdrop of locking out twenty-five thousand severely underpaid workers—as he fumbled “in a greasy till” counting his pennies. It was a vivid image, made more potent by the poem's refrain that “Romantic Ireland,” and all that such represented, was “dead and gone.”48 The corporation voted 23–21 against the bridge site.On 16 September, Murphy's Irish Independence, gloatingly published a photograph of a squalid tenement building on Ash Street with roughly twenty-eight children, many barefoot, with six or seven adults standing before it. All were impoverished. The caption read: “Needless to say, they are all deeply interested in the fate of the project of the Art Gallery over the Liffey.”49 The paper ran additional photographs of Dublin slum dwellings on 17 September, as the entrance to a Coombe Street tenement, with two impoverished women, and a tenement on Cork Street with seven children dressed in what appear to be rags. The latter's caption, in part, read: “This wretched abode is inhabited by two families at a rent of 4s a week for two rooms. It is the embodiment of misery.” The paper completed their captions for the two photographs with, “And they still think of Art Galleries!”50 No doubt, lockout conditions made the weekly rent for rooms in the Cork Street tenement unattainable.On 27 September, Lane removed his continental impressionist paintings from the Mansion House and sent them to Belfast for a short-term loan. He then willed them to the National Gallery in London “on assumption that they will be exhibited as a group.”51 The debate on the Municipal Gallery had ended—at least for the moment.Certainly, Yeats was not the only Dubliner to see Murphy as the flashpoint both for the gallery's defeat, though Lane's entrenchment with the bridge site worked against the gallery as Shaw had foreseen, and for the lockout. Poet and artist George Russell, who worked closely with Horace Plunkett in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, penned a letter published in the Irish Times on 7 October titled “Open Letter to the Masters of Dublin.” While not specifically naming Murphy, Russell strongly alluded to Murphy's winter letters against the gallery when he claimed that housing for the poor needed to be addressed before an art gallery, which the Irish Independent had recently echoed with its photographs and captions on Dublin's slum dwellings. Russell also directly alluded to Murphy's warning to his workforce: That you are an uncultivated class was obvious from recent utterances of some of you upon art…. You have allowed the poor to be herded so that one thinks of certain places in Dublin as of a pestilence. There are twenty thousand rooms, in each of which live entire families, and sometimes more, where no functions of the body can be concealed and delicacy and modestly are creatures that are stifled er they are born…. Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity. If you had between you collectively a portion of human soul as large as a threepenny bit, you would have sat day and night with representatives with labour, trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful of the women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong to you. But no! You reminded labour you could always have your three square meals a day while it went hungry.52 When the Dublin Employers' Federation used English workers, scabs, to fill jobs that locked-out Dublin workers had formerly held, Murphy's 12 August Irish Times letter attacking Lane for his English architect, with his quip “no Irish need apply,” rang with callous hypocrisy.Similarly, Yeats also took his war with Murphy directly into the lockout battle. He attended the Dublin Industrial Peace Committee meeting on 27 October at the Mansion House. While addressing the meetings, the Lord Mayor, Lorcan Sherlock, cut Yeats's speech before he could finish. Larkin then published Yeats's speech, “Dublin Fanaticism,” in The Irish Worker: “I charge the Dublin Nationalist newspapers [the same that turned against the gallery] with deliberately arousing religious passion to break up the organization of the workingman, with appealing to mob law day after day, with publishing the names of workingmen and their wives for purposes of intimidation…. Intriguers have met together somewhere behind the scenes that they might turn the religion of Him who thought it hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven into an oppression of the poor.”53Before the month was out, James Larkin was arrested and imprisoned for sedition. London's Daily Herald, for which Shaw had contributed establishment funds the previous year, organized a rally for Larkin's release and to raise money for food relief for locked-out Dublin workers, held at London's Royal Albert Hall. Shaw was among the speakers, following directly behind Russell, then James Connolly representing the ITGWU. Shaw ended his speech by referring to the Dublin Metropolitan Police violence against workers: “It has been the practice, ever since the modern police were established, in difficulties with the working class to let loose the police and tell them to go and do their worst to the people. Now, if you put the policeman on the footing of a mad dog, it can end in one way—that all respectable men will have to arm themselves.”54 Two weeks later, James Connolly, addressing locked-out workers before the ITGWU's Liberty Hall, announced the formation of a labor militia to protect workers and their rights. It would become the Irish Citizen Army, which Connolly would lead into Irish revolution in 1916.55 In some respects, the debate over the Dublin Municipal Art Gallery was tied to Ireland's period of revolution that emerged in 1913. However, the debate over Lane's continental paintings was not over.In January 1914, the National Gallery in London decided not to exhibit all of Lane's paintings. During the following year, Lane wrote a codicil to his will, leaving all of his continental paintings to Dublin, with the stipulation that “a suitable building is provided within 5 years of my death.”56 The codicil was not witnessed, and in the spring of 1915, Lane traveled to New York and was returning on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 7 May. Lane was among the twelve hundred victims. Gregory would campaign tirelessly for Lane's codicil to be granted, but an agreement to share the paintings was not reached until 1959, with restructured agreements in 1979 and 1993.57 Shaw certainly contributed to the gallery debate during its most heated months and made the transition when the debate bled into the Dublin lockout.
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