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  • Title: Dorothy Walker Archive
  • Reference Code: IE/NIVAL /DW
  • Level of Description: Collection
  • Creation Dates: [1959 - 2002]
  • Extent And Medium: 36 bankers boxes of assorted documentation including personal and professional correspondence, administrative records for exhibitions, published catalogues, critical writings, draft publications, books, journals, reports, essays, lectures, photographic and audio visual material and ephemera.
  • Creators:
  • Repository: NIVAL

Scope and Content

Dorothy Walker was a dynamic and highly influential art critic, author and broadcaster. She played a central role in many of the most significant events in Irish visual art in the second half of the 20th century including the foundation of the Rosc exhibitions, the Guinness-Peat Aviation Awards and the establishment of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Throughout her career, Walker contributed art criticism to the New York Times, RTÉ, Hibernia, Studio International, and the Sunday Times. Her book, Modern Art in Ireland (1997), provides the first critical account of the impact of political and cultural developments on the visual arts in Ireland in the post WWII period.
This archive was bequeathed to NIVAL and presented to the library by the Walker family in 2004. The material charts the broad scope and diversity of Walker's interests in Irish art and architecture, abstract Modernism and the nature and influence of International art movements on the Irish cultural landscape of the 20th century. The collection documents Walker's involvement with institutions and projects such as Rosc, Signa (established with Michael Scott and Louis LeBrocquy), the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), and the International Center for Advanced Studies in Art at New York University (NYU), and with artists such as LeBrocquy, Patrick Scott, Sean Scully, Michael Farrell, James Coleman, Patrick Ireland, Eileen Gray, Francis Bacon and Joseph Beuys.

Arrangement

Arranged to series level.

Language / Script

Mainly in English. Also French, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Japanese and Arabic.