“How is it then,” asked John Berger in 1960, that he, “a Marxist, c[ould] find so much truth and splendour in the art of an arch-romantic such as Yeats?” The combative young critic had in 1956 paid a visit to the painter in question, Jack B. Yeats, in Dublin, gifting him a copy of Dylan Thomas’s poems, and later penning a short essay in praise of the Irish artist, whom he considered “a master: he teaches us to hope.”

It was this last quality, for Berger, that provided the surest answer to his initial question: Yeats’s “romantic view of life,” he wrote, was unusual, in that it brought the painter “closer to his subjects — his horsemen, actors, lovers, talkers, beggars — instead of separating him from them.” This in turn infused his work with a human sympathy that teemed with “a sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know.” No true Marxist, Berger believed, could fail to be moved by such an aesthetic.

Berger’s assessment is an outlier among critical responses to Yeats’s oeuvre, which have tended to foreground issues of genre and pictorial technique, while leaving the social basis and cultural politics of his work largely undiscussed. As Róisín Kennedy has observed, Yeats is generally presented and interpreted — from scholarship to TV and exhibition notes — as “an apolitical artist whose art contains no wider agenda than his own poetic needs.” Ever the heretic, Berger glimpsed a more radical figure behind this innocuous façade, identifying the London-born painter’s wild, weathery canvases with the “fight [against] English imperialism” and “the image of the independent individual Rebel.” Yeats may have been an “arch-romantic,” but the impulses that drove and enriched his paintings were attuned to history, and alert, in the context of Ireland’s tumultuous liberation and state-building movements, to deep traditions and fresh possibilities of political change.