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One of the intriguing questions emerging from the last half of the twentieth century and the great fever of activity in the Irish art world is that of Imogen Stuart: by what grace did she fit so neatly into the Irish cultural ambience? It seemed rather as if a little niche, like one of those she has created for some of her saints or the Mother of God had been waiting for her to fill. Individual, strong, with a noble force, her work does not immediately tell of its sources. Yet, a reasonable acquaintance with it will reveal the wide basis of its European origins.
    A young German, originally a Berliner, but due to force of circumstances then living in Bavaria, came to Ireland and halted in Laragh, near Glendalough. The family of her boy friend had settled there. It was no ordinary family in no ordinary place. Nor was Imogen Werner any ordinary girl. The family was noted, international, of great historical and literary fame: the young man was Ian, son of Iseult, daughter of Maud Gonne MacBride. Francis Stuart was his father. It was a notable mixture of politics and literature.
    The young people brought their own cultural accretion to this abundance. They were both sculptors. Imogen made an immediate mark on the local scene with a carving, "St Brendan discovering America," that was shown, and sold, in that year’s RHA Exhibition.
    Her own heritage was equally distinguished. Her father was Bruno E. Werner, a noted and much-respected art critic, well-known in Europe and the English-speaking world.. Her mother was Katharina Kluger. These two had first met while studying the history of art under the great Professor Wolfflin, who founded that science. They married and moved to Berlin, he from Dresden, she from Upper Silesia. Imogen was born in l927. She had one sister, Sybille. Her childhood she describes as "the most golden" . The girls were brought up in an atmosphere of gentle cultivation. The busy father ensured his participation in their childhood by writing plays for their performance out of the family experience, reading to them, playing games with them, all shared en famille.
    Until the thirties. "At the time art was advancing vigorously towards the visual expression of the contemporary sense of reality" . A new style of tremendous range..... Reflecting the combined effort of all the social forces and the achievements of individual artists was at last in sight. The spiritual élite was equal to the task in hand. Modern art was penetrating the life of society..... And influencing it.
    But there were also factors from outside the realm of art: considerations of humanism, Christianity..... Politics, affected the internal development of modern art..... And this not only in Europe. But the true threat to modern art did not come from this direction. The real assault was political . It began with Lenin and continued with the Nazis.
    It was in this new world that Bruno Werner and his family lived. The "golden childhood" would perhaps not come to an end, but the old certainties would change. Whether the young Werners ever really understood these changes completely at the time is not clear, but there was no doubting the greater brutalism that afflicted both social and all other activities of the population. Bruno Werner was partly Jewish. For that reason he could not serve in the German Armed Forces although he had done so in the First World War. But there were other difficulties that he could have endured and which did not afflict him. "Without his publisher we would not have managed..... He (the publisher) was a member of the Party......and he was able to keep my father’s monthly magazine going as long as possible. It was called Die Neue Linie....... It was by far the finest of its kind in Germany" . It was edited and mostly written by him and it had a famous reputation.
    It was when Berlin became a central war zone that the family, despite any security they might have felt due to having their own "little bomb-shelter in the back garden" left Berlin and the girls went to school in Bavaria, then the centre of Catholicism in Germany. Nuns ran the school. While they were there their father had gone "on the run", presumably a condition of all wars. He was never arrested. His Jewish lineage was undeniable. His mother was Jewish, an American citizen. She died in a Dresden nursing home, the family never discovered how.
    The girls had been oriented towards the visual arts from young girlhood onwards, receiving lessons in craft and sculpture from competent teachers. So it was hardly surprising that, when Imogen was eighteen, the war just over, her ambitions had coalesced into one field, sculpture. When the family had reunited in Bavaria after the war they lived near an old friend of the father’s, Otto Hitzberger, sculptor, who had been a professor at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Berlin, and was now retired. Her father went to see him with a request. Hitzberger agreed to take Imogen on as an assistant. She says, "He had me drawing for a while, " - the basics of course - "and then he said, ‘Why don’t you do some carving?’ I was five years with him, five heavenly years." He the Master, as he insisted on being called, she his pupil. This was the golden line between sculptors, modern and ancient, old and young, as I discovered somewhere in that magical book Stone Mad by Seamus Murphy, which Imogen herself found equally entrancing.
    Here I must quote Brian Fallon’s question from his excellent book and Imogen’s reply:
B.F. "What, chiefly, did he (the Master) teach you?"
I.S. "Modelling, carving, how to handle different sorts of wood and stone, polychromy, composition, relief (high and low), how to handle drapery. By ‘carving’ I mean not just basic technique, but how a head is constructed and other essential skills. I learned how to work with a pointing machine..... All about timber, the grain of different woods - everything came to life with him. I also learned that you don’t make certain shapes because it is against the nature of the material and would weaken it. We also did some casting too, but he was bad at it - making moulds and so on - and got into a bad temper about it....."
B.F. "Looking back, how good a sculptor was he in fact, and what is his standing in Germany today?"
I.S. "Just now, he would probably be remembered only in a small circle. Most of his work seems to have vanished or been destroyed during the war. His sculpture under the Nazis was considered to be "Degenerate Art" and he had been forbidden to exhibit.
    ..... His best work was done in the early l930s. His Stations of the Cross in a Church in Berlin-Wannsee are the finest of that period and at least as good as Ernst Barlach’s sculpture. {This was really high praise because both Barlach and Brancusi were in the highest bracket of her esteem, at that time.}"
    That first visit to Ireland was made in l949, to Ian Stuart’s home, Castle Laragh, County Wicklow, where he lived with his mother. The two young sculptors had met through coincidence. Iseult, Stuart’s mother was a friend of Eduard Hempel, the former German Minister to Ireland and he had also been a friend of Imogen’s parents. As the result of a letter Bruno Werner received from Hempel Ian came to stay as a student in Imogen’s home, sharing also her teacher. Imogen’s visit a year later was in the nature of a "return." At the time she was a fully-fledged professional. Her training had given her an unusual breadth of knowledge from medieval to modern. The prospect of this new adventure to a country hardly known in Europe, having been isolated for more than six years, must have been exhilarating. The transition was quite stunning: "It is very hard to describe how different this country was from the country from which I had come. It was a totally different world, on a different planet. The Catholicism, the nationalism, the magical countryside, made it all seem like going back a hundred years."
    She also commented, as others had done before her, on Irish visual insensibility; "What was so strange to me was the way people seemed to be indifferent to their surroundings, or simply not to notice them. I went into the houses of people in Dublin who were very sophisticated, very refined and literary-minded, and yet their surroundings were ... well, I would not call it old-fashioned but..... How could these people be highly cultured and intelligent and yet have no visual taste?" She found herself unable to assess it.. She stayed a year on that occasion and then went back to Hitzberger for another year, after which she came back again. She married Ian Stuart in 1951. From that time her professional, creative life has been devoted to Ireland.
    It was at this time that I met them first, working together in their studio, a long stone and glass building which, in a previous history might have been a greenhouse, but which served them for their work for ten years. It was Ian that my husband had come to see and to interview, he being at the time the better known as a sculptor in this country.
    That was all to change.... Imogen Stuart has flourished, creating, over a remarkable half-century, a repository of work that is unique and utterly magnificent, sometimes gentle and humane, often powerful. The extraordinary variety of her experiences, from the immersion through her father and teacher in pre-war German art, her vast knowledge of the great Romanesque and Gothic eras, which contrasted with the decorative elegance of the later Baroque churches has trained an eye that sees beauty in strength and strength in beauty. Every idea that she has is first of all visual, she says. The Ireland that she arrived in, so totally different even then from the Ireland of today, must have clarified, while instilling a new and spontaneous excitement into, that vision.
    Stuart’s work encompasses all aspects of sculpture, intimate, large and monumental. She is both modeller and carver, the latter most important. She utilizes all the sculptor’s materials, woods of all kinds, stone, steel, and plaster. Her creativity reveals no gender but, although she asserts that she does not wish to create work that can be attributed to a woman because of its flaccid nature that does not mean that it lacks tenderness. Someone attributed to her ‘a feeling for the hermit.’ It is an emotion that, for instance, permeates "St Kevin and the Blackbird" in all its versions (there are several in a variety of materials). The hard contours of the ascetic head, enclosed within what we assume to be his cell walls, are softened as he meets the gaze of the bird. The bird is not timid, and the encounter is not sentimental. It is an almost Chinese conception of the unity of nature.
    Her sense of humour is wonderfully manifest in the great ensemble of "Pangur Ban" now to be seen in University College Dublin, although it was originally created for Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre where it made quite a stir. Large and commanding, the letters of the familiar poem cut deeply into the wood, the marks of the chisel clear, the contented monk a real personage. It is a lovely thing.
    She loves children with an objective understanding, as her young dancers in the Stillorgan Shopping Centre make clear in their response to the fiddler’s playing. Such scenes she must have seen often, so true and unsentimental is the old man’s delight.
    The children who apparently are hurrying along to school at Tyrrellspass in an ensemble that often causes travellers to stop and take a look, are a memorial to the Fallen Dead of the Civil War. The group was made on her suggestion as being more appropriate to the future than another man with a gun.
    Stuart’s work has evolved from a wide-ranging cultural inheritance augmented by an accidental accretion from an ancient heritage. Her work is powerful, strong, like the great Romanesque churches that she knew, stripped like the cells of the monks and the massive stone Crosses of her later acquaintance.
    After the woeful hiatus of hundreds of years when religious art and the building of churches practically ceased, it was not until the nineteenth century that such building was restored. Mostly Gothic, probably due to Pugin’s influence, they were great structures that expressed the released emotions of the people who had been denied for so long. "Built," as Stuart remarked, "with the pennies of the poor" she is adamant that more appropriate ways of introducing the new dispensation post-Vatican II than tearing the Sanctuary interiors apart could have been found. Indeed, their preservation would have been an appropriate memorial to the people’s joy at the time.
    Stuart’s work can be found in almost every religious institution in the country, its Christian basis acceptable to both Protestant and Catholic. One of her most powerful achievements is the great bronze Crucifix which now stands in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Armagh. She has made several versions of "In Principio" the first words of St John’s Gospel, the basis of all Christian faith.
    However, it was at the end of the ‘Seventies that she received a new accolade for her work. Father John O’Connell, then Parish Priest of the very large parish of St Alphonsus and Columba, Ballybrack, had perceived the need for a new Church in Killiney to serve the growing population there. St Stephen’s was the result: small, delightfully located, it won a prize for the architects, Pearse McKenna & Partners. Father O’Connell designated Stuart as "Artist in Charge" of the interior decoration, an idea that had never been proposed before.
    It was a heavy responsibility. Creating one’s own work is both physically and mentally exhausting, but sharing ideas, guiding and helping other artists to achieve one’s own plan is quite another feat. The Altar, the Tabernacle, the Ambo and the Rood Cross were her own work, Niall O’Neill made a Crucifix and a nun she knew made the Stations of the Cross. The whole ensemble was crowned by a magnificent stained glass window by Helena Moloney, her last work. The whole entity was a complete success.
    Monsignor Thomas Fehily was about to build a new church in Porterstown, Castleknock, for which he had ample funds and a unique vision: again Stuart was asked to be Artist-in-charge. This was a singular honour in Ireland. Indeed it was a rare event anywhere. There were some famous Churches in France created by artists (Le Corbusier, Architect; Rouault, Painter; Matisse, Painter,) but Ireland generally was not given to such ideas.
    The Church of Our Lady Mother of the Church was built in 1982/3. A Committee had been set up and it was another architect, Angel Bruton, also a committee member who finally persuaded Stuart to take on the job. She had not wanted to do another church, as she had just finished one and found it a heavy commitment.
    Much of what follows is in Stuart’s own words.
"Brian Conroy was the Architect. He was asked at the very beginning to have me as Artist-in-Charge so we had a very good relationship. I really didn’t want to do another church, but somehow they got me to do it. It’s not a matter of just doing your design and passing it on or doing it yourself.
    "I had very good men, Phil O’Neill and Paddy Rowe, who I still work with. They did all the stonework, all the granite work, which was the most important feature in this church. Then we had Botticcino marble on the floor, I had seen it before: my idea was to have this church a symphony of white. It is full of symbolism. The Altar has two pillars with a stone laid across. The two pillars represent the Old and New Testaments.
   

       "And then I designed the vases; I even saw to it what kind of plants and flower-arrangements were put in, but I am afraid ... everything has changed, now there are all sorts of knick-knacks in it, it was a very pure church.

 
    "It turned out that we could not have the tapestry ready in time for the Consecration of the Church. I made a cartoon of the Crucifix on Vilene which is dressmakers’ material and then we had to get a scaffolding and then Kathy and I worked day and night more or less except for sleeping: we were working in shifts, we had so little time. On the morning of the Consecration at seven o’clock Kathy had to go home to change and get ready, I had to get ready and change. We were in a terrible mess after working all night painting and spraying. And I remember arriving with this wide piece of Vilene about sixteen foot long and everybody was in the church already sitting on their seats and we came with what looked like a flag and then it had to be hoisted up. They had pulleys ready. And all this just before the Archbishop arrived. It was such an experience.
    "It was also wonderful to work with young Kathy. She also worked with me on the Pope and the children which is now in Maynooth."
    But the great exhilaration which she experienced on the completion of the church has faded. It is no longer kept as the artefact that she designed, nor did it ever receive any publicity as the rare event that it really was in Irish church architecture.

Kate Robinson is a Curator.     Imogen Stuart is a Sculptor and Church Designer.

We thank Imogen Stuart for supplying us with the images used in this article