| Louis le
Brocquy |
Photograph by Perry Ogden, 2000 |
| Born |
10 November 1916 (1916--) (age 91)
Dublin, Ireland |
| Nationality |
Irish |
| Field |
Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Printmaking, Ceramics,
Tapestry, Illustration, Design |
| Training |
Self-taught |
| Famous works |
A Family, coll. The National Gallery of Ireland
The Tain illustrations
|
| Awards |
Premio Acquisto Internationale, Venice Biennale, 1956
http://www.lebrocquy.com
|
Louis le Brocquy (born November 10, 1916) is an
Irish painter. Born in Dublin, Louis le Brocquy's work has
received much international attention and many accolades in a career that spans seventy years of creative practice. In 1956, he
represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Acquisito Internationale
with A Family (coll. National Gallery of Ireland), subsequently
included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art at Brussels,
World Fair 1958. The same year he married the Irish painter Anne
Madden and left London to work in the French Midi.
le Brocquy is widely acclaimed for his evocative "Portrait ‘Heads" of literary figures and fellow artists, which include
William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and his
friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon
and Seamus Heaney, in recent years le Brocquy’s early "Tinker" subjects and Grey period
"Family" paintings, have attracted headline attention on the international marketplace marking him as the fourth painter in
Ireland and Britain to be evaluated within a very select group of artists, alongside Lucian
Freud, David Hockney and Francis
Bacon.
In Ireland, he is honoured as the first and only living painter to be included in the Permanent Irish Collection of the
National Gallery of Ireland. To mark le Brocquy's 90th birthday some eleven
one-person exhibitions were organised at home and abroad including the National
Gallery of Ireland; the Tate; the Irish Museum
of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; the
Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork; and the Hunt Museum, Limerick.
Early life
Honorary Secretary of the League of Nations Society, Ireland, and Sybil, née
Staunton (1892-1973), co-founder of Amnesty International, Ireland; the latter was
an acknowledged authority on the life and works of Jonathan Swift and prominent within
the city’s literary circles. Parents friendly with W.B. Yeats and family. Named
after his grandfathers, his father and his maternal uncle Herbert, who had died at sixteen from a kick on the head playing rugby
for Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare.
According to the artist’s biographer Anne Madden le Brocquy: ‘Herbert’s memory was cherished
in the family throughout Louis’ boyhood and marked the child’s mind with a tragic image of his injured head.’ Attends Miss
Sweeney’s Mount Temple school (1924-26), where Elizabeth Yeats, co-founder with her
sister Lily of the historic Cuala Press, teaches
art. Earliest childhood drawings made there include the arms of Dublin City, a subject to which le Brocquy will return in old age
in his illustrations for James Joyce’s Dubliners (1986).
Contemplating an early predisposition for painting le Brocquy says: ‘At birth I was the subject of an unusual genetic experiment;
my right eye long-sighted, my left which could see clearly to within a foot or two. This meant of course that I could not see
three-dimensionally, which in turn made it difficult to judge whether a distant figure was coming or going, or at which point of
space in relationship to myself a ball might be bowled at cricket. Later on this greatly interested a London ophthalmologist
named Dr. Trevor-Roper who, with his brother Hugh Trevor-Roper of Magdalen College, Oxford,
studied art in relation to optical vision. Later, again, I realised that my own two-dimensional vision corresponded exactly with
the painted surface before me. Here I was in my element.’ Educated at St. Gerard’s School,
Bray, Co. Wicklow (1926-34), the young boy undergoes a
painful loss of religious faith. Gesa E. Thiessen observes: ‘In his youth le Brocquy was, as he
himself states, very religious, in fact, he secretly believed he was to become a monk. However, in his last year at primary
school he experienced the painful loss of faith due to the doctrinaire Roman Catholic teachings in his school on mariology, on
the question of salvation of non-Roman Catholics and on the concept of transubstantiation which for him seemed entirely
metaphysical and little related to actuality.’
Holidays spent in Glendalough and his grandfather’s home in Co. Roscommon fire his imaginative life: ‘It was there that it dawned on me that life was not ordained,
as we had been led to believe, but had mysteriously emerged and continued to emerge through some magic compulsion in which all
nature secretly shared.’ Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, a nephew of Lewis Carroll, perceives
his creative gifts and encourages him to become an artist. Le Brocquy, however, has no such plans at the time and shows little
more than a casual interest in art: ‘I did try to make a number of landscape watercolours up to the age of thirteen. At which
point I realised that these were nothing but imitative versions of works I was somehow led to emulate. I destroyed them. That put
me off painting for a while.’ Studies chemistry at Kevin Street Technical School (1934), and, later, as an extra mural student
attends Trinity College, Dublin (1934-36), while working at Greenmount Oil
Refinery, the family business established in Harolds Cross by his paternal grandfather, Louis le Brocquy (1861-1950). Of his
family background le Brocquy says: ‘My great-grandfather Ange van den Eynde, was said to have been involved as a boy in the
Belgian War of Independence of 1830, capturing riderless Dutch horses for the rebels. Afterwards, on manoeuvres with a battery of
field artillery, he was thrown from his horse under a gun-carriage, injuring his leg. Unable to ride thereafter, he maintained
his love and exceptional judgement of that animal, which eventually led him via Chelsea, London, to his home at Newgrove, Raheny,
Dublin, where he married a Kilkenny girl named Anne Walsh and passed a good-humoured and expansive life buying strings of Irish
horses for the Belgian cavalry remount ... When I was a young man (with the derisory term West-British in mind) I occasionally
referred to myself ironically as a “West-Belgian”. No-one seemed to me less manifestly Irish than that small family whose name I
bore.’
Early career
At the age of seventeen le Brocquy regains an amateur interest in art, prompted, in particular, by music. Produces his first
sculpture Evolution (1934; plasticine, plaster cast), alongside the experimental paintings Sunlight in a Wood
(a.k.a. Summer Haze, 1935), and L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (1937), all light-heartedly entered into the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition of 1937-38. In May 1937, the Dublin Evening Mail reports: ‘One rarely hears of a young artist breaking through the portals of the
Royal Hibernian Academy without having had a lesson in art ... Both his exhibits attracted attention on the opening day ... He is
not, as I had expected, exceptionally keen on art, but is more interested in his chemistry work. The fact is surprising that
these, the only two works of art which he has ever completed, were accepted and hung in the Academy, for he has not hitherto
taken it devotedly.’
In the summer of 1938, however, le Brocquy will envisage for the first time becoming a painter, having previously regarded the
matter as nothing more or less than a diversion. Unaccountably drawn to reproductions of old master paintings with which he had
long been familiar, the young chemist immerses himself in the works of Titian (1485-1576),
Velázquez (1599-1660), Goya (1746-1828) and
Manet (1832-1883), later evoking his particular wonder at Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654; National
Gallery, London), in which ‘the handling of white lead impasto could miraculously become the texture of her coarse white
dress.’ In time the artist will record the following impression: ‘Perhaps of all painters, Rembrandt has given me the deepest insight. Just now, looking long at an overwhelming self-portrait, I had a
disquieting experience. It was not that the hand which held the brushes in the painting became, so to speak, my hand. It was that
I identified with the paint on the canvas so that my hand understood that painted hand, felt those painted brushes. For a moment
I left the actual world. For an instant I entered through the looking-glass of this painted reality, as though into another
room.’ Realising that painting is an essential process for him, he experiments with oils, pigments and wax-resins in the
laboratory. He will recount the pregnant silence that followed his grandfather’s discovery of these in his laboratory cabinet:
‘My grandfather had also been expected to inherit an oil refinery in Düsseldorf.
He also had shown an early interest in painting. He was taken to a poor quarter of the town frequented by down-at-heel artists
and writers, where his godparents impressed him with the grim correspondence between maler and “malheur”.’ Studies technique from
Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte (1437), and Hilaire Hiler’s Notes on the
Technique of Painting (1934). Makes frequent visits to Dublin’s Municipal and National Galleries, where the ‘deep humanity’
of Goya’s A Woman in a White Fichu (‘La Moue’; National Gallery of Ireland) impresses him, as does El
Greco’s St Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1590-95; National Gallery
of Ireland), depicted ‘within a white ectoplasmic cloud in which spirit has become paint, paint spirit.’ The metamorphic
power of art will remain an enduring source of wonder throughout the artist’s life: ‘Since painting first interested me, I have
been drawn to a constant tradition which I think of as central to this old European art. This implies a peculiar use of oil
paint; not to symbolise, not to describe the object, nor to realise an abstract image but rather to allow the paint, while
insisting upon its own palpable nature, to reconstitute (if it will) the object of one’s experience. In certain works of old
masters, the paint (with its qualities of colour, tone and texture) has been transformed into the experienced object. Obversely
the image of the object has become paint. This dichotomy, this tension pulls taut the nerves of insight. Reality is stripped down
to a deeper layer and the ordinary is seen to be marvellous.’ Encouraged by his mother and with no formal training, le Brocquy
left Ireland in 1938 to study the major European art collections in London,
Paris, Venice and Geneva, the latter then exhibiting the [[Prado collection during the Spanish
Civil War. From this deep experience le Brocquy recalls his revelatory encounter with Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1654; Museo del Prado): ‘There in front of this huge work stood a small group of fellow visitors, partially
obscuring the figures in the painting. Suddenly I perceived that the ephemeral actuality of the viewers was less real than the
painted image before them. I believe at that moment I became a painter.’ French nineteenth-century art impresses le Brocquy, in
particular Degas (1834-1917), and Manet (1832-1883),
in whose works he perceives the paint, rather than the subject matter, to be the prime reality. The great Spaniards
El Greco (1541-1614), Velázquez (1599-1660), and
Goya (1746-1828) are equally revered.
The art historian Anne Crookshank observes: ‘He was enthralled by Spanish painting and its
influence has remained a feature of his work, where the precision of his tone values and his use of greys and whites, both very
prominent factors in Spanish painting, are constantly important.' Le Brocquy’s journeys abroad prove catalytic: ‘Alone among the
great artists of the past, in these strange related cities, I became vividly aware for the first time of my Irish identity to
which I have remained attached all my life ... From the very beginning their (the artist’s) transcendent universality helped to
protect this incipient painter from self-consciousness – from self-conscious nationalism, for instance, inducing picturesque
images perhaps of Irish country folk dressed in the clothes of a preceding generation, or of thatched cottages arranged like
dominoes under convenient hills; images no more respectable in themselves than the sterile Nazi Kultur, or indeed the ordained
Marxist aesthetic of “social reality” with its own insistence on compulsively happy peasants ... For art is neither an instrument
nor a convenience, but a secret logic of the imagination. It is another way of seeing, the whole sense and value of which lies in
its autonomy, its distance from actuality, its otherness.' His return to Dublin coincided with the Irish
Exhibition of Living Art, of which he is a founding-member, establishing an effective forum for contemporary art in Dublin
in 1943. Emerging as an innovative and influential artist, in 1946 le Brocquy moved to London and became prominent in the
contemporary art scene. Assessing the period, Maurice Collis writes in Penguin Parade: 'He experienced in reality the dream of every young painter - to show and to be immediately
acclaimed with enthusiasm. The half-dozen pictures hung at the [[Leicester Galleries were sold along with some others hastily
sent to reinforce them; among the purchasers was the the Contemporary Art Society, an organisation that buys with a view to
presentation to the Tate ... Later in 1946 he showed more pictures in the same gallery, on this
occasion along with other Irish painters. Again the response of the public was instantaneous; the critics, too, for the first
time took serious notice of him. His right course now was to have a one-man show as soon as possible. This was achieved in the
spring of 1947, when some forty of his works were hung at the Gimpel Fils Gallery.'
Important Developments
Le Brocquy's inquiry into the human condition is seminal to his motivation as a painter. This underlying concern has informed
a number of significant developments. As Robert Clark has observed in The Guardian (May 6,
2006): 'There's something reveric and poetic about the entire body of work, as is evidenced by Brocquy's frequent portraits of
fellow Irish greats such as Oscar Wilde, WB
Yeats and Samuel Beckett. Yet Brocquy's poetry is always rigorously painterly and
visual. He never falls off into literary illustration or compositional melodrama. As Francis Bacon once remarked, Brocquy continues to be "obsessed by figuration outside and on the
other side of illustration". And there is certainly a thematic otherness haunting all of his painterly and graphic work, whether
it be the psychologically incisive portraits, ritualised figure gatherings, lyrical still-lifes or the long series of
mist-drenched watercolour landscapes.'
Early Works 1939-1945
Louis le Brocquy,
Girl in Grey,
1939, Ferrens Art Gallery: Hull Museums and Art
Gallery
Early Works (1939-1945) incl. Southern Window (1939; coll.
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane), and A Picnic, (1940; coll.
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Beecher Collection), establish the artist's
ongoing preoccupation with the inward isolation of the individual. Depicting three sitters withdrawn from one another around a
bare tablecloth A Picnic is inspired by [[Degas’ Bain de mer: petite fille peignée par sa bonne (c.1877;
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Lane Bequest 1917), and ukiyo-e woodblock prints (in
which the image is implied beyond the outer frame). The painting’s almost surreal aspect heralds much of the artist’s subsequent
work. The critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith observes: ‘For, in hindsight, the investigation of
interpersonal relationships appears to have been destined from the start to be subordinated in le Brocquy’s work to the
exploration of the individual in isolation. ... A pronounced tendency toward solipsism is evident almost from the very beginning,
as can be seen as early as 1940 in the painting entitled “A Picnic” in which three figures, far from enjoying the communal meal
indicated by the work’s title, turn moodily away from each other in melancholic introspection.’ Le Brocquy explains: ‘I now see
that, in this work, I was already groping towards that invisible reality that lies within us – our most profound reality I
imagine – the spirit, the inner consciousness of the individual human being.
Remarking on the precision, balance and resolution of his handling of paint, Anne Crookshank
notes: ‘From the beginning le Brocquy had remarkable fluency and these early, academic paintings have a beauty and authority
which is astonishing in view of his inexperience.’ Technical skill and dexterity, however, will be viewed with increasing
suspicion by the artist who will come to value accidental discovery above all else: ‘Contrary to a generally held view, I think
that painting is not in any direct sense a means of communication or a means of self-expression. For me at any rate, it is
groping towards an image. When you are painting you are trying to discover, to uncover, to reveal. I sometimes think of the
activity of painting as a kind of archaeology – an archaeology of the spirit. As in archaeology, accident continually plays an
important part. The painter, like the archaeologist, is a watcher, a supervisor of accident; patiently disturbing the surface of
things until significant accident becomes apparent, recognising it, conserving this as best he can while provoking further
accident. In this way a whole image, a whatness, may with luck gradually emerge almost spontaneously. Thus, what counts in
painting is, I believe, recognition of significant accident within a larger preoccupation and not dexterity and skill and
calculated imposition.’ Assessing the artist’s progress during this period, James White,
later a Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1964-80), writes in
Envoy: ‘The born artist, as Mr. Salkeld has suggested, must have some instinctive understanding of
his materials and how to use them. Louis le Brocquy did not go to art school or sit at the feet of any living master to learn his
craft. He learnt to paint, quite simply, by painting ... It must be remarked again that he was still only twenty-two; he had been
handling brushes less than a year. A man who could go so far in that time might be expected to go a great deal further before
long.’ On the outbreak of World War II, le Brocquy’s small rented headland studio in Cap
Martin, France, is requisitioned to install artillery facing Italy (September 1939). Moves to Saint Raphael, cutting his stay short before the invasion of France by German forces (May 1940).
The Tinker paintings 1946-1948
Louis le Brocquy. "Tinkers Resting"
1946,
Tate, London
The Tinker paintings (1946-1948) incl. Tinkers Resting
(coll. Tate Britain) developed concerns relating to their marginal lives. Encounters the tinkers near Tullamore, Co.
Offaly (August 1945). The vitality, mystery and wildness of these travelling people is admired by le Brocquy: 'Most of all
I was impressed by their insistence on freedom - freedom from every external regulation - observing only their own tribal rules,
their tradition. Not, perhaps, altogether unlike the independence of the artist within society.' Described as the
once-dispossessed people of confiscations wandering without security of land, Earnán O'Malley
remarks: 'They are lithe and hardy, sharp in feature, and capable of sudden calls on endurance from their uncertain way of life
in a difficult climate. With them primitive emotions are easily aroused and expressed; their woman drink and fight as readily as
their men, and bear children without halting the day's journey. Their aloofness, intractability, and fierce independence
interested le Brocquy. They are, he could see, outside of the closely organised life of the parish unit, looked on with mistrust
and suspicion ... They become a symbol of the individual as opposed to organised, settled society ... For the creative worker
they could represent the artist who deals in the unexpected and the unrecognised and who suffuses with meaning familiar things.'
Armed with bicycle and sketchbook, the artist produces swiftly executed life-sketches depicting their unruly way of life. The art
critic Dorothy Walker (critic) notes: 'He got on well with them because he was
different from them and did not attempt to identify with them, because they were in fact extremely jealous of their own identity,
of their own language shelta, a form of Irish, and of their own esoteric practices.' The artist explains: 'Faced with
Cromwell's choice to Hell or Connaught, the forebears of the travelling people took a third way. They took to the road. In
time they became the road - that which lies outside the security of settled society - their wild nature as defiantly distinct as
that of a tiger.' According to Alistair Smith: 'Le Brocquy's interest in the travelling way of
being, like Synge's before him, is to be seen in the context of the century's
"discovery" of so-called "primitives", or, rather, of societies where there still exist languages and customs which have not been
eroded by modern society. Le Brocquy appropriates John Millington Synge's notion
of the spiritual bond between the traveller and artist, as Manet and Picasso had done beforehand with Baudelaire's. The elegant
melancholy, however, of Picasso's Blue
Period Saltimbanques, who have much in common with the travelling communities, is
substituted in le Brocquy's tinker paintings with a sense of harsh endurance. In this, the tinker theme may be seen to express a
more generalised predicament in the light of war-torn Europe, mirroring the dangers of an a way of life that, elsewhere, had
ultimately lead to the horrific fate of the Jewish people and Eastern European Gypsies. According to Anne Crookshank: 'They convey the proud isolation and the uncertainties of the travelling life with an
understanding and feeling for the subjects which are very moving. Le Brocquy has said that: “For me the Travelling People
represented, dramatically perhaps, the human condition. During this entire period there is much symbolism in his work, though at
no time does this become an overriding preoccupation. Always the actual picture, its painting and its composition triumph over
the literary and anecdotal content.'
Embarks on Tinker Woman with Newspaper (a.k.a. The Last Tinker, 1947-48), portraying the matriarch of a clan
defiantly clutching the crumpled sheets of an alien world in newsprint: 'I still remember sketching her - as casually as I could
- remote and uncompromising as she was, within the depths of her nature.' Le Brocquy strives to put Byzantine rigour into his work, in its two dimensional force of confrontation: 'Cézanne demonstrated in his late works what had been sensed by Manet, in his symphonic series of paintings from Lola de Valence to Le Balcon.
Matter, the painter's reference and subject, ceased to be expressed objectively as a self-evident solidity, and was now
interpreted as the manifestation of a mysterious inner movement. The amorphous became crystalline, the opaque transparent, the
static kinetic ... At the end of the long avenue of perspective we have reached conviction in surface: surface again may be
exploited to state the conceptual, the metaphysical reality of matter; matter seen as it were from inside out. Today we peer
forward in a fundamentally altered landscape. Glancing backwards from our new position, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic forms gain new reality for us. The tinker theme reaches its ultimate development with the
so-called 'Apocalyptic' paintings. Dr. Brian Kennedy notes: 'In the late 1940s, as the politics
of the cold war settled into place, le Brocquy, like many others, grew uneasy. "In those post-war, cold-war days," he has
written, "we all of us walked in the fear of eventual nuclear disaster obliterating civilised life".' Paints In Fear of
Cain (1948), an image of secreted violence, Fearful World (1948), a throwback to the terrors of primaeval times, and
The Human Child (1948), alluding to W. B. Yeat's poem 'The Stolen Child': Come away, O human child! / To the waters and
the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. According to Alistair
Smith 'Le Brocquy's Man Creating Bird of 1948 is the culmination of the Tinker series. It refers to Picasso's Harlequins or Pierrots, while also invoking a chilhood memory of a Kingfisher. The painting, an exuberant and decorative
response to Picasso's work of the late 1930s, makes it clear that by this time le Brocquy, now resident in London, was working in
an international style which bore only little resemblance to that of his Irish contemporaries.' The artist himself evokes the
painting in stark terms: 'I remember having in mind the puppet, Petrouchka, who
becomes human in Stravinsky's great ballet. But here it is the puppet, man, who is
creating life. An unconscious forecast of the ominous genetic achievement half a century later
The Grey Period 1950-1956
The Grey Period (1950-1956) incl. A Family (coll.
National Gallery of Ireland) contemplated a stark human circumstance in the
aftermath of the war. Embarks on the Grey Period "Family" paintings (c.1951-54), the third distinctive period in the artist's
work. According to John Russell: 'In the early 1950s, above all, he came before us as a man
who was looking for the image that would compound all other images. Anyone who was around at the time and concerned with what was
called "post-war British art" will remember the painting called "A Family" (1951; National Gallery, Ireland).' Widely acknowledged as the artist's masterpiece from the
period, the painting marks a shift in palette from the comparatively colourful work of the late forties to predominant whites and
greys. John Berger writes in Art News and Review: 'His style
has developed and changed; his colours are pale and severe - the Family is mostly grey; his forms, in their movement both across
and into the picture, are precise. This finesse implies - because le Brocquy's motive is always human - a tenderness which is not
sentimental, and a sense of wonder which is exact; one thinks twice about the quite ordinary but in fact miraculous construction
of any man's back, having looked at the father in the Family. Le Brocquy is completely free of contemporary tendency to cosmic
megalomania. It has become pretentious to talk of an artist's humility, yet that is what distinguishes his work; his studies
testify to his patience, and his final, large picture to his refusal to evade simple but difficult problems by relying on the
grandiose cliché.' Conceived in the wake of World War II, the artist explains: 'I have
always been fascinated by the horizontal monumentality of traditional Odalisque painting, the
reclining woman depicted voluptuously by one Master after another throughout the history of European art - Titian's Venus of Urbino, Velasquez' Rokeby Venus turning her back on the Spanish Court,
Goya's Maja clothed and unclothed, Ingres' Reclining Odalisque in her seraglio and finally the great Olympia of Edouard Manet celebrating his favourite model,
Victorine Meurent.
My own painting "A Family" was conceived in 1950 in very different circumstances in face of the atomic threat, social upheaval
and refugees of World War II and its aftermath. The elements in its composition correspond in some ways to those of
Olympia, if not to Manet's cool sensuality.
The female figure in "A Family" may be seen to take on a very different significance. The man, replacing Manet's black servant
with bouquet, sits alone. The bouquet is reduced to a mere wisp held by a child. The Olympian black cat in turn becomes white,
ominously emerging from the sheets. This is how "A Family" appears to me today. Fifty years ago it was painted while
contemplating a human condition stripped back to Palaeolithic circumstance under electric light bulbs. The painting will prompt
John Berger to declare in The New Statesman: 'The right-hand half of the very large Family
group is, by itself, the finest bit of contemporary painting I have seen for a long time, and I am now convinced that le Brocquy
is one of the really promising (in this case that infuriating word is not an excuse but an achievement) British [sic] painters of
his generation.'
According to Alistair Smith: 'The key painting of the group is entitled A Sickness
(1951) which may owe something to the composition of early works by Munch, where, very
often, a figure broods in the foreground over what is happening behind. Here we are witness to two women, one seated and caring,
the other near death, floating within sheets. In the other pictures of the grey series, the mood is of pervading melancholy.
Despite the persistent quotation of elements from Picasso's Pink Period - the bouquets of flowers, the sparse interiors and the similar "intervals" between
the figures - there is nothing of the sweetness of that part of Picasso's oeuvre. Le Brocquy has moved from a perception of his
Irish travellers as outcasts, who thereby possessed a preternatural vitality, to an understanding of dismal entrapped, post-war
urban society, refugees included.'
Eric Newton writes in The Listener: 'Louis le Brocquy is a haunted artist. It would be
easy to praise the pale delicacy of his colour and the angular simplicity of his line. But plenty of contemporary painters have
precisely those gifts - they threaten to become rather tiresome cliché - yet cannot use them for any expressive purpose. Le
Brocquy breaths life into the modish idiom. The familiar tricks become vehicles of a powerful vision. The recumbent woman, the
back view of a man, the small child holding a nosegay of flowers who recur as a leitmotif in more than half the exhibits at
Gimpel Fils, are the raw material for a kind of sonnet in paint, polished and rearranged and played with until it appears in at
least eight different disguises ... Le Brocquy's exhibition establishes him as a lyrical artist with an exceptional evocative
gift.' le Brocquy prepares for his first gallery exhibion in Ireland at the Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin (December 1951):
Paintings and Tapestries, including Negro Woman in White (1951), Child with Doll (1951). John Ryan writes in the
Dublin Evening Mail: 'Louis le Brocquy discovered his peculiarly individual mode of
expression early in his career and courageously employed it even when doing so meant that he had to discard a style which
promised a fashionable and lucrative future as a portrait painter in the traditional manner. That pedestrian opinion has not
forgiven him for this revolt against its standards was amply proved by the deplorable attack on the painter in the
Evening Herald recently. Le Brocquy's stand and his subsequent development as an artist,
however, won him the admiration and respect of intelligent opinion wherever his work has been shown. In great Britain he is
accepted as one of the handful of really brilliant painters of this generation, while America in so far as she has had the
opportunity to judge has reacted similarly. Despite the strictures of the Evening Herald
it is satisfactory to note that the exhibition itself has been an outstanding success in every respect.'
White Period 1956-1966
Le Brocquy's painting underwent a profound development in 1956 with the "White Period Presences"
(1956-1966) incl. Woman (coll. Tate Modern) that radicalised the human figure as an isolated presence. An extensive tour of
Spain in the summer of 1955 signals a turning point in the work. The
artist explains: ‘One day while passing through a village in La Mancha in shimmering heat, I
stopped spellbound before a small group of women and children standing against a whitewashed wall. Here the intensity of the
sunlight had interposed its own revelation, absorbing these human figures into its brilliance, giving substance only to shadow.
From that moment I never perceived the human presence in quite the same way. I had witnessed light as a kind of matrix from which
the human being emerges and into which it ambivalently recedes – with which it even identifies.’ According to John Russell: ‘There was from the very beginning a blanched look about many of his paintings: pure white
light, pure white walls, pure white skin. Bone-white, chalk-white, almond-white were the adjectives that come to mind. Around the
mid-1950s that whiteness, which had been simply a prevailing tonality, became the very element and substance of the
paintings.’
Embarks on the ‘White Period’ Presence paintings (c.1956-66), the fourth distinctive period in the artist’s work. The generic
term is first attributed during the exhibition 50 Ans d’Art Moderne, Brussels, where it is remarked that in his latest work the human figure is no longer an abstraction drawn from
living beings. Rather it has become a magic presence. The artist explains: ‘An essential break occurred, where I began to
concentrate on a single image emerging from a canvas, in which the composition, in the conventional sense of the word, had been
destroyed or ignored. Quite a painful decision, in fact. I had always based myself on being a traditional painter in that I
maintained that composition was important; all that had to be thrown out.’ The artist adds: ‘Then, later, I had the idea of
conjuring up images out of nothing, out of light, out of the depths of the blank canvas, as it were.’ According to Dr Brian Kennedy: ‘The theme which in its first phase was to occupy him for almost a decade, gradually became
a vehicle of exploration for the whole of his later career.’ Alistair Smith writes: 'By the time he represented Ireland in the
Venice Biennale of 1956, he had already abandoned the way of painting which had won him
a major international prize there, and had embarked upon what was to become his most inventive series of works ... The triumphs
of the period were considerable, with le Brocquy producing a body of work which was not only well-wrought and emotionally
convincing, but also, for the first time, original, the sine qua non of modern art. This success was hard won, however. The
establishment of a new subject-matter which dealt more directly with the spirit than with the body, and the recognition of a
working method which admitted a force outside the artist's control. The artist meets the young Irish painter [[Anne Madden in
November 1956, to become his lifelong ever-present inspiration. Paints Young Woman, Anne (1957) belonging to a notable
series of white-on-white compositions. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith notes: 'The title refers to le
Brocquy’s wife, the painter Anne Madden, who was seriously injured in a riding accident in
the mid-1950s and had to undergo a series of painful operations on her spine. Le Brocquy remembers "being filled with an
irrational anger at the aggressive implications of this surgical carpentry" and goes on to note that, quite apart from his
personal feelings of anger, the spine literally continued to form the backbone of the ‘Presences.’ According to Alistair Smith: 'The fact that the painting mimicked the visual circumstances of the artist's life is
important, but more important, if less tangible, were the emotions of the situation - the natural anxieties, apprehensions of
mortality ... The voluptuous aspect of the female torsos, and the fact that wounding (as in surgery) is part of their subject
matter, is clearly the result of the powerful mechanism of sublimation. Despite the origin of the work in his personal life, le
Brocquy was alive to the more universal aspect of what was forming on his canvas ... His paintings quickly came to form a far
more generalised statement on humanity, both male and female, both palpable and ethereal.'
The critic Michael Shepherd writes in Art News and
Review: 'A typical example of le Brocquy's current work is a large canvas covered with pure white ground, or occasionally
modulated to a smooth silvery oriental grey ... The general effect is of a painter who is less interested in superficial
individuality than in catching some evocation of generalised spirit, who inhabits a world in motion, and who brings a scrupulous
delicacy to making of this insubstantial material a calm and composed object for contemplation.' John Russell observes in The Sunday Times
(UK): 'In his beginnings he showed himself a witty observer of his fellow men, a born short-story teller or manager of the
outward look of things. Gradually this dropped away; his palette, too, lightened until little was left but white, silver, and a
rare stain of red ... "presences," he calls them, and the remarkable thing is that they are so undeniably present, and that so
much of their predicament can be deciphered from the fragmentary evidence before us. He is a painter who never outstays the
initial thrust of his ideas; his talent, an authentic one, is pushed to its limit in each phase and then he at once moves to the
next one. This can be said of few painters
Head Series 1964-2006
Louis le Brocquy, "Entremont"
1968,
Fondation Maeght, St.
Paul
The ensuing "Head Series" (1964-2006) incl. Head of an Irish
Martyr (coll. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington)
and Stele: Hommage à Entremont (1968; Collection Fondation Maeght, St Paul) kindle his interest in the Celtic head culture. Le
Brocquy discovers a vital source of inspiration in Polynesian heads, Musée de l'Homme, Paris (winter 1964). The artist is
profoundly impressed by these objects reconstituting the human presence. As he recalls: ‘Skulls, partly remodelled with clay, and
then painted in a decorative way, often with cowrie shells for eyes.’ Anne Madden who accompanies the artist to the
anthropological museum recounts: ‘These head images suggested to him a new human significance. He felt the over-modelling and
painting implied a ritualistic laying on of hands, a recognition of the ancestor’s entity; palpable marks from the outside which
defined and celebrated the spirit within the reconstituted ancestral head.’ The event kindles le Brocquy’s interest in the
Celtic head culture: ‘Like the Celts I tend to regard the head as this magic box containing the
spirit. Enter that box, enter behind the billowing curtain of the face, and you have the whole landscape of the spirit.’
According to Dorothy Walker: ‘The crystallisation of his interest in the remote
past into a twentieth-century version of the old Celtic notion of the head as “the magic box that contains the spirit” is an
intensification of a fundamental obsession: the desire to lay his finger on the pulse of the very earliest manifestation of art
in Ireland, somehow to absorb the autonomy of that anonymous art into his creative energy and to re-show it forth in his own very
different work.’ Embarks on the Ancestral Heads series (c.1964-1975), the fourth distinctive period in the artist’s work.
Alistair Smith remarks: ‘Le Brocquy’s steps towards his position of analyst of the Irish
imagination are fascinating to recount. It would be easy to underestimate in this story of brilliant and famous men the
importance of a small painting of a child called Caroline. Painted in 1956, the year of le Brocquy’s vita nuova, it measures no
more than thirty centimetres across. First exhibited in 1957 with the original group of Presences, it was one of the paintings
which seized the attention of Francis Bacon. Formed through only the minimum of
descriptive brushwork, this is clearly a head which “formed itself” ... The painting is Aristotelean in its premise that the eyes
are the gateway to the soul, save that here the whole indistinct face provides that gateway.’ John Montague further observes: ‘Her eyes and nostrils are staring pinholes in a tossing sea of paint.
Though very small, it is a portrait of real humanity and tenderness, which attempts to do justice to the spirit peering out of
that shapeless face. It seems to me that here we have both the culmination of le Brocquy’s earlier studies of children, immobile
or isolated in rooms, and the unconscious ancestor of his later heads, with their awe before the human.’ Initially anonymous, the
heads later depict specific individuals, including Shakespeare (coll.
Guggenheim, New York City) and
Image Ulterieure de Picasso (1983; Collection Picasso Museum, Antibes), whom the artist
perceived as avatars of consciousness. The artist’s motivation comes about through a commission by the Swedish gallery-owner
[[Per-Olov Börjesson who was assembling a portfolio of thirty-three aquatints of Nobel
prizewinners by international artists. Le Brocquy remarks: ‘From among the several Irish Nobel prizewinners at that date I chose
Yeats as my subject, having known him when I was a boy and because of his vast and
mysterious personality. I made a number of studies for my final aquatint, and was struck by their diversity. It was then I
realised that a portrait can no longer be the stable, pillared entity of Renaissance vision
– that the portrait in our time can have no visual finality.’
John Montague observes: ‘So the le Brocquy who rejected an early career as a portrait
painter finds himself, as all artists do, back where he started, but with an added richness.' Embarks on the Portrait Heads
series, the fifth distinctive period in the artist’s work. Le Brocquy explains: ‘In order to produce a human image which has some
kind of contemporary relevance, you have to recognise that certain factors which have arisen in the last hundred years have
revolutionised the way we look at things. Because of photography and the cinema on the one hand, and psychology on the other, we
can no longer regard a human being as a static entity, subject to merely biological change ... Replacing the single definitive
image by a series of inconclusive images has, therefore, perhaps something to do with contemporary vision, perceiving the image
as a variable conception rather than a definitive manifestation in the Renaissance sense ... Repetition, on the other hand,
implies not linear but circular thought, a merry-go-round interpretation of reality, another form of completion, another whole,
which can be entered or left at any point. This latter counter-Renaissance tendency is, curiously enough, already evident here
and there within our Irish tradition, from The Book of Kells and Lindisfarne to Finnegans Wake.’ Dorothy Walker (critic) notes: ‘His heads of writers derive directly from his earlier heads of
ancestors, as being spirits, like the great father-figures of Yeats and
Joyce, who still influence our consciousness. He is not interested in the traditional portrait,
the single static image, feeling that photography has superceded (sic) the documentary role of the
painted likeness. He is primarily interested in creating an image of a human face which by its own autonomy as a work of art will
convey the inner presence of a human personality with greater intensity than any depiction, however skilled, of external
appearance. He seeks among multiple images of the same person an epiphanic flash of what lies hidden behind “the billowing
curtain of the face”, and to make palpable what is sensed in the image of an individual trapped within the canvas. His method is
distinctly Proustian, in which the “quick” of the epiphany is caught by involuntary
accident.'
Prompted on his choice of subjects the artist explains: ‘I’m drawn to their work, yes, certainly, and in each case, before
beginning to paint, I have tried to steep myself as deeply as possible in it. On the other hand, I don’t think of them so much as
famous or brilliant men but as vulnerable, especially poignant human beings who have gone further than the rest of us and for
that reason are more isolated and moving. Above all, I was drawn to the journey they had made through life and the wide world of
their vision.’ Turns to heads of Federico García Lorca. Anne Crookshank observes: ‘Although le Brocquy studies intensively the background of the figures he paints,
reads what they have written, and much of what has been written about them, his works are not didactic. They seem so
authoritative that they can be awe-inspiring. But, in fact, they require the viewer’s cooperation for real understanding. They do
not aim at instantaneous revelation. Sometimes the veils are lifted and a vivacious, flickering reality seems to pour out of the
canvas, but this is rare. They are themes with infinite variations, meditations of quiet, still beauty.’
Louis le Brocquy,
Image of Federico Garcia Lorca, 1977
Le Brocquy remarks: ‘In the case of Lorca, I have even been moved to add to the series of
paintings several further studies in bronze of his forehead, Os frontis [Michaelucci Foundry, Montecatini, ed. 6, 1977] in an
attempt to touch that broad tabernacle of his vision: Oh, city of Gypsies!... ? / Who could see you and forget? / Let them
seek you on my brow / The play of moon and sand. I am aware that that vision lies far from my own country which gave birth to
Yeats and Joyce. Lorca,
far away, lending his Iberian temperament and his voice to the cries of his own people, echoing within his “astonished flesh”.
For me, an Irishman, it was curiously enough the plays of Synge which provided the
key to an understanding of [[Lorca’s fierce, lyrical world. Synge, with his ear
pressed against the floorboards, passionately noting the marvellous vernacular of the Wicklow people in the room below. It was
only quite recently that I was told by Mark Mortimer in Paris that
Lorca knew and admired the works of John Millington
Synge. Meets Samuel Beckett through Con Leventhal,
the playwright’s professor at Trinity College, forming a close friendship in
Paris until Beckett’s death in 1989. The journalist Anne Cremin reports: ‘Louis le Brocquy has been attracted to Beckett’s
remarkable face and has created haunting images of Beckett. Unlike the Israeli artist, Avigdor
Arikha, he does not aim to produce a portrait or likeness as such, but rather what he calls “studies towards an image.”
... (Beckett) speaks with warmth and affection of Louis le Brocquy and his wife, the painter Anne
Madden.’ Asked whether the fact of knowing his subjects bears influence on his work, the artist responds: ‘It’s an
advantage, but it’s also an inhibiting thing. I mean, you may feel it to be an impertinence to be playing with their appearance
in this way – and also a distortion to place them outside time, as it were, in the matrix I referred to. Particularly since
people believe – it’s a reaction I’ve often come across during exhibitions – that in some way you’re making a “statement” about
the person you’ve painted. I’m not making a statement at all, you know, I’m simply trying to discover, to uncover, aspects of the
Beckettness of Beckett, the Baconness of Bacon.' Jean-François Jaeger, Director of the
Galerie Jeanne-Bucher, Paris remarks: ‘A veritable adventure in itself is implied in the choice
of the subject, in the nature of personality which the artist evokes – and in the wide-open risk of letting himself be invaded by
that subject even to the point of abandoning all thought of an individual style. I myself feel happier in contemplating the
intense image of Joyce or those rather sharper images of Beckett than I am before the Fellini-like portraits of Bacon, even when the latter are utterly true and of such power and refinement
in their sensuality as to create an impression of positively sharing in the discovery of Bacon by himself, in the act of becoming
Bacon.’ According to Anne Madden: ‘Sam bore up nobly when confronted with the artist’s
reconstructions of his handsome creviced face, his pale piercing eyes. He chuckled as Louis told him of Francis Bacon’s reservations when he viewed his own image in the gallery before the opening.
Notwithstanding Bacon’s declared admiration of Louis’ images of Yeats, Joyce and Lorca and his
initial enthusiasm in a letter to Louis: “I am very flattered you have included me amongst your portraits”, he was silent before
Louis’ distortion of his appearance.
Gilles Plazy writes in Quotidien de Paris (trans.): ‘What a joy it is to discover a work with an undeniable presence! How
should we view the density of a work which will not allow itself to be polluted by the mass-media, a work with simple force that
aims solely at ultimate truth! While the Dali hullabaloo is held at Beaubourg, the intervention of Louis le Brocquy’s paintings in the rue de Seine impose an
admirable comparison ... The painting itself appears at first sight featureless, small touches of vivid colour brushed on little
by little in apparent confusion; when, from that very confusion, is born the dominant features of a face. Working in masses, in
planes, building as did Cézanne before him. In his watercolours, in which he appears as an
astonishing master, here his work recalls Redon: impossible to tell whether a
face is emerging or disappearing ... The adventure in art, the interior adventure, this is where it takes place with Louis le
Brocquy, under the aegis of James Joyce and Samuel
Beckett.’
John Russell writes in The New York Times:
‘By general consent the most distinguished of living Irish painters, Louis le Brocquy, has for years been meditating on the
variability of the human head as it is found in people of genius.[ W. B. Yeats,
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are the most often
studied, with García Lorca, Strindberg
and Francis Bacon to vary the plot. Where most painters resent or gloss over the
hit-or-miss element in portraiture, le Brocquy welcomes it into the studio as an indispensable familiar. No one image can be
definitive, in his view, and the act of portraiture should be a long and patient siege, as distinct from a headlong assault.'
Aidan Dunne remarks: ‘In a way these portraits are a high cultural equivalent of Andy Warhol’s [[silkscreen paintings of celebrity icons like Elvis
Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth
Taylor. Both bodies of work emerged initially in the same decade, the 1960s, and they might be seen to converge in one of
the most recent of le Brocquy’s subjects, Bono.
Louis le Brocquy, "Image of Pablo Picasso"
1979,
Picasso Museum,
Antibes
If Warhol were still around, Bono would surely be at the
top of his to-do list. Yet there is clearly a tension between Warhol’s infatuation with the vacuity of celebrity culture and le
Brocquy’s endorsement of the individual creative imagination. It comes down to a question of depth. For Warhol, everything is
surface, whereas le Brocquy pledges allegiance to dense and complex layers of meaning, somehow bound up in the painted surface.
Cultural Icons are, he implies, much more than depthless signs. But it’s not as simple as that. His evocations of individual
heads, living or dead, come with a rider. They are Studies towards an image of ... and they occur in sequential multiples rather
than single, definitive versions. Like Warhol, le Brocquy had realised that portraiture was a problematic genre by the mid-20th
century. In attempting to embody a presence in paint while acknowledging that it was an unattainable goal, he signalled both his
ambition and the current limits of that ambition. The subjects of his heads veer between virtual anonymity and iconic status.
Ancestral Head, for example, is effectively anonymous but marks out the territory: not so much making a portrait per se as
engaging in an “archaeology of the spirit”, reconstructing not likeness but imaginative life. Throughout his long bouts of
wrestling with his named subjects – a list that also includes Federico García
Lorca, Seamus Heaney, Francis
Bacon and Pablo Picasso – likeness is both a boon and an encumbrance. It grounds
the image, but can also tie it to a formulaic restatement of familiar features. When the balance is right, le Brocquy manages to
engender a feeling of tenuous, fugitive presence, providing a glimpse into the mysterious complexity of mental life and spirit.
There is also a sense of cultural placement, not in the sense of merely iterating an Irish literary canon – though that is an
obvious danger – but in terms of locating particular sensibilities and imaginations in terms of historically derived identity, a
view of individual consciousness as extending forwards and backwards in time, in terms of genetic and other, more conscious
influences.'
Procession Series 1984-1992
In 1988 le Brocquy undertook a major series of works entitled "Processions", in an impressive succession of oil paintings,
watercolours and lithographs (1984-92). The artist notes: 'Recently I've been painting some images of Picasso - Picasso, as we know, a being in whom the power and joy of life were uniquely personified. Yet
for me this is not what altogether emerges in the paintings I've made of this promethean man. I imagine most of these heads are -
when they emerge at all - essentially tragic; pertaining as they do to the past, to memory, to reflection ... Nature is by
definition ever present. It has no past other than its soil. I've tended to refer back to nature recently. I don't think,
however, a painter consciously chooses his way. He hasn't much say in the matter, not much decision. He simply does his best to
catch some kind of inner tide, to avoid being stranded. Often I am stranded, but just now I seem to have caught a sort of ebb
tide, to have returned to an older preoccupation in a shift back to natural things around me - to growing plants and fruit and
goldfish and fantail pigeons. Perhaps this is simply a temporary release from the heads and their rather intense reflective
consciousness, their tragic aspect. A return to a simple state of being, emerging in its own nature, filling out its little
volume of reality with the various natural possibilities of its form.' Dorothy
Walker writes: 'Le Brocquy's peonies are the epitome of his intention to transmute the reality of an object into the
reality of an image by the medium of oil paint. The medium is rich, palpable, almost luscious, recreating in terms of paint the
reality of a peony, and indicating its floral identity by the merest deft reference. Similarly in his paintings of doves or
fantailed white pigeons their fluttery featheriness is transmuted into fluttery white paint not by attempting any realistic
reproduction of a dove but by means of an image having its own inherent reality. Even in his paintings of goldfish, le Brocquy
has created a more intense reality than one could imagine emanating from that somewhat cool customer.' Le Brocquy's still-life
paintings originate in the early 1940s with Still life with Book and Penny (1941), and, later, in the 1950s with Still life with
Apples (1951), Study for Flowers (1953), Still life with Grapes (1955). The paintings of single fruit on darkly stained grounds
of the 1960s lead to a notable body of work in the 1970s, including Fruit Now and Then (1970; A.R. 353), Fruit in the Hand (1974;
A.R. 355), Lemon, Newsprint (1974; A.R. 357). The ensuing studies of lilies revive an earlier preoccupation with children in
procession.
Dorothy Walker notes: 'The image of these jeunes filles en fleur (et aux
fleurs) has been simmering in the artist's mind since 1939 when a friend in Dublin sent him, to France where he was then living,
a newspaper cutting from the Evening Herald showing a group of young girls in white First
Communion dresses, coming around a corner, laughing and carrying white lilies. The caption to the photograph was "Schoolgirls
returning from Church after the blessing of the Lilies on the Feast of St Anthony." The date on the newspaper was 16 June 1939,
the date of the publication of Finnegan's Wake ... He was also struck by the
complementary paradoxes in the image, the togetherness and the scattered individuality: all the faces facing forward, all caught
up not merely in a communal event but also in a common physical movement, the movement of a flock, in their rush around the
corner of the street. Later on, he was also struck by the haphazard conjunction of dates, that this epiphanic Dublin photograph
should have been published on the same day as Finnegan's Wake. The image of happy,
excited children was sharpened by the poignancy of the date, Bloomsday 1939, so soon before the doomsday of war, almost the last Bloomsday of
Joyce's life ... Le Brocquy has spent so much of his working life inside Joyce's head, as it were,
that this simple, accidental newspaper cutting thus assumed further significance for him. It seemed to him to be an illumination
of Joyce's own words, a "fluid succession of presents", a chain of present moments, a river of life.' The artist explains: 'I
made a few watercolours and drawings on the theme in the mid-forties which were followed some twenty years later by further
studies and two surviving canvases. It was not until 1984 that this procession with lilies returned to haunt me, interposed
within my work for nine consecutive years, giving rise to an ongoing series of oils and watercolours and lithographs.' Embarks on
the Procession paintings (1984-1992), the sixth distinctive phase in the work. The artist re-addresses the seminal Riverrun.
Procession with Lilies (1962; A.R. 75), alongside a second composition originating in very different circumstances: 'That was in
1953, I remember I was living in London. One day I visited the Matthiesen Gallery in Bond Street.
It was exhibiting works from the school of Rembrandt, one of which was by Nicholas Maes [since reattributed to Cornelis Bischopp (1630-1674)] ... Its
stilled, interlinked gestures intrigued me, and something indefinable beyond them. Early the following year, I completed the
first version of Children in a Wood.' The Procession theme will lead to eight large-scale definitive works and numerous
preparatory studies. Discussing the contrasting connection between the two themes, le Brocquy says: 'It was not until quite
recently that I consciously recognised a relationship between these two youthful processions ... two sides of the same phenomenal
coin: one a Joycean charade, a fleeting actuality in a continuous progression of present moments, the other, as I see it, a
constant condition of being, a return in the mind to the sensuous magic of childhood, when meaning lay within each hollow tree
and time was a measure of eter
