Seán Keating in Context

Sean Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland offers, for the first time, a comprehensive compilation and contextual analysis of Keating's articles and broadcasts between 1924 and 1972. The introduction to the book examines the context of his thoughts on culture, politics, and economics. Moreover, given the present economic conditions in Ireland and further afield, the content of Keating's articles and broadcasts is prophetic, poignant, and amusing. The book is a precursor to the author's forthcoming full-scale monograph on the artist.

Eimear O'Connor received her PhD from UCD in 2008 for her thesis on Sean Keating. During this time she was a Humanities Institute of Ireland Scholar. She has since co-curated, with The Hunt Museum, Limerick, an exhibition of the artist's work titled 'Sean Keating in Focus', for which she also wrote the catalogue. For the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD, O'Connor has lectured on twentieth-century Irish art and on developments in European and North American modern art. She is presently Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at TRIARC [Trinity Irish Art Research Centre], Trinity College, Dublin. Her research interests include the life and work of little-known Irish women artists; the contextual development of Irish art and visual culture in the twentieth century; visual art and the Irish theatre; the representation of Ireland abroad - with an overarching emphasis on the development of identity in the twentieth century and its meaning in a now globalized world.

The artificial antithesis between Art and Modern Art is largely a by-product of phoney journalism. It equates with Loch Ness Monsters, Yellow Perils, and flying saucers. Art was always modern in the sense that sincere artists were always experimenting and insincere ones were always imitating them in the hope of attaining the end without understanding the means.' Sean Keating