“I Cannot Do Abstract Art”: An Interview with John Behan

Abstract

“I Cannot Do Abstract Art”: An Interview with John Behan Adrian Frazier and John Behan (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 19:4. john behan was born in 1938 on Sheriff Street in Dublin, where his family ran a corner shop. From early childhood, he showed a love of drawing and painting. At fifteen, he started a seven-year apprenticeship as a metalworker, and soon began to use his skills in making sculptures. His first was of a bull, and it is for bulls that he has become famous. It is fair to say that Behan is a maker not just of art but of the conditions for making art in Ireland. Behan was a force in the Independent Artists, a founder of the Project Arts Centre, and a board member of the Design Studio. His public advocacy for the social value of art played a part in the reconstruction of the Arts Council in 1973. His leading role in the establishment of the Dublin Art Foundry made it possible for him and for other Irish sculptors to produce work in quantity and in quality at reasonable prices. A great reader in a generation of great Irish writers, Behan has often been inspired by motifs in poetry or drama. After the publication of Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin, he produced a series of figures and scenes from the Irish epic. His graphics and bronze figures of crows follow from Ted Hughes’s Crow. In the comic spirit of Ulysses and Don Quixote, he has illustrated dozens of characters and scenes from these masterpieces. Writers have often returned the favor: John Behan’s sculptures are held in the private collections of Brian Friel, Tom Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Gerry Dawe, and others. From the 1990s onward, Behan took on epic subjects, works of massive public remembrance. He produced the National Famine Memorial in Mayo, the Arrival (on the theme of Famine-driven emigration) for the United Nations in New York, the Liberty Tree in commemoration of 1798 in Carlow, and the Flight [End Page 103] of the Earls in Donegal. Key images in his work include birds, crows, fish, boats, Icarus, and Dedalus. But the iconic figure for him is the bull. He has done bulls of many sizes and breeds, in various castings and styles, bulls that are anxious or angry, contented or fighting. Sometimes his bull is the king of his herd, and sometimes he is being led to slaughter. Behan’s hundreds of bronze bulls amount to a meditation on the fate of the male, and particularly the Irish male, at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. The following interview took place on October 20, 2014, at Behan’s house on Canal Road, Galway. ________ AF: When you were first introduced to sculpture by Paddy McIlroy, was that to modeled pieces, or an open steelwork form? JB: It started off as an exercise in making functional things out of copper, like bowls. Then Paddy realized that my talent lay in making figures, and hammered steel pieces, semi-abstract. So I went on from making copper objects to making hammered steel and welded steel figures of animals. The first successful piece I made after a two-year course with Paddy in the North Strand Technical School was a welded steel bull. This happened in the late fifties. Between 1957 and 1960 I was with Paddy. That was the beginning of my career as an artist. After exhibiting that piece in August 1960 in the Living Art Exhibition, my career just went on, from public exhibitions, to private exhibitions, to commissions. AF: That first bull was prominently mentioned in the Irish Times review of the show in August 1960. JB: Yes, James White wrote it up; he said it was one of the best pieces in the exhibition. He was the leading art critic at that time. AF: Did it give you a sense of purpose when you read those words in the Irish Times? JB: It did, because it made me realize that I could make work that would communicate...