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2002. Dublin
The painting A Family (1951), is presented to the National Gallery of Ireland. The ARTnewsletter reports: 'After a 46-year hiatus in Italy, Irish artist Louis le Brocquy's 1951 masterpiece A Family has been donated to the National Gallery of Ireland by businessman Lochlann Quinn. The Alied Irish Bank chairman bought the painting last year from Mark Adams of Agnew's for £1.7 million, a record for a work by a living Irish artist. Adams says that Quinn, an established patron of the arts, strongly believed the work belonged in a public Irish collection. It was donated under the Irish Government's 1997 Taxes Consolidation Act, a scheme providing tax relief on donations of objects of historical and cultural preeminence to national collections. Ironically, in 1952 a group of art patrons had offered to buy and donate the painting, priced at a mere £400 at the time, to Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Art-whose advisory committee refused it. Nonetheless it was widely acclaimed by critics such as John Berger and won the Prealpina Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale, when the Nestle Corporation purchased it for their headquarters in Milan. In 1958 it was included in the historic "50 ans d'art moderne" in Brussels alongside artists the likes of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.'314 Commenting the acquisition Dr. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch of the National Gallery of Ireland, notes: 'In 1992 the artist Louis le Brocquy was granted Ireland's highest cultural distinction byAosdána, that of the rank of Saoi. This honour was in recognition of "his creative work which has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland." Ten years on his painting A Family (1951) is displayed in pride of place in the National Gallery of Ireland. This laudable celebration of an artist's talent by his own country men and women in fact marks 'closure' on an earlier history of rejection. The pinnacle of that negative reception was the reaction to A Family at the time of its production. Now acknowledged as a highly significant work in the history of 20th-century Irish art, the response to it in Dublin in 1951/52 was decidedly mixed; from recognizing it as "a major work of art" to denouncing it as "a diabolical caricature." ... A Family is rightly recognized as a seminal painting in the history of 20th-century Irish art. It is not only an important transitional work in the artist's oeuvre but one anticipating modernism as an everyday style in Irish art. All of this is implicitly acknowledged in its being on display to the public. To date, the exception to the policy of only displaying work by dead artists in the Gallery is the continuous acquisition of portraits by contemporary artists for the National Portrait Collection. Le Brocquy is the only living artist to have a work on show as part of the permanent collection. As Medb Ruane has pointed out, the prophet has finally been honoured in his own land.'315 Commissioned by architects Benson & Forsyth designs The Triumph of Cúchulainn, Aubusson tapestry, donated by chairman Mrs Carmel Naughton for the newly opened Millenium Wing at the National Gallery of Ireland. Lisa Godson reports in The Sunday Times: 'The new Millenium Wing of the National Gallery of Ireland has been praised for its cool elegance. The buffed, plain walls are considerably enlivened by a magnificent tapestry designed by Louis le Brocquy... The animation of the tapestry is enhanced by its scale and position - its 14 metres hanging on one of the swooningly high walls of the gallery's entrance, to vertiginous effect. The National Gallery commission is le Brocquy's largest tapestry to date, 37 square metres in all, which took four weavers five months to make. It is in no way merely a transposition of his painting: he designs his tapestries with a complete mastery of their medium of woven wool and the way that no matter how finely woven, they still give a sense of having been worked on. It is something to which the vibrant Triumph of Cúchulainn, with its amorphous forms, bears ample testimony.'316 Included in The Public Eye: 50 years of the Arts Council Collection, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast (2002); Portrait exhibition, Model Art and Niland Gallery, Sligo (2002); Revealed Treasures, Stormont, Belfast (2002). Pursues work on the 'Human Images'. In Being, 2002 (AR746) a lone, pale-white male figure is pictured facing sideways, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith remarks: 'His inchoate torso seems to set up a rippling disturbance in the dark blue matrix in which he is embedded, though this disturbance abates toward the outer edges of the canvas. High up in the figure's torso a small disc of red and white flecks of paint once again suggests what le Brocquy describes as a kind of 'chakra', an energy source for this nameless figure who is seemingly trapped, suspended in time and space. This figure exudes that sense of alienation, of otherness, of isolation and removal which has characterized almost all of Louis le Brocquy's work over the past half a century and more. It is the quintessence of le Brocquy's art and, he himself might well suggest, a defining characteristic of all art. As he has argued in his 'Notes on Painting and Awareness' "In the context of our everyday lives, painting must be regarded as an entirely different form of awareness, for an essential quality of all art is its alienation, its otherness. In art at its most profound levels, actuality - exterior reality - is seen to be relevant, parallel, but remote or curiously dislocated".'317 Paints Fallen Man (A.R.743, 2002), le Brocquy acknowledges that the title 'Fallen Man' suggests both a physical fall and a fall from moral or spiritual grace, though he insists that his initial interest in the subject was primarily as an image of the 'interiorised experience of catastrophe'. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith further remarks on the difference between this painting and the early version bearing the same title: 'We may note the contrast between the thickly painted viscera of the rigidly kneeling figure in the 1957 'Fallen Man', whose body seems impossibly shorn off at the knees, and what the artist cogently describes as 'the more kinetic image' of the 2002 version of this same composition. In the later image, the figure is similarly abased, but any suggestion of being brutally sheared off from the world beyond the consciousness of the body's physical predicament is absent. By contrast the boundaries between the later kneeling figure and its surrounding environment have become significantly blurred. The neo-pointillist or divisionist technique which, as we have noted, in 'Painting no. 725' (1999) suggested particles of energy, has been replaced here by a more solidly patterned ground that seems almost cellular. This technique, with its faint formal echoes of analytical cubism, further highlights and extends this more recent tendency in le Brocquy's painting to view embodied human consciousness as being inextricable from the rest of the physical world.'317bis Conferred Doctorate of University, Queen's University, Belfast (2002).
314 Pernilla Holmes, The ARTnewsletter, Vol. XXVII, No. 19 (London, May 14, 2002).
315 Dr. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Curator of Irish Art, National Gallery of Ireland, Louis le Brocquy's A Family : 'An unwholesome and satanic distortion of natural beauty, CIRCA online article.
316 Lisa Godson, No. 119: ‘The Triumph of Cúchulainn tapestry by Louis le Brocauy’, The Sunday Times (Dublin, 17. 02. 2002).
317 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
317bis Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', Notes, le Brocquy Archive, 2002.
A Family, 1951
oil on canvas, 147 x 185 cm
National Gallery of Ireland
Being, 2002
oil on canvas, 162 x 114 cm, A.R.746
Fallen Man, 2002
oil on canvas, 114 x 162 cm, A.R.743
