A harrowing collection of 115 paintings and sculptures is on display in Connecticut, writes LARA MARLOWE
IRELAND’S GREAT Hunger Museum, which was inaugurated in Hamden, Connecticut, on Friday, is a unique visual record that puts the defining event in Irish history within reach of a public who might not otherwise learn of it.
The opening took place in the presence of Minister for Tourism Leo Varadkar and Consul General Noel Kilkenny.
Quinnipiac University, which owns Músaem an Ghorta Mhóir, is believed to hold the world’s largest collection of Famine art, some 115 paintings and sculptures spanning the last 167 years.
William Faulkner’s maxim that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past” could be the museum’s motto. Its exhibition shows how representations of the Famine have followed the classic stages of grief: from awareness of what was transpiring to repression of memory due to guilt, shame and the impossibility of conveying its scale and horror. More recently, expressions of bereavement and recrimination have given way to a search for broader relevance.
There are no known photographs of the Famine, but the haunting drawings commissioned from the Irish artist James Mahony by the London Illustrated News were the equivalent of today’s newspaper photos: children scrounging for food; evicted peasants wandering country roads; a deserted village which Mahony described as “like the tombs of a departed race, rather than the recent abodes of a yet living people”.
Niamh O’Sullivan, professor emeritus of visual culture at the National College of Art and a specialist in 19th-century Irish art and social history, was commissioned by Quinnipiac to guide the final stages of its 15-year collection process.
With designer Brad Collins, she oversaw the rebuilding of the library where it is housed. The contemporaneous illustrations are exhibited on a wall of dynamic, high-definition video monitors.
Sketches and written accounts from 1845-1852 still carry a powerful impact. O’Sullivan tells of being “shocked to my core” by a text “about a family going into a graveyard to bury themselves while they were still alive, because they knew there would be nobody left to do it for them”.
Artistic representations of the Famine were rare at the time. Quinnipiac purchased Irish Peasant Children, which belonged to the Gore-Booth family and hung at Lissadell. O’Sullivan considers the painting the historic keystone of the museum.
Painted by Daniel MacDonald in 1847 – the worst year of the Famine – it shows how the upper classes, the sole patrons of art at the time, sanitised the calamity. “The rich bought art and the rich did not want dirty peasants hanging on the walls of their great houses,” O’Sullivan explains.
MacDonald made the central figure in Irish Peasant Children a beautiful girl. The disaster that has befallen Ireland is merely hinted at: the wilderness setting and the absence of parents; the girl’s bare feet and the gurrier look of her brother; the hard face of the other girl, who clutches a bottle like a weapon.
With the exception of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1962 book The Great Hunger, which was unjustly shunned by contemporaries, the question of British responsibility for the Famine was barely addressed until the 1990s. Christine Kinealy’s landmark book, The Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52, broke the silence.
John Lahey, the Irish-American president of Quinnipiac University who has been the driving force behind the museum, calls Kinealy’s book his “awakening”. As grand marshal of the New York City St Patrick’s Day parade in 1997, the year of sesquicentennial commemorations of “Black ‘47”, Lahey delivered dozens of speeches about the Famine. One prompted a blast from the British ambassador to Washington.
“He said that as an educator, the president of a university ought to know better than to compare Ireland’s Great Hunger to the Holocaust,” Lahey recalls.
“I never mentioned the Holocaust in any of my remarks. I was very careful not to.”
Controversial as it may be, the comparison is often made. In May 2010, then president Mary McAleese spoke of similarities between the Irish and Jewish people in a Manhattan synagogue.
“I am comparing the two,” says Catherine Marshall, the art historian who is co-editing the Royal Irish Academy’s five-volume history of 20th-century Irish art and architecture.
Marshall believes the Famine is of enormous importance in Irish art. In 1995, she participated in a conference at New York University entitled Ireland’s Holocaust, whose goal was to push Famine studies on to the curriculums of US learning institutions.
Murray Lender, who died in March of this year, was the instigator of the Great Hunger Museum. The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he was an alumnus of Quinnipiac and vice-chairman of its board of trustees. “He grew up in a mixed Irish and Jewish community,” Lahey explains. “He said the Jews talked about the Holocaust all the time, but my speech was the first time he heard Irish friends talk about the Famine.” Lender had made a fortune marketing frozen bagels. With his brother Marvin, he donated millions to Quinnipiac, much of it specifically for the Famine collection. “In many ways, Murray saw the compelling nature of the Famine story more clearly than I or other Irish-Americans,” says Lahey.
The late Michael Farrell’s monumental, 3 metre by 4½ metre painting Black ‘47 was the artistic equivalent in the 1990s of Kinealy’s and others’ research into British responsibility for the million Irish deaths and emigration of two million others.
Farrell’s canvas seems to float on a wall by itself in the museum. It is the trial of Charles Trevelyan, the British official who was in charge of Famine relief. Trevelyan stands in a searchlight shaft, a hand on one hip, embodying the arrogance of empire. The prosecutor gestures towards Irish skeletons rising from an open grave, evidence against the man who called the Famine “the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence” and a “mechanism for reducing surplus population”.
In the 1920s, Lilian Lucy Davidson’s Burying the Child became the first modern example of what became the dominant style of Famine commemoration. It hangs at the top of the stairs leading from the 19th- to the 20th-century in the museum. Three emaciated peasant figures, clothed in rags, prepare to bury a tiny bundle under a looming sky; humanity made grief and destitution. More recently, Rowan Gillespie’s bronze sculptures convey a similar sense of desolation.
Since the 1990s, notes Marshall, “a number of Irish artists have started to address the Famine in new and different ways.” Alanna O’Kelly, whose Famine art won the 1994 IMMA/Glen Dimplex award, was inspired by breast-feeding her newborn to think of Irish women who could not nourish their own children. She keened and recited the names of Famine victims in performance art, and represented the landscapes where the Great Hunger happened.
With famines in Africa recurring on our television screens, artists like Brian Maguire have expanded their work to refer to present-day injustice and hunger. Memory has prompted Ireland, in the words of President Michael D Higgins, “to place ourselves in the circumstances of the other”. Some hear echoes of 19th-century claims that government intervention would “create dependency” in the response of European and American conservatives to today’s crisis. “During the Famine, there was a belief that even though people were starving, if we made it too easy for them, they’d be lazy and take advantage,” notes Kinealy, the historian.
“That was exemplified in the public works, where people who were starving had to do hard physical labour, six days a week, building useless roads and walls to prove they were in need of assistance,” Kinealy continues. “And they died . . . How far have we really moved on if we can be talking in 2012 in those terms about not helping the poor?”