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Painter Jack Butler Yeats. (National Gallery of Ireland via Wikimedia Commons)
“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.
Perhaps the most well-known expression of Yeats’s public sympathies in the period preceding the Easter Rising in 1916 is Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory (1915), commemorating four civilians shot by British forces in late July of 1914. Blending realist rendition with allegorical resonance, it pictures a woman in profile as she places a flower at the scene of the crime, some days later, as a sullen, barefooted boy nearby stares down the Dublin quays, bathed in a tingling half-light — a stirring evocation of dignity and defiance, in an atmosphere of violent misrule. As Samuel Beckett later summarized, his friend “was very Republican” in outlook (and “always polishing up on his Irish”).
Jack Butler Years, Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory (1915). (National Gallery of Ireland, purchased, 2021, with generous and special support from the Government of Ireland and key contributions from several donors)
Yeats, however, was no middle-of-the-road nationalist. As the battle for Irish freedom ruptured and dissolved into brutal civil war, he increasingly found himself on the side of those agitators (including, notably, almost the entire membership of the women’s nationalist organization, Cumann na mBan) who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty that partitioned the island in 1921, and resisted the punitive Free State it created in the South.
Yeats’s art, as ever, documented the times. Recording the burial of the prominent anti-Treaty politician, Harry Boland, murdered (while unarmed) by Free State forces during a raid on his Dublin hotel room, The Funeral of Harry Boland (1922) captures the ambience of shock and political tension among the mourners, as the blue sheen of turned-up earth seems to open up and illuminate the regimented cemetery. Another canvas, Communicating With Prisoners (1924), shows a group of women gathered outside Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol, as they call up to captives in their cells, imprisoned for their anti-Treaty activities; with the fortress-like monolith of the jailhouse looming in the background, as an advertising billboard shines in the left foreground, the painting offers a vivid, and haunting, critique of the repressions built into the new Irish “Free State.”
Jack Butler Yeats, Communicating With Prisoners (1924). (The Model, Niland Collection, purchased by public subscription from the Capuchin Annual in 1962)
Both pieces marked a dynamic advance in Yeats’s work, but they were also significant in the context of the Irish arts scene in general. As Ernie O’Malley, the writer and (unrepentantly left-wing) former Irish Republican Army commander, later recalled, Yeats’s “depiction of national events” had seemed “completely new in Irish painting” — the contemporaneous guerrilla portraits and heightened allegories of the Limerick artist Seán Keating notwithstanding.
Even as a younger artist, however, and before the intimate cataclysm of the civil war years, Yeats had been a close observer of Irish political life. His numerous sketchbooks demonstrated an acute consciousness of the class tensions and social inequalities that churned below the surface of Edwardian Ireland’s rapidly modernizing society (tensions that persisted, of course, long after the war of independence had ended). In 1913, he etched into his notebook a view of workers assembling on the streets of Dublin during the mass strike and infamous “lockout” of that year, as well as completing another notational drawing of James Larkin — the militant union leader and cofounder, with socialists James Connolly and Jack White, of the Irish Citizen Army — leaning out of a window in Liberty Hall, to deliver a speech to the strikers below. A decade earlier, likewise, Yeats’s papers suggest that he had been in sympathy with corn workers laid off from the job, with one drawing portraying a group of approximately fifty men marching under police escort, with a protest banner that reads, “unemployed don’t forget the corn workers.”
Perhaps due to personal sensibility, as well as artistic disposition, Yeats preferred to observe from the nooks and edges of public life, rather than placing himself at the polemical heart of the action, as his brother William occasionally did (in his roles as poet and senator). Whereas William B. Yeats harbored an elitist, and creatively fruitful, disdain for what he viewed as the philistinism and mob-like tendencies of the Catholic masses, Jack, who began his professional career as a caricaturist and freelance illustrator in England, was glad to immerse his art in the daily round and popular pleasures of his time. His back catalog is filled with circus acts, music-hall scenes, and horse races — as in the early oil painting, Before the Start (1915), where three jockeys are glimpsed in a posture of unsmiling determination, as they maneuver their horses to the starting point of a race, over the expectant heads of a watching crowd.
In contrast to many modernists, impelled by a repugnance for the masses and their culture, Yeats’s work is awash with popular feeling; his art is of and for the people.
The populist American artist George Bellows famously represented boxing as a savage form of entertainment, with ringside onlookers leering salaciously as combatants pummeled each other to bits. But in works such as The Small Ring (1930), Yeats delighted in the art, depicting its sportsmen in quasi-mythic terms, while capturing the visceral spectacle of the matches as popular events. Donnelly’s Hollow (1936) visits the titular site in Kildare, where in 1815, in the extended aftermath of Ireland’s defeated republican rebellions of 1798 and 1803, the Irish boxer Daniel Donnelly claimed victory over the reigning English champion, George Cooper, in the presence of an estimated twenty thousand spectators. The picture surges with imaginative passion — sunlight and shade flooding the green slopes of the natural amphitheater — as visitors to the glen stand tall, reimagining the dramatic bout.
In his short-story collection, Dubliners (1914), a young James Joyce had detected in the Irish capital a pervasive and stultifying “paralysis.” Yeats’s urban portraits, however, often gleam with understated pathos and a physicality of perception that give the same streets a dynamic hue. The Liffey Swim (1923) crackles with the enthusiasm rippling through the Dublin crowds as they throng the banks of the River Liffey, eyes fixed on the swimmers racing through the mud-blue waters. Completed in 1923, as the atrocities and schisms of the Irish Civil War continued to wrack the nation, the painting documents a shared event in the collective life of the city’s inhabitants, a moment of common enthusiasm and pleasure that seems, in its way, heroic and inspiring. In contrast to many modernists, impelled by a repugnance for the masses and their culture, Yeats’s work is awash with popular feeling; his art is of and for the people.
Far from shirking the harsher aspects of contemporary history, however, Yeats had a documentarian’s eye, and an instinctive personal sympathy, for figures cast off by modernity or pushed to the edges of society. Remembering the writer John Millington Synge, a close friend and collaborator, Yeats suggested, with a mixture of boyish vividness and warmth, that
[if] he had lived in the days of piracy he would have been the fiddler in a pirate-schooner, him they called “The Music”. “The Music” looked on at everything with dancing eyes but drew no sword, and when the schooner was taken and the pirates hung at Cape Corso Castle or the Island of Saint Christopher’s, “The Music” was spared because he was “The Music”.
Synge is famous today as the author of The Playboy of the Western World, a knowingly provocative island-drama that prefigures, and outshines, Martin McDonagh’s violent and hyperbolic Irish pastiches a century later. Like Yeats himself, however, Synge also took an engaged interest in the conditions (of life, work, revelry, and subsistence) that pertained among marginalized communities, documenting the words and experiences of poor, homeless, and uprooted populations in Wicklow, Kerry, and Connemara. “These people live for the most part beside old roads and pathways where hardly one man passes in a day,” Synge recorded of the indigents sheltering in the Wicklow mountains: “[they] look out all the year on un-broken barriers of heath.” Meanwhile, he went on, the “old people who have direct tradition of [Fenian] Rebellion, and a real interest in it, are growing less numerous daily, but one still meets with them here and there in the remote districts.”
Yeats not only chronicled the rhythms, struggles, and shifting aspirations of the Irish people through a period of radical change; he was, himself, a radical painter.
An implicit empathy, and a seething social anger, smolders in Synge’s otherwise carefully clear-eyed account of his travels, qualities that are equally evident in the work of Yeats, whose illustrations accompanied the published testimonies above in 1911, offering stark visual portrayals of Synge’s vagrants and the desolate landscapes they moved through (a factor that may in fact complicate Berger’s designation of Yeats as a “romantic” working in a nationalist idiom). As an American critic noted, somewhat reprovingly, the following year, the “people Mr Yeats is interested in are a rough, hard-bitten, unshaven, and [a] generally disreputable lot.”
In a manner that may have influenced Beckett’s later dramas and novels, tramps, clowns, paupers, and itinerant outsiders continuously appear in Yeats’s repertoire, their fate and resilience through time assuming an almost metaphysical force in many of his late paintings. Livid and aching, Death for Only One (1937) seems like a visual distillation of wild pain and mourning in a scenario defined by destitution and beleaguerment, showing, as Yeats put it, “a dead tramp lying on a headland with another tramp standing by — and a dark sea and dark sky.” In No Flowers (1945), likewise, an old man, lean and disheveled, has no flowers to lay on the grave of a loved one, and so stoops to place fallen leaves on the dirt mound instead, as the graveyard behind him flares in lurid sunshine, a haze of grief-flecked reds and greens. By contrast, a later painting again, Roadsters Old and Young (1956), brims with sensation, as a straggling band of unkempt foot-travelers sways through a wind-lifted landscape under beryl skies: a portrait of vagabondage, and a vision of freedom.
Jack Butler Yeats, Roadster Old and Young (1956). (Art Institute of Chicago, bequest of Maxine Kunstadter)
As above — and although Yeats remained a figurative painter, portraying recognizably human forms and situations — his later canvases especially have a free-flowing chromatic richness and sustained emotional intensity that make them analogous, at times, to the mature work of Jackson Pollock, for instance. In its combination of elemental wildness and technical control, its sense of unsentimental mortal repose, Sleep Sound (1955), one of Yeats’s very last paintings, may be compared to Pollock’s Full Fathom Five (1947). Certainly, Yeats’s experimentalism was no less daring, in aesthetic terms, for its denotative tendencies and pictorial roots.
If anything, the visionary power of his work attains depth and focus, an inclusive specificity, through its insistence on eye-level familiarity and humane recognition as requisite modes of artistic creation (a feature frequently lacking in the designs and canvases of the mid-century abstract expressionists across the water). As Berger intuited, Yeats not only chronicled the rhythms, struggles, and shifting aspirations of the Irish people through a period of radical change; he was, himself, a radical painter — mustering, from within the contours of a drab and embattled present, an art of passionate and egalitarian perception. He was a transformative artist, charged with the griefs and hopes of his time.
Likud Member of Knesset Amit Halevi, directing his remarks to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller and the rest of the Biden administration, said the U.S. should not be concerned when Jews return to their homeland and then gave a list of issues that should concern them.
The post WATCH: US should not be ‘concerned’ when Jews return to their homeland, MK tells Washington appeared first on World Israel News.
(Pramote Polyamate / Getty Images)
Jenn Coffey was so tired of having her care denied by her Medicare Advantage insurer that she considered signing a do-not-resuscitate order. “There was no more hope,” she said. “There was nothing left for me to hope for.”
Coffey, a former emergency medical technician (EMT) from Manchester, New Hampshire, went on Medicare, the government health insurance program for seniors and others with disabilities, after a breast cancer diagnosis left her unable to work. Like an increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries, she ended up on a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan; a marketer directed her to an option administered by UnitedHealth Group, a $450 billion insurer.
But instead of finding the program a relief, Coffey, fifty-one, says UnitedHeath constantly rejected or second-guessed the care options her doctors suggested for her cancer recovery and for a rare and painful secondary disease that has no standard treatment plan. “There’s lots of ways that they deny stuff that you need,” she said. “So many times that I had the opportunity to try different treatments and medications, the response was, ‘They won’t cover.’”
UnitedHealth’s routine denials led Coffey to frequently end up in the emergency room, and she eventually became so sick of struggling through the system that she nearly waived her right to be resuscitated if her condition was irrecoverable. “Mentally, it was very destructive,” she said. “I have been an EMT and worked in a hospital, knew there were treatments, but never thought about not having access.”
Coffey’s experience with Medicare Advantage transformed her views. Coffey is a former two-term Republican state representative in New Hampshire who, like many GOP faithfuls, believed private insurers could solve the health care crisis if they were allowed to do things like sell policies across state lines.
“Now I’ve realized that you can’t fix or repair the system,” she said. “The insurance companies don’t offer anything. They serve as a roadblock… The only way forward is Medicare for All.”
Coffey is not alone. As the privatization of Medicare via insurer-owned Medicare Advantage plans expands to half of Medicare beneficiaries — thirty-one million people — care denials by Medicare Advantage insurers are threatening the foundational premise of the government’s health care safety net for seniors and people with disabilities: that people on Medicare should get the care that is recommended by a doctor.
A 2022 investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services found that in 2019, 13 percent of the total prior authorization requests denied by Medicare Advantage plans would have been covered under traditional Medicare, leading to an estimated eighty-five thousand additional care denials. That year, Medicare Advantage plans also wrongly denied 18 percent of payment claims — covering an estimated 1.5 million claims — reducing the likelihood that doctors will recommend the costliest yet often most effective care, for fear of not being paid.
In the subsequent two years, as total Medicare Advantage enrollment increased from twenty-two million to twenty-seven million, such denials have reportedly skyrocketed. A February report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that two million prior authorization requests had been denied by Medicare Advantage in 2021, more than triple the 640,000 prior authorization requests these plans denied in 2019, according to an estimate in the inspector general’s report.
These care denials are helping to drive record insurer profits — Coffey’s insurer, UnitedHealth Group, made more than $14 billion in profits in 2022, and the other three largest for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers pulled in an additional $10 billion. But these denials have disastrous impacts for ordinary people’s lives, as detailed in numerous patient stories shared with the Lever. And the total instances of denied care are likely vastly understated.
Kip Sullivan, an independent health care policy analyst active in Medicare for All advocacy groups, told the Lever that denied care in Medicare Advantage was “a grossly understudied problem” and that many instances go entirely unnoticed.
“It’s a primary reason for why we should terminate the Medicare Advantage program,” said Sullivan. “There are just not enough cops with nursing degrees stationed in emergency rooms across the country to detect this kind of abuse.”
Coffey’s story is not unique.
Bob White, a fifty-six-year-old former blue-collar worker living in Texas, spent a few months a decade ago working at a construction company, where he worked with toxic chemicals without proper protective equipment. The exposure left him with severe chronic pain — agony so significant he’s elected to have significant outpatient procedures done without anesthesia, since the pain of the procedures matched his normal levels.
He’s been enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan administered by the insurance giant Humana for the past ten years, since he became eligible for Medicare due to his disability.
Prior to White moving from Minnesota to Texas, doctors had put White on a pain pump, a medical device that continually administers pain meds directly to his spinal cord — but to have it installed, he had to travel back to Minnesota for an insurance-approved provider.
Because White’s pain pump kept failing, he needed a solution for his pain problem closer to home — and found a ketamine clinic recommended by doctors as an alternative solution. “I thought it was hocus-pocus,” he said of the ketamine treatments. “[But] within a week it was working better than anything has since I got hurt. The best I ever got on Fentanyl was to an eight on the pain scale, and ketamine got me down to a six.”
Traditional Medicare covers ketamine infusions for severe chronic pain, compensating ketamine providers $300 per session under standard Medicare rates. According to White, Humana had pledged that they would cover his infusions — but then he said the insurer abruptly stopped covering the treatments.
“When Humana pulled their stunt and said they weren’t going to cover it, my blood pressure went through the roof,” he said. “Now I’m stuck on fentanyl again.”
Care denials are a feature, not a bug of Medicare Advantage plans. Traditional Medicare was founded on the principle that seniors and disabled people would get the care they need because it covers care without an insurer middleman, instead making set payments directly to health care providers. But by creating Medicare Advantage, Congress inserted private insurers into Medicare, who have an inherent incentive to deny care. The less medical attention they provide beneficiaries, the more government money they can pocket as profits.
Medicare Advantage options also limit critical care by requiring pre-authorization for an array of services.
Richard Gilfillan, the former CEO of the nonprofit hospital conglomerate Trinity Health, said that prior authorization has led to built-in delays in care, resulting in far worse prognoses for patients. “We’ve built into our whole system of care that we’re going to have to give insurers a week or two to pre-authorize care,” he said.
White said he is appalled by Humana’s “need to line their pockets and to cause such physical and mental pain to do so.” And he fears for the potential end result. “I wonder how much it’s going to cost Humana if I had a stroke?” asked White. “It’s going to be a hell of a lot less to give me the ketamine.”
Humana made $2.8 billion in profits in 2022, and its CEO made over $17 million that year.
In late 2020, Rick Timmins, seventy-five, a retired veterinarian from the Seattle area, discovered a small discolored lump on his ear. His primary care provider referred him to a dermatologist to conduct a standard biopsy — but he faced unexpected obstacles, thanks to Premera Blue Cross, his Medicare Advantage plan.
Unlike traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans are based around provider networks that force patients to choose health care providers selected by the insurance company, or else they face potentially enormous financial penalties. That meant that rather than getting the best care from the most experienced doctors of his choice, Timmins’s plan outsourced its claims processing and determinations to a health services company called Optum, which is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth.
Optum repeatedly gave Timmins the runaround, turning a minor diagnosis into a serious health problem. “I would call every week, and the customer service agent would say that Optum was having some problems,” he said. “This little lump almost tripled in size, very painful. It was malignant melanoma that had become pretty aggressive.” Seven months passed before Timmins was treated.
In a statement, Premera said, “It is always our goal to ensure our members can access quality care that best fits their needs in a timely manner. We are disappointed this member’s experience did not meet those expectations.”
Now in remission, Timmins is facing a new challenge for his recovery, as Premera may no longer cover his doctors at the University of Washington (UW) Medicine health care system. “I just got a letter from Premera that says [they] were in contract negotiations, [and I] better be prepared to find a new provider.”
Premera concluded negotiations with the UW in early June, but because Medicare Advantage plans always use provider networks, there are no guarantees that future contract negotiations will ensure that UW doctors remain available to patients with Premera.
Timmins pointed to another major issue with Medicare Advantage. Patients on traditional Medicare nearly always purchase Medigap plans, which provide full supplementary coverage to Medicare, as traditional Medicare covers just 80 percent of care costs. But in most states, Medigap plan insurers are allowed to reject patients or discriminate against them by charging them far higher premiums on the basis of preexisting conditions after they have elected for a Medicare Advantage plan, due to a loophole in federal law. So once a patient enters the Medicare Advantage system, they typically cannot afford to leave.
“I’m stuck,” Timmins said. “I can’t change to another Medicare Advantage plan at this stage. I can’t go back to traditional Medicare because there’s no way they’d accept me for Medigap, so it would be outrageously expensive. I’m pretty much trapped.”
In May, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing to investigate the pattern of claims denials and delays in Medicare Advantage, requesting information from the three biggest providers: UnitedHealth, CVS Aetna, and Humana.
The month before, in April, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a proposed rule that would rein in prior-authorization abuses. The rule emphasizes “continuity of care,” meaning that Medicare Advantage plans would be prohibited from denying care in the middle of a patient’s care plan, and provides that Medicare Advantage will not use additional factors beyond basic Medicare guidelines, such as the opinions of insurer-employed doctors, to deny care.
The reforms are an important step forward. But it is likely that billions will still flow into the pockets of private insurance corporations, further destabilizing the Medicare trust fund (the $409 billion pot used to provide Medicare, funded by payroll tax receipts), and preparing the ground for potential cuts to Medicare down the road.
It’s why Coffey, the former Republican representative from New Hampshire, is now an avid supporter of Medicare for All. By expanding more Medicare services to seniors and the general population, Medicare for All would eliminate the need for Medicare Advantage.
Medicare for All legislation was reintroduced in May with one hundred cosponsors in the House, a record level of support. And a 2022 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that “longevity and labor productivity would increase as people’s health outcomes improved,” if the United States implemented a single-payer health care system.
“The way to fix it and open up access for people across the country is Medicare for All,” concluded Coffey. “Every day we are living like this, more people are dying.”
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.
Austin K. Green-Yurick, a 32-year-old man from Portland, Oregon, was recently charged with several crimes relating to a recent attack in which he reportedly struck and subsequently killed his mother with a baseball bat.
On Thursday at 7:26 p.m., Portland police responded to a domestic violence report, finding 64-year-old Kathy S. Green with life-threatening injuries sustained from the assault.
Austin K. Green-Yurick, the victim’s son, was located at the scene and made incriminating statements during questioning; according to a probable cause document, he stated that he “was tired of the way his mother treated him, and so he struck her.”
Unfortunately, she passed away on Saturday in the hospital, and Austin K. Green-Yurick was subsequently taken into custody and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center. His public defender has yet to comment on his defense.