NY Irish centre gets Byrne on board

ArtScape: 'As an Irish person who has lived in New York for a long number of years I have always felt that there should be a focal point in the city to promote Irish culture and to celebrate the heavy fingerprints and footprints that Irish people have left on American culture," said actor Gabriel Byrne this week in Dublin.

He was here to accept the chairmanship of a working group set up to develop an Irish cultural centre in New York. The planned centre in the Big Apple will add to the growing clout of Culture Ireland and should increase its financial backing, and developments such as the LA office of the Irish Film Board indicate an increasing attempt to bolster our international cultural reputation with official backing. Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue invited Byrne to chair the group and they also sat down with Culture Ireland chairman Prof Micheál Ó Súilleabháin and board member Mary McCarthy to discuss the remit and make-up of the working group. It's planned to comprise people from the Irish and Irish-American business communities - "individuals with credentials and expertise in getting large infrastructural projects off the ground as well as leading figures from business, law, banking [ and] public-private partnerships," according to the Minister. A consultative forum of artists and those engaged in the arts world in New York and Ireland will be established in the coming months to work alongside the group and to feed into the developing the cultural centre.

The primary focus of the working group will be to develop the project's infrastructure. As well as advising the Government on enhancing the promotion of Irish culture in New York, the Minister has also, intriguingly, specifically requested that the group examine "the potential of the proposed facility to contribute to Ireland's economic prosperity given the expectation that it will become the focal point for Irish culture in New York".

"Ireland and generations of its people have made a significant contribution to American culture not just in the arts but in business and politics. It is only right and fitting that we celebrate this proud tradition and all that is unique about heritage and modern Ireland by developing an Irish cultural centre as a permanent presence in what is the capital of the world," O'Donoghue said, praising Byrne's "unstinting enthusiasm" for the project. "The fact that Gabriel has cleared his schedule to work on this project for the next six months and that he is volunteering his time underlines his commendable commitment to making it a reality," he added.

Crawford goes national

Earlier this week, Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue addressed a meeting of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork to mark its transition from a municipal to a national institution, writes Aidan Dunne. Adding substance to the change of status, he announced that he was assigning the Great Southern art collection (recently passed on to the State by the Dublin Airport Authority), to the Crawford. Good for the gallery and good for Cork, but is it what's best for the collection? O'Donoghue noted that he hoped the Crawford would in the future lend items to other national institutions - the National Gallery and Imma - for temporary exhibitions.

That goes without saying. National institutions habitually share works for temporary thematic shows. But it sidesteps another issue, which is the faltering progress towards the consolidation of a national collection of Irish art from the mid to late 20th century, which is still lacking. The acquisition of the Great Southern collection should have been evaluated in that context. Judging by the recent exhibition of about half of the estimated 90 or so works at the Office of Public Works headquarters in Dublin, the collection, while predictably uneven and by no means comprehensive, does contain some outstanding individual works and some valuable clusters of works by individual artists, such as Norah McGuinness and Nano Reid. But rather than adopting an overall strategic view of the national collections, the evidence suggests a piecemeal approach rather than joined-up thinking on the part of the authorities.

That said, one of the implications of the Crawford's national status is that erstwhile curator Peter Murray becomes director of the gallery. His track record during the years when the Crawford was in the charge of the Cork VEC has been consistently impressive, and he has been exceptionally industrious and ambitious in terms of temporary exhibitions. The gallery faltered only with its modern extension, a striking architectural statement that experienced teething difficulties and still has shortcomings as an exhibition space. Nevertheless, one feels that Murray is certain to make the most of the Crawford's expanded remit, not to mention its added clout.

The National Gallery's big buys

During 2006, the National Gallery of Ireland acquired several pieces of work to augment its holdings of post-impressionist and expressionist paintings from the early 20th century, writes Aidan Dunne. The most recent is Le Déjeuner, by Pierre Bonnard, whose work was once memorably described by Picasso as "a pot pourri of indecision", largely because the forceful, decisive Picasso could not relate to Bonnard's shimmering pools of colour composed from myriad, soft-edged brush-strokes. Le Déjeuner, purchased at Christie's in New York in November, features a staple subject: his companion Marthe at the dining table in their house, Ma Roulotte, painted in 1923. The modestly-sized painting was in the collection of Janice H Levin, an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum, until her death in 2001. At $2,704,000 (more than €2,053,000, the painting was well within its fairly modest estimate of $2-3 million.

Two German expressionists whose works were acquired earlier in the year are not as well known as Bonnard - Gabriele Münter and Hermann Max Pechstein. Münter, who lived and worked with Kandinsky for several years before parting in 1914, is a painter of bold colour and design, as evidenced by the painting acquired for the National Gallery, Girl with a Red Ribbon. Pechstein, for a time a member of the expressionist group Die Brücke, spent time in Paris and the South Seas. He then worked and taught in Berlin until ousted from his position by the Nazis. He was reinstated after the war. The painting by him, Departing Boats, Nidden, is a typical scene of workmen launching boats on a shore.

Remembering Patrick Murray

Although he had been ill for some weeks, the death of theatre designer Patrick Murray in Cork on Wednesday was unexpected, writes Mary Leland. His career, while rooted almost defiantly in his native Cork, spanned many theatrical traditions, numerous countries and more than 40 years. The wide

experience and sympathetic understanding of those years informed his term as a member of the Irish Arts Council, during which he travelled tirelessly throughout the country in order to see everything possible in performance.

As a student, talented both as a musician and a visual artist, he concentrated on the stage after a scholarship sent him from the Cork School of Art to the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Germany, returning to establish himself as a practitioner at the highest level in operatic productions from, classical to the contemporary.

A member of the Institute of Designers in Ireland, his list of engagements ranged from the Dublin Grand Opera Society (now Opera Ireland) to the Wexford Festival Opera, from Tannhäuser to The Ha'penny Bridge, from the Irish National Ballet (for which his designs for The Playboy of the Western World were seen in both London and New York), from the Gate Theatre and the Point to Siamsa Tíre, and from Noel Pearson Productions to Gemini Productions. He worked with directors such as Alan Simpson and Ted Kotcheff and with both the Abbey Theatre and the Theatre of the South, for which he designed the original productions of the plays of John B Keane.

For many years he was associated with both the Cork Opera House and the Everyman Palace - he produced a remarkable and memorable design for the latter's 2004 presentation of The Glass Menagerie with Barbara Babcock.

His large, jovial and generous personality would have been pleased at the thought that he died in harness, his designs for the current Everyman Palace pantomime being finalised from his hospital bed, from which he was also busily planning future events.