exhibition programme | paintings | tapestries | prints | chronology of a life | market | biography & bibliography | agents | news
2000-01. London
Returns to live and work in Dublin. The painting Travelling Woman with Newspaper (1947-48) makes headline news when it sets a world auction record for a work by a living Irish artist (Sotheby's, London, May 2000): 'The price represents a new world auction record for the artist and places him within a very select group of artists whose works have commanded prices in excess of £1 million during their lifetimes. Among British and Irish painters, only Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney have equalled this feat. Travelling Woman with Newspaper, a masterpiece by the man acknowledged as the greatest painter working in Ireland today and certainly the most important Irish Modernist painting ever to appear at auction, sold for a staggering £1,158,500. Mark Adams, Sotheby's specialist in charge of the sale, said: "In these days the £1 million barrier is increasingly seen as the surest test of an artist's international importance and it is a very rare event for a living painter to break it. Le Brocquy's achievement marks him out as one of the painters, like Freud and Hockney, who will come to symbolise this age".308 Unveiling of the large-scale Massing of the Armies, Aubusson tapestry, 445 x 683cm (December 2000). Commissioned by Architect Dr Ronald Tallon of Scott Tallon Walker, Dublin, as an integral feature of the new Programmes Building, RTÉ, the tapestry shows multiple black figures of men and horses against an off- white background adapted from the original lithographic illustration for The Táin. Included in Nude/Body/Action, 'Transfiguration', Tate Modern, London (May 2001). The artist holds two joint exhibitions in London. Tom Rosenthal reports in The New Statesman: 'After a longish quiet spell during the decades when figurative art had gone out of style, he now rejoices in renewed success, with major early works selling for seven-figure sums at auction. None of this affects the way he paints his unfashionable, endless variations on the human body and, above all, heads, preferably male and literary... Le Brocquy has two shows running concurrently in London. His latest paintings are at Gimpel Fils and his tapestries are at Agnew's. The paintings are uncharacteristically based on whole bodies, and not just heads. All the figures are generic nudes, several occurring in triptychs. In one, a full-frontal male is flanked by his two profiles, like a man contemplating himself in a tailor's multi-mirrored fitting room (States of Being, 2000, A.R731). Among the solo figures is one with a red mark, which recalls the artist's vision of an exposed pituitary gland, observed when the young le Brocquy watched surgery to make anatomical drawings for medical textbooks to pay for paints and canvas. The tapestries at Agnew's are particularly impressive. Le Brocquy was a disciple in this medium of Jean Lurcat (1892-1966) who, having studied the medieval tapestries at Angers, single-handedly revitalised the tradition of graded tones and detailed numbered cartoons. Unlike the much-vaunted Graham Sutherland tapestry in Coventry Cathedral (which is, I suspect, simply a giant, weaver-magnified copy of a smallish gouache), le Brocquy's coloured tapestries are created specifically for the techniques of Aubusson. Those from the 1950s, notably Adam and Eve in the Garden, are completely different from his paintings, and while other artists have been happy to have their images merely copied by the lissier, le Brocquy has thought, from the outset, like and for the weavers - and it shows.'309 Included in Shifting Ground, Selected Works of Irish Art 1950 - 2000, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2001); The Serious and the Smirk, National Gallery of Ireland (2001); The 1960s, ‘Selections from Great Britain’, Joseph Rickards Gallery, New York (2001). Pursues work on the 'Human Images'. Begins the large composition Ecce Homo (A.R.744) based on the 1958 painting that bears the same title. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith notes: 'Ecce Homo' (1958) is an important work that reflects both le Brocquy's particular personal concerns during the late '50s and the more general cultural context in which it was produced, a context within which, for example, French existentialism exerted a powerful influence. This distended, wraith-like figure, at once graceful and constrained, owes something to Giacometti. The shadowy head, shoulders and upper arms of this archetypal man, whom we are invited to behold, appear to exist on a different plane (above? beyond? behind?) to that of the craggy encrustations of pigment in which the torso is partly encased. The alternate use of thinned-out strokes of gray paint alongside thick, almost concrete-like lumps of white, with the occasional smear of yellow and crimson, suggests a distinction between an elusive and ethereal spirit and a decidedly earth-bound body. Yet the criss-crossing swathes of paint that extend the lower torso toward the bottom of the picture, which vaguely resemble intertwined cords of thick rope, suggest that these two aspects of an individual's being are nevertheless inextricably bound one to the other in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. The comparison between this painting and its recent equivalent, or indeed any one of le Brocquy's frontal depictions of a centrally positioned, stationary male figure from the past few years, is instructive. In 'Painting No. 725' (1999) individual consciousness is not so much depicted as encased within its physical container; rather, it appears to be virtually suspended within a body that is at once stationary and an integral part of the limitless flux of the universe. The individual human spirit is portrayed as simultaneously a source of and a focus for an apparently endless flow of energy particles that constitute both the physical body itself and the surrounding environment, within which it is thoroughly enmeshed.'310 It has often been suggested that the artist's images, whether torsos or heads, are ghostly intimations of an afterlife and in some way connected with religious belief. Responding to this suggestion, the artist says: 'Since the age of eleven I have held no formal religious beliefs. You could say I'm agnostic. I simply do not know. What concerns me in these paintings is, rather, the state of living, of being. I once came across a Chinese acupuncturist on French television who seemingly could alter the metabolism of a growing lemon as effectively as that of a human being. I was fascinated. For years I had myself been trying to realise the interiority of lemons and other fruit throughout the Presence period and beyond - trying to discover some image of their inner reality. It would seem that life, in its multiplicity of forms, is one.'311 In States of Being, 2000 (A.R.731), Robert Melville's comments, made in 1962, remain pertinent to this painting: 'By adumbrating a human presence in his magic substance le Brocquy seems to me to be challenging the now almost universally held belief that the concept of man in harmony with himself is spurious. Le Brocquy's paintings have helped me to realize that when Malevich said “I wish to be the maker of the new sign of my inner movement, for in me is the path of the world”, it was much more than avant-garde effervescence, and that such a claim would be understood by, say Erwin Schroedinger who has pointed out that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown, and that what seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of different aspects of the one thing. Le Brocquy's vision of human presence in an infinite, undivided substance is an insight of the same order.'312 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith notes: 'In a number of the 'Human Image' paintings of the last seven years le Brocquy has revisited and reconstituted specific compositions from the first period of the 'Presences'. States of Being is a large, recent triptych that has been worked up from a smaller study from 1964 from which it also takes its title. In the painting's central panel a ghostly figure emerges from a sky-blue matrix. Viewed frontally and painted in white, it features an intense spot of red paint between its breast-bone suggesting a chakra-like energy source. This figure is flanked on either side by two equally isolated figures, viewed from the side, each of which is turned toward the central figure. Their presence is fainter and they appear to recede into a dark blue ground. Far from representing a scene of human interaction, each of these three figures is locked into its own discrete environment so that they suggest, rather, different aspects of the same bodily predicament. Louis le Brocquy acknowledges this sense of a thwarted interaction: 'My own perception in painting those 'States of Being' was not exactly to paint a relationship or dynamic between three separate figures. It was rather to contrast various states of being within a single being. That they are seen to be quite different shapes and tones might be more comprehensible if we contemplate the utterly different shapes and tones we become to ourselves in the course of twenty four hours. Our immediate subjective image of our daytime self, its shape its solidity, its pale colour, has little to do with the deep inwardness of self in darkness, an image in which the idea of our centrality can shift from head to heart, to belly, to the tips of our fingers - to the exclusion of all else. Feeling has no shape.'313 Made Officier de l'Ordre de la Couronne Belge (2001).
308 Press Release, Sotheby’s, London, May 2000.
309 Tom Rosenthal, ‘Headmaster’, The New Statesman (London, 21 May 2001).
310 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
311 Louis le Brocquy quoted by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
312 Robert Melville, exhibition catalogue, Louis le Brocquy (Zurich: Galerie Leinhard, January 1961).
313 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
Tinker Woman with Newspaper
(a.k.a The Last Tinker), 1947-48
oil on gesso-primed hardboard, 127 x 89 cm
Human Image , 2002
oil on canvas, 162 x 114 cm. AR744
States of Being, 2000
oil on canvas, 116 x 251 cm (triptych) A.R.731
