Yes, icons are HIP right now in the West, which may be a good thing in itself but what I find dodgy are 1) their own Western Catholic iconographic tradition is dissed and 2) the
Novus Ordo is basically unchanged - there is little corresponding movement rightwards among many who loooooove icons. (Except conservative RCs are interested in them too and apparently for the right reasons.)
From the liberals I fear this simply falls under the rubric of patronizing political correctness - multiculturalism, or taking other people's trappings out of their context and giving them a new, liberal European-American false meaning.
I've always thought that icons don't belong in a coffee-table book or in some pretty art collection but on the screen, walls and stands of churches or in people's homes actually used as icons.
Is there also a development of icon production in Roman Catholic communities
Yes, and for some time, Peter, far pre-dating today's fad, though it was never mainstream. This real interest in and love of icons goes all the way back to the legitimate liturgical movement (revival, yes, renewal) in the 1920s (along with interest in Gregorian chant), when the dual Roman-Byzantine Rite Benedictine monastery was started in Amay (now in Chevetogne), Belgium, and a few other RC monks and nuns probably learnt Orthodox iconography as well.
(Once read somebody online describe a nun at his Catholic school in the 1950s who loved things Eastern, teaching him about St Panteleimon, for example.)
or are they relying on Orthodox sources
AFAIK yes - coming from the old-time liturgical revival and today's conservatives, a sign of genuine goodwill towards and recognition of the Orthodox.
or was the tradition maintained in Eastern Catholic communities?
AFAIK not really, except perhaps among Melkites in the Middle East (right, Samer?) who of all the substantial Byzantine Catholic churches kept most of their heritage. The Slav(on)ic ones mostly disobeyed Rome (you read that right) by self-latinizing, losing such traditions.
