Desmond MacNamara

Who is Desmond MacNamara?

Desmond J. MacNamara, born in Dublin, Ireland, was a sculptor, painter, stage and art designer and novelist. After graduating from University College Dublin and the National College of Art in Dublin in the early 1940s, he found a place as stage designer and prop maker for the Abbey Theatre and at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, working with the legendary duo Michael Macliammoir and Hilton Edwards. He was an uncredited art designer on Henry V. His sculptures are on display in the National Art Gallery of Ireland and at the Dublin Writers Museum. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he and his first wife ran what evolved into a literary salon on Dublin's Grafton Street, a posh thoroughfare today, where they hosted many figures in the Irish arts. The eminent traffic included Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O'Brien, Anthony Cronin, Valentine Iremonger, J. P. Donleavy, Gainor Crist, Edna O'Brien, actor Dan O'Herlihy, Ernest Gebler, John Ryan, and other literary personalities. Wartime emigres Nobel laureate physicist Erwin Schrodinger and his wife were frequent guests. Major memoirs of the period cite MacNamara as a pivotal figure in Dublin's cultural underground. This post-war Dublin bohemian scene was immortalized in Donleavy's novel The Ginger Man, where MacNamara appears as MacDoon, the Kangaroo-suited artist