More than 80 people gathered at the Ulster Museum and Queen’s University Belfast last month for the conference “New Histories of Irish Art and Modernism.” Held in honor of S.B. Kennedy, an art historian who served as curator at the Ulster Museum for over 25 years, the conference brought together curators and art historians from across Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany to explore the current state of scholarship in the Irish visual arts from the 19th into the 21st century.

Kennedy was a notable scholar of Irish painting, authoring numerous monographs on artists from Paul Henry to members of the White Stag Group. His seminal work, Irish Art & Modernism 1880-1950, was one of the first to comprehensively explore the major artistic and institutional histories shaping the trajectory of modern Irish painting.

The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which is part of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, organized the conference to celebrate the gift of Kennedy’s papers to the University’s Hesburgh Libraries.

“Brian Kennedy was a titan of Irish art history, and the accession of his papers to the Hesburgh Libraries will transform the University’s holdings in this important area and complement the already strong collections of Irish paintings, prints, and other material held in the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” said Colin Barr, the Thomas Moore and Judy Livingston Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute and professor of modern Irish history in the Keough School of Global Affairs. “For a scholar, there is perhaps no finer tribute. For a research institute such as Keough-Naughton, there is no better opportunity to renew our commitment to the study of the arts in Ireland.”

Kennedy’s daughter, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, who gifted her father’s archive to Notre Dame, described the conference as a “proud and slightly emotional moment.” Remembering family holidays tracing the exact placement of Paul Henry’s paintings and her own childhood growing up around the Ulster Museum and the collection, she recalled: “As my father put it, his work was also his hobby. We pretty much lived Irish art at home.”

Describing her father’s collection of exhibition catalogues, notes, and correspondence, Ribeiro de Menezes noted: “It was my father’s hope, and it is my own, that his papers and archive will support and encourage the study and the teaching of modern Irish art into the future. I’m really delighted that Notre Dame has begun this work with this conference.”

She remarked: “There are, I think, these days few institutions with the capacity to accept such a large donation and to preserve it in its entirety. Notre Dame has this ability, and I think it is a fitting and safe home for dad’s papers.”

Scholars at the conference, which was held May 22-23, presented over a dozen papers responding to Kennedy’s writing and the questions that motivated his career. They spoke on topics ranging from defining modernism as an idea to charting spheres of influence around key artists and thinkers in modern Ireland, tracing the global networks of exchange, exhibition, and patronage which shaped the trajectory of Irish modernism in the arts. Speakers from the National Gallery of Ireland, Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art were joined by scholars from Trinity College Dublin, Belfast School of Art, and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, as well as the University of Notre Dame, University of Nottingham, University of Limerick, University of Jena, and Humboldt University of Berlin.

The conference also featured a tour of the Ulster Museum given by Kennedy’s longtime colleague, Anne Stewart, senior curator of art at the National Museums of Northern Ireland. She talked about Kennedy’s work developing the museum’s collection from the 1970s to 2005. Speaking of him as an inheritor of the legacy of Anne Crookshank, a pioneer of Irish art history, Stewart noted: “The collection is very much alive and carrying on that spirit of Anne and Brian,” describing the conference as a “celebration of that energy and that time.”

The keynote lecture featured a conversation between curators and art historians Joseph McBrinn, Riann Coulter, Fionna Barber, and Róisín Kennedy, who spoke on the impact of Kennedy’s work on their careers and the field. Róisín Kennedy (of no relation) noted: “Brian’s book stands as a major landmark publication that established the fact that Irish art was in fact touched by the ideas and theories of the modern movement and what we are doing now is trying to address exactly how and why this was so.”

The conference was organized by Dr. Judith Stapleton, postdoctoral research associate at the Keough-Naughton Institute. “Our goal was to really expand what we think about when we talk about modernism in the context of Irish art,” she explained. “The conference was fascinating in revealing new networks between individuals and stories behind some well-established artists, but also in expanding our sense of Irish modernism beyond the ‘greats’ and an established canon of works, especially as we considered artists working in different media — on paper, in illustration, mural composition, or installation — and working within or against corporate and state sponsorship.”

Artists discussed included Sarah Cecilia Harrison, William Orpen, Jack B. Yeats, George Collie, Seán Keating, Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, Pamela Coleman Smith, Stella Steyn, Francis Walker, Elizabeth Rivers, Mary Swanzy, Basil Rakoczi, Kenneth Hall, and the contemporary artist group the Array Collective.

The conference lastly featured the release of an important new volume, Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen’s Routledge Companion of Irish Art. The volume features over 40 new essays on Irish art from 1800 to the present day.

Originally published by Keough-Naughton Institute at irishstudies.nd.edu on June 24, 2025.