exhibition programme | paintings | tapestries | prints | chronology of a life | market | biography & bibliography | agents | news
2003-04. Portrait of Bono
The National Gallery of Ireland celebrates the opening of the National Portrait Collection with the unveiling of a specially commissioned work, Image of Bono (20 October 2003). According to this institution: 'The portrait is not only the most important commission yet for the Irish National Portrait Collection, but represents a remarkable crystallisation of contemporary Irish culture. Le Brocquy's work has defined Irish painting since the 1950s, while Bono is arguably the world's best-known citizen of Ireland. The two men are friends and have been admirers of each other's work for many years.'318 Bono and le Brocquy first met at the opening of an Amnesty International office in Dublin in January 1986 while U2 were making The Joshua Tree: 'I have known Bono for something like 20 years' says the artist, 'and I have always greatly admired him - both his considerable intellectual powers, but also a great goodness, in the simplistic use of the word,' later adding 'In the past I have painted an extensive series of interiorised head images of artists such as Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon, WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney whom I see as extraordinary instances of human consciousness. In more recent years, I have made a number of similar studies of Bono, whose spirit and whose radiant energy I admire so much. But a painting destined for the National Portrait Gallery presents a different challenge; to make a recognizable image of Bono's outward appearance, while attempting to portray what I conceive to be the wavelengths of his inner dynamism.'319 Medb Ruane reports in the Sunday Independent: 'Bono's image hits the canvas like stones skimming water, sending ripples through time and space in Louis le Brocquy's new painting of him. Rock's grand master meets art's great master and, in the process, the National Gallery gets to celebrate two unusual men. "Its an unbelievable honour to have one of the world's great contemporary painters do your portrait," Bono says. "If I could have told the 14-year-old Bono - as he wandered the Municipal Gallery in Parnell Square - that his favourite painter would one day do his portrait for the National Gallery, he probably would have believed it. But that's puberty for you".'320 Aidan Dunne remarks: ‘In a way these portraits are a high cultural equivalent of Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings of celebrity icons like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Both bodies of work emerged initially in the same decade, the 1960s, and they might be seen to converge in one of the most recent of le Brocquy's subjects, Bono. If Warhol were still around, Bono would surely be at the top of his to-do list. Yet there is clearly a tension between Warhol's infatuation with the vacuity of celebrity culture and le Brocquy's endorsement of the individual creative imagination. It comes down to a question of depth. For Warhol, everything is surface, whereas le Brocquy pledges allegiance to dense and complex layers of meaning, somehow bound up in the painted surface. Cultural Icons are, he implies, much more than depthless signs. But it's not as simple as that. His evocations of individual heads, living or dead, come with a rider. They are Studies towards an image of ... and they occur in sequential multiples rather than single, definitive versions. Like Warhol, le Brocquy had realised that portraiture was a problematic genre by the mid-20th century. In attempting to embody a presence in paint while acknowledging that it was an unattainable goal, he signalled both his ambition and the current limits of that ambition. The subjects of his heads veer between virtual anonymity and iconic status. Ancestral Head, for example, is effectively anonymous but marks out the territory: not so much making a portrait per se as engaging in an "archaeology of the spirit", reconstructing not likeness but imaginative life. Throughout his long bouts of wrestling with his named subjects – a list that also includes Federico García Lorca, Seamus Heaney, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso – likeness is both a boon and an encumbrance. It grounds the image, but can also tie it to a formulaic restatement of familiar features. When the balance is right, le Brocquy manages to engender a feeling of tenuous, fugitive presence, providing a glimpse into the mysterious complexity of mental life and spirit. There is also a sense of cultural placement, not in the sense of merely iterating an Irish literary canon – though that is an obvious danger – but in terms of locating particular sensibilities and imaginations in terms of historically derived identity, a view of individual consciousness as extending forwards and backwards in time, in terms of genetic and other, more conscious influences.'322bis Exhibition at the Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork, Louis le Brocquy, Procession (October 2003); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (November 2003). Sequence of eight large-scale paintings dating from 1954 to 1992, hung together for the very first time. 'The works in le Brocquy's two procession series', reports Christin Leach in The Sunday Times 'represent an intense exploration of human innocence and experience. The physical presence of the works is impressive, and the opportunity to study the artist's development invaluable.'323 Designs Ebb Tide, tufted V'soske Joyce wall rug, commissioned by Cantrell & Crowley architects, Four Seasons, Dublin (2004). Included in A Vision of Modern Art, in Memory of Dorothy Walker, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2004) The Táin Tapestries are exhibited at Millenium Monument Museum, Beijing, and Shanghai Gallery of Modern Art (2004). Conferred Doctorate of Philosophy, Dublin Institute of Technology (November 2004).
318 Press Release, National Gallery of Ireland, October 2003.
319 Eimear McKeith, ‘The master stroke’, Interview, The Sunday Tribune (Dublin, 11 June 2006); and Louis le Brocquy, statement made on the occassion of the unveiling ceremony, National Gallery of Ireland (21 October 2003).
320 Medb Ruane, ‘Le Brocquy gets inside Bono’s head’, The Sunday Independent (Dublin, October 26, 2003).
321 Louis le Brocquy, 'An Interview with Louis le Brocquy by George Morgan', Procession (Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1996, p. 7. The exhibition referred to by the artist is Rembrandt's Influence in the 17th century (London: The Matthiessen Gallery, February 20 - 2 April 1953).
322 Louis le Brocquy quoted by Dorothy Walker in the exhibition catalogue Images Single and Multiple 1957 - 1990 (Kamakura: Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa, January 5 - 3 February, 1991. Osaka: Itami City Museum of Art, Hyogo, February 9 - 31 March 1991. Hiroshima: City Museum of Contemporary Art, April 6 - 12 May 1991), p. 95.322bis Aidan Dunne. 'Archaeologist of the spirit', The Irish Times, weekend review (September 9, 2006)
323 Christin Leach, ‘Face up to reality’, The Sunday Times, Culture (Dublin October 19, 2003).
Bono & le Brocquy National Gallery of Ireland
Unveiling of Image of Bono, 20 October 2003
Photo Dara MacDonaill / Irish Times
Image of Bono (detail), 2003
oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm, A.R.749
National Gallery of Ireland, Portrait Collection
