The sculpting of modern Ireland

The art and literary worlds of Dublin, as seen through the prism of the life of the late sculptor EAMON DELANEY, is a story of modern Ireland. His son Eamon Delaney writes about exploring his father's life for his book 'Breaking the Mould'

AMONG THE many impulses for writing this book was my father’s movement into a nursing home in Connemara seven years ago. After he left, I found in his house and studio a collection of fascinating material – photographs, papers and two large scrapbooks. The house, with an adjoining studio and foundry, was in the bluff of a hill, nestled above a beach and facing the Atlantic Ocean. The fields around the house remained full of his sculptures, bronze shapes and spiky stainless steel trees and constructions. The house was empty now and surrounded by ferns, where once it echoed to the sound of industry and children, but there was still sculpture about, inside and out. As ever, the sculpture lives on, jangling in the sea breeze.

One of the found scrapbooks was a big red book, like a church register, with newspaper cuttings of my father's career from the 1960s and 1970s. The other was a smaller scrapbook, from the 1950s. They shed a light on a lost world, with pictures of social scenes long departed, many of them in titles that no longer exist: the Dublin Evening Mail,the Sunday Review, Hibernia, and all of the Irish Press group. The material propelled me into writing a part memoir, part social history. I remembered much, but there was much that I didn't, and so I would write myself into remembering. It would not be an exhaustive account, looking up record and files. I would simply work with what came to hand, and make enquiries. It would also be a chance to write about art, and especially sculpture – that most important but often neglected art form.

I would also write about my relationship with my father, and how it was transacted through the world of art. I had been living in Paris, and would walk through the Tuilleries garden, with sculpture on either side: large outdoor works by David Smith, Henry Moore and Giacometti. It was like meeting old friends. It made me want to write about sculpture, and its effect, and the atmosphere of my childhood. Paris was also where Eddie first represented Ireland abroad. After Paris, he got married and soon I was born. It was the same with me. After Paris, I went back to Ireland hoping to meet someone special. And I did, and in the most romantic fashion. I just walked into a cafe near the Liberties in Dublin and there she was: the love of my life. Within months I was preparing to get married, and soon a child was due to be born.

I was thus further stimulated by the impending birth of my son, and the simultaneous decline of my father. It would be like Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych, with one generation passing out of life as another passes into it. The hope was that I could finish the book before my son was born and my father passed away. My main source has been the big red scrapbook, made by Hely's, the famous stationers, which readers of Joyce's Ulysseswill remember being advertised by four men walking around Dublin with the company's name spelt out on their hats, H.E.L.Y's – a letter per man. They are like an art project: moving sculptures, walking through the city that my father peopled with his statues, and which the rest of us have peopled with our lives and memories.

Looking back, all my formative early memories were associated with sculptures and their making, and especially, in the early years, my father’s most famous works, the Thomas Davis memorial in Dublin’s College Green and the statue of Wolfe Tone and the Famine memorial in St Stephen’s Green. Indeed, my earliest memory is of 1966, and the Big Man going over our house in a wooden box. Davis, the founder of the Young Irelanders, was now two tons of bronze, on his way to placement in the city to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Too large to fit through the gate, he had to be hoisted over the lane of cottages in Dún Laoghaire where we lived.

AFTER HIM CAMEWolfe Tone, a year later, also sculpted in our backyard. He went up over the roof too. The founding father of Irish republicanism, whom the British tried to hang, was off to the Green to be put in front of a row of granite columns, which the city's wits quickly dubbed Tone Henge. In 1971, it was blown up by loyalist paramilitaries – the first Northern-related bombing in Dublin. Anxious to get at the symbolic core of Irish republicanism, and emulating the republicans who were always attacking monuments, Ulster loyalists had two years previously attacked Tone's grave in Bodenstown. This time they put the explosives up inside his codpiece – a variation, perhaps, on Brendan Behan's line that "all the problems of Ireland came from the balls of Henry VIII".

In the newspaper photos of the time, so exciting for us at school, only the legs remain. The statue had to be made again. “There’s a few things I didn’t get right the first time,” my father said with a wink, ever the wag. He also said that the statue’s arm would now move outwards, with the other tucked in, just as if Tone were marching – marching back to life. Some detractors said my father was “paid twice” for the job. Others that he blew up the statue himself. Tone’s torso was shattered and the Shelbourne Hotel opposite received part of his hand.

In our childhood, we were surrounded by such statues and masks: strange, headless figures and skeletal animals. In the darkness, it looked like Picasso's Guernica, with jaggedy silhouettes and arms upheld. For years, we slept with the death mask of Austin Clarke, the poet, hanging over our bed. Except this was not quite Clarke's death mask but a version of the original taken in wax, which had been allowed to melt and then cast in bronze. We also had the death mask of Seamus Ennis, the piper, and better still a cast of his hands, with their extraordinary long fingers. As kids we were confused: was he a great piper because his hands were naturally long, or were they made long from playing?

As well as being a memoir, the book looks at the cultural atmosphere of Ireland at the time, and the sense of optimism and buoyancy before the recession of the 1970s and violence in the North. This ties in with the international atmosphere of the 1960s, but with a specifically Irish flavour, with traditional music festivals and my father’s purchase of a cottage, deep in the Connemara Gaeltacht. My parents embraced this, but also the emerging corporate culture, and the mohair suits with their valuable commissions and exciting new architecture. From a western, small farming background, my father personified the emerging “modern Ireland” of the time: ostensibly rebellious and yet business savvy, avant-garde and yet traditional, Irish and yet avowedly European. This story thus hosts an eclectic array of characters, such as The Dubliners, Elvis Presley, Austin Clarke, Henry Moore, Oskar Kokoschka, Susannah York and Francis Ford Coppola.

THIS STORY ALSOexplores modern art, and the break with conventional realism in terms of public art, of which my father was a particular exponent. But the demands for "proper art" by an often philistine media and public became wearying, and only reinforced his determination not to compromise, either critically or commercially. This eventually led him to a sort of withdrawal from the crude art market and the creation, on his own land, of an open-air sculpture park entitled appropriately, Beyond the Pale.

The critic Peter Murray wrote in the Irish Arts Reviewin 2004 that "through his art and his personal life, [Edward] Delaney established himself as a rebellious spirit, and yet, paradoxically, for many years he was championed by the cultural and political establishment, a paradox in keeping with the self-assertiveness of the 1960s, when a wave of economic prosperity lifted Ireland out of its post-war doldrums.

“However, like many other serious European sculptors of the 1960s, Delaney ultimately faces the artistic dilemma identified by René Huyghe. ‘Having liberated himself from that past whose paralysing effect he dreaded, has the modern artist succumbed to the terror of his new task? Is his ultimate outlet the bitter despair of an essentially human failure, poorly disguised under aesthetic programmes and proclamations?’” One can’t help thinking of the parallels with an emerging State or Republic. And it was this that I wished to explore.

Breaking the Mouldby Eamon Delaney is published by New Island