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1997-99. Human Images: Later phase (1997-2005); Táin Tapestries (1998); Garden Tapestries (1999)
The artist's return to some of the core concerns addressed in the Presence series (1956-66), leads to an extended body of work: 'I always seem to return to what is central - that indivisible social unit, the individual human being in its "matrix" of isolation'.297 This preoccupation has widely informed the work, from the early depictions of assembled figures in isolation, to the long series of heads of literary figures 'perceived not so much as famous or brilliant men but as vulnerable, especially poignant human beings who dared go further than the rest of us and for that reason are more isolated and moving.’298 Returning to the full-length figure subject, le Brocquy readdresses both in form and content the pivotal Presence series originally inspired by a revelatory experience in Spain in the mid Fifties. Asked what, in his mind, are the principal similarities as well as the most notable differences, between these two bodies of work, the artist says: ' In the recent works the subject remains formally the same, based as it is on the image of the human torso. But I think the principal similarity between those recent paintings and the original 'Presences' lies in their content, in an attempt to discover some kind of image of our inner human reality - that impalpable thing we call in turn the spirit, the psyche, consciousness. On the face of it, it's an impossible venture, a painter trying to realise an immaterial entity by the material means of paint on canvas. But then, I am inclined to think of art itself as a visa to the land of the imagination. I suppose the most obvious difference in the new paintings is their abandonment of the white ground or matrix from which the earlier images emerged. In the recent paintings this whiteness was replaced by greyish backgrounds or 'environments', initially composed of minute particles and later by a fractured texture from which the central figure is derived and into which it in turn diffuses in a substantial identity of surface and image'.299 This protracted revisitation of the 'Human Image' will find a source of inspiration in an earlier body of work. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith points out: 'That the male figure in A Family, a picture painted in 1951 (National Gallery of Ireland), is equally relevant and resonant almost half a century later when we come to consider Back (A.R.719) a painting from 1999. Like all of the torsos painted around this time the central figure emerges from a granular surface that extends to the very edges of the canvas. This surface suggests elemental particles, which le Brocquy tends to see as 'another kind of matrix from which the image might materialize, both in the depths of its shadow and in its emergence into light.' Despite the emphasis on human isolation and aloneness in le Brocquy's entire body of work from the 1940s on, he has remained equally interested in what he has described as 'the limitless outreach of the human presence in its physical and social environment'. His concern is not simply with the isolated human being, but with that being's physical embeddedness in the phenomenal world at the most fundamental, molecular level. Viewed in this light even the most isolated human being is implicated in an infinitely wider and more complex context. This includes our physical indebtedness to those who came before us. As le Brocquy puts it, "the individual is multiple in so far as each one of us is the sum of our ancestral genes. My own awareness is, in that sense, not entirely singular. Even my limbs I tend to regard as Palaeolithic arms and legs on loan for a lifetime." The intricately constructed but utterly ordinary back that only partly emerges from the painted matrix in Back may be compared to a much earlier work, Ageing Man Washing, from 1954. Painted when le Brocquy was a relatively young man, it is nevertheless a moving image of the simultaneous frailty and resilience epitomised by an otherwise unremarkable human being engaged in an everyday activity. If we recall that Study: Man Holding a Towel of 1951, one of a number of other works from the early 1950s depicting the quotidian activity of washing, was to become the model from which Lazarus emerged in 1954, we may appreciate all the more le Brocquy's capacity for perceiving the miraculous in the mundane.'300 This inquiry into the human condition will lead to a series of canvases including Human Image, 1999 (A.R.728); Human Image, 1999 (A.R.729) and later Human Image, 2000 (A.R.739), which formally echo the much earlier Lazarus (1954), now more clearly posed as crucified figures. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith further points out that 'while le Brocquy acknowledges the inescapable echoes of this central image of Judaeo-Christian culture he claims that his purpose in painting these images is not at all religious: "I have no religious purpose in these paintings of 'human images'. Certainly they are in the extended form of crucifixion, but they relate neither to the terrible Crucifixion of Grunewald nor to El Greco's sublime Christ on the Cross. My concern is rather with an ultimate state of being".'301 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith pursues 'in its vertiginous, suspended isolation of this body in extremis Human Image (A.R739) might in fact most usefully be compared, not to one of the many pre-twentieth-century images of the crucifixion, but to Salvador Dalí's 1951 painting of The Christ of Saint-Jean-de-la-Croix. It is also, however, formally related to one of le Brocquy's own paintings from the same era, the crucial, transitional Lazarus of 1954. The outstretched arms and the bowed head, which is in effect a dark hole, clearly echo this earlier work... "When le Brocquy first came to be known as a painter … it was not as the civilised head-hunter he has lately become. It was as a story-teller, a symbolist and thoughtful enquirer into the conditions of life. 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". John Russell, in this quotation from his introductory essay to Dorothy Walker's 1981 monograph Louis le Brocquy, was not to know that in the mid-1990s Louis le Brocquy would unexpectedly sideline his painterly 'head-hunting' in a renewed quest for 'an image that would compound all images'. Among the quintessential images of western art is of course the image of the crucified Christ. It is impossible to avoid relating Human Image 2000 (AR739, and a number of related works, to this central icon of Christianity. Le Brocquy is reluctant, however, to concede that such images should be read primarily, much less exclusively, in religious terms.'302 Included in A Century of Irish Painting, Museum of Art, Kokkaido; Mikaka City Gallery of Art; Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art; When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentirth Century Ireland, Berkeley Art Museum; Grey Art Gallery, New York; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Barbican Art Gallery, London (1998); Usporednosti - 12 Francuskih Umjetnika, Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik (1998); Visions Nouvelles d’une Collection, Fondation Maeght, St. Paul, France(1999); Word and Image: Samuel Beckett and the Visual Text, Lilly Library, Bloomington; Indiana University, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Cabinet des Estampes, Caen (1999); Linhas de Sombra, Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (1999). Exhibition at Taylor Galleries, Dublin, Louis le Brocquy Human Images, early and recent works on paper (December 1999), one hundred and twenty-four works. Aidan Dunne writes in The Irish Times: 'The human presence has always been at the centre of Louis le Brocquy's work, so it is appropriate that a major exhibition of his watercolours at the Taylor Galleries, spanning nearly four decades, should take Human Images as its title. Last year le Brocquy was the recipient of the first Glen Dimplex Award for a sustained contribution to the arts in ireland, a fitting acknowledgement of an illustrious career. One might expect that, now in his eighties, he would slow down and rest on his laurels. So it is gratifying, if a little daunting, to see that so much of the work in Human Images is new. Not only is it new, it is also substantial. he has, for example, revisited the Being series that he initiated in the 1950's. But rather than simply reprising old ideas, he has thoughtfully reapplied his talents to them, coming up with some fine images. While he is best known for his spectral portraits of literary figures, including Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, incarnated in head studies that celebrate imaginative potential, his studies of the body are as impressive. They range from evocations of the spine or body orifices that are every bit as spectral as the ghostly heads, to compelling images of embodiment and physicality. These weighty, sculptural studies are surprising given le Brocquy's subtlety of touch, his liking for delicate washes and off-whites. His trick is to convince us that the being, the person is there, without having to belabour the point. It's the mark of a fine painter.'303 The artist turns momentarily to tapestry design (1998), adapting The Táin lithographic illustrations for Thomas Kinsella's celebrated translation of the Irish epic An Táin Bó Cuailnge: 'Translating the Táin into tapestry was yet another great experience' le Brocquy says, 'for here the original drawings were faithfully transformed, not only in scale, but into the very different medium of woven tapestry, further extending within its own tactile nature something of the sweep, violence and passion of the epic.'304 Commenting these works the Irish Museum of Modern Art notes: 'The Táin Tapestries, which must rank among the best-known artworks ever created in this country, have very generously been donated by Dublin businessman Brian Timmons under the Heritage Donations Act ... The tapestries are based on le Brocquy’s inspired illustrations for the 1969 translation by poet Thomas Kinsella of the pre-Christian Irish epic An Táin Bó Cuailnge, which recounted the legendary battle fought by queen Medb and the men of Connaught against Cúchulainn, over the brown bull of Cooley. In creating the illustrations le Brocquy was mindful that “any descriptive precision in the depiction of Medb, Cúchulainn or a first century charioteer would disturb their imaginative reality.” To capture the necessary energy without distracting detail le Brocquy developed his now-famous “blot” technique. This provided the perfect solution to the artist search for “a non-figurative figuration”. Following the success of the publication, le Brocquy made designs for a set of tapestries using some of the original images. In this he was returning to a fruitful field of collaboration dating back to the late 1940s and his work with the well-known firm of weavers, Tabard Frères et Soeurs in Aubusson, France. Twenty images from the publication were chosen to highlight the most crucial moments in the story and translated by le Brocquy into cartoons which the weaver, or lissier, works from. The first translation of the 1969 cartoons into tapestries was begun in 1998 and completed in 2000 at Atelier René Duche, Meilleur Ouvrier de France, Aubusson. Although limited to two colours, the tapestries encompass an extraordinary range of nuance and subtlety, brought about by the careful blending of cotton and wool threads and the mixture of bleached, unbleached and natural white fibres, contrasted by black and grey ones. This, and the textured cutting of threads, resulted in a subtle “marbled” effect, a technique mastered by only a few weavers at Aubusson.'305 Designs the Garden Tapestries (1999), comprising three individual pieces, Adam, Eve and Uccello. Commenting on the latter, le Brocquy says: 'I have named this tapestry after the great fifteenth century artist, Paolo Di Bono, better known as Uccello, whose amazing Rout of San Romano I have admired since painting first interested me. I am still moved by its then adventurous perception of space and perspective, including that astonishing foreshortened figure lying in full armour under the horses' hooves. But yet another wonder which haunts me in this painting is the recurrent emergence of oranges, appearing like small suns from their dark foliage, very much as I saw them a little later, unbelievably exotic, blazing from their small trees on the sidewalks of the frontier town of Menton in 1939.'306 The artist approves the production of the Colour-Inverted Tapestries, comprising Travellers (1948), Garlanded Goat (1959-50), Allegory (1950), Adam and Even in the Garden (1951-52), Cherub (1952) and Eden (1952): '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 a means of a technique I learned directly from the master in this medium, Jean Lurçat. No colour sketch 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 in collaboration with my son Pierre, has at last enabled me to realise their inverted transformation of mood, 'as contrary as night from day.'307 Conferred Doctorate of Philosophy, Dublin City University (1999).
297 Louis le Brocquy, statement to Pierre le Brocquy, Chronology of a life (Dublin, November 2005).
298 Louis le Brocquy, statement to Pierre le Brocquy, Chronology of a life (Dublin, November 2005).
299 Louis le Brocquy quoted by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
300 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
301 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
302 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
303 Aidan Dunne, ‘New takes on familiar images’, The Irish Times (Dublin 12.01.1999).
304 Louis le Brocquy quoted by Medb Ruane, ‘The stuff of legend: the Tain tapestries by Louis le Brocquy on show at Imma ars a wonder to behold’, The Sunday Times (Dublin, 8 September 2002).
305 Press release, 'Táin Tapestries donated to IMMA', Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 10 July 2002).
306 Louis le Brocquy, ‘Artist’s Note’, exhibition catalogue, Aubusson Tapestries, Taylor Galleries (Dublin, November 2000).
307 Louis le Brocquy, ‘Artist’s Note’, exhibition catalogue, Aubusson Tapestries, Taylor Galleries (Dublin, November 2000)
Back, 1999
oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, A.R.719
Human Image, 1999
oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, A.R.729
Human Image, 2000
oil on canvas, 162 x 114 cm, A.R.739
Back, 1997
oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, A.R.707
