Commissioned by Liam Miller, completes ninety calligraphic brush drawings
for James Joyce's Dubliners. Published by The Dolmen Press, Dublin,
1986, the edition is originally envisaged by Kevin M. Cahill, President
General, American Irish Historical Society, New York. Encouragement is provided by Stephen J. Joyce to whose sympathetic
approval the book owes its existence. The artist notes: 'The Táin drawings. are unique in my work in discovering a purely calligraphic
interpretation of the heroic fantasy of the epic, completely free of any
descriptive drawing. James Joyces Dubliners was quite a different
matter, involving the precise nature and appearance of Dublin life at the
turn of the century. Again the illustrations throughout are inblack but
here they are drawn with the rough sliver of bambou I carved for myself.'262
The artist's illustrations are admired by Samuel Beckett who requests the
artist's collaboration on Stirrings Still, his valedictory work
published in 1988 by Barney Rosset and John Calder. Exhibition at the Taylor
Galleries, Dublin (November 1986): Shadows, portfolio of twenty-two
lithographs selected from le Brocquy's illustrations of Joyce's Dublin, including Quays, Dodder Bank, Street houses, Kingstown, Sackville Street, St George's church, Kings Inns, Tenement Door, Grattan Bridge, Davey Byrne's, Ballast Office, General Post Office, The Pillar, Suburban
Door, Liffey Chapelizod, College of Surgeons, Swans
Chapelizod, The Castle, Ballast Office Clock, Dublin
rooftops in snow, Goldsmith, T.C.D., Four Courts. Aidan
Dunne writes: 'In making his illustrations, he has returned to the
fluid, calligraphic style he developed for The Tain, and, as he
makes clear, to the same spirit that inspired that style. "Drawings
should be induced to grow spontaneously and even physically - marks in
printer's ink - from the matter of the text itself. Here again, I hope,
it is as shadows thrown by the text that they derive their substance."
(It is worth remembering that le Brocquy is not only one of the smartest
painters Ireland has produced, he is also one of the most eloquent, adept
at articulating the conceptual basis of his art as well as describing its
practical details.) In The Táin, the painter saw a distillation
of a nation's historical experience, something approaching a repository
of race memory, and his style sought to reflect the democratic breadth
of the saga, letting everyman have his day in the neutral anonymity of
his figure drawings. He sees Dubliners in terms as broad: "the
essence of a people, distilled from the intimate life and history of a
city." In this he is undoubtedly invoking Dublin's unique status as
more than a city, as a state of mind, or a state of the mind, the place
celebratedand reinvented by Joyce inexile.'263
Assessing le Brocquy's illustrations to date, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain
observes: 'By 1967, the year in which Liam Miller commissioned drawings
for The Tain, le Brocquy had already illustrated two books: Austin Clarke's
Poetry in Modern Ireland (1954) and J. J. Campbell's Legends of Ireland
(1955). He had also worked once with the Dolmen Press: he designed the
head and tail piece for Donagh MacDonagh's broadside Love Duet (1951) ...
Following the publication of The Tåin in 1969, leBrocquy
illustrated six books, all of which form a coherent body of work. For Liam
Miller and the Imprint Society in 1970, le Brocquy depicted characters
from J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World as "masks."
These six faces, each distinguished by a vivid combination of two colours,
resemble the vividly colored heads in The Hosting of the Táin tapestry, as in the case of Orange Mask for the Widow Quinn. Le
Brocquy again turned to ink brush drawing in 1977 for the Dolmen Edition
of Desmond O'Grady's The Gododdin, a series of poems adapted from
the Welsh telling of the annihilation of the Gododdin tribe; these drawings
use variations of the raven symbol from The Tain. In 1979, Le Brocquy
illustrated Seamus Heaney's Ugolino, translated from Dante's Inferno,
which can be linked both to Kinsella's The Tain and O'Grady's The
Gododdin, for all deal with ancient myths, feuds, and themes that "mesh
with and house the equivalent destructive energies at work, say, in contemporary
Belfast." ... The "Troubles" find direct expression in le
Brocquy's cover design for Kevin Cahill's Irish Essays (1980), a
proposal of possible solutions for the situation in Northern Ireland. There
the artist depicts two groups of people, in the style of the Tain battle scene converging to represent a single society. In 1981, le Brocquy
produced a series of lithographs portraying eight Irish writers - including
James Joyce - published by Andrew Carpenter as a portfolio of unbound images.
In one of the very last Dolmen Editions, le Brocquy illustrated Joyce's Dubliners.'264 Preview of the documentary Louis le Brocquy. An
other Way of Knowing, directed by Michael Garvey,
National Gallery of Ireland (November 1986). Broadcasted on the occasion
of the artist's 70th birthday (RTE, 10 November), Frazer Macmillan writes
in The Sunday Independent: 'Ireland's "travellers" may
not be the most likely source of reference on the background of an outstanding
- in global terms - painter, but as a programme being screened tomorrow
evening will show, more than a few of them are likely to know the name
Louis le Brocquy. Today the Dublin-born artist's work is on view in such
exotic climes as Florence, Washington, Antibes, San Diego, Zurich and Bahia.
It was, however, the stark contrast of tinker camp sites in rural Ireland
that first launched him on a career that, in three decades, was to propel
him to international prominence ... (the) kaleidoscope of his endeavours
that have encompassed graphics, stage settings and fabric and tapestry
design as well as painting, will include a glimpse back to the period when
he became known as one of the early champions of the travellers ... The
painter is a travelling man himself - of a different kind - dividing his
year between France and Ireland in the company of his wife Anne Madden,
herself a painter of note. They have their studio in the South of France,
but 'home' is here, in Dublin and West Cork.'265
NEXT
262 Louis le Brocquy, 'Artist's Note', Dubliners (Mountrath, Co. Laois: The Dolmen Press 1986). Paperback (Oxford/New York:
O.U.P. 1972 - 2002).
263 Aidan Dunne, 'Le Brocquy's Joyce's Dubliners', ILS (Dublin, Spring
1988), p. 13.
264 Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, 'Le Livre d'Artiste: Louis le Brocquy and
The Tain (1969)' New Hibernia Review, 5.1 (2001).
265 Frazer Macmillan, 'A brush with the travelling people', Sunday Independent (Dublin, November 9, 1986).
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Two Gallants, Dubliners
The Dolmen Press, Dublin,
1986
The Bording House, Dubliners
The Dolmen Press, Dublin,
1986
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