'Out of Step' Michael Kane, Modernism and Irish Art History

As a leading member of the Independent artists and a founder of the Project Arts Centre, Michael Kane has made an immense contribution to Irish art. Along with John Kelly, James McKenna, John Behan, and Charlie Cullen, he formed Group 65 in the mid 1960s. It came to dominate the Independent artists, the exhibition society, founded in 1960, as an alternative to the RHA and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Declaring themselves to be ‘the nucleus of a new school of painting in Ireland’, they saw their work as representative of an important aspect of Irish art practice, one that was neither academic nor one that slavishly followed international trends.