Dashing pair

Jack B. Yeats & Oskar Kokoschka
Compton Verney, until 14 December

In 1962 Oskar Kokoschka drew record crowds to his Tate retrospective — belated recognition for the Austrian-born artist who had lived in London, on and off, since 1938. Herbert Read blamed the long delay on Kokoschka’s ‘un-Englishness’, so it’s ironic that his latest comeback should be at that most English of galleries, Compton Verney, in a double bill with another un-English artist still awaiting due recognition in this country: the Irish painter Jack Butler Yeats.

Oskar Kokoschka: Exile and New Home 1938–1980 comes to Compton Verney from the Albertina, Vienna; Jack B. Yeats, Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair from the National Gallery of Ireland. The two artists knew and admired each other. Both loved juicy paint and rampant colour; both were dramatists who also wrote plays, and humanists who also happened to excel at painting horses. And both were interested in the circus, though for Yeats this was a lifelong obsession, whereas for Kokoschka it was just another colourful subject.

Yeats fell in love with the travelling circus as a child in Sligo where he lived with his grandparents until age 15; when he rejoined his parents in Earl’s Court in 1887, Buffalo Bill conveniently pitched camp on their doorstep. By the time the artist, then an illustrator, moved back to Ireland in 1910 and began painting in oils, he had a full back catalogue of circus sketches. ‘No one creates, the artist assembles memories,’ was his belief, richly illustrated in the watercolour ‘A Travelling Circus’ (1906) which assembles barefoot urchins on a wall above a queue of spectators, while piebald ponies are reluctantly pulled through the crowd under orders from a skinny, ragged ringmaster — all the details discernible in a descending dusk where the only bright light issues from two open tent flaps.