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Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art in Ireland from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modern art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of Irish national identity. Through an analysis of significant controversies and debates on modern art, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Disputes about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O’Connor; the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault; the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly, British artist, Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.

Today, Pamela Colman Smith is primarily remembered for designing the storied 1909 tarot deck that served as the model for T. S. Eliot’s Madame Sosostris and “her wicked pack of cards” in The Waste Land. For almost one hundred years it was known as the Rider-Waite deck, named for the mystic A. E. Waite, who is credited with conceiving the deck, and the London publisher, William Rider. This omission perfectly encapsulates Colman Smith’s gendered erasure from the cultural imagination, a type of misogyny that affected many women artists and writers at the turn of the twentieth century but, in her case, was also tinged with racism. Colman Smith was much more than the graphic designer of the tarot deck. Active from the mid-1890s through the 1920s, Colman Smith had a burgeoning career as an American artist, writer, folklore performer, editor, publisher, stage designer, and suffrage activist. Colman Smith’s letters to friends, patrons, publishers, and gallery owners reveal an irrepressible spirit who was committed to rooting out all types of hypocrisy and prejudice, including classism, sexism, and racism, but who, nonetheless, capitalized on racial stereotypes through her Afro-Jamaican Anansi performances. Taken as a whole, Colman Smith’s prodigious body of work is particularly notable for its ability to take on, and often as quickly cast aside, a range of personas and identities.