First impressions last, and Ireland's used to be bad

CULTURE SHOCK:Stamps are the first Irish-manufactured product that many people see and are capable of conveying a good or bad impression of Ireland

‘WE FOUND many products which were badly designed and executed and which, in our view, have not the slightest chance of competing successfully on the world market . . . We gained a strong impression in many of the factories we studied that product design was not considered with the serious attention it demands . . . We encountered in Ireland the extraordinary situation of a multiplicity of art, architectural and craft schools, not one of which appeared to us capable of adequately satisfying the needs of the country in regard to design.”

These descriptions of a visually illiterate country were made by a group of five senior Scandinavian designers who spent an intensive fortnight in Ireland 50 years ago, in 1961. They had been brought here by the innovative head of the Irish Export Board, Córas Tráchtála, William Walsh.

Their report, Design in Ireland,is probably the most bracingly honest piece of cultural analysis ever produced by a State body. Reading it now is oddly cheering. Whatever the limitations of contemporary Irish visual culture, it has come an awfully long way.

There has been a certain amount of revisionism in recent years, suggesting that Irish culture before the 1960s was much more vibrant than is often claimed. But the poverty of basic craft activities and of ordinary design is stark.

In 1945, for example, when Peter Brennan set up Ring Ceramics Studios in Kilkenny, it was, astonishingly, the only one in Ireland. The tradition of hand-thrown pottery had simply died. As his wife and collaborator Helena has written, "There were no teachers to ask, classes to attend, potters to visit." And this absence was a token of a miserably impoverished visual culture. The Irish Timesreported, in 1942, almost as a matter of course, that "exhibitions are almost unknown in the country towns". The results of this abysmal lack of attention to visual education and good design were laid bare with unflinching, and often unwelcome, clarity by the Scandinavian investigators of half a century ago.

Apart from Donegal tweed, the hand-knitted jumpers produced by Muriel Gahan’s Irish Homespun Society, and the hand-painted signs on rural shopfronts, they found little to praise. Looking at Waterford Glass, for example, they admired the magnificent achievement of reviving the industry and the excellence of the materials and craftsmanship. But they were critical of the over-reliance on traditional designs and argued, presciently as it turned out, that Waterford’s success could not be maintained in the long term without a “radical reorientation” of its aesthetics.

Irish ceramics factories were dismissed as producing work “mainly based on bad English production, both as regards design and form”. In metalwork, the visitors found “very few examples of worthwhile design”; the only really excellent indigenous metalwork was in the National Museum. As for furniture, what they saw were bad copies of continental styles: “Usually plagiarism in furniture degrades the original because there is very little confidence in the joinery and Irish plagiarism lacks all the advantages of the originals.” Tourist souvenirs were “clumsy . . . rough and artless”. Reproductions of Celtic designs were “always depressingly incorrect and ugly”. Graphic art was underdeveloped because “an up-to-date education for graphic artists is not available”.

Even the humble postage stamp was not spared. One member of the delegation, Gunnar Petersen, professor of graphic design and typography at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, was taken ill early in the trip. He stayed in his room in Dublin and studied Irish stamps. This was not as eccentric an activity as it might seem. As he pointed out, “Stamps are the first Irish-manufactured product that many people see and in this way are capable of conveying a good or bad impression of Ireland.”

The impression made on Petersen was pretty bad. Of the sixpenny stamp with the Sword of Light on it, he said the motif, which appeared on a number of stamps at the time, was “so timid and transparent that it is killed by the pedantic and boringly executed ornament next to it”. Another design is marred by the “childish and insignificant asymmetric placing of elements in the background”. Phrases like “deplorable layout”, “unrelated things just pinned together” and “completely unnecessary noisy background” litter his analysis.

Of one commemorative stamp of an idealised Volunteer beside the GPO, he said: "The way in which the building . . . bites him in the stomach seems vulgar to those not prepared to accept the strangeness and dishonesty of some of the lower branches of advertising design." In a culture so prone to self-satisfaction, the Design in Irelandreport was quite shocking. The painter Sean Keating suggested that it should not have been published at all, merely made available to specialists who requested it. But in fact the Scandinavians did the country an enormous service by their bluntness. The report can now be seen as the catalyst for a revolution in Irish visual culture.

Foreigners made a huge contribution to that change. At a semi-official level, institutions like the Kilkenny Design Workshop (established in 1963) were heavily dependent on Dutch, German, English and Scandinavian craftspeople. But there was also an unofficial and unplanned influx from the same countries. Irish visual culture benefited enormously from fears of a nuclear apocalypse in cold-war Europe. As Alison Ospine documents beautifully in her recent book, West Cork Inspires, the area around Ballydehob began to attract German, Dutch, French, Scandinavian and British artists and craftspeople from the early 1960s onwards, with the German potter Christa Reichel leading the way. Gradually, these influences led to a revival of indigenous crafts and a vast improvement in everyday design.

This revolution is by no means complete: there is not, in the rest of the world, a notion of “Irish design” equivalent to the cachet of “Scandinavian design”. But to look back 50 years is to realise that something profound has been achieved: ours is no longer a visually illiterate culture. In times when we are inclined to be defensively smug about our cultural brilliance, it is worth remembering that the change happened because of two things rare in Ireland: honesty and openness.