The sculptures of Edward Delaney, mostly made in the 1960s, are bold reflections of a new Ireland in a state of flux, writes Aidan Dunne.
The Royal Hibernian Academy's exhibition of the work of sculptor Edward Delaney casts a light onto an era of Irish art that is ripe for exploration and reassessment. It is an exaggeration, though only a slight one, to say that Delaney, now in his mid 70s, burst onto the Irish scene in the 1960s in a spectacular flurry of energy and ambition. Certainly when he arrived back in Ireland, in 1961, as a relative outsider, after studying and working abroad for several years, he embarked on an unprecedented run of work that included two major, landmark public monuments in Dublin, the Thomas Davis and Wolfe Tone memorials, on College Green and St Stephen's Green respectively.
As Roisin Kennedy writes in her catalogue essay, his meteoric rise in the 1960s coincided with "a [comparatively] massive upsurge in collecting and commissioning of visual art in Ireland", directly related to the changing economic and cultural climate of the Lemass era. There was also what could be described as a general cultural loosening in both Europe and the United States, and without doubt some of that energy fed into what was happening here.
Delaney's expenditure of energy throughout the 1960s was prodigious. Yet there was nothing modish or ephemeral about what he was doing. The works he created then combine the age-old mystique of the medieval master-craftsman with the sensibility of a European modernist. Add to the mix a concern with Irish national identity and romanticised Celtic imagery and you have something of the distinctive flavour of his rugged, ancient-modern bronze figures.
His feat in casting the three-quarter ton figure of Wolfe Tone out in the open at his own studio in Dun Laoghaire was positively heroic. It recalls a key episode in Andrey Tarkovsky's film about the icon painter Andrey Rublev. The episode is an allegory about the artistic process. The cathedral needs a new bell but the master bell-caster has died. His teenage son claims to have inherited his secret and supervises the huge project. Failure means death. Only when the bell has tolled does he break down and confess to Rublev that his father had died before he could pass on the secret of casting.
Delaney did know the secret. He had carefully set about learning it over a period of years. Born in Claremorris in Co Mayo, he left school aged 14 but nurtured an ambition to be an artist, choosing an unorthodox means of going about it. By all accounts he infiltrated himself into the National College of Art and Design, bypassing formal enrolment and just turning up at classes, becoming part of the fabric, a strategy that took him right through to graduation and won him the support of some, though not all, staff members.
THEN, WITH AN Arts Council scholarship, he set off for Europe to learn the art of lost-wax bronze casting, or, as he put it in interviews later, "the secrets of the foundries". Lost-wax is a venerable, highly skilled and indeed secretive method of casting. Its appeal lies in the fact that it is an exceptionally faithful means of casting from an original wax model, allowing fine detail. Such is its mystique that when British troops looted lost-wax cast sculptures from Benin at the end of the 19th century, European scholars simply refused to believe that African artists could have mastered the technique, and came up with crackpot theories about kidnapped Renaissance sculptors being transplanted to the Bight of Benin.
Of course, studying in Germany and working in foundries there and in Italy, Delaney absorbed more than casting technique - he also took on board the concerns and ways of seeing of the artists with whom he came into contact. With hindsight, it is possible to identify him as primarily a worthy exemplar of a broad post-war tradition of European figurative sculpture. Some outstanding artists who come under this general heading are Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier, Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzu. Delaney met Manzu when he visited Kokoschka's summer school in Salzberg, and regarded him as pre-eminent.
These artists shared a commitment to figuration, to modelling and casting, to bronze. In the disillusioned aftermath of a cataclysmic war, some of them looked to Existentialist humanism, depicting the troubled, isolated human presence afflicted with all the doubts and anxieties of mid-century. Paradoxically perhaps, an underlying sense of doubt and fragility comes through the intractable, material substance of Delaney's figures, human, animal and mythical. The most robust forms have an awkwardness, a tenderness about them.
STRIKINGLY, THIS QUALITY is evident in his public, monumental work, although, as Judith Hill has pointed out, it is not something typical of such an heroic form. Actually, it gives the monuments an appealing, human character. That character, a compound toughness and fragility, touches virtually everything included in the RHA show: single human figures, close family groupings, mythical heroes and animals, notably horses, a favourite subject. All have a hard-won, tragic dignity about them and a sense of being frayed by mortality and uncertainty.
The show is titled simply Bronzes from the Sixties, and there are good reasons why that defines its scope. Many of the works he went on to make subsequently are, by their nature, not amenable to gallery display. And, though it is premature to produce a definitive judgement, the 1960s and early 1970s look to be his most satisfactorily productive time as an artist.
To explain why, it is necessary to look at the art-historical context. At the time, figurative, bronze sculpture was rapidly superseded by other, radical developments: the large-scale, fabricated steel abstractions pioneered by David Smith; the minimalism of Serra and Andre; Land and environmental sculpture; Conceptualism; Performance; Installation. Eventually, in fact, sculpture exploded into a bewildering generality of procedures. The environmental pieces - composite components in an extensive sculpture park - that Delaney fabricated in Carraroe following his move there in 1980, can be broadly aligned with David Smith's constructed steel works, though they also have kinetic elements. His move into environmental fabrication was audacious and ambitious, but somehow he seemed more at home with his bronzes, though opinions on that may change. For the moment, the RHA show provides plenty of food for thought.
Edward Delaney is at the RHA Gallagher Galleries II & III, 15 Ely Place, Dublin, until January 9th. Telephone:01-6612558.