The author, essayist and critic Brian Fallon has died. He was 93.
A former literary editor of The Irish Times, and its chief critic for 35 years, Fallon was also founder of the newspaper’s Weekend supplement, testament to his belief that, rather than culture and criticism being a rarefied pursuit, everything could, and should, be interesting through the right lens.
His many publications included books on the Irish artists Charles Tyrrell, Martin Gale, Patrick Swift and Seán McSweeney, among others. He also wrote books about Imogen Stuart and Nancy Wynne Jones, who was married to his younger brother Conor, the sculptor. A Poet’s Journal & Other Writings 1934-1974, which appeared in 2005, was his edited selection of essays and reviews by his own father, the poet and playwright Padraic Fallon.
Brian Fallon’s writing was open, engaging and often informal. According to his son Rory, he believed that writing should read with the same fluency as spoken language. In an Irish Times piece from 1985 on the Christmas group show at the now defunct Hendriks Gallery, for example, he introduced the relative newcomer Brian Maguire, “who shows a good figure painting in his ‘old’ style, and an energetic though slightly formless picture in his more recent New Expressionist manner”.
Writing about a “coolly elegant Robert Ballagh” work, he asks, in parentheses, “by the way, did I see this in Cork recently..? At any rate, it is surely one of the best pictures he has done for a long time.”
He also notes in his Hendriks piece that Patrick Graham is bringing “a fierceness which is a useful antidote to … over-refined taste”.
In just three paragraphs the review captures a sense of the artists, their work, the gallery and the state of art in Ireland.
A 1983 portrait of Fallon by Edward McGuire shows a thoughtful man, with heavy dark eyebrows and grey hair, wearing a corduroy jacket and appearing older than his 50 years, although that could be to see it through today’s eyes, when endless youth seems to have become an ethical pursuit.
A photographic portrait of him taken six years later, holding a grandson on his lap, is in the collection of the Tate, having been acquired as part of the collection of the Austrian-born British artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, a marker of the breadth of his connections.
Fallon’s range of reference was undeniable. His poet father, a friend of RM Smyllie, who was then editor of The Irish Times, had introduced his son to the newspaper at the age of 19.
He worked initially as a subeditor at night while studying classics at Trinity College Dublin by day. “I didn’t really settle,” he said, “I didn’t fail any exams, but I left after two years. My Greek wasn’t up to it.”
He had likewise failed to thrive at school, starting as a “star pupil” but then losing interest through boredom. Newspapers suited his thirst for eclectic self-directed knowledge far better.
In Dublin he initially lived with his grandparents on Baggot Street, where Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan were regular figures in the Baggotonia scene. “No one could clear a pub quicker than Kavanagh, my parents used to say,” according to Rory.
It was working night shifts at The Irish Times that Fallon met his fellow journalist Marion FitzGerald. The pair would go on to marry and have seven children – Aonghus, Catríona, Rory, Fionnuala, Emer, Oisín and Donal – living in a house in Co Wicklow stuffed full of ceramics, art and books. “He never learned to drive,” Rory says. “He would take the bus to work every day, reading a book. All the way there, all the way back.”
Fallon loved art, but “critics are rarely loved”, as Eileen Battersby, the late Irish Times literary critic, wrote in 1998, on the occasion of the publication of An Age of Innocence, Fallon’s exploration of Irish culture from 1930 to 1960.
Yet in his later years many artists would remember how his reviews of their first exhibitions had helped launch their careers.
In that book he argued for the uncelebrated vibrancy of the period, the creativity, and the ideas. The volume was, Battersby wrote, “a singular performance. Not all literary academics could claim such a historical understanding and few historians would be as familiar with the literary texts.”
As chief critic, back in the days when many newspapers had such roles, Fallon would have been awe inspiring to those who did not know him, although this perhaps also had something to do with his shyness and of the preference so many writers have for standing back and observing rather than being at the heart of the party.
But he was always fair, never vicious, never taking easy hits, and his writing was always well balanced.
Hugely influential in the shaping of the arts scene in Ireland, he was also remarkably prescient, remarking in that 1998 interview that “the rise of populism seems to me to be one of the dominant realities of Irish life in this century.”
Yet, his son Rory notes, he also believed in recent years that art in Ireland was in a better place than it had been when he began his career. For that, many artists working now should remember him with warmth, and with gratitude.
Brian Fallon, who was born on May 3rd, 1933, in Cootehill, Co Cavan, and died on September 3rd, 2026, in Dublin, is survived by his four sons and three daughters. His wife died in 2021.