Born: May 4th, 1928
Died: November 7th, 2022
Brian O’Doherty achieved so much as a painter and sculptor, award-winning novelist, influential critic, and guardian and advocate of the arts, we are left wondering how one man could have done so much in a lifetime, even when granted a presence for more than nine decades. Brian has provided an explanation: “I speak of I, and that notion of myself … is strange to me, for there are several persons I have met in recent months, all of them myself”. He tamed this multiplicity of persona within himself, by creating alter egos, the most famous of which was Patrick Ireland. The “real” Brian O’Doherty was always within reach and what a warm, sincere, and loving person he was. A mischievous sense of humour could be aroused by reference to the cant and hypocrisy of religiosity that had blighted his youthful schoolboy and student days.
There were also creative talents yearning to express themselves in literature and the visual arts and Brian stamped each with an individualism that was unique. In his creation of the Rope Drawings, he brought the precision of architecture and the colour and contrast of painting into spatial harmony. He once told me that the Rope Drawings had allowed him “to capture the desire of ballet dancers to throw themselves into space and to remain suspended therein”.
Brian admired Beckett enormously and he paid homage to him with his production of “Hello Sam” in which the minimalism of the Rope Drawings was aligned to the austereness of Beckett’s work to create a “willing suspension of disbelief”. As young men, the pair had trod similar paths along the Grand Canal to pay homage to Jack Yeats in the Portabello Nursing Home, where the artist resided in his later years, (and where Brian sketched him shortly before his death) but unfortunately, they never met. Each would later acknowledge the beauty of Yeats’s painting, but more importantly, they were both guided by his philosophical ethic that the inspiring muse of talent must be served however great the personal pain.
Yeats persuaded Brian to desert medicine for art, and he left Ireland to settle in Manhattan to “contribute to a new definition of individual freedom within society”. His success in doing do has been acknowledged by George Segal, who hailed his work as “the greatest oeuvre of drawings by any postwar American artist”.
The influence of medicine remained in the background throughout Brian’s life. He was saddened by the increasing separation of the humanities from medicine. “If your surgeon reads Proust, does that mean he’ll operate on your gallbladder better than someone who doesn’t? Not necessarily, but at least you have something besides your missing gallbladder to talk to him about when convalescing.” That medicine could determine artistic form is shown most noticeably in Brian’s ingenious portrait of his friend Marcel Duchamp Lead 1, slow heartbeat and Duchamp Boxed in which Duchamp’s electrocardiograph is used to bestow a haunting immortality on his friend, whose heart continues to throb in perpetuity.
My fondest memory of Brian arises from my visit in 2015 to La Casa Dipinta, the house he and Barbara donated to the small town of Todi in Tuscany, where it is a now major tourist attraction. Throughout the house Brian has created Rope Drawings and innovative frescos in vibrant colour paying homage to favourite themes, such as the ancient Ogham alphabet. At morning coffee in the town square, residents queued politely with passing tourists to introduce themselves and shake hands with the couple in polite homage. I came away with an awareness of the warmth and love Brian and Barbara had for each other and with a deeper appreciation of the creative ability of this remarkable artist.
Brian, and his wife, Barbara, have given generously to Ireland, most notably in donating the Novak/O’Doherty collection of postwar American art to the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Brian’s benefaction and love for Ireland is also evident in his participation in the restoration of his recently discovered murals in the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh. We will miss him greatly, but his art will endure, and with it, his presence.