I first saw these unusual black metal disc grave markers (Austro-Hungarian army) on a visit to Terezin in the Czech Republic many years ago. The area was witness to different strife and horror over time. This cyclical horror which Yeats refers to reminds me of this place. The reticulation from the different printing I use on this work I think also reflects traces from the past being relived .
The garrison I visited a decade ago when we lived in Prague was used as a political prison camp during World War I where Gavrilo Princip (who assassinated Franz Ferdinand and his wife) was imprisoned and died of tuberculosis in 1918. The same year witnessed the fall of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and the area became part of the newly formed Czechoslovakia. There was also the battle of Teschen in January 1919 Czechoslovak-Polish war). During World War II the Gestapo used it as a ghetto and concentration camp, 150,000 Jewish people from Germany , Austria , The Netherlands and Denmark were moved to the ghetto . Although it wasn’t an extermination camp it is estimated over 33,000 died in the camp due to extreme population density , malnutrition and disease. Over 88,000 inhabitants were sent to extermination camps .
WB Yeats poem 1919 is one that weighs heavy on the shoulders, the things most precious are lost and what remains constant is violence and the inevitable loss that follows in its wake.
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen will be officially opened by Ireland’s Ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall at a reception in the Hyde Bridge Gallery, August 1st at 1.00 pm.
The exhibition can be seen in two sections across two galleries, Hamilton Gallery and the Hyde Bridge Gallery from July 18th – August 7th, in conjunction with the 60th Yeats International Summer School and the 9th Tread Softly… Festival.
In September 2020 this exhibition was showcased at the Irish Consulate Offices, Park Avenue, New York. It was opened at the Consulate in the middle of the General Assembly of the UN . Minister of State Ciaran Cannon for the Diaspora and International Development gave the opening address. Newspaper link
I would like to thank Martina Hamilton and Ailbhe of the Hamilton Gallery for their commitment , hard work, and ambition building up this annual project with incremental impact.
You Tube link to exhibition catalogue
Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen by William Butler Yeats
MANY ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood —
And gone are phidias’ famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
III
Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.
A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.
The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
We, who seven yeats ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked — and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias’ daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
William Butler Yeats
