One Man's Art

Gordon Lamber, Chairman and Managing Director of Irish Biscuits, is a lover of art. His collection of modern works is regarded by many as the best in Ireland. How intimately is it connected with his work and life? How closely does it chart his development, or reflect his ambition?

Goroon Lambert belongs to that generation - it includes also Jack Lynch and Conor Cruise O'Brien born amid the birth-pangs of the Irish nation itself. Their infancy, childhood and youth coincided with the uncertain twenties, the harsh and often bitter thirties. They emerged as people during what all of them would describe as "the Emergency". They were faced with the Isolation then, the deprivation that followed. They saw contemporaries emigrate, and probably thanked providence that they did not have to also. At critical climacterics in their own lives they lived through the despair of the early 'fifties, when people asked themselves whether Ireland, as a country, workect at all, and could discover no satisfactory answer.

They were in positions of some influence and some power when things began to pick up, as we passed from the fifties into the sixties, but the progression was grindingly slow, and an innate caution had been etched by experience into their souls. Then, just when all that it had seemed worthwhile to be working for was coming to some kind of fruition, the Northern crisis broke, followed by political upheaval, the oil crisis, inflation, and the imminence of some kind of slump. That is the circumference of Lambert's life, of Lynch's life, of Conor Cruise O'Brien's.

The other two are not mentioned arbitrarily. Gordon Lambert and Jack Lynch have been friends for a long time. Lambert and Conor Cruise O'Brien were at Sandford Park School together. Both feature in his story. At school, O'Brien was two years ahead of Lambert, and Lambert retains a deep memory of the exclusive protective treatment the older boy received. O'Brien was deposited in classes and taken from them as though the virus of common contact might dilute the special fluids of intelligence pumping through that unique brain; and fifty years afterwards, the recollection is there, vivid, by no means either dismissive or bitter: the older boy was "different".

Gordon Lambert was the son of a veterinary surgeon. The family, in fact, boasts four generations of vets, spanning a hundred years, and Gordon's eldest brother, Ham, who only recently vacated the surgery jn South Richmond St., has for long been regarded as Dublin's best. There were four brothers. Gordon was the youngest. His father was a cricketer of some note, and sport and competitiveness coloured and shaped his upbringing. It probably emphasised the studiousness, and held in check the response to art; for it was not until 1954 that he bought his first painting, Pont du Carousel by Barbara Warren. By then he had done a first class degree at Trinity College, studied accountancy, serving his articles with Stokes Brothers and Pim, and had worked long enough in Jacobs to reach the position of Chief Accountant the previous year.

It is significant that the first work he bought was from a friend, since friends have always shaped and influenced his collecting. It is also significant that he still has the painting, and that it hangs in his bedroom, opposite his bed. Unlike many collectors, he has refined and thinned out what he has very little indeed over the years, attaching calendar sympathies, even career achievements, to the acquisition of individual works of art.

It is this aspect of Gordon Lambert's collecting that encourages one to set the art he owns against the life he has lived. In 1954, very few people indeed bought original works of art, and the embarkation was tentative, the outlay small. But how perceptive! Twenty-five years later the little canvas glows with lustrous colour. Since then a second Barbara Warren has been added to the collection, a small but vital little painting of a clown that hangs in the surgery at Irish Biscuits in Tallaght. Barbara herself still has exhibitions, still cannot be said to have hit the highlights of modern Irish art, and yet has been consistently good, one of the neglected, unsung minor masters of the group of painters who came to maturity in the fifties.

Patrick Collins, Robertson Craig, Camille Souter, George Campbell and Patrick Hennessy were all artists whose work he acquired in the late fifties. Still mainly involved in representational art, Gordon Lambert reflected, in these purchases, the perceptions of the period. With the exception of the straightforward little canvas by Craig, the others all edge into subjective territory; the Hennessy is a good example of his surrealist technique; the Camille Souter a vivid and fairly abstract work painted in 1956; the Collins, another favourite, essentially belonging to that dreamlike, atmospheric world he inhabited at the time, and the Campbell has some of the earlier, realistic determination which later vanished.

It was a cautious embarkation. In the sense that it involved the buying of works of artists of his own age or younger, rather than canvases from the older generation - notably Jack Yeats, who has never been represented in Gordon Lambert's collection - he was looking forward rather than back into the past. Yet it was a tentative enough regard. For adventure, if it can be so described, he went off to Paris, and acquired graphics by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Though he did, in the case of both Collins and Campbell, buy one further work each in the early 1960s, this small group of artists is really representative of the first buying phase in his collecting career, roughly coincidental with the decade of the fifties. Towards the end of it he became commercial manager of the company, and in 1959 became marketing director with a seat on the board.

Cecil King was a significant influence on Gordon Lambert's collecting in the early sixties, and was responsible for the change of direction into pure abstract art with the purchase, in 1962, of Deborah Brown's White Brush Strokes on canvas ref. 207, a fine, early and straightforward oil on canvas. He was later to buy fibre-glass sculpture by her.

In 1965 he bought one of Cecil King's own canvases, Disintegration, a large and florid work in the rougher style that preceded the Baggot St. and the Berlin series. Cecil King, in age a close contemporary of Lambert's, had begun painting in 1954, when he was 33, had had his first show two years later, but had taken some time to work out for himself a satisfactory style. When it came; in the mid-sixties, it heralded a cool and linear abstract modernism in Irish painting which was to influence younger artists whose work was also to be acquired by Gordon Lambert. Among these were Robert Costelloe, Michael Farrell and Brian O'Doherty. They were added during the sixties, as was a large abstract by King's contemporary, Patrick Scott.

This shift into abstract in Lambert's collection went a good deal further than the cool and still somewhat exploratory work that Irish pamters were producing. In 1966, in Paris, and after some deliberation, a large kinetic work by Jesus Raphael Soto, the Venezualian painter, was bought. So was the first example of Victor Vasarely. The move into Op and kinetic art was influenced to some extent by Father Cyril Barrett, who became an active influence at this time in Irish art, pushing hard to extend the barriers of conservatism, which, at the time, were not only tending to inhibit painters, but weTe dividing Irish art into camps: the new and the traditional. In 1967 there was the first Rose, and the end of the decade was a noisy and argumentative time during which, as fast as one generation of painters and sculptors managed to absorb and digest the messages about style and trend flowing in from the Continent, and increasingly from America, the whole thing changed again.

A smooth facade of decorum generally conceals the toughness and muscle in the world of art, and elegance acts as a cloak for ambition; but money, reputation and power are all behind the manipulations. The sixties was the decade during which galleries began to sell regularly and well. The Arts Council became a substantial buyer, and therefore a trend-setter for collectors generally. A small caucus of influential men, led by Father Donal O'Sullivan, Michael Scott, Basil Goulding, and one or two others, effectively held in their hands discretion over the future direction of careers and of taste.

For better or worse, Gordon Lambert remained somewhat aloof. With the exception of the Contemporary Irish Art Society, on which he worked with Basil Goulding, he was either too busy or disinclined to become involved in what for others was almost a fulltime occupation. He did throw his support behind the Project Arts Centre, of which he is still a member, and this co-operative venture to some extent explains his own taste, and the character of his approach to collecting. It is oriented primarily towards artists. He likes being with them, trying to understand them; he enjoys the involvement which goes with commissioning work from them. He really has neither the time nor the desire to be a king-maker.

It gave him, in the late sixties and early seventies, a rather special position. His own collecting was accumulative, natural and diverse. For almost twenty years he had been buying Irish and international art, and yet still, to a certain degree, he was feeling his way, exploring, recognising that those who were then asserting that they knew all the answers about how good or bad, important or trivial, painters were, just had to be wrong, since no one could possibly know. In his own case a thread of realistic works had firmly punctuated the abstract. From the first group of Irish painters, acquired in the late fifties and early sixties, he had moved on to Barrie Cooke's painting, and later his sculpture, to Edward Delaney, and in 1970 to Robert Ballagh (whose most recent work was his portrait of Jack Lynch on the cover of last month's issue of Magill).

In a sense Gordon Lambert was retaining his amateur status in all this. He was increasingly committed, during the sixties, not just within Jacob's, but also more generally in Irish business and industrial affairs, and also on the fringes of politics. Though not personally interested in party politics he was involved, by Sean Lemass, in North-South relations, and in 1964 was a Government appointee to the ESB. In 1967, after the Jacob's-Boland merger, he became joint managing director, and within two years was sole managing director. Perhaps in celebration of this he bought, in that year, the painting which he still regards as the most important in his collection, Lant by Victor Vasarely.

By 1972, when Gordon Lambert's private collection was put on exhibition in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, an exhibition which the Taoiseach opened, it was able to offer a fairly wide cross-section of both Irish and international painters and sculptors to a Dublin, and later to a Belfast public. The Belfast exhibition did not, in fact, take place until 1976, by which stage further important acquisitions had been made; but even at the Dublin show further adventurousness was evident in such works as Arakawa's Degrees of Meaning.

Colin Harrison, Charles Tyrrell, Erik Adriaan van der Grijn, John Burke, Michael Ashur, Clifford Rainey, Brian King, James Coleman, are all Irish artists whose work has been acquired during the past five years. Northern Ireland artists, T. P. Flanagan and Colin Middleton, occupy an important place also.

No overall judgement is possible. The collection now spreads through Gordon Lambert's own house and over many of the walls of Irish Biscuits, in Tallaght. Its diversity is unchecked: realism and abstract, sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, Northern and Southern artists, international figures of importance as well as minor ones, paintings that are strictly personal documents, like the commissioned portrait of him as senator by Adrian Hall, or the Ballagh portrait. The whole collection, however, is a tapestry of personal documents, a visual calendar of twenty-five years.