From 1960, when a chance meeting with Cecil King led to his work being included in a show at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, Michael Kane was a formidable, indomitable presence in Irish cultural life.
From 1960, when a chance meeting with Cecil King led to his work being included in a show at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, Michael Kane was a formidable, indomitable presence in Irish cultural life. Born in Dublin, prior to attending the National College of Art (NCA) in the late 1950s, he went to school in Co Wicklow, an experience that did nothing to encourage in him a pastoral view of Irish life and Irish art. Rather, as he later argued, Ireland had been well on the way towards becoming an urbanised society way before the shift had registered culturally, and he knew he belonged in the city. He quickly became, and remained throughout his life, spiritually affiliated to ‘Baggotonia’ and its literary, Bohemian ethos. He thought Patrick Kavanagh exemplary in his unwavering devotion to his art. Ulick O’Connor placed Kane in the lineage of writer-flâneurs memorialised in Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails (1976).
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