Visual Arts: The exhibition A Vision Of Modern Art, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is a tribute to the late Dorothy Walker. The venue is all the more appropriate given that she was advocating such a museum long before IMMA became a reality.
She was a founder board member and took on the role of director until Declan McGonagle was appointed.
But her myriad involvements with Irish cultural life extended much farther back than that. She managed the innovative design consultancy Signa back in the 1950s, for example. With the participation of her great friends Patrick Scott, Louis le Brocquy and others, Signa was a significant initiative to improve the quality of Irish design. Later the Rosc series of exhibitions set out to enhance awareness and appreciation of contemporary art.
Having worked as assistant to the architect Michael Scott, Dorothy married another partner in the practice, Robin Walker, and became closely associated with the international modernist aesthetic promoted by the firm. She and Robin lived in a house he designed on uncompromisingly modernist lines, and this sense of living within a particular aesthetic rather than being merely theoretically engaged with it came through in practically everything she did.
If you make your way through the rooms housing the exhibition it may not be immediately apparent that Walker was not only an admirer but also a passionate advocate of the work of the artists represented there. The catalogue reprints an article on her work as an art critic that she wrote for Hibernia magazine in 1977. She begins, perhaps surprisingly, with a declaration of her religious faith. But her belief in art was an aspect of her belief in a deity. Donald Kuspitt is not quite right when he writes that she seemed to "have believed in the religion of art". For her art was an expression of divinity, of the sacred, in humanity. She remarks, "I would see the critic's role more as that of an advocate of art that he understands and loves", although she reserves the right "to vent my disappointment". The exhibition, curated by another critic, Ciaran Bennett, is compact, well chosen and extremely agreeable to visit. There is an almost conversational quality to several of the works, literally so in the case of Michael Craig Martin's well-known piece of Pythonesque dialogue in a conceptual piece that sets out to persuade us that a glass of water on a shelf is, in fact, an oak tree.
More surprising is Les Levine's Group Shows Kill The Group, a call for the abandonment of the practice of group exhibitions. What's surprising is that it comes from the Walkers' collection - Walker devoted much time and energy to organising and promoting group shows. In fact she received the piece as a letter from Levine and took it in good heart. She was long associated with Joseph Beuys, seeing that his revolutionary educational and social ideas might be useful in an Irish context.
The show features Food For Thought, an amazing little textual piece by Beuys from Oliver Dowling's collection in the form of blank verse (plus a bit of translation), but it's not so much poetry as a drawing made with words. The sketch for Christo's proposal to wrap the pathways of St Stephen's Green in 1977 commemorates one of the great might-have-beens of art in Ireland.
Walker preferred abstraction to representation, but she wasn't dogmatic about it and was extremely responsive to several representational painters - predictably enough in the case of the work of Ireland's modernist pioneers Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, represented here by two fine works from the Walker family collection, but not so predictably in the case of Camille Souter. But Walker warmed to Souter's pared-down, painterly lyricism, just as she took to le Brocquy's intense, Beckettian evocations of the human presence. Again there is a very good example, Male Presence, a small painting from 1958.
She was also a generous supporter of Michael Mulcahy when he emerged as a visionary, expressionist painter in the early 1980s. More recently she spoke with admiration of Diana Michener's remarkable dark photographic work, which has a brooding, introspective quality. She was equally enthusiastic about the work of Jim Dine, Michener's partner, even though she may not have been temperamentally sympathetic to it.
As Bennett points out, Sean Scully was in a way the artist Walker had been waiting for: an Irish-born abstract painter capable of making profoundly expressive statements within the context of an exceptionally spare formal language, a painter who is a significant presence internationally. He is the culminating figure in her critical history Modern Art In Ireland. One of his pieces in this show was made and presented to IMMA as a memorial to Robin Walker.
Another, from the loan collection that will find a home in the Hugh Lane's new extension, is next to an early work by Charles Tyrrell, an abstract acquired by the Walkers in 1974. It's striking how well this work stands up. It's a simple composition, influenced by the American post-painterly abstractionists, but it already shows Tyrrell's distinctive voice, rigorous and clear.
There are of course other artists who were important to Walker, including her son and daughter, Corban and Sarah, both of whom have established themselves nationally and internationally. They and others are fittingly represented here in what is a distinctly friendly, approachable show and a worthy tribute to a woman who contributed greatly to the contemporary cultural landscape.
• A Vision Of Modern Art In Memory Of Dorothy Walker is at IMMA, Dublin, until June 27th
