The extensive tour of Spain in the summer of 1955, signals
a turning point in the work: '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.'118 Le Brocquy's revelatory vision of whiteness
is curiously echoed by an earlier experience while living at Albert Studios,
recorded by Anne Madden: 'Snow had blanketed the city during the night.
He woke to a white world with no relation to yesterday's actuality, silent,
unmarked, as he walked out in the morning and crossed Albert Bridge Road
into Battersea Park. As he moved through the stillness of the other world
without footprint, the only sound the thump of snow from an overweighted
bough, under the little bridge he was crossing a heron rose suddenly from
the matrix of snow, hung in the air quite still for a moment, then flapped
away in slow motion.'119 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 themid-1950's that whiteness,
which had been simply a prevailing tonality, became the very element and
substance of the paintings.'120 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, World Fair, Brussels,1958,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. Caoimhín Mac Giolla
Léith notes: 'Le Brocquy's choice of the individual human form,
occluded and isolated within a mostly undifferentiated ground, as the pre-eminent
motif in his paintings from 1956 to 1964 was partly a refinement of previous
subject-matter and partly the result ofthe revelation to which we have already referred. The painting that relates most
closely to the epiphanic encounter in La Mancha is 'Figures in Sunlight'
(1956) in which an adult woman is accompanied by the figure of a young
child. This is still a transitional work. The artist concedes that its
composition suggests a relationship between these two figures, which is
further accentuated by an arm form entering the picture frame from the
right. This incidentally establishes a certain continuity with an earlier
exploration of the family unit undertaken in a series of paintings of figures
in darkened interiors produced between 1951 and 1954, sometimes referred
to as 'The Family Paintings'. Yet one suspects that for le Brocquy this
sense of continuity is to some extent fortuitous, and far outweighed by
the sense of rupture and new beginnings heralded by 'Figures in Sunlight'.
It seems likely that the arrangement of figures in this painting, which
approximates to those the artist actually perceived in La Mancha, was principally
dueto a desire for fidelity to the particular circumstances of an important
and enabling vision.'121 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 thatI maintained that composition
was important; all that had to be thrown out.'122 ... 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.'123 According to 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.'124
Paints Ging Heut' Morgen Ûbers Feld (1956),inspired by Gustav Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen.
John Montague observes: 'Something happened to le Brocquy in the mid-fifties,
a new feeling for painting, a draining away of formal inessentials to present
the central image more directly ... The whole cycle (usually knownas Songs
of a Wayfarer) is about a heartbroken lover wandering through the summer
fields. Le Brocquy uses the simplest means to suggest this counterpoint
of sorrow and jubilance, dividing the canvas in two areas of light and
shadow, with the central figure striding forward, despite the ridges of
his coat or cloak. It is a minute but forceful image of survival, a Watteau-like
tribute to nature, broken down to its contrasting elements.'125 Paints Caroline (1956), a tentative image of a child with Down's Syndrome.
Acknowledged as a seminal work in the artist's oeuvre, 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 centimeters 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.'126 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.'127
In June 1956,
le Brocquy attracts international attention at the Venice Biennale, where
his painting A Family (1951) is awarded the Premio Acquisito
Internationale and included in Mostra dei Premiatialla XXVIII Biennale,
Messina. Assessing this period of intense creativity, 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 periodwere 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.'128 The artist meets the young Irish
painter Anne Madden in November 1956, to become his lifelong ever-present
inspiration. Paints Young Woman, Anne (1957; A.R. 0020), 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.'129 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.'130 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.'131 Exhibition at Gimpel Fils,
London (February 1957): Paintings, twenty works, including Lovers (1957; A.R. 0018), Nude in Movement (1957; A.R. 0019), Presence (1957, A.R. 0026). John Russell writes in The Sunday Times: '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.'132
NEXT
118 Statement made to the editor, January 2005.
119 Anne Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy: A Painter Seeing his Way (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994), p. 6.
120 John Russell, 'Introduction', Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy (Dublin: Ward River Press 1981; London: Hodder & Stoughton 1982), p.
12.
121 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings
of Louis le Brocquy', notes, 2003.
122 Louis le Brocquy, 'Harriet Cooke Talks to Louis le Brocquy', The
Irish Times (Dublin, 25 May 1973).
123 Le Brocquy, Michael Peppiatt, 'Interview with Louis le Brocquy', Art
International, Lugano, Vol. XXIII/7, October 1979, p. 66. Reproduced
in Louis le Brocquy, The Head Image (Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1996),
p. 24.
124 S. B. Kennedy, exhibition catalogue, Anne Madden, Louis le Brocquy (Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, August 11 - 8 October,
2000).
125 John Montague, 'Primal Scream, The Later le Brocquy', The Arts in
Ireland, Vol. 2. No I (Dublin, 1973), p. 4.
126 Alistair Smith, 'Louis le Brocquy: On the Spiritual in Art', exhibition
catalogue Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 - 1996, (Dublin: Irish
Museum of Modern Art, October 1996 - February 1997), p. 37.
127 John Montague, 'Primal Scream, The Later le Brocquy', The Arts in
Ireland, Vol. 2. No I (Dublin, 1973), p. 4.
128 Alistair Smith, 'Louis le Brocquy: On the Spiritual in Art', exhibition
catalogue Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 - 1996, (Dublin: Irish
Museum of Modern Art, October 1996 - February 1997), p. 36.
129 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings
of Louis le Brocquy', notes, 2003.
130 Alistair Smith, 'Louis le Brocquy: On the Spiritual in Art', exhibition
catalogue Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 - 1996, (Dublin: Irish
Museum of Modern Art, October 1996 - February 1997), p. 16.
131 Michael Shepherd, 'Louis le Brocquy', Art News and Review (London.
September 23, 1961).
132 John Russell, 'Explorers', The Sunday Times (London, March 10,
1957).
|
Ging Heut' Morgen Ubers Feld, 1956
oil on canvas, 30 x 25 cm
Caroline, 1956
oil on canvas mounted on board, 12.7 x 15.2 cm
Young Woman, 1957
oil on canvas, 112 x 86 cm, AR0020
|