Posted February 17, 1999

Seamus Heaney (right), winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, shares a seat at the Berkeley Art Museum with Berkeley's own Nobel Prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and Milosz' wife, Carol.

Heaney was on campus last week as the 15th Avenali Professor at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. His visit and Avenali Lecture on "Getting the Picture: Reflections on Art and Artists in Ireland" were planned in conjunction with the Feb. 10 opening of the Berkeley Art Museum's exhibit, "When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Twentieth-Century Figurative Painting from Ireland."

At his Feb. 8 Avenali Lecture to a packed Wheeler Auditorium audience, Heaney referred to the "fast friends" he made at Berkeley while a visiting lecturer here in 1970-71. He also noted the longstanding American support of Irish artists. Heaney quoted from Irish poet W.B. Yeats, whose father and brother were famous Irish artists. Work by brother Jack Yeats is part of the BAM exhibit, while the phrase "rant and rage" in the exhibit's title is taken from W.B. Yeats' poem "To Ireland in the Coming Times." Peg Skorpinski photo.

February 17 - 23, 1999 (Volume 27, Number 23)
Copyright 1999, The Regents of the University of California.
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