Women, Art and Nationalism in the Irish Revival: Presence and Absence

The contribution of women to the construction of modern society has been largely forgotten in Irish history. Even though the interest in women's studies has improved in the past decades, adding women's names to history is not enough: we need to question its basis, Adela Flamarike argues in this original new book. / The author explores how the distinctive features of Irish cultural nationalism led to a distinctive understanding of both womanhood and the role of women's arts in Irish cultural self-realisation. / The focus on female visual art gives new clarity to the participation and circumstances of Irish women in the Irish revolution and the creation of modern society. It recovers some of the voices that have been silenced and the experiences that have been forgotten by giving them an aesthetic platform. /This book is a major attempt to explore the construction of womanhood created by nationalism and the Irish Revival, to investigate whether female artists challenged this idealised representation of the feminine and, if so, how they did it. / It exposes female participation in the Irish cultural scene by interrogating the new styles and techniques that women artists and craftswomen in Ireland developed between 1890 and 922. It focuses in particular on two groups of women - those in the Arts & Crafts movement - whose guilds sought to offer poor women a self-determining future - and those women who travelled to the continent (notably Paris) to gain an art education which they then they integrated into their creative practice on returning to Ireland. / Adela Flamarike shows that if we ignore female creation, the history of art will remain complete, and false. This book seeks to recuperate female artworks of the Irish Revival in order to contribute to creating a more complete and true history of art and therefore of culture. It also re-frames a history of art in an unbiased manner. Analysing the representation of the Irish reality painted by female artists provides a better picture of what happened and how women participated in the nationalist movement while engaging or not with feminism.