Latest news with #CasimirMarkievicz
RTÉ News
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Meet Casimir Markievicz - a Polish artist in bohemian Dublin
In Ireland, the name 'Markievicz' immediately conjures the figure of Constance Markievicz, Irish revolutionary heroine. For the first time, a new exhibition explores the artistic life and work of her Polish husband, Casimir Markievicz – painter, playwright, and larger-than-life personality – and his place in Dublin's bohemian circles on the eve of the Revolution. Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald introduces Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist in Bohemian Dublin below. On a Paris evening in early 1899, two Polish friends arrived at a ball attended by fellow international art students, drawn to the hedonistic atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle city. One of the young men – the writer Stefan Krzywoszewski – was struck by a young Irishwoman present, 'who appeared to be about twenty years of age… conspicuous for her proud bearing. She was a living Rossetti or Burne-Jones'. Seizing his friend, Casimir Markievicz, he insisted 'Do dance with this lady. You will be well matched in height and bearing.' Thus began one account of the first meeting of Constance Gore-Booth (1868-1927) and Casimir Markievicz (1874-1932), who married in 1900 after a whirlwind courtship in Paris. From 1903-1913, 'Casi and Con', as they affectionately referred to one another, made Dublin their home. In a city teeming with rival theatrical factions, writers, and visionaries of the Irish Revival, they pursued their artistic ambitions. Cycling around Dublin with paint and canvases strapped to their bicycles, they revelled in (and led) its avant-garde clubs and salons, whilst also gliding amongst the elite of Dublin Castle. It was a decade of competing visions of what art could be, of how theatre and art might inform politics (and vice versa), and what fate lay ahead for Ireland as a nation. Constance Markievicz would go on to become one of Ireland's revolutionary heroines – but a new exhibition on show in Dublin Castle from 22 April to 15 September 2025 – Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist in Bohemian Dublin (1903-13) – brings Casimir's life and work back into the frame. Casimir's background from a Polish landed family settled in Ukraine mirrored Constance's upper-class upbringing in Lissadell, Co Sligo, and both sought to rebel against bourgeois society by adopting an unconventional lifestyle and marriage. The exhibition explores Casimir's involvement in Dublin's vibrant cultural life as a painter, playwright, and bon vivant, as well as the interconnections between Ireland, Poland, and Ukraine. Rarely-seen paintings and photographs created by Casimir and Constance of Ukraine's landscapes and people, drawn from private Markievicz family collections, are a particular highlight. The exhibition evokes this vibrant period of Dublin with more than eighty paintings, drawings, photographs and objects loaned from the public collections of the National Gallery, Crawford Gallery, Model in Sligo, Hugh Lane Gallery, National Museum, National Library, Pearse Museum, UCD Special Collections, and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland; and works from private collections including Lissadell House, United Arts Club, and Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth. Sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Dublin, and co-produced with the OPW/Dublin Castle, the exhibition testifies to the irrepressible spirit of Casimir Markievicz, embodied in the motto of the Dublin 'Reality League' club he founded: Long Live Life! Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald is Professor of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. Along with Dr Kathryn Milligan (NCAD) she is curator of Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist in Bohemian Dublin, on show in Dublin Castle from 22nd April – 14th September 2025 - find out more here.
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Frightfully unfashionable: Frank McNally on the century-long decline of adverbs
That Casimir Markievicz exhibition (Diary, April 23rd) reminded me in passing how dependent the upper classes of these islands used to be on what grammarians call 'degree adverbs'. Witness a letter, included in the show, in which Eva Gore-Booth congratulates her sister Constance on becoming engaged to the Polish count. 'I can't help being frightfully amused when I think of the bomb bursting,' she writes (the bomb-burst being the reaction when others find out). 'Still, I do hope you'll be awfully happy.' Those two adverbs alone convey the accent of the writer and also hint at a certain attitude to life found only in big houses, preferably Georgian, in the decades before and after 1900. READ MORE But it wasn't confined to adverbs. Adjectives ending in -ly were just as important, especially if they were 'ghastly' or 'beastly'. Here's a paragraph from Molly Keane's Good Behaviour, set in another big house a few years later, that has a bit of both: 'They were sending Richard to South Africa on a safari. It might help him a bit. 'He's taken this whole ghastly business terribly hard, poor boy,' Wobbly wrote.' The 'Wobbly' there sounds like an adjective too, which is a bit confusing. But no. The narrator tells us Wobbly is 'an old friend of Papa'. This way of speaking survived the first World War, unlike many big houses themselves. Or at least 'beastly' and 'ghastly' were still going strong in the mid-20th century novels of Enid Blyton, of which I read too many as a child. But 'awfully' and 'frightfully' were dying out by then, except in books and films evoking the earlier period. Modern literature had started to take a dim view of adverbs in general, a trend that has continued since. In a study of 1,500 books a few years ago, aimed at finding out what gains writers' critical acclaim, data journalist Ben Blatt concluded that a low adverb count was one of the keys. Books with fewer than 50 per 10,000 words had a strong chance of being considered 'great', he found. Although failing this test did not preclude wealth and fame. JK Rowling, for one, is famous for using adverbs of the -ly kind. Her favourites include 'coolly', 'calmly', 'ponderously' and 'snarkily'. But as the adverb-hating Stephen King summed up, snarkily: 'Ms Rowling seems to have never met one she didn't like.' Her overall adverb count, according to Blatt, is 140 per 10,000 words. Ernest Hemingway played a big part in making adverbs and adjectives unfashionable. And yet he used some odd ones himself on occasion, boldly going where no writer had gone before. Here, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a typical Hemingway passage, full of short, hard words, sometimes repeated for effect in long, flat sentences, and devoid of all -ly adverbs, with one notorious exception: 'Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes.' Yes, her lips moved 'smally'. (And 'by themselves', whatever that means). There is an adverb nobody else in literature can have used before or since. Not even Donald 'Bigly' Trump would write it, if only because he has no time for diminutives. [ Bigly, Javanka, witch-hunt, sad! The Trump era in 32 words and phrases Opens in new window ] The -ly ending has fallen out of fashion in modern cuisine too. For mysterious reasons, upmarket restaurants will no longer serve 'slowly roasted pork', for example, if they can serve 'slow-roasted pork' instead (although the shorter version probably costs more). But an adverb that is still used a lot, and shouldn't be, gained renewed currency from events in Rome this week. Breaking the news, at least one British tabloid (along with many Twitter users) announced that Pope Francis had 'sadly died'. And yes, I know that grammar and syntax are not the most important things on such an occasion. I also know what each writer meant: that he or she was sad at the news. But the sentence implies that it was the pope who was upset at his own passing, as well he might be, and that in other circumstances he would have died happily. (Mind you, if anyone can die happily, one of the world's foremost believers in the afterlife has a better chance than most of us.) At least the writers here did use the verb 'die', which is often avoided now on social media. The euphemisms 'passed on' or just 'passed' tend to be preferred these days. When the dreaded d-word is used, as it was here, the effect needs to be softened with an adverb, placed however badly.
Irish Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
A count in arrears – Frank McNally on a first-ever solo exhibition of the life and work of Casimir Markievicz
Casimir Markievicz (1874–1932) was an example of that rare 20th-century phenomenon: a man who came to be completely overshadowed by his wife, even though for most of their lives together they did much the same thing. His uncertain place in the national memory was unwittingly summed up back in 2013, by a protester at a distressed properties auction on Dublin. 'Ninety-seven years ago, people lost their lives in that park over there [St Stephen's Green},' a spokesman for the New Land League told RTÉ, in a voice tinged with patriotic fervour. He continued: 'Constant Markievicz gave up his life to enable us to eradicate suppression, taxation, eviction, criminality.' That was an extreme example of the extent to which the male Markievicz's identity had been subjugated to that of his wife Constance (who did indeed participate in the fighting at Stephen's Green in 1916, although like her husband, she lived for more than a decade afterwards and died peacefully in her bed). READ MORE But a new exhibition in Dublin Castle – Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist in Bohemian Dublin (1903–1913) – may help clear up any lingering confusion. Jointly hosted by the Polish Embassy and the Office of Public Works, it is billed as 'the first ever solo exhibition of Casimir's works', even if, inevitably, Constance plays a big part too. One of the show's most impressive pictures is his full-length portrait of her, painted in Paris where they both studied art, in 1899. She's wearing a long white dress and has a gold ring on the middle finger of her left hand. As the exhibition notes point out, however, this was a symbolic ring, denoting her marriage to art, not to the man painting her. She married him too a year later, still in Paris, where he had started calling himself a 'count' (with dubious entitlement), an ennoblement she now shared. There was nothing revolutionary about their lives then. Maud Gonne, who also lived in Paris in 1890s but didn't meet Constance there, would later recall pointedly that while she was helping evicted tenants and organising the 1798 centenary, the future countess was enjoying a carefree life at the Académie Julian. The lack of care continued during the couple's early years in Dublin where they became known for their Bohemian lifestyle but comfortably straddled the social and political divides. Dublin Castle is an apt venue for the exhibition in more ways than one, because it helped support the artist in life too. Another of the show's bigger painting depicts the 1905 investiture there of the Earl of Mayo as a Knight of St Patrick, with the massed Irish aristocracy gathered in regalia, a prestigious commission for the count. But the exhibition also adjoins a room in the State apartments where, as visitors are today reminded, James Connolly stayed as a wounded prisoner before his execution. Connolly had been influential in turning Constance Markievicz into a socialist, while she in turn had helped convert him to nationalism. By 1908, the count and countess – both descended from ancien regimes, he via an old Polish family in what today is Ukraine, she via the Gore-Booths of Sligo's Lisadell House – were starting to go different ways. He didn't share her growing radicalisation, although he was prone to most of the enthusiasms of nationalist Ireland then, including theatre. Many of those who would later stage the Easter Rising had first staged, written, or acted in plays. Casimir Markievicz caught that bug too. Reviewing one of his works in 1908, The Irish Times marvelled that 'the microbe of drama has infected nearly everybody in Dublin' and likened it to an 'influenza epidemic'. The count's infection was not a complete artistic success. WB Yeats – no admirer of him in general – suggested his plays were the work of a man who struggled with English. But Markievicz never recovered from the bug and continued to work in theatre long after his return to Poland. Back in 1902, previewing the couple's arrival from Paris, George Russell told his friend, stained-glass artist Sarah Purser (in a quotation now writ large on one of the exhibition walls): 'The Gore-Booth girl who is married to the Polish Count with the unspellable name is going to settle near Dublin about summertime. As they are both clever it will help to create an art atmosphere. We might get the materials for a revolt, a new Irish Art Club. I feel some desperate schism of earthquaking revolution is required to wake Dublin up in matters.' Casimir Markievicz became a prominent figure (literally – he stood 6 feet 4 inches) in Dublin's social and artistic life for a decade. He and the 'Gore-Booth girl' certainly added to the city's creative atmosphere in those years. And they did indeed help establish the United Arts Club in 1907. A caricature by Beatrice Elvery, also included in the show, features a giant Casimir acting as club bouncer, dwarfing everyone else in the picture. But in 1913, by then amicably separated from Constance, he left Dublin never to return. This free exhibition at the castle's staterooms is a long overdue retrospective of his Irish years. It opens officially on Thursday and continues until mid-September.
