Helen Hooker O’Malley Roelofs (1905-1993) has posthumously achieved her greatest dream: the establishment of a home in Ireland for her art collection. The Irish American Cultural Institute’s Helen O’Malley Collection has now been placed on permanent loan and display at the University of Limerick’s Plassey House. Helen Hooker, my mother, was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, the third of four daughters and she became interested in the creative arts at an early age (Fig 3). Prone to stuttering, she felt she could better express herself through arts and sports. From an early age she was fascinated by form and colour and discovered the many ways in which she could create beauty through her own weaving, carving, sculpting, drawing and painting.

After secondary school, my mother decided not to attend university or follow a tennis career. Creating art rather than studying the history of art interested her and her parents supported her. In New York and on trips to Europe with friends and family she pursued her painting and sculpture. She worked on woodcarving in Germany, studied sculpture with Emile Bourdelle in Paris, and worked on classical dance in Greece – all the while sketching and painting wherever she went. She spent one full year in Finland and Soviet Russia, where she studied art in St Petersburg with Philonov and theatre design in Moscow. Her travels were essentially pilgrimages for art rather than social circuit events. By 1933 she was living permanently in New York while continuing her painting and sculpting at the Art Student’s League and elsewhere. At the League she studied under many distinguished artists, some of whose works she would later buy like Jean Chabot, Mahonri Young and William Zorach.

In 1933 my mother met my father, the Irish independence and civil war fighter Commandant General Ernie O’Malley (1897-1957), who was then living in New York and finishing his autobiographical memoirs, On Another Man’s Wound and The Singing Flame (Fig 2). Starting in 1928 he visited extensively in North America and Mexico and followed his interest in art history, photography, theatre, music, and the arts generally. From 1929 to 1932, he lived in Taos, New Mexico and Mexico City before moving to New York where he continued to write poetry and short stories and lecture on Irish history, culture, and poetry, ancient and modern. Though not an artist himself, he had come to know and understand artists.

My mother was intrigued with this wandering artistic spirit – a soul mate – as she too felt misplaced in her own New York social world. As an unemployed Catholic who had not completed university, who was not in good health and had socialist tendencies, my father stood somewhat in contrast to the Yankee family tradition of my mother’s family, and yet it was he who introduced her to Georgia O’Keefe. With little else in common, their interests overlapped in the arts. She eloped, and they were married in London in 1935. They lived initially in Dublin where he returned to his medical studies for a third time and published his book in 1936. But by 1938 he had abandoned his medical studies, lost a libel suit over his book, and they both went to live on Clew Bay in his native County Mayo. Together they became active in photographing early Irish Christian monuments and churches all over Ireland, but they never completed their book on this subject.

My American grandmother had inherited a small part of her family’s mid-late 19th-century art collection, and so my mother grew up with art in her home. My mother did not set out to establish her own art collection when purchasing art, but rather she acquired objects merely because she liked them. Her first purchase was a drawing in 1924 by the Japanese artist, Tsugouharu Foujita, then living in Paris. Later while travelling in Europe, she bought Greek, Finnish and Russian religious icons. Then, while on her way to be married in London in 1935, she visited Japan, Korea, China and Russia and in each of these countries she became fascinated with their art and their approach to both life and art. With her camera and sketchpad, she captured parts of their daily life, and she also bought their prints, masks, ceramics, silk clothing, and other objets d’art.

During the early years of their marriage, my parents made several trips to Paris and London and while there, they visited art galleries and museums. In Paris my mother bought work by contemporary artists such as Pierre Boujet, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy, Alex Ganesco, Moise Kisling, Gaston Lachaise, Marie Laurencin, Jean Lurcat, Aristide Maillol, Andre Marchand, Amedeo Modigliani, and Georges Rouault. Back home in Ireland in the late 1930s and 1940s, my mother bought works by her Irish friends such as Dulcibella (Da) Barton, Jack Hanlon, Evie Hone, Louis le Brocquy, Mainie Jellett, Jack B Yeats and others. My parents visited galleries together, but they bought separately. During this period my mother continued to pursue her own sculpture, painting, design and photography and exhibited her sculpture in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art with many of her artist friends, starting in 1943. In an innovative manner for the time, she used Irish tweeds to make curtains, bed covers and table mats and even designed her own tweed clothes. She undertook interior design work for public libraries and friends as well as designing stage sets and costumes for the Players’ Theatre for their season in Dublin in 1945-1946 and in London in 1948. Between 1936 and 1942, my parents had three children, Cathal, Etain and Cormac.

Strains arose in my parents’ relationship while they lived in the comparative isolation of Mayo during the war years. While my father pursued farming and local folklore, my mother continued to sculpt, expanded their home, and became interested in theatre. After the war, she helped to establish the Players’ Theatre as a theatre run by actors to produce plays written by actors, a concept my father did not support. He was shy, academic and quiet while she was far more outgoing and vivacious. She started to spend even more time visiting her family in the United States after the war. Eventually they separated in dramatic circumstances when she returned to Ireland in 1950 to take my older brother and sister out of boarding school and away to America. She went to live in Colorado where she divorced him in 1952.

Notwithstanding her separation and divorce from my father, my mother continued in her own way to try to re-establish her relationship with him and have a life in Ireland. In 1953-1954 she lived in London and was involved again in Irish theatre. While there, she bought works by English artists including Jacob Epstein, Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, and John Piper. During her periodic visits with her family in America and after her return, she acquired some promising North American artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz, Milton Avery, Jean Charlot, Chaim Gross, Rockwell Kent, Ricardo Martinez, Carlos Merida, Georgia O’Keefe, Horace Pippin, Atillo Salemme, Charles Sheeler, Mark Tobey, Polygnitos Vagas, Mahonri Young and William Zorach. She also bought more European art, such as works by, Kathe Kollowitz and George Kolbe and others. Her art purchases were made usually from an art dealer rather than from the artist directly or by auction.

During my mother’s stay in Colorado, she became deeply interested in American Indian art and culture and over the years built up a significant collection of kachina and other dolls, weavings, baskets, and pottery (and a library to go with them) from tribes such as the Acoma, Cochiti, Cherokee, Hopi, Hupa, Karok, Navajo, Papago, Pima, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and Ute. She also began to paint, sketch, design and photograph once again. By this time she was able to live quite comfortably on money inherited from her father, but she could not settle down in one place. She always thought about reconciliation with my father, but it never came about.
My grandmother died in 1956 and perhaps in hopes of giving her and her family greater stability, my mother married Richard Roelofs, Jr. and soon bought a large house in her home town of Greenwich. After my father died in 1957, she started to spend more time each year in Ireland, where she had been so happy as an artist and as an individual. However, Dick Roelofs did not enjoy Ireland in the same way – it may have been too much for him to live in the shadow of my father. In spite of this she started to remodel her home in County Mayo and later a mews in Dublin. Over the next two decades, she bought more Irish art to decorate her homes that include works by Patrick Collins, Gerald Dillon, Stella Frost, Patrick Hennessey, Paul Henry, Oisín Kelly, Louis le Brocquy, Anne Madden, Maurice MacGonigal, Norah McGuinness, Theo McNab, F E McWilliams, Sean O’Sullivan, James Power, Nano Reid, Elizabeth Rivers, Cecil Salkeld, Patrick Scott and Anne Yeats.

As the years passed, my mother started to collect more art for her homes in Ireland and America. Her already eclectic art interests expanded further into ceramics, glass, weaving (rugs, tapestries), folk art, African art, and Asian sculpture, rubbings and prints and more American Indian art. She only bought what interested her in terms of design, colour, form, and shape; the fame of the artist was not important. She would even buy a replica of a beautiful item if the original was not available.

Dick Roelofs had not been well in the late 1960s, and mother devoted herself to his care and attention until his death in 1971. For the next twenty years she spent more time in Ireland and revived her interest in sculpture, photography and gardening and started into a new field of poetry to record her thoughts on many diverse subjects. She also began to dream of a museum to house her art collection to honour her lifetime love, Ernie O’Malley. This became a compelling drive, and she pursued the project energetically. She wanted the museum to be in County Mayo where he was born. She wrote poems about the museum; she talked incessantly; and she badgered officials and individuals about the museum concept. Finally with the inspiration from her visit to The Treasures of Early Irish Art exhibition in New York in 1977, she started discussions with the Irish Government about gifting her collection if they agreed to build a museum. In the meantime, she gifted part of her overall collection to the Irish American Cultural Institute which continued the museum discussions with the Irish Government. After delays by successive governments and ultimate rejection, the dedicated museum concept was abandoned. In an effort to achieve at least some part of her original dream, the Institute decided in 1989 to sell one third of the collection (being the American, American-Indian, English, and European segments) and to establish an annual O’Malley Art Award with the proceeds. The Institute also arranged to loan the Irish and French portions of the collection to the newly established Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 1991 while the Institute continued to seek a permanent home for the balance of the Collection in Mayo or elsewhere. No institution in Ireland was able or willing to accept the Institute’s diverse O’Malley Collection in its entirety until the University of Limerick agreed to do so in 2003.

Mother always wanted the O’Malley Collection to be a teaching collection illustrating a variety of types of arts. She hoped that the different media and forms would inspire young Irish artists to pursue careers in the diverse range of the art forms represented. She wanted the collection to reflect her own broad gamut of artistic endeavours as well as other media. The costumes and weavings were meant to capture how diverse cultures incorporate beauty in their everyday lives as well as ritual artifacts. By the end she had collected art in many different media and from many countries.

In my mother’s later years she was obliged to downsize her homes in Ireland and America, and she sold off or donated parts of her remaining collection principally to museums. The most notable of these works were by Milton Avery, Georgia O’Keefe, Ricardo Martinez, Horace Pippin, Charles Schiller and Jack B Yeats. Many of her purchases, bought purely for their aesthetic merit, turned out to be wise investments. She also retained a portion of her collection for herself and her family. Thus, in reality the Institute’s O’Malley Collection represents only about one third of my mother’s lifetime collection.

The Institute’s O’Malley Collection now at the University of Limerick consists of over 400 items. The Irish segment, with about seventy-five items, represents a range of Irish art from 1930 to1970 and includes paintings and sculptural works by Gerald Dillon, Patrick Hennessey, Hilary Heron, Paul Henry, Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, Oisín Kelly, Louis le Brocquy, Norah McGuinness, Theo McNab, Sean O’Sullivan, Nano Reid Salkeld, Patrick Scott, Anne Yeats, and Jack B Yeats. The remaining European section includes work by Amadeo Modigliani , Georges Rouault, Pierre Soualges and less well known Italian and Greek artists as well as examples of Greek and Roman antiquities.

The 300 other items in the O’Malley Collection, which have not been exhibited together in Ireland, includes works from Asia, North America and Africa. There are paintings, prints, sculpture, rugs, and decorative arts such as masks, metal, ceramics, woodcuts, screens, tombstone rubbings, wood- carvings, folk art and craft. In the Asian field there are fine examples of Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Thai and Persian works. These artifacts vary greatly from small domestic objects to larger temple religious figures. The small American section includes works by Rockwell Kent, Mark Tobey and Mahonri Young.

Mother was an enthusiastic collector. She would study her subjects through art magazines, museum exhibitions and gallery visits and created files with clippings of paintings, sculpture and other art objects she liked. She did not buy systematically, but rather she bought inspirationally. Once while in a taxi on Madison Avenue going to a social event, she saw a beautiful Ghandara style buddha in a gallery window, and announced ‘I have to have that buddha’. She asked the taxi driver to go around the block, jumped out, negotiated the purchase and delivery, and continued on her way to the event.

In her poem, Build A Museum written in 1976 prior to the early Irish art exhibit in New York, my mother presciently wrote:
Dreams a quarter century in advance
No matter, if time lags before completion
Governments are slow and timid in acceptance…
Meantime let the picture hang securely….
Life has little meaning if our dreams lie in the tomb
Our very worth be lost if vision ended…
I pray these goals be fulfilled as we intended.
The University of Limerick has had on permanent display in their library since 1992 over forty-five bronze casts of my mother’s own sculpture of Irish personalities and figures. Included among these are works representing the fields of theatre (Siobhan McKenna, Jack MacGowran), dance (Michael Flatley), literature (Samuel Beckett, Mary Lavin, Frank O’Connor, Peader O’Donnell), poetry (Austin Clarke, Seamus Heaney), politicians (Eamon De Valera) as well the head of my father that she had sculpted shortly after they met in New York in 1933. Limerick was also well known to my father during his military activities and after. Thus, the University of Limerick is a most appropriate location for the fulfillment of my mother’s dream for a permanent exhibition of the Irish American Cultural Institute’s Helen O’Malley Collection.

Cormac K H O’Malley is a New York-based international legal consultant.