In 1991, the National Gallery of Ireland published a book of poetry by Paul Durcan. It was, to put it mildly, an unusual thing for the gallery to do. Generally its publications were standard exhibition or collection catalogues. Not that the book in question, Crazy About Women, isn't about the paintings. In fact it brilliantly captures Durcan's passionate engagement with painting and reveals his remarkable knowledge of the National Gallery collection.
The poems are his typically irreverent responses to the works reproduced beside them. Not surprisingly, the book remains one of the most popular publications ever produced by the gallery.
It came about at the instigation of the then Assistant Director, Brian P. Kennedy, who had noticed the "strong pictorial references" in some of Durcan's poems. But he hadn't, he wrote in his foreword to the book, realised the extent of Durcan's interest. "He quite simply loves painting," he came to realise. Kennedy's original insight was his recognition of the alchemical possibilities offered by the combination of poet and paintings. It is the kind of incalculable, imaginative initiative that marks him as more than an administrator, more than a gallery manager, that indicates genuine creative flair. The kind of thing that, presumably, accounts for the exceptionally positive views he has generated from so many observers throughout the current round of controversy at IMMA.
During his time as Assistant Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (he had also worked in the Chester Beatty Library, the Department of Finance and been involved in the EU), Kennedy gained a reputation as an enormously enthusiastic and energetic presence in the gallery and beyond. It often seemed that, if there was a project that needed an overseer, he was the one you called first. His varied endeavours included editing Art is My Life, the tribute to James White, the gallery's esteemed former director.
He was also editor of Town House publisher's Lives of Irish Artists series, designed to meet the public appetite for accessible publications on Irish artists - certainly the right idea, marred only by the fact that the books were too insubstantial in terms of both text and reproductions.
Of course, Kennedy was probably best known at the time as the author of the briefly controversial history of the development of state arts policy in Ireland since independence, Dreams and Responsibilities, which, after the smoke generated by the Arts Council's shredding of its stock of the book had cleared, stands as a fine work. As does his study of Chester Beatty's involvement with Ireland, accurately subtitled A Study in Cultural Politics.
Apart from all this, while he may not quite have evidenced Paul Durcan's idiosyncratic eye for a picture, there was no doubt about his own instinctive and deeply felt engagement with art. Within the ambit of an essay on the singular oil painting technique of Jack B. Yeats, for example (published in a number of the Irish Arts Review), he felt free to offer a perceptive reading of the painter's work. This impressed me at the time as pin-pointing if not a central, glaring lack, then at the very least a curious and telling omission in the work of Yeats as an artist.
Kennedy contrasted the conspicuous passion of Yeats's use of materials with the odd absence of sensuality in his work. This, for all the drama, vitality and apparent humanity of Yeats's subject matter, imbues his work with a certain sterility. It is as if the exaggerated presence of the paint is an alibi for what is actually missing: more than enough for a serious thesis there.
The point, though, is that Kennedy was quite prepared to step beyond the bounds of his technical outline and risk getting his knuckles rapped because he couldn't help but respond to the paintings as he saw them.
In my own occasional dealings with him I have to say I found him exceptionally good natured, enthusiastic and agreeable (even when I left him in the lurch in relation to a publishing project with which he was involved and when he would have been quite entitled to feel somewhat aggrieved). Even based on his career in Ireland prior to his departure for Australia, it's hard not to feel that, whatever the procedural concerns, an exceptional talent was allowed slip through the net.
