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

15 THE ERNIE O’MALLEY COLLECTION · 25 NOVEMBER 2019 AT 6PM No one would have been especially surprised to learn that the New York socialite and artist Helen Hooker (1905-1993) collected art during her widespread travels in North America, Europe, Russia and Asia. It was what privileged, educated young American women of her class, like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, did in the 1920s and ‘30s, but her marriage to the Irish revolutionary, Ernie O’Malley (1897-1957), who was, if anything, even more excited about art, shocked her friends and surprised his. Apart from the romance of that partnership, the Hooker/O’Malleys shared a deep and enduring commitment to art; Helen as a maker, collector and patron, with a dream of sharing her own extensive knowledge of different cultures and periods with those less privileged than herself, while Ernie, initially inspired by reading while on the run and as a prisoner in Mountjoy Gaol in 1922–24 and developed following his release, through wandering around European churches and museums, went on to become one of the most thoughtful writers on contemporary art in Ireland in the 1940s. Helen’s direct engagement with making her own artwork, dance, and photography and, later, theatre designs and interior decoration, led her away from ancient cultures to the contemporary while Ernie’s friendships, conversations and correspondence with American avant-garde artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Hart Crane and EdwardWeston, formed during his seven years in California, New Mexico, Mexico and New York, gave him a solid grounding in the kind of progressive Modernism, that would soon dominate the western art world. Helen eloped and married Ernie in London in 1935 and the two lived in Dublin and Newport, County Mayo. By then, Ernie could fairly claim his place among writers and intellectuals, having lectured on James Joyce, still very much a minority taste, published his memoir On Another Man’s Wound and his poetry, joined the Irish Academy of Letters, and writing to and about Jack B. Yeats. John McGahern considered On Another Man’s Wound to be “the one classic work to have emerged directly from the violence that led to independence”. His reviews, particularly of Yeats, who was a close friend, raised standards of critical writing in Ireland and were delivered with an honesty that only the very single-minded dared to offer. As well as giving birth to three children, Helen began to exhibit her work. She first showed publicly at the inaugural exhibition of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA) in 1943 and continued to show there for the next several years, while both she and Ernie purchased work by leading artists, including Jack Yeats, Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone and the emerging Louis le Brocquy. They moved in artistic and literary circles, numbering those artists among their friends along with writers such as Frank O’Connor, Peadar O’Donnell, and Seán Ó Faoláin, and Helen began to make an impact as a theatre patron, co- founding the Players Theatre in 1944 and supporting Gerard Healy’s play The Black Stranger, the first play directly dealing with the Famine to be performed in Cork and Dublin, in 1945. Together the Hooker/O’Malleys used their contacts in the United States to help Irish artists to show their work in America. In many ways, the rest is history. The marriage broke down, ending in divorce in 1952, but Ernie continued his writing life from Newport and although Helen returned to America, she spent a good part of every year after 1960 in Ireland, as an artist and patron of the visual arts, theatre and dance. Importantly, at a time when there were few openings for Irish artists to display their work, she used her homes in Ireland and abroad to showcase their work as well as the work of Irish designers and crafts-workers. In 1979-81 she began the process of gifting a significant part of her art collection, comprising some 600 works, to Ireland, through a donation to the Irish American Cultural Institute (IACI). The donation, now on loan to the University of Limerick, included a solid collection of those Irish artists that she and Ernie had collected, – Jack Yeats, Paul Henry, Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, Nano Reid, Gerard Dillon and others, some modern European artists including Modigliani, Mailliol, Rouault and a large collection of prints including a Hokusai, ceramics, Roman and Renaissance bronze casts and textiles from Helen’s global travels. While not all of these are individually important, collectively they offered a chance for Irish students to study those historic and ethnic cultures at first hand and to see Irish art in an international context. In recognition of her contribution the IACI created the O’Malley Award for visual artists in 1989, from which such artists as Tony O’Malley, James Coleman, Dorothy Cross, Janet Mullarney, Paul Mosse and many others have benefitted. As a final gesture in patronage, Helen, now widowed for the second time, gifted a collection of her own sculpture to the University of Limerick and a collection of her photography to the National Library of Ireland. The next generation of the Hooker/O’Malley family have continued to lend paintings from the remainder of their parents’ collection to important exhibitions, notably the 1971 Jack B. Yeats Centennial Exhibition, Stephen McKenna’s The Pursuit of Painting in IMMA in 2000 and to exhibitions of the works of Yeats at the National Gallery of Ireland, IMMA, Arnolfini Bristol, New York University and other venues. Collectively the support offered to Irish art by this Irish and American family has been unparalleled in its range, longevity, and, I suspect, in its impact. Helen Hooker and Ernie O’Malley By Catherine Marshall – art lovers, writers, makers, collectors and patrons