Helen Hooker O'Malley: A Short Biography by Cormac O'Malley

Helen Hooker O'Malley, American Artist 1905-1993

Helen Hooker was born into a wealthy American family from Greenwich, Connecticut and New York City. As a young girl, she attended the Wabanaki School in Greenwich. This open-air, alternative school instilled in her a love of Native American spiritual principles. After attending secondary school in New York City, she refused to apply to university and instead set up her own studio and enrolled with the Art Students League of New York where she was taught by many distinguished American artists.

Art and Travel, 1924-1935

To supplement her art studies in New York, Helen made trips to England, France, Spain, and Italy in the mid-1920s. In 1928, aged just twenty-three, she embarked on a long journey with her older sister, Adelaide, through Germany, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union. They stayed six months in the Soviet Union while Helen studied art off with avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov, in Leningrad. On returning home in late spring 1929, Adelaide wrote a series of articles on their Russian travels for Good Housekeeping, which Helen illustrated. Helen also had her first exhibition, which featured her Soviet paintings.

Helen spent the Christmas of 1929 with her sister, Barbara, in France, where she continued working on her art. In 1930 she traveled in Italy and Greece, where she studied dance with the Kanellos Academy of Greco Choral Dance and produced a prodigious number of watercolors. In their depiction of rural and coastal landscapes, these works anticipate the photographs she would later take in Ireland.

When the Great Depression hit, Helen returned home and limited her travels to domestic excursions to California and New England. Being conscious of her social responsibilities, she helped out at Hartford House which provided relief to those in need. She applied her artistic talents to designing rooms there, a skill she would later use to design interiors for public libraries in Dublin.

Meeting Ernie O’Malley, 1933

In the spring of 1933, Helen met the wandering Irish writer and former military leader, Ernie O’Malley, at a Sunday lunch in the Hooker’s Greenwich home. Fascinated not only by his story but, as a sculptor, by his dramatic face, Helen asked to sculpt his head. Despite her parents’ disapproval, Helen and Ernie saw more of each other in New York and they fell in love.

In late 1934 Ernie decided that his future lay in reviving the arts in Ireland and that he should return there in order to secure his military pension. Helen resolved to join him there. To achieve this, Helen and her sister accompanied their mother on a trip to Japan. They visited, among other places, the Japanese branch of Hooker Electrochemical Company. After Japan, the two sisters continued their travels alone and embarked on an epic journey through Korea, China, Mongolia and Russia to London and eventually on to Dublin.

Helen and Ernie married in London in September 1935. They returned immediately to Dublin, where took up his medical studies at University College Dublin and Helen set about renting and decorating a house in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines. She explored the use of Irish tweeds and handicraft in their home and on their walls hung a mixture of Russian, Greek, Chinese and Japanese art as well as her own paintings.

Married Life, Dublin 1935-1938

The O’Malleys settled down to domestic life. After a difficulty pregnancy, their first child Cahal, was born in 1936. Even during the pregnancy, Ernie and Helen had started to go on weekend photographic trips. Over the next few years, they would visit over 150 medieval monasteries and archaeological sites around Ireland. In mid-1935 Ernie had taken the American photographer Paul Strand on a five-week tour of Ireland. They had both been impressed by the beauty and artistic integrity value of old Ireland. No doubt, Ernie thought similar visits would be a good way not only to explore Ireland with his wife, but also to start on a project to photograph the remaining traces of ancient Irish culture.

While Ernie was pursuing his medical studies, publishing his memoir On Another Man’s Wound and securing a diploma in European painting for University College Dublin, Helen set up her own sculpture studio and in 1938 she enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. She had quickly established a close circle of friends in Dublin, they included Maude Aiken (musician, wife of Frank Aiken), Fran Fagan (boutique store on Duke Street), Stella Frost (artist), Evie Hone (artist), Sybil le Brocquy (writer), Eileen McGrane MacCarvil (Lecturer in English at UCD), and Roising Walsh (Dublin City Librarian) who commissioned Helen’s interior design work for libraries in Ballsbridge, Howth and Pearse Street.

A Model Farm in Mayo, 1939-1944

In 1938, Helen was drawn home to Greenwich by her father’s untimely death. By this time, having lost a libel action in Dublin, Ernie was no longer at ease in Dublin, and they decided to move to Mayo and pursue their photographic projects from there.

On Helen’s return from the US in August 1938, Ernie had already rented a house on the Louisburg coast in Co Mayo. They sought a more permanent home, which they found that November at Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport. During the Second World War – ‘The Emergency’ – they were determined to make their contribution and established a self-sufficient farm and the first tuberculosis-free herd west of the Shannon. They leased additional land and employed men to grow new crops and to plant an entire new garden full of diverse fruit trees. Helen would say proudly, if a little exaggeratedly, that they were self-sufficient except for sugar and tea.

Over this period, Helen gave birth to Etain in 1940, and Cormac in 1942 and also continued her photography. Her focus turned to subjects close to hand such as planting, reaping, harvesting, threshing and other domestic matters. Using funds inherited from her father, Helen designed striking new harm buildings and an art studio at Burrishoole Lodge, and Ernie oversaw their constructions.

Dublin – Visual Art and Theatre, 1942-1947

A driven and committed artist, Helen started to spend more time in Dublin, and in 1942 she began renting a small studio there for her sculpture. Her work was included in the inaugural Irish Exhibition of Living art in 1943. By 1944, Helen and Ernie decided that the rural life was not for them. Helen rented a house in Clonskeagh, Dublin, moved the children to local schools, and threw her energy into the Dublin arts and theatre scene.

In late 1944, Helen helped found the Players Theatre with actors Gerald Healy and Liam Redmond. Their first play, ‘The Black Stranger’, which was based on the famine, received considerable acclaim in 1945. Other plays followed, included Donagh MacDonagh’s ‘Happy as Larry’. Helen played an important role on the Board in addition to designing stage sets, costumes and the company’s logo. When the war ended in June, Helen returned to Greenwich to see her family and her theatre enterprise fizzled out. It was revived in London where Helen moved in 1947-48 and again in the 1953-54 season.

America, Divorce and Remarriage

The immediate post-war period from 1946 to 1950 was challenging for Helen. With her marriage in trouble, she spent more time in America, away from her husband and children. During this period, Cahal and Cormac contracted primary tuberculosis, and Ernie had taken them out of school and back to Mayo to rest and recuperate.

With the encouragement of her American family, Helen returned to Ireland in 1950 and took her two older children, Cahal and Etain, out of boarding school and flew them to the United States – without Ernie’s permission. Helen started a new life with them in Colorado. She designed a new house, garden and amphitheatre amid the dramatic Colorado mountain landscape. She started to sculpt, paint and take on interior design work again. By 1952, when she divorced Ernie, and had her first exhibition in Colorado Springs. The following year, she moved between New York and London, working on theatre projects. In 1956, she married Richard Roelofs, Jr. By early 1957, she had a significant exhibit in Greenwich, shortly before Ernie died in March of that year.

The next fourteen years were spent in settling into married life ago, then later tenderly caring for her sick husband in Greenwich and renovating Burrishoole Lodge, which had been uninhabited for almost ten years. The refurbishment of Burrishoole, and subsequently the Dublin mews, gave Helen an opportunity to buy a second collection of contemporary Irish art. She continued her photography in Ireland, which now included work in Kodachrome, and also expanded her artistic activity to include poetry. Her poems were a form of diary, which recorded her thoughts on all sorts of subjects – her life, loves, art, ambitions, stories about travels and meeting people.

A New Creative Phase

Some months after Richard Roelofs’ death in May 1971, Helen started her most productive phase. In the next fifteen years, she would create over half of her lifetime’s sculptural work, spending a significant amount of time in Ireland. Firstly, in Burrishoole, which she eventually sold in 1981, then latterly in her mews in Ballsbridge, Dublin, where she established a studio. Here, her later sculptural work concentrated on new challenges such as capturing the body in motion. In her photographic work, she also explored new areas such as still life, while continuing her examination of form and pattern in landscape.

During this time, Helen started to dream of creating a museum in Mayo where her collection of Irish and international art could be enjoyed by locals and visitors. In 1977 she approached the Irish government with her plans. She selected over 600 artworks for the proposed museum and donated them to the Irish American Cultural Institute. Ultimately, however, several years after giving her gift, the government decided not to build the museum. Instead, the O’Malley Art Collection is currently housed at the University of Limerick.

After these last productive years, Helen decided to gift forty-five of her sculptures to the University of Limerick and a selection of her photographs to the National Library of Ireland. In the US she exhibited her works in Birmingham, Stamford and Greenwich. She was delighted by the creation of the O’Malley Art Award by the Irish American Cultural Institute, which both honors the name of Ernie O’Malley and benefits contemporary artists of Ireland.

Helen continued to sculpt and exhibit until 1991. She died, aged 88, in 1993. To the end Helen had always been true to her mission – to show how art could transform life and to exemplify the artist’s role in that effort.

Biography by Cormac O'Malley