An Irishman’s Diary about a Dublin sculpture and holidays in France

I must have have passed it a hundred times and not noticed. But the next time I'm in Dublin's Upper Leeson Street, I shall pause long enough to admire a sculpture called Carnac, by the Limerick artist Bob Mulcahy.

A 2.5m-tall chunk of granite, it’s named after the village in Brittany, home to 10,000 standing stones or “menhirs”. And I’m told that its apparently casual placement (at a junction where the street divides) is anything but, because a north-west/south-east axis means it faces that megalithic Mecca in western France.

The menhirs of Carnac stand in straight lines, giving rise to a legend that they are the remains of a Christian-persecuting Roman legion, turned to stone by Pope Cornelius. Alas for romance, archaeologists suggest they were there 3,500 years before he was.

The sculpture at Leeson Street has stood for a mere 36 years. But according to the local residents association, ULSARA, it was already suffering the combined effects of traffic pollution and tree roots. Hence a recent refurbishment, as a result of which it has been restored to its original condition.

Carnac was among the fruits of a summer school in 1978, when eight artists spent five weeks in a quarry in the Dublin mountains working with the Japanese-American sculptor Minoru Niizuma. They produced one collaborative work (now in UCD), and various individual ones, including Mulcahy's.

Sad to say, the then 24-year-old sculptor was not long for the world. He died in a canoeing accident on Lough Derg in 1982, since when, as well as being an artwork, the Dublin sculpture has been his monument.

We’ll return to Carnac in a moment. But as it happened, ULSARA picked an auspicious day to email me this week – Thursday – in that it was also the 175th anniversary of one of the greatest sculptors, Auguste Rodin.

And never mind the menhirs, the stars must also have been portentously aligned in mid-November 1840, because he was not the only Gallic art celebrity born that week. You wait ages for one French artist of era-defining genius. Then, two days after Rodin, Claude Monet arrived too.

The Rodin museum website has a very entertaining piece about the pair, who became close friends. One of my favourite details is that when Rodin first saw the ocean (during a visit to Brittany, aged – wait for it – 47), he was struck by its similarity with the painter’s work. “It’s a Monet!” he said of the Atlantic.

But the relationship was not always as admiring. When the two mounted a joint exhibition in 1889, Rodin was at first distracted by other work, so that Monet had to write to him belatedly urging him to install his sculptures.

When Rodin did, however, they obscured an entire wall of Monet’s pictures. The painter was so upset he declared himself ready to retreat to his garden and forget about the show. Rodin, meanwhile, responded with the sensitivity typical of artists. “I don’t care about Monet,” he said. “I only care about me.”

He had reason to repent a few years later when, as the website puts it (in a strangely memorable phrase), he faced "biting criticism because of his Balzac". His Balzac was a statue of the writer for which Rodin won the commission in 1891.

But he exasperated the commissioners by, first, taking years years to do it (he over-researched) and then by delivering a sculpture designed to reflect the writer’s personality rather than his mere likeness.

It was still fully figurative, but it was a first step on the road to abstraction, and is now considered revolutionary. Then, it was considered grotesque. Amid a fierce critical backlash, Rodin was grateful to Monet and others who organised a counter-backlash and helped restore his reputation.

Anyway, returning from Balzac to Carnac, and speaking of first steps along the road, I'm told the Leeson Street sculpture may also carry an implicit joke from the artist, being a landmark near the start of the N11 – the route by which many holidaying Dublin families begin trips to Brittany and France in general.

A veteran of several such holidays, I have somehow never visited Carnac, usually rushing through the Breton peninsula en route south instead. And my children are now in any case threatening to grow out of the whole Vendée campsite thing.

But maybe there’s still time. I’m banking on the Irish soccer team to give us an excuse for one more French road-trip next summer, perhaps via Carnac. I just hope that, by the time you read this, they haven’t already made a Balzac of my plans.

@FrankmcnallyIT