Born: March 4th, 1952
Died: March 28th, 2025
Painter, photographer, art teacher and co-editor of The Great Book of Ireland, Gene Lambert had a defiant and disruptive artistic presence in Ireland of the 1980s and 1990s. The Dublin-born Kildare resident who died in March was also a formidable force when campaigning for the rights of people with disabilities, following a catastrophic car crash in 1981 which left him partially paralysed.
Lambert’s plans for a residential centre for artists with and without disabilities in Clashganna Mills on the river Barrow were visionary even though the project never came to fruition. Ciaran Benson, emeritus professor of psychology at University College Dublin, former chairman of Poetry Ireland and former chair of the Arts Council, said that Lambert’s life was shaped by “adversity, pain, creativity and great ideals”.
The initial impetus for The Great Book of Ireland was to raise funds for the Clashganna Mills project and Poetry Ireland. Working with the poet Theo Dorgan and others, Lambert’s original design was for a handcrafted vellum book of poems illustrated by a single artist. However, the book became a much larger project which eventually included the work of 120 artists, 143 poets, nine composers and the calligrapher Denis Brown.
“Working on the Great Book of Ireland was an intense experience. Gene and I spent a huge amount of time together and I came to have a great affection for him and his humane values, his good humour and his commitment to highest standards,” said Dorgan.
The Great Book of Ireland was first exhibited at the newly opened Irish Museum of Art during Dublin’s stint as European City of Culture in 1991. It was later stored in a bank vault in Dublin for 20 years while a buyer was sought. In 2013, University College Cork acquired the book through philanthropic funding for $1 million and the funds were initially divided between Poetry Ireland and the Clashganna Mills Trust. However, following the liquidation of the latter, these funds were later channelled back into the current refurbishment of Number 11 Parnell Square as the national centre for Poetry Ireland, shared with the Irish Heritage Trust.
Lambert was widely known as both a painter and a photographer. The art critic Aidan Dunne said that Lambert had a distinctive voice. “He developed a mode of figurative painting that was stylised, humorous and incorporated barbed if playful commentary. He always had tremendous energy and was fundamentally and unpredictably inventive,” said Dunne.
The illustrated prints of his paintings, which accompany poetry by Paul Durcan in the book In the Land of Punt (Clashganna Mills Press, 1988), are an example of this expressive style of painting. These paintings were later exhibited in the David Hendriks Gallery in Dublin in 1991. His most groundbreaking work was the emotionally charged exhibition of photographs Work from a Dark Room, which first showed in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity College Dublin before touring to various venues around Ireland.
He said at the time that he found photography to be a more direct way of engaging with the public. And these highly contrastive black-and-white portraits of people with and without physical disabilities drew the viewer’s eye beyond the physical impairments to reveal their broader personalities.
“Having spent several years recovering from a serious crash, Gene turned his empathy towards people he perceived to have been marginalised by society, either through physical or mental disability or class,” said Andrew Folan of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).
Folan said that by drawing attention to specific aspects of bodily mobility and losing the greater part of the figure in shadow, Lambert’s images gained a strong dramatic presence. This exhibition followed Work from a Ward, in the Lincoln Gallery, Dublin. The work in that show was directly inspired by the physical damage to his own body and the chronic pain he suffered after the car crash.
Lambert was a member of the RHA and later Aosdána, and his work featured regularly in RHA group shows. He also frequently exhibited in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and won its Carroll’s Award in 1981.
He represented Ireland at the 14th International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-Mer in France in 1982 and had shows in Bradford, Glasgow and Copenhagen throughout the 1980s. In 1997, his exhibition at the RHA, entitled Playtime, was partly inspired by the toy soldiers of his beloved son, Danny. Irish Times art critic at the time, Brian Fallon, wrote how the show created a “mini-world, entirely its own”. “Gene’s life oscillated between such mini-worlds and the injustices of the world at large, and suffering all too often seeded the contraction of his worlds. Yet from Gene’s private pains came rich public gains,” said Benson.
Through his work with the National Disability Authority (NDA) and later as a board member of Rehab, Lambert doggedly pursued his vision to improve the lives of disabled citizens. “Gene’s fearless, tireless and trenchant participation in discussions around the NDA had a major influence on its eventual structure and policy direction – he could be a terrier in argument. It was always his view that people with disabilities are first and foremost people, not defined by their disabilities but needing resources and support in order to lead full and active independent lives,” said Dorgan.
Born in Finglas, he was the second eldest of 10 children of Eugene and Mai Lambert. His parents moved to Monkstown, where they established the Lambert Puppet Theatre, and Eugene Lambert – originally a refrigeration technician – worked on the RTÉ television children’s series Wanderly Wagon. Although initially involved in the family puppet shows, Gene turned his attention to art and attended the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time of student sit-ins and demonstrations in which he took an active part.
As a student, he was an outspoken critic of the approach to teaching art at NCAD and the narrow confines of artistic debate in Ireland at that time.
In an interview with Patrick Murphy in Circa art magazine in 1986, he spoke about how at that time, NCAD was directly controlled by the Department of Education. “It was managed by disinterested civil servants. That, coupled with the reactionary academic structure, forced us to starting questioning the whole concept of art college,” he told Murphy. Lambert was suspended twice for his protests but subsequently reinstated. His thesis, a Marxist analysis of the work of Sir William Orpen, was rejected. “I reversed the arguments and wrote a right-wing analysis and they accepted it. It was a game,” he said.
In that same interview, he explained how he turned to photography in part as a reaction to the “obsessive art pub conversations about aesthetics” and also because he was trying to come to terms with learning how to live, “to dress, to cook, to work – the basic techniques of living”.
Following years living in Deansgrange and working as a well-regarded teacher of painting at the Dún Laoghaire School of Art (now the Institute of Art, Design and Technology), he bought a Dutch barge and lived in it on the Grand Canal in Sallins, Co Kildare, for a number of years. His son Danny joined him on the boat for a few years. Later, as his health deteriorated, Lambert moved to live in a flat in Monasterevin where he spent his final days.
Gene Lambert is survived by Danny, his brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces.
