THERE is a certain, almost inevitable aura of recycling about most recent Yeats exhibitions; many of the works begin to seem if not over familiar, at least vaguely familiar. Yet he was, after all, a man of very large output and, although a mature Yeats canvas is usually recognisable as such straightaway, he had an immense variety of subject matter. The emphasis should be on "subject", because Yeats - like Kokoschka, Chagall, and certain other 20th century masters was essentially a subject painter.
This might have sounded strange in Dublin 40 years ago, when even quite intelligent people complained that his "third period" baffled them because all they could see was a welter of paint. Yet a Yeats painting is not a mere formal statement or an essay in "pure" painting in the old Modernist sense. You always feel, that an immediate visual or imaginative experience has triggered him off, however he may have transfigured the original image.
The exhibition at the Solomon Gallery runs the gamut of his whole career. without claiming to be a kind of mini retro. It includes oils, watercolours and drawings from all periods, some of them relatively familiar and others new to most of us. Water Play, a much loved work (recently seen, by the way, at Then Waddington's gallery in London), shows his innate sympathy with children and belongs to that period when he was in transition from the rather greyish tones of his early work to the iridescent quality of the late pictures.
Another masterpiece is a small painting of a swan, an image which appears to have fascinated him as much as it did his illustrious poet brother. Some of the drawings are rather slight, but today's collectors are eager to snap up even a few pencil lines on paper so long as the result is legitimately "a Yeats". However, that does not detract from the overall impact of an exhibition which catches the essentials of a long, great career and should not be missed.
The inner room of the gallery contains a small exhibition by Melita Denarn, whose work - which has an overall landscape bias is also quite prominent in the current RHA exhibition.
