C. Flower
12-11-2011, 07:42 PM
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/1112/1224307428038.html
Fascinating - another one for the Christmas wish list -
O’Malley’s character emerges forcefully from these letters: detached, brusque, much given to listmaking, and breathtakingly perceptive. Books remained at the centre of his life, and he amassed an impressive collection, numbering some 4,000 in 1953, after an auction of an earlier batch at Sotheby’s in 1949. The impression remains, however, that the visual arts were O’Malley’s real passion. An early project photographing early Christian sculpture never came to fruition, but he went back to it sporadically, and an account of a 1948 journey through Cos Clare and Galway with Bob Herbert and O’Malley’s elder son, Cathal, punctuated by whiskey, reads as one of the few uncomplicatedly happy episodes after the return to Ireland.
Paintings remained an abiding obsession, and he was a perceptive critic and important collector. His account of his purchase of the Yeats canvas Death for Only One is revealing: “I saw Jack Yeats, fell clear in love with a picture and felt I must have it.” The painting, depicting a tramp standing over the body of another in a bleak western bogland, speaks both to O’Malley’s sense of detachment and to his love of landscape, in particular the west of Ireland. For all of O’Malley’s intellectual sophistication – and it is clear that he was formidably well read and familiar with contemporary European and extra-European culture – Ireland was his true north.
A recipient of two military pensions (and frequent referee of other applications), he was not altogether comfortable with the self-satisfaction of the official republican narrative. Irish people, he wrote, were “a family too close to each other”. England, his old adversary, is the subject of a few biting observations throughout, but he reached a sort of resolution in a moving late letter to his daughter. Asking to be buried facing eastwards, in the Celtic tradition of facing one’s enemies, he commented: “Indeed [the British] are no longer my enemies. Each man finds his enemies in himself.” In 1955 he wrote, “I suppose Ireland, whatever way it is, is my destiny.” That destiny was not an easy one, riddled with doubts, dissatisfactions and personal distress, but O’Malley emerges as a key figure in Ireland’s postrevolutionary cultural landscape.
Fascinating - another one for the Christmas wish list -
O’Malley’s character emerges forcefully from these letters: detached, brusque, much given to listmaking, and breathtakingly perceptive. Books remained at the centre of his life, and he amassed an impressive collection, numbering some 4,000 in 1953, after an auction of an earlier batch at Sotheby’s in 1949. The impression remains, however, that the visual arts were O’Malley’s real passion. An early project photographing early Christian sculpture never came to fruition, but he went back to it sporadically, and an account of a 1948 journey through Cos Clare and Galway with Bob Herbert and O’Malley’s elder son, Cathal, punctuated by whiskey, reads as one of the few uncomplicatedly happy episodes after the return to Ireland.
Paintings remained an abiding obsession, and he was a perceptive critic and important collector. His account of his purchase of the Yeats canvas Death for Only One is revealing: “I saw Jack Yeats, fell clear in love with a picture and felt I must have it.” The painting, depicting a tramp standing over the body of another in a bleak western bogland, speaks both to O’Malley’s sense of detachment and to his love of landscape, in particular the west of Ireland. For all of O’Malley’s intellectual sophistication – and it is clear that he was formidably well read and familiar with contemporary European and extra-European culture – Ireland was his true north.
A recipient of two military pensions (and frequent referee of other applications), he was not altogether comfortable with the self-satisfaction of the official republican narrative. Irish people, he wrote, were “a family too close to each other”. England, his old adversary, is the subject of a few biting observations throughout, but he reached a sort of resolution in a moving late letter to his daughter. Asking to be buried facing eastwards, in the Celtic tradition of facing one’s enemies, he commented: “Indeed [the British] are no longer my enemies. Each man finds his enemies in himself.” In 1955 he wrote, “I suppose Ireland, whatever way it is, is my destiny.” That destiny was not an easy one, riddled with doubts, dissatisfactions and personal distress, but O’Malley emerges as a key figure in Ireland’s postrevolutionary cultural landscape.