Elizabeth Curran Solterer; Irish Cultural Activist
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: Matt Schudel, Washington Post Staff Writer
Elizabeth Curran Solterer, whose charmed early life was
spent among the giants of Ireland's literary and political
flowering of the 1920s and '30s, died July 15 at Georgetown
University Hospital after a stroke. She was 89 and had lived
in the Washington area since 1955, often lecturing at area
museums and cultural gatherings about the art of her native
land.
She was 40 years old when she married and settled into a
quiet life as the wife of a Georgetown University professor
of economics, but the first part of her life was spent amid
the artistic ferment of Europe between the world wars. In
Dublin, where Mrs. Solterer grew up in the twin enthusiasms
of revolution and modernism, her parents were at the center
of the Irish freedom movement, which led to the Easter
Rising of 1916 and establishment of the Irish Free State in
1922.
Her mother, Helen Laird, was a founding member of the Abbey
Theatre and close friend of poet William Butler Yeats and
his muse, Maud Gonne. Her father, C.P. Curran, was a lawyer
who wrote some of the first journalistic accounts of the
Irish revolt of 1916. Among their friends was James Joyce,
the Irish novelist who once commented that the Currans'
daughter was the only child he knew who had read his
modernist masterpiece "Ulysses" -- and had done so by the
age of 9.
"It was a village, Dublin, in those days," said Mrs.
Solterer's daughter, Helen Solterer, a professor of French
literature and culture at Duke University. "My grandparents
held an open house and knew everyone."
Mrs. Solterer attended a school where classes were taught in
the Irish language and, in later years, she became fluent in
German, French and Italian. As a student at University
College Dublin in the early 1930s, she and the writer Flann
O'Brien founded a literary magazine with the waggish title
of Blather.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in history in 1935, she
traveled across Europe and studied art history in Germany,
from which she was expelled with other "undesirable"
foreigners in 1937. She moved to Paris, where she worked in
an art gallery that sold works by Picasso, and renewed her
friendship with Joyce, who at that time lived there. In
1939, Mrs. Solterer made her first visit to the United
States, where she became acquainted with leading figures of
modern art and stormed around New Orleans in a hearse owned
by the sculptor Fritz Bultman.
After returning to Dublin in the early 1940s, she wrote
about modern art for the Bell, a publication edited by the
celebrated writer Sean O'Faolain, taught art history and
helped found the Irish Living Art movement. The most
prominent painter in that movement was Jack Yeats, the
younger brother of the poet, who was "like a second father
to her," according to Mrs. Solterer's daughter.
The Irish government sent her back to the United States in
the early 1950s to introduce Irish art to the American
public through a series of lectures.
Back in Ireland in 1954, she met Josef Solterer, a
Viennese-born economist who had taught at Georgetown since
1932. They married in 1955 and settled in Falls Church on
what was then farmland. They moved to the District in 1972.
In Washington, Mrs. Solterer spoke of Irish accomplishments
in the arts at museums and galleries, at the Irish-American
Cultural Institute and in lectures arranged by the Irish
Embassy. She was active in the American Association of
University Women and in Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the
District.
Her husband died in 1992.
Survivors include her daughter, of Durham, N.C.; a stepson,
retired Navy Capt. Carl Solterer of Arlington; three
grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.