Louis le Brocquy: The New Work

Irish Arts Review

Louis le Brocquy: The New WorkAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 12-17Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491714 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

LOUIS LE BROCQUY: THE NEW WORK

Pigeon in Flight. 1984. Oil on canvas. 50 x 65cm.

For twenty years, the greater part of Louis le Brocquy's painting has been

concerned with the head image, with the reiteration of the Celtic idea of the head as 'a magic box that contains the spirit', as the artist himself has put it, and with 'trying to glimpse the interior landscape behind the billowing curtain of the face'.

After this lengthy proper study of man, and indeed specifically of the male gender - Le Brocquy has never made a study towards an image of a woman

writer and it is quite a touching realiza tion that almost the only female images he has made in those twenty years of

head images have been of his mother, Sybil le Brocquy, and of his wife, Anne

Madden - the artist is now turning towards nature and, as part of that, to a

major series of paintings of little girls carrying lilies.

The image of these jeune filles en fleur (et aux fleurs) has been simmering in the artist's mind since 1939 when a friend in Dublin sent to him, to France

where he was then living, a newspaper cutting from the Evening Herald show ing a photograph of a group of young girls in white First Communion dresses, coming round a corner, laughing and carrying white lilies. The caption to the photograph was "Schoolgirls returning

Dorothy Walker, contributing editor to

Studio Intemational and the leading authority on the work of

the Irish painter Louis Le Brocquy, explains the background to this

artist's new work in which he tums towards nature.

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 Finnegans Wake.

The feast of St Anthony, a popular saint whose main miraculous function, as everyone knows, lies in his unfailing knack of finding things that have been lost, is the day for the yearly blessing of lilies. The fragrant flower has been associated with the Franciscan saint for centuries, more specifically since 1680 when a freshly cut lily had been placed in the hands of his statue in a church in

Austria; for a whole year the flower remained fresh and white, then the fol lowing year bore two lilies which filled the church with their scent. The fact

was testified to by many eye-witnesses, among them Don Carlo Giotti who made an official report of the miracul ous event on August 11, 1681. Permis

sion to bless lilies in honour of St Anthony was given by Pope Leo XIII, and the ceremony still takes place every year on 13 June at the Franciscan Church of Adam and Eve at Merchants' Quay, Dublin.

Le Brocquy was initially taken with the image itself, the freshness of the children's laughing faces, crowding round the corner and stopping, giggl ing, blushing, when confronted with the unknown photographer. It is a photo graphic epiphany of a community moment, a cultural epiphany, and quite a remarkable photograph as such.

He was also struck by the comple mentary paradoxes in the image, the togetherness and the scattered individ uality: 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 Finnegans Wake. The image of happy, excited children was sharp ened by the poignancy of the date, Bloomsday 1939, so soon before the doomsday of war, almost the last Blooms

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

LOUIS LE BROCQUY: THE NEW WORK

Bignonia Growing. 1984. Oil on canvas. 38X46 CM.

day of Joyce's life: he left Paris the fol lowing year, in December 1940, and died in Zurich in January 1941. Le Brocquy has spent so much of his work ing life inside Joyce's head, as it were, that this simple, accidental newspaper cutting thus assumed further signifi cance 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.

Before the present series, he had painted several earlier versions of Procession with lilies, small studies as early as 1945, and larger works in the late fifties and early sixties in which

white, palely indicated figures were dancing along, somewhat in the manner of his 1954 painting Children in a wood, after Nicholas Maes. The paintings have a similar composition of prancing, danc ing figures, but are quite different in colour, the children in a wood veering towards 'a green thought in a green shade' while the girls with lilies are bathed in a whiteness of scented blossom. A large canvas of 1962, Proces sion of girls with lilies remained in Ireland in the collection of the Great Southern Hotels but was later sold at auction for a huge profit; possibly the only profitable activity ever under taken by CIE was its investment in

works of art. The theme was also used by Le

Brocquy in his large tapestry Figures in procession 1963 (2m x 3.5m) woven by V'Soske Joyce & Co at Oughterard for the Intercontinental Hotel, now jury's. In this work, the dominant motif has been isolated and condensed into an almost abstract linear composition carried by a white line recessed in a rich blue tufted surface.

These isolated warning puffs have now erupted in a sudden volcanic flow of inspiration, a gerbe of children and flowers leading the artist out of his long obsession with men's faces and human consciousness into the fresh air and natural forms. The lilies have led to other flowers like the peonies which had been heralded by his Homage to

Manet, a small painting in the Artists for Amnesty donation in 1982. Manet was always one of Le Brocquy's most revered painterly ancestors from the time when he taught himself to paint by studying the Old Masters in the great galleries of Europe. Manet's peonies appear in small still life paintings in the Louvre and again, most charmingly, at the bottom of the portrait of Eva

Gonzalez in the Lane Collection. 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 fan-tailed white pigeons: their fluttery featheriness is transmuted into fluttery white paint not by attempting any realistic reproduc tion 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 emana ting from that somewhat cool customer. If not even Solomon in all his glory

was arrayed as one of the lilies of the field, then not even the Queen of Sheba could rival the dumb, frightened goldfish shimmying through a succes sion of present moments in a ukioye flow of self-images reflected in the side of her bowl, and bathed in the art-light refracted from the relativity of all living things.

Parallel to this 'return to nature', Le Brocquy has quietly continued his varied studies of the head, pre-occupied particularly by two widely different images, Shakespeare and Picasso. Of these recent works, five canvases and six watercolours have been acquired by the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Columbus Museum, Ohio; the San

Diego Museum of Art, California, and the Picasso Museum, Antibes, France.

Dorothy Walker

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Louis le Brocquy: The New Work