Sir, - It is patently clear to anyone visiting IMMA that Declan McGonagle (July 23rd) is defending the indefensible. Instead of answering the issues raised in my piece (July 2nd), he chose instead to impugn my right to the views I expressed. He says it represents "the unhealthy undercurrent of denial . . . of the wider success which younger Irish artists are consistently beginning to achieve."
Denial of the achievement of my colleagues? Hardly: I opened my gallery in 1970 precisely with the intention of showing their work and was the first person to protest publicly against the exclusion of Irish artists from ROSC. He goes on to assume that, had I been writing in the 1940s (I was born in 1938), I would have been attacking the Exhibition of Living Art. As it happens, from my early teens, I was a regular visitor to the Living Art and, in time, was proud to exhibit with them.
He says: "Davis writes on the faulty premise that he knows what a museum of modern art is". Over the last 40 years I have had the good fortune to visit numerous museums of modern art and galleries of contemporary art, in the UK, Europe, the US and, most recently, Asia and Australia. Based on what I have seen, I submit that IMMA comes off very badly.
In the countries I have visited the priority is, whilst showing exemplary work from other countries, first and foremost to celebrate their national art. The nub of my complaint is the Irish Museum of Modern largely ignores the contribution made by our own artists of the last 50 years and does not regularly make a cross section of their work accessible to the public. The current policy of promoting that which is internationally fashionable is, in essence, provincial.
It is perhaps ironic that McGonagle should accuse me of "artistic taxidermy". It was he, after all, not I, who purchased the stuffed kangaroo! - Yours, etc.,
11 Capel Street,
Dublin 1.