The studio of sculptor Gerda Fromel is a remarkable archive of an important artistic talent. Aidan Dunne enters a world of wonder
It's just over 30 years since sculptor Gerda Fromel drowned in a swimming accident. She was 45 years old and was at the height of her artistic career. She had spent practically her entire working life in Ireland, arriving in 1956 with her husband, Werner Schurmann. By the time of her death, many regarded her as the foremost sculptor in Ireland. Schurmann, who went on to become a professional singer, was also a sculptor and bronze-caster. They came to Ireland at the suggestion of Michael Morrow, who had been studying painting in Germany and, like Schurmann, straddled the worlds of music and visual art.
Initially, Schurmann was involved in establishing a foundry at the National College of Art and Design, but he left the college after three years to work on his own, bronze-casting for several Irish artists, including Oisin Kelly, who became a close friend.
In 1964, Schurmann and Fromel built a striking, modernist house on a two-and-a-half acre site above Rathfarnham in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. It was designed by his brother, architect Joachim Schurmann. An impassively geometric structure clad in brown brick, it is square in outline, with four wings fronting on to an inner, cobbled courtyard.
However, Werner Schurmann later abandoned his sculptural work to pursue his musical calling. He returned to Germany, leaving Fromel, with their four sons, in Ireland. Since her untimely death, the house - a listed structure - has remained in the family, but now it is on the market. The building also housed Fromel's studio. In the immediate aftermath of her death, some work was removed from the studio but, as the years passed, her sons decided to leave the room, and what remained in it, pretty much as it was.
A simple, oblong room, with a note of austerity in its atmosphere, it still contains her workbench with its fitted vise, a Belfast sink, her clay-modelling stand, a cabinet of drawers and an array of small sculptural pieces and maquettes which line shelves built high into the walls. The drawers are filled with her black-bound sketchbooks and notebooks, with her drawings, photographs, and press cuttings, and with correspondence relating to her work.
There are sheaves of life drawings as well as working drawings for sculptures and many beautiful, finished pieces - she was an exceptional draughtswoman. Meticulously made models in flat, cut card relate to the development of some of her larger commissions. There are, as well, many smaller sculptural pieces in stone and bronze, as well as maquettes for some of her best known works. Altogether there are upwards of 60 sculptural works of one kind or another in the studio and the house.
THE STUDIO'S CONTENTS amount to a remarkable archive of an important artistic talent, but the pending sale of the house poses the question of what is going to become of it.
The evolution of her thought as an artist, from student work to projects in hand at the time of her death, is consistently recorded in drawings and sketchbooks, which are, for the most part, carefully dated. Through individual examples and whole sequences of drawings, her lifelong fascination with certain families of forms and themes becomes evident. In her accounts of landscape, she seems to treat mountainous forms bisected and penetrated by rivers, streams or waterfalls as equivalents of the human body and the vulnerable human presence. As with another consistent subject, the head, she refined the embodied presence into a number of virtually abstract, elegant shapes so that heads, ponds, the sun, and shields are almost interchangeable as motifs. She was fascinated with the problems of how to make a sculptural treatment of a tree, and solved it very convincingly (spelling out one line of approach in one extraordinary pair of drawings).
BORN IN SCHONBERG, in Czechoslovakia, to Austrian parents, Fromel spent her childhood in a Europe torn apart by conflict. Although, her son Killian recalls, she spoke little of her memories of that time, there were oblique allusions to difficult and dangerous experiences.
In the post-war years, she went to Stuttgart to study sculpture, eventually going on to further studies in Darmstadt and Munich. Giacometti and Brancusi were clear though by no means overbearing influences on her work. Her affinity for ancient forms and markings recalls Brancusi, but her voice was her own.
Critic Dorothy Walker wrote of another, less obvious influence, the Italian Impressionist painter-turned-sculptor Medardo Rosso. He devised a fluid sculptural style in which the form seems to be fleetingly glimpsed, barely grasped while in a state of flux. And certainly a hallmark of Fromel's work is her ability to impart meaning to a form with just a few subtle incisions or inflections, so that it seems it might disappear with a change of light.
She reached her artistic maturity in Ireland at a time when one of the more progressive strands in the Irish art world was embracing an international Modernist aesthetic. That Fromel was more than capable of working proficiently within this aesthetic is amply demonstrated by some of her high-profile commissions, including her sculpture for the PJ Carroll building in Dundalk. While she was actively exploring the problems of large-scale sculpture at the time of her death, she was never wholeheartedly into a sculpture of large-scale abstract geometry. There was always a humanising element to what she did, and her true centre of gravity is to be found in her smaller pieces, work made to a human scale.
Here, Dorothy Walker rightly noted, she had a knack for expressing tenderness without any hint of sentimentality. In fact there is always a slight astringency to even her most delicately expressive pieces.
She was a natural at both carving and modelling, and this quality is evident in her drawings. Broadly speaking, she had two approaches. One depended on an decisive, incisive though sensitive linear style, the other on the gradual textural accumulation of marks to form extraordinarily dense masses.
GIVEN THE UNMISTAKABLE quality of her work, it is perhaps not surprising she was held in universally high regard, by fellow artists, collectors and critics. Writing of her contribution to a group exhibition, former Irish Times art critic Brian Fallon expressed his admiration and added that: "If there is a really first-rank sculptor in the country, then she is it."
Her achievement is all the more noteworthy given that she pursued a busy artistic schedule while also coping with the demands of raising children, for the most part during a time when raising children was regarded as more or less what women were supposed to be content with doing.
In 1962, for example, when the Arts Council awarded her a £600 travel bursary, the Irish Press reported that the Council had given a sculpture scholarship to someone they described as: "a 32-year old alien . . . married to a German sculptor, Werner Schurmann." A stern postscript to the letter from the council, informing her of her award, noted that as "the council have at present no funds" there was no prospect of her getting any money until the following September.
Fromel occupies an important place in the history of 20th century Irish art. Her work is widely dispersed throughout public and private collections in Ireland and elsewhere.
What remains in her studio, though, apart altogether from a substantial archive of correspondence, is the largest single concentration of her sculpture and an exceptionally rich collection of works on paper, not to mention working drawings and sketchbooks that provide a rich, compelling account of, and insight into, her creative process.
One can only hope that this body of work and related material can be suitably conserved and maintained, and made accessible to students and historians.