Review of Eimear O'Connor 'Sean Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland'

Sean Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland is a much needed addition to the literature on this major figure in 20th Century Irish art. It is an anthology of the artist’s articles and broadcasts dating from 1924 to 1971. Almost half of the 32 texts are transcripts of radio broadcasts dating to the 1930s, appearing for the first time in published form. Eimear O’Connor also provides an excellent and useful discussion of the rather complex figure of Keating who has been stereotyped as a vehemently anti-modernist academic artist by earlier generations of Irish art historians and critics. As O’Connor points out much of this dismissal of Keating came from the need to champion modernist art in Ireland and to set up a rather artificial academic versus modern divide.