An intimate gift of post-war American art

Irish artist Brian O'Doherty and his partner Barbara Novak made many friends in New York's art world, they have now donated their fine collection of American art to Imma, writes AIDAN DUNNE

FOR 36 YEARS, until 2008, the artist Brian O’Doherty went by the assumed name of Patrick Ireland. He took on the name as an act of protest after Bloody Sunday in 1972, and pledged to retain it until the British army withdrew from Northern Ireland and “all citizens were given their civil rights”. By 2008, following on from the Belfast Agreement and the slow consolidation of peaceful politics in the province, he judged it time to lay Patrick Ireland to rest, and he did so at a formal ceremony in the grounds of Imma, with a substantial audience in attendance.

Now he – Brian O’Doherty, that is – and his partner Barbara Novak, the renowned American art historian, have donated their collection of post-war American art and related material to Imma, where it is on view until the end of February 2011.

It is an unusually personal collection. The 76 works include a number of well-known artists, including Edward Hopper, Eva Hesse, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt and Robert Rauschenberg. More often than not there is a direct link to or involvement with O’Doherty and Novak, because they were not collectors in the conventional sense of the term. They were intimately involved in the art world in the US in several, overlapping capacities, from the 1960s onwards, and the artworks and documentary material they have given to Imma reflect that involvement.

As Imma curator Christina Kennedy observed, it's not just a collection, it's also a biography, detailing their interests, activities and friendships over 40 years. And they are both remarkable individuals, renaissance figures who have achieved a great deal across a daunting range of disciplines. Apart altogether from the visual arts, for example, both are novelists. O'Doherty's The Deposition of Fr McGreevywas shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2000. Besides being an artist and novelist, he has also worked as a curator, an art critic, administrator, editor and broadcaster. He wrote a classic of contemporary art theory, Inside the White Cube.

A New Yorker, Novak first established her reputation with a benchmark study of 19th-century American painting. She has also published two novels and a play, and she paints botanical watercolours.

O’Doherty was born in Co Roscommon and studied medicine at UCD. He also painted. Despite the presence of some exceptional individuals, he found 1950s Dublin to be artistically benighted: “It was a dark time.” Dublin was “bereft of visual culture . . . not a Matisse in sight. Picasso was a rumour; Moscow, unheard of.”

A fellowship brought him to Harvard to study public health: “I learned the difference between sewerage and sewage.” Figuratively speaking, he harboured the desire to run away and join the circus, and he soon moved full-time into American cultural life, writing and broadcasting and then producing his own work. He and Novak married in 1960. Soon their New York apartment, in a building known for its cultural pedigree, close to Central Park on West 67th Street, became a meeting place for all sorts of art practitioners including, at various times, Mel Bochner, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Smithson and – a close friend – the composer Morton Feldman.

As Kennedy notes, their artistic friendships spanned generations and movements, encompassing realist painter Hopper, the abstract expressionist Rothko as well as an emerging wave of minimalist and conceptual artists. “Moving from abstract expressionism to conceptualism,” Novak says, “was like changing your head.”

O’Doherty became one of the pioneers of 1960s conceptualism. He got to know Marcel Duchamp, the grandfather of conceptual art. His conceptual portrait of Duchamp incorporates the artist’s recorded heartbeat, a response to Duchamp’s remark that a work of art dies when it reaches the museum.

O’Doherty and Novak are not wealthy collectors, so their collection doesn’t comprise a group of large-scale signature pieces. Rather there’s an intimacy to it. Often they acquired works as gifts or as exchanges between artists. This means there’s a story behind almost every piece, and in a way that’s its strength. Their gift expands and consolidates Imma’s holdings of American art, particularly of the 1960s and 1970s, and it also adds considerably to the texture of the museum’s collection. It fleshes out the story of Irish involvement in American art of the time: besides O’Doherty’s own contribution, he mentions the presence in New York of Noel Sheridan and Micheal Farrell, for example.

As such, it is important for Imma, but also important in terms of Ireland’s recent cultural history.

Post-War Americanart works from the newly donated Novak/O'Doherty Collection. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. Until Feb 27