WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

10 Given his knowledge of and background in Irish folklore, Ernie was most interested in Native American folklore. He visited many festivals and wrote assiduously about them in his daily diaries. To subsidise his travels Ernie drew local landscapes and mountains around Taos and offered them for sale at $20 each. In his diaries and notebooks, he drew many buildings, statues, masks, pottery, ornaments, costumes as well as technical drawings of locations, as he had done back in his military days. While there he acquired works by Native American artists Maria Rodriguez and Julian Martinez, and other artists, Frank Applewood, Dorothy Brett, Howard Cook, Dorothy Stewart, Theodora Goddard, and Henry Mara. He collected over 300 contemporary photographs of New Mexico. Ironically Ernie’s Irish first cousin, Sylvia Laithwaite, worked as a librarian in Santa Fe. He visited her and was able to continue his writing and general reading of newspapers and magazines at her library, including the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune. In Santa Fe he lectured on modern Irish history and literature, including poetry, and on James Joyce, whose Ulysses was not available in the US until four years later. He renewed his friendship with Preston and Helen McCresson, whom he had known earlier in California, and he befriended the poet and editor Alice Corbin Henderson and two artists, Dorothy Stewart and Theodora Goddard. When these two artists wanted to return to Mexico, they enlisted Ernie to drive them, and the trio stayed from December 1930 through August 1931. Stewart had previously painted in Mexico. Ernie agreed to write a book on her Mexican and New Mexican prints. Many American and international artists were fascinated by the experimental forms of art in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. They wanted to see how a society, freed in 1910 from the tight leash of the Catholic Church and century-long conservative politics, would express itself, and to what extent their indigenous cultures were being included. Ernie was eager for this journey as he saw a parallel with how he hoped the Irish would overcome the traditional dominance of British culture in Ireland and start to establish its own form. He observed carefully and wrote in his diaries fastidiously about the works of Diego Rivera and Jose Clements Orzco. Ernie was interested in this broad artistic community and in particular how the individual artists were approaching the challenge of independence. He spent time with Victor Arnautoff, a Russian general, who had worked with Ray Boynton on murals in San Francisco and helped continue in Mexico the mural works of Rivera when the artist was in the United States. He spent time with the American poet Hart Crane. While collecting over 300 photographs of contemporary Mexico including folk festivals and the arts, he found many by the Itialian photographer Tina Modotti, who had been a companion of EdwardWeston in Mexico. He collected art by Mexican Feliciano Pena and Japanese Tamiji Kitagawa. When Mabel Luhan and Toni Lujan entertained during their visit to Mexico, Ernie met Mexican composer Carlos Chavez and American conductor Leopold Stokowski. On the literary side, he associated with Clifford Beals, Katherine Anne Porter and John Sloan. He visited with Frances Toor, the American folklorist and editor of the magazine, Mexican Folk-Ways. Through the introductions of Moisés Sáenz, the government educational official, he travelled through rural Mexico hoping to find work as an English teacher and to learn about rural life and culture. On his travels he met the Russian film-makers, Sergei Eisenstein and Eduard Tissé, while they were making a film set in rural Mexico. By late August Ernie and the two artists drove back to New Mexico. Ernie settled down once again to write, balancing his daily diary with his memoirs and poetry about New Mexico and Ireland. Irish friends in New York typed Ernie’s handwritten manuscript. Because his writing was so difficult, he would have to return the typed manuscript not only with additions but with many corrections. To reduce expenses, he moved to the rural village of Chimayo. By Christmas 1931 Helen Merriam Golden asked him to return to Taos to tutor her three children as the local schools had been closed. She was the recent widow of Corkman Peter Golden who had been an Irish nationalist and thespian in New York City. Ernie Dorothy Stewart drawing of Ernie O’Malley, 1931.