If the term "art collector" can also mean "public servant", it certainly does in the case of politically committed businessman Gordon Lambert, founding member of the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, whose private collection of 310 modern works is now the museum's backbone. When he presented the works, including Braque, Vasarely, Soto and Picasso, as well as Barrie Cook, Patrick Collins and Brian Maguire, to the newly founded Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1991, he did so unconditionally.
He made no stipulations about permanency of display. As he explained at the time: "I myself thought, having seen so many galleries around the world, you couldn't have one collection on permanent display." Nowadays his collection is housed mostly at the gallery, where some pieces are always on display while others are toured as part of IMMA's national programme.
Lambert's collection is an extremely active one. Including Irish and international artists, it has managed to lift awareness of Irish artists abroad, while also extending interest in the international Kinetic and Op art movements here.
Far from conforming to the standard idea of an art collector as a member of the ruling elite collecting for private use, Lambert has had a long, active career as a businessman. As a former chairman of Irish Biscuits, where he spent 43 years in a variety of roles including chief accountant, marketing director, managing director and finally chairman - and was behind the devising of one of the most pressing questions of our time: "how do they get the figs into the fig-rolls?" He was the first non-family member of the board and devised the Jacob's Irish Television Awards in 1962.
Appointed to the Seanad in 1977 by Jack Lynch, his interest in politics was always national rather than party-based, and over the years he played a part in improving relations between North and South. As early as 1962 he had organised the first meeting of the Belfast and Dublin Junior Chambers at a lunch in Jacob's with the then Taoiseach, Sean Lemass.
Pointing to a photograph on his study wall, featuring former president Patrick Hillery, then Minister for Industry and Commerce, and Brian Faulkner, then Northern Minister for Commerce, he says: "I organised that meeting of the Junior Chambers in Belfast in 1966. Unfortunately it was also the day Nelson's Pillar was blown up, so little came of it."
Considering the influence he has had on modern art in this country, he came to an appreciation of it almost by accident. "There was no interest in art at home. My family was more sporting. He enjoys referring to his father, Dublin vet Bob Lambert, as "the W.G. Grace of Ireland". "He captained the Gentlemen of Ireland Cricket Team for 26 years and scored 100 centuries as well as bowling five hat-tricks in first-class cricket."
Gordon's eldest and only surviving brother, Ham, was a rugby international and subsequently an international rugby referee. Indeed, on December 18th last, when Gordon was conferred, along with poet Michael Longley and former Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby, with an honorary degree, Ham found time not only to attend the ceremony and reception, but also to squeeze in a rugby match.
Lambert's home is dominated by a life's involvement in art and business. Among the artworks are photographs of politicians and historic events such as the inaugural, Jacobs-sponsored flight to Cork Airport. Among the smiling passengers boarding the plane are Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch. Currently on his wall is a Jack Coughlin pen and pencil drawing of Lynch which Lambert commissioned in 1978. Was he close to him? "I was very fond of Jack Lynch. I miss him terribly. He was a great and good man." There is also the Brian Maguire portrait of Lambert with his terrier, Westie, from 1982.
Elsewhere, in a corner of the living-room, is a glass case reflecting success on the sports field. Lambert's personal trophy collection is dominated by prizes for golf and badminton. His garden - which features a number of sculptures, including Edward Delaney's Fisherwoman and Birth of Cuchulainn and Michael Bulfin's Atom Smasher - backs on to a Dublin golf course. "You have to get out early on this course," he says thoughtfully. "There is a very large female membership, and it gets very busy."
Design has always attracted him. Lambert was born with a strong visual sense, and as a boy was a keen photographer. A collage made by him for the cover of a scrapbook when he was 14 features in the collection and indicates he was always drawn to abstraction.
"I designed this house," he says and recalls arguing with his brothers over the use of glass doors. Initially the family had lived in a big house further up the road. About 50 years ago they moved to the present house, which he says his mother always called "the match box". Match box or not, this modern-style, somewhat American house with its closed front and open back, has hosted many parties. Lambert enjoys guiding his visitors from art work to art work. Standing by his Soto, Curvas Immateriale, he fingers it gently but firmly enough to set the metal rods moving and says, "this was the only work from an Irish collection selected by James Johnson Sweeney for the first ROSC", an exhibition which took place in Dublin in 1967.
Sitting in the living-room among neat stacks of art exhibition catalogues, it is difficult not to be aware of the large Victor Vasarely, Lant (1968), on the wall in the adjoining dining-room. One of three by this Hungarian artist in the collection, Lant, with its array of wines, reds and blues, shimmers and changes colour according to the changing light outside. Over the doorway leading to the room is an early Felim Egan - Installation with Neon No. 3.
Born in Dublin in 1919, the youngest of four boys, Gordon does not appear to have been indulged. Nor did he come from a home filled with pictures; sporting prints, not works of art, appealed to his father. It was a brisk, practical, sporting world constructed upon old-style, natural good manners and an instinctive ability to conduct oneself. Early in life, Lambert acquired a reputation for being a bit of a dandy, favouring cravats and blazers, and with no aversion to being painted. Currently on show in the Gordon Lambert Collection Gallery, which was officially opened at IMMA last June, is Pat Harris's Triptych, Senator Gordon Lambert (1980).
On this cold January morning, he is wearing a navy blazer and his Trinity tie. He lives alone now that his parents are dead, has never married and has no children. The house is modest and ordered rather than clinically tidy. It has a lived-in feel. The books and objects here are regularly taken down, looked at, put back. While there is a powerful sense of a life lived, the overall feeling is of the story of Ireland in the mid to late 20th century, as well as a chronicle of Lambert's personal odyssey.
