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

tutored during the day and wrote at night During this period he befriended photographer Paul Strand. He also knew photographer Dorothea Lange and her artist husband, Maynard Dixon, who were then in Taos. In June 1932 Ernie travelled to New York, en route to Ireland. Paul Strand provided him with contacts in the New York artistic community. Through Strand, he met Harold Clurman, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, Lee Strasburg, and other members of the Group Theatre. With the help of Philip ‘Ted’ Stevenson, he managed to secure a six-week residence at the Yaddo Foundation, to continue to work on his memoir. Through his Yaddo friends he met a broad group in the Northeast including Aaron Copland, Israel and Rebecca Citkowitz, Gerald Sykes, Sidney Hook, and Mary Heaton Vorse. He assisted James Johnson Sweeney giving lectures on modern art for a New York University course. Ernie also spent several months in Boston with a prominent attorney, John T. Hughes, and some theatrical friends in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Despite Ernie’s limited financial resources, he still managed to create his own art library building it out of postcards, newspapers and magazine clippings on the arts. Some of his folders were sorted geographically while the postcards were randomly kept. They lend insight to the different artists in whom he was interested and in his evolving taste. While living in the artistic literary society in New York, in 1933 Ernie met and fell in love with an American artist, painter, sculptor and photographer, Helen Hooker. She photographed Ernie and then sculpted his head. Ironically, he, the foreigner, introduced her to Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and James Johnson Sweeney, who was then at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. Other artists and literary characters included Theodora Goddard, Maraquita Villard, Vassos and Tenagra Kanellos, Joseph Campbell, and Pádraic and Mary Colum. Ernie may have noticed that some of his former Irish comrades-in-arms, like Frank O’Connor, Frank Gallagher and Peadar O’Donnell, had written and published short stories. After finishing his memoir while still in New York and Boston, Ernie started writing vignettes about fictional accounts of military incidents. He could infuse these stories with life and characters from his own experience. After Ernie received at least twelve rejection letters from American publishers for his memoir, he decided to return to Ireland to pursue his publishing opportunities and pension claim. Helen agreed to join him there, and they would eventually marry. She went around the world through Japan, Korea, China and Mongolia on a four-month trip with her sister. 11 THE ERNIE O’MALLEY COLLECTION · 25 NOVEMBER 2019 AT 6PM Raymond Boynton Nude. From The Collection of Ernie O’Malley. Helen Hooker and Ernie O’Malley, New York, 1934.