EDWARD DELANEY: THE SCULPTOR Edward Delaney, one of the leading Irish artists of the mid-20th century, best known for his public monuments in College Green and St Stephen's Green in Dublin, has died aged 79.
Born in Farmhill, Claremorris, Co Mayo, he left school at the age of 14 but was determined to be an artist. By all accounts, rather than formally enrolling in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, he simply turned up for classes until he became an accepted part of the student body.
He subsequently travelled to Germany on an Arts Council scholarship to learn bronze casting or, as he later put it: “To learn the secrets of the foundries.” He studied at the Academie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich, and also spent time in Bonn before an Italian government scholarship brought him to the Accademia dell’Arte Rosa in Rome at the end of the 1950s. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1959 and in 1961, the year he returned to settle in Ireland.
In Germany, he had gained an expertise in the highly skilled cire perdue or lost-wax method of bronze casting. Several attempts to establish a bronze foundry in Ireland had proved abortive. In the 1950s, Irish sculptors largely looked to the workshop of the German artist Werner Schurmann in Stocking Lane on the outskirts of Dublin.
Delaney set up what fellow sculptor John Behan described as a “foundry-cum-workshop” at his home and studio in Dún Laoghaire, mainly to produce his own work.
To the writer Wolf Mankowitz he seemed at this time like the epitome of a Renaissance all-rounder, an impassioned artist and exacting craftsman in one: “His physical approach to expression being closer to the wrestler than the intellectual.” His bronzes are generally unique and were not editioned.
Behan, who later established the Dublin Art Foundry, was enlisted as an assistant and made his first bronze castings in the Dún Laoghaire workshop. He credits Delaney with raising public consciousness of small cast bronzes as affordable art works with his exhibitions in the Brown Thomas and David Hendricks galleries.
Working in an expressionist, figurative style that derived largely from the existentialist humanism of European and British sculpture of the 1950s, Delaney introduced a specifically Irish dimension, drawing on Irish mythology and history, and reflecting the growing national self-confidence and economic optimism of the Lemass era. He was extraordinarily productive during the 1960s, completing a succession of major public commissions as well as much personal work.
While many of his smaller pieces, particularly his animal sculptures, display real feeling for integral, curvilinear masses, he was ultimately inclined towards more fragmented forms, whether extended and spiky or obdurately blocky, suggestive of both strength and vulnerability, roughness and tenderness.
In 1966 he completed the Thomas Davis monument on College Green. The following year he made the figure of Wolfe Tone and the Famine memorial, a family group, on the northeast corner of St Stephen’s Green. When the sculpture of Wolfe Tone was shattered by a bomb planted by Loyalist terrorists in 1979, the head survived intact and the figure was subsequently restored.
His tally of public sculptures is formidable, he exhibited widely in Ireland and abroad, and his work is represented in many public collections. There were retrospective exhibitions at the RHA in 1992 and 2004.
This week his sculpture Eve was unveiled at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It was given to the museum by Agnes Toohey in memory of her late husband Jack Toohey, an enthusiastic collector of modern art.
From the 1960s onwards Delaney spent the summers working in Carraroe in Connemara, and in 1980 he moved there permanently. Perhaps surprisingly, living in this rugged natural setting, he moved away from bronze and began to make highly formalised, monumental works, some incorporating kinetic elements, in fabricated steel. Many of these, created in situ, now form part of an open air sculpture park. In 2007, one of his steel sculptures, Celtic Twilight, was given to UCD by the developer David Arnold.
He is survived by his children, Eamon, Colm, Catherine, Garech, Hugh, Emer and Ronán, by Nancy Delaney and Dr Anne Gillan, by his grandchildren Ciarán and Siún, his brothers and sisters, and his daughters-in-law.
Edward Delaney: born 1930, died September 22nd, 2009