Travellers, colour-inverted, 1948-1999
Aubusson Tapestry, 180 x 100 cm
Adam's, 30 May 2007
Sold €205,955 (including AAR)
Artist's Notes
 In Dublin during the early forties, I became interested in
the effect of colour, particularly in the relationship of the chromatic
scale in music to the twelve subdivisions of the primary colours, red,
yellow and blue. I still have some remaining charts I made at the National
Library in which I attempted to relate musical notes to their corresponding
colours by means of their comparative vibrations. I was fascinated by the
possibilities of reconstructing musical chords in pure colour. In paintings
I made at the time, such as Spanish Shawl (1942) I did in fact manage
to incorporate major and minor 'colour chords' for their emotional resonance. At the same time I was also excited by the dramatic effect
caused by the visual inversion of both colour and tone. I then noted:
Further to the emotional character of single and interrelated
colour, lies the magic of colour reversal. Staring fixedly at a colour
or colours, the 'saturated' eye - shifting to a white surface - precisely
inverts colour both in hue and in tonality. A retinal 'memory' emerges inverted, an entirely new perception as contrary as night from day.
Some years later in London (1948 - 52) I designed a number
of tapestries for Tabard Frères et Soeurs, Aubusson, which included Travellers, Garlanded Goat, and the Eden series. These tapestries
were designed by means of a technique I learned directly from the master
in this medium, Jean Lurçat. No coloured cartoon is involved. Instead
a purely linear cartoon defines areas within which a range of coloured
wools are indicated by numbers. But, further to these first cartoons, my excitement regarding
the drama of colour-inversion encouraged me to make at the time second
versions of these linear cartoons, inverted both in colour and tone. I have had to wait some fifty years before these colour-inverted
cartoons could be woven at Aubusson by the great Lissier René
Duché who along with my son Pierre has at last enabled me to realise
their inverted transformation of mood, 'as contrary as night from day.
Read on
Allegory, 1950
Aubusson tapestry, 152 by 181 cm
James Adam & Bonhams, Dublin, Important Irish Art, 31 May 2000
Sold €205,014 - 130,297 GBP
 Woven at Aubusson by Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs in an edition of 9, Allegory is the third tapestry that le Brocquy designed, having `rather stumbled into by accident' this particular form of artistic expression. Following the first Edinburgh Weavers commission of 1948, le Brocquy turned to the medium `as a kind of recreation, involving completely different problems; it is refreshing in the sense that one is exhausted in a different way...' (the artist in interview with Harriet Cooke, published in The Irish Times on 25th May 1973). Conceived in 1950, Allegory marks a dramatic, and indeed refreshing departure in terms of colour, mood and feeling from the artist's contemporary Grey Period paintings (see for example, Child with Flowers, lot 117, and Study (Man with a Towel), lot 122). As Dorothy Walker has explained, the delineation of the figures and the harlequin patterns relate directly back to the celebratory influence of Picasso. However, the more general surface pattern, with its overlapping planes and interlocking forms, points instead to the powerful stylistic - and conceptual - influence of Jean Lurçat, the key tapestry revivalist of the twentieth century. In his 1956 essay on Lurçat, le Brocquy explained his mentor's `central conviction' concerning the inter-relation of all matter. He recounted how, `sitting in my London studio recently he enlarged on this theme, carefully discovering the small, golden reflections and broken shadows which his glass of whisky cast around it. Books, table, papers, trouser leg, even the rush matting on the floor, were decorated by its presence, proclaiming for him the woven interdependence of all things' (quoted in Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Ward River Press, Dublin, p.30). In this same essay le Brocquy commended Lurçat's `own highly particular display of age-old symbols. Here, on an unfolding surface, the sun and his herald, the cock, once more proclaim with pagan fervour the potency of natural life, while man and dog alike are in life, in death, related to the leaves.' Although le Brocquy's own Allegory design is clearly indebted to Lurçat and the idiom is far removed from his concurrent work in oil, the subject matter itself can nevertheless be reconciled with that of the paintings. By 1950, the artist had begun to find pictorial form for the existential anxieties of the moment. Le Brocquy has spoken of how, `in these post-war, Cold War days, we all of us walked in fear of potential nuclear disaster obliterating civilised life' (quoted by Alistair Smith, Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-1996, Irish Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue, 1996, p.36). In ancient times, abstract concepts of life and death, time and timelessness were represented in narrative or pictorial form using characters and symbols. These concepts are those that le Brocquy has been deeply concerned with throughout his artistic career, the duration of which has been characterised by an ongoing quest for quintessential, irreducible symbols. With this tapestry, le Brocquy drew attention to the allegorical form and its relevance to modern existence. His interpretation of the theme in tapestry form has, moreover, become one of the key works upon which his international reputation as a tapestry designer now rests.
Travellers, 1948
Aubusson Tapestry, 180 x 100 cm
Mealy's, Cork, The Goldberg Collection, 5 October 2004
Sold €140,400
 In 1948 , Edinburgh Tapestry Weavers, an ancient industry under the patronage of the then Marquis of Bute, invited a number of painters, working in London, to design tapestries. The artists included Stanley Spencer, Jankel Adler, Graham Sutherland and Louis le Brocquy, who later continued his work in this medium in collaboration with the Tabard workshop at Aubusson in France. His first tapestry continued his preoccupation with the travelling people: Travellers 1948 was exhibited originally by the Arts Council in London in 1950. It depicts a woman and a young child with an old faun-like figure of a man: the delineation of the figures is strongly influenced by Picasso but the weaving of the tapestry with its overall surface of leaves and shadow patterns is much indebted to Lurçat, so that an intriguing cross fertilisation of Picasso/Lurçat here takes place in the forms of an Irish travelling family. It is curious that le Brocquy's interest in colour, and his
admiration for the great colourists from Titian to Manet and Matisse, has
scarcely been reflected in his painting subsequent to the so-called Traveller period of the late Forties. In his grey period of the Fifties and his subsequent
white paintings, colour is used with the utmost restraint. Tapestry, however,
gave him an unbounded if spasmodic outlet in his feelings for colour, already
evident in his first works in the medium, Travellers, Garlanded Goat,
Allegory and the Eden series. For these the artist made linear
cartoons, a technique he learned directly from the great tapestry reformist,
Jean Lurçat, numbered according to the Gamme or range of
coloured wools provided by the Aubusson weavers, Tabard Frères et
Soeurs. | Read on
 Garlanded Goat, colour-inverted, 1949-50-1999
Aubusson Tapestry, 158 by 130 cm
Adam's, 30 May 2007
Sold €135,872 (excluding AAR)
 Adam and Eve in the Garden, colour-inverted,
1952-1999
Aubusson Tapestry, 158 by 130 cm
Adam's, 30 May 2007
Sold €118,150 (excluding AAR)
Adam and Eve in the Garden,
1952
Aubusson tapestry, 136 x 270 cm
Christies, London, Important British
& Irish Art, 30 November 2000
Sold 75,250 GBP
- €110,000
LOT NOTES
 Referring to le Brocquy's preoccupation with the subject, Dorothy Walker writes: 'he treats the theme with archetypal imagery in a classical, even traditional manner, the sun and the moon appearing respectively in the male and female spheres. The tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil appears as in traditional French medieval tapestry with the birds and butterflies among its leaves, but he adds a surrealist aspect with eyes as well as leaves (as befits a tree of Knowledge) and fish swimming in its branches. In the style of drawing, the tapestry corresponds closely to the paintings of the period, particularly the figure of the man, which is closely related to Man Writing, 1951'.
Adam and Eve in the Garden is one of the artist's greatest achievements in the medium of tapestry and among the finest modernist works to be woven at Aubusson. A weaving of this edition is in the collection of the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
 The Garlanded Goat, 1949-50
Aubusson wool tapestry, 158 by 130 cm
Whyte's Irish Art Auctioneers and Valuers, Dublin, June 13, 2001
Sold €106,654
 Mille Têtes; Cuchulainn II, 1973
Aubusson tapestry, 136 x 270 cm
Christies, London, Important British
& Irish Art, 30 November 2000
Sold £49,350
LOT NOTES
The present work, based on the saga of Tàin, belongs to the artist's ongoing Cùchulainn series, in which the hero's fierce trophies are displayed in triumph. Speaking of these colourful tapestries, le Brocquy has said: 'I have tried to produce a sort of group or mass emergence of human presence, features uncertain - merely shadowed blobs or patches - but vaguely analogous perhaps in terms of woven colour to the weathered, enduring stone boss-heads of Clonfert or Entremont - or of Dysert O'Dea... This poses a difficult pictorial problem. Pictorially a mass of individuals, conscious of each other, implies incident - better left to photography perhaps. In Clonfert each individual head is conscious only of the viewer facing it. This I think is the secret of their mass regard. Each head is self-contained, finally a lump of presence. No exchange or incident takes place between their multiplied features' (see Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1981, pp. 51-52).
A weaving of this edition is in the collection of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin.
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