In 1922 Ireland''s emerging ''national culture'' of art, artists, and buyers had to contend with the same problem that all other Irish state and non-state systems faced: how to transform and hibernicize delegitimated systems of power without breaking them entirely. How does the Irish attempt to do so compare with other emerging post-colonial and post-imperial states? The 1920s saw multiple small states emerge from the chaotic breakup of the Ottoman, Hapsburg empires, just as the partial freedom of Ireland pointed to the future fracture of the British empire. Literary and other modernisms strained under the pressure of this, not least the visual arts where several key patterns that emerged in Ireland have had clear parallels in post-revolution societies elsewhere in Europe and indeed further afield. Key distinctive aspects of Irish national, or nationalist, art emerging in the 1920s include a commitment to medieval Irish motifs, a new and related focus on the ''Catholicity'' of the Irish Free State a preponderance of ''western'' landscapes and settings that emphasized a ''pure'' periphery. Irish art in the interwar period developed in several distinct directions. Art that was platformed and encouraged by the state tended to emphasize the modernity of the emerging Irish nation and was future focused, pro-Catholic, and generally resistant to avant garde approaches, while seeking to sanctify the various heroes of the recent revolution. Ireland was entirely typical of peripheral and postcolonial polities in developing this type of ''national'' art, and formed part of what amounted to a fairly widespread reinvention of national identities by mostly urban-based intelligentsia. The key objective of this turn was to differentiate art that was Irish and national from the dominant culture from which it was emerging.

This was a tricky proposition, especially in a relatively small and contained market context, and with an Irish visual art scene dominated by artists who were typically cosmopolitan and very often trained in Paris or London. This, too, was typical of other emerging polities, such as Lithuania, for whom the building of a national identity through art mapped closely on to the Irish experience in the 1920s and 1930s. Lithuania depended heavily on the imagined ideal of a medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a lodestone for national pride and in the interwar period. Having regained their independence after the First World War in 1918, roughly contemporary to Irish independence, Lithuanian artists set about reclaiming a national identity that differentiated them from the period spent under Russian rule 1795-1918, and the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth c.1569 -1795. The emphasis on medieval roots for a modern nationalism is evident elsewhere in Europe in the interwar years: in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, to a certain extent in Scotland, Hungary, and elsewhere. In Germany the Third Reich leaned on the idea of a constructed ''medieval'' origin myth and modern France derives some of its modern national identity from a very partial reading of a Gaul-centred history. In Spain it was the Visigoths.

In the Irish case a constructed Celtic and early Christian heritage and iconography is pronounced, especially areas in which Irish art had a major reputation: in Arts and Crafts, and in Stained Glass especially. These ideas all came to the fore in Europe in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, but by the 1920s they had matured and were for the first time presented with a postcolonial political reality that invited their translation from idea to practice, and from practice to canonical status. Irish artists such as Seán Keating, whose ''artistic aims were political'', and Albert Power, ''the nation''s sculptor'', began to create ''national'' works that aligned with or were commissioned by the state, with the reasonable expectation that these might translate into canonical status, while those who created works that were more obviously cosmopolitan suffered in (mostly) benign neglect. Artists who tread this line sometimes fell foul of it, such as in the case of Harry Clarke''s Geneva Window, but managed through an excess of exuberant talent to re-emerge from such setbacks. Others simply left the country or saw their work unjustly minimized or neglected, such as in the case of Mary Swanzy who continued to send work home for exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the principal exhibition space in Ireland. Louis Le Brocquy also had modernist work refused by the same RHA early in his career. Across the various fine arts and literature those who remained and were judged sufficiently racy of the soil were to be canonised, along with the few undeniable ''moderns'' of European stature, who were in some cases grudgingly accepted into canonical status when their wider fame meant it was no longer possible to exclude them. This was more obvious in literature, where cosmopolitan exiles such as James Joyce or Samuel Beckett conform to this type.

In art and design, we can see that with some modern greats such as Eileen Gray, whose permanent exhibition opened in the National Museum of Ireland in 2002. To a lesser extent, figures like Mary Swanzy and Mainie Jellett have only been reclaimed by the Irish with retrospective exhibitions. Swanzy''s first retrospective in 1968 was regarded as ''a landmark in her rediscovery''. Although accorded a posthumous retrospective in 1992, Jellett ''is still under-represented in the major Irish collections''. The decades after independence was a period of what we now call ''nation branding,'' and the work of some artists aligned with the emerging nation brand, and some did not. These absences are something we will try to consider throughout the book, as well as the ways in which those excluded have been more present in the ''remembering'' of the revolutionary period a century later. (excerpted from the Introduction).