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2005. Homage to his Masters
The artist returns to look again at the original Masters who drew him to become a painter in 1938: Velázquez, Goya, Manet and Cézanne. Medb Ruane observes: 'The very idea of homage invokes le Brocquy's formation as an artist, where he learned from looking at the work in the National Gallery of Ireland, as well as in London, Paris and Geneva. There in 1938, works from Museo del Prado, including both the Vélazquez he cites [Velazquez' The Dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora, and Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Facade], found sanctuary from the terrors of the Spanish Civil War Picasso pictures so awe-fully in Guernica. A mighty terrain is being covered, or uncovered as may be. This traversing relies on an intense kind of looking, for artist and viewer, so that what you see at first - a likeness, a familiar composition - is not the image held in memory when you leave the scene.'326 Prompted on the reasons for this return, the artist says: 'In 1951, I completed A Family, [National Gallery of Ireland] a large oil structurally based on Manet's Olympia, but here Manet's sensual subject had changed utterly through the circumstance of war to depict a family of refugees, as I've said, “stripped back to palaeolithic circumstance under an electric light bulb”. It was my son, Pierre, who asked me if I would consider going back over the years to that unforgettable experience when, in 1938, I first looked at Olympia in Paris at the Jeu de Paumes; looking beyond A Family to recall my original aesthetic joy when face-to-face for the first time with Olympia.'327 Paints Odalisque I. Looking at Manet. Olympia, 2005 (AR764). 'It is significant' notes Mike Wilson, 'that this turn in the recent work is continuous with the artist's ongoing preoccupation with specific moments of the tradition. Most clearly there is a recurrent pre-occupation with Manet's Olympia (1863), a work which the artist first encountered in Paris in 1938, and which provided a key reference for his later major work, A Family, of 1951. Le Brocquy's 1951 meditation on Manet's Olympia was synthesised through a cubist idiom as distilled within Picasso's work of the 1930s. In this painting le Brocquy had also gone far beyond his reference to Manet and Picasso to construct an ambitious “historical” work. A Family constructs an ambitious proposition about the existential turmoil of post World War displacement, dislocation and desolation. Drawing on the mythic and public languages of Guernica, it is a work also pitched at the level of the dysfunction of the domestic and the crisis of personal identity. Indeed, it is noteworthy that even now, more than half a century later, this work continues to be the subject of ongoing interpretative contests. Le Brocquy, in a manner similar to Picasso and Manet before him, has drawn upon the precedents of the tradition to construct a new work which simultaneously seeks to restate and innovate, to renew and in some degree renegotiate - even to overcome - the terms of the tradition. Manet's Olympia had in its turn been derived from the tradition of the nude rooted in the prototypical works of Titian and Giorgione, but again transformed through Manet's own exploration of Spanish painting, most especially the work of Goya. It is precisely this complex layered and multiple interaction between images, pictorial idioms and historical precedents that constitutes the persuasive grip and embedding of a tradition. Manet's work is pivotal within this tradition as marking a critical transition to the modern - a transitional moment whereby this whole pattern of relationship with tradition became further complicated by the self-conscious desire to be of one's own time; to break with those moribund aspects of the tradition as institutionally mediated; and to become the pictorial thinker of one's own contingent historical moment. The inherent contradictions of wishing to proceed within a tradition, to extend it, and at the same time to renew, revitalise and redefine that tradition may be experienced as both productive and disorienting. In such a project the moments of doubt and the moments of confidence necessarily turn upon each other without warning. Le Brocquy demonstrates - within his own multiple working through of the Olympia and other key works by Manet, at various points in his career as a painter - that the to-ing and fro-ing between exemplars and variations, between precedent and new iteration, is an open process. The latest variation or meditation on a theme is not exhaustively determined by its forerunners, even as it draws part of its life from the matrix of relationship with those earlier works.'328 Barbara Dawson observes: 'Louis le Brocquy's most recent paintings created in his 90th and 91st year are astonishing in their execution and content. He pays homage to his inspirations of earlier years Valazquez and Goya as well as Cezanne and Manet... While they pay homage, they are contemporary expressions of le Brocquy's ideal.'329 Paints Looking at Goya. Doña Antonia Zárate, 2005, (AR765); Looking at Cezanne. Four Apples and a Knife, 2005 (AR771); Looking at Velazquez. The Dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora, 2005 (AR767); Looking at Velazquez. Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Facade, 2005 (AR766). The artist notes: 'To my mind, apart from the uncanny facility of his painting, I see Velázquez's supreme insight as empathy, whether it be an image of Philip IV or of Don Sebastián de Morra, this stunted man peering out at us in isolation, whose tattered lace collar has been so carefully noted by the artist. In 1984, Anne and I, invited by the Director of the Villa Medici, Jean Leymarie, to spend some days at this great French Academy in Rome, admired the walls, bare of paintings, carefully stippled under the supervision of its previous Director, Balthus. In 2005 memories of this visit spurred me to return to Velázquez's Grotto-Loggia Façade, Villa Medici and its dramatic central black which I had long admired. Regarding Goya's Doña Antonia Zárate, my immediate concern was to preserve the dignity and deep humanity of Goya's chosen subject, by whom he himself was so clearly moved. In my small painting 'Four Apples and a Knife', I emphasised that aspect which I think of as Cézanne's transparent vision of the object, whether it be a mountain or a building in a landscape. In the Zeitgeist of his time Cézanne, with uncanny independence of vision, instinctively perceived what his contemporary physicists had scientifically realized: that the conception of the solidity of matter could no longer be regarded as valid. In this belated return to my original Masters, it seems appropriate to end with some lines from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, 'The Four Quartets': We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.'330 Mick Wilson notes: 'Le Brocquy's work is saturated in the flows of European high culture; and not only the streams of post-Renaissance visual arts and the specific eddies and cascades of modernist painting. It is also pervaded by references to the high literary canons of European culture - most notably Francophone and Anglophone literary modernism. This work frames explicit commitments to the values and schemas of these high art traditions. It seeks to operate within this value frame, and to do so at the highest level of ambition and achievement within such traditions. This is a remarkable undertaking, all the more so given that the artist begins in some very concrete sense as an outsider, who begins by looking to the pinnacles of this tradition with an unschooled eye... It is notable that in this most recent body of work, le Brocquy employs the term “looking at” repeatedly as a means of identifying and naming the works. It is this call to look again, and renew one's understanding of the already given, and the already known, that seems to me most significant in this new work, and in this exhibition as a whole. This talk of “looking” seems to provide a better way with respect to both the new and the earlier work, rather than the language of “homage” and “mastery” which risks closing down, rather that opening up, the ambiguities and uncertainties that permeate the encounter with art works, and the question of the values and purposes that we may find there. This has been identified by James Hamilton who notes that: "The titles 'Looking at' - Looking at Manet, Velazquez, Goya, Cezanne. They began as 'Homage to' these masters, but le Brocquy's vision and translation of his models is so searching that he invites us not so much to pay homage, but, as he has done all his life, to look at them again and again. Thus, through le Brocquy's brush we meet once again Velazquez' Don Sebastian de Mora and Goya's Dona Antonia Zarate, we revisit the Villa Medici …".'331 Included in Siar 50. 50 years of Irish Art from the Collections of the Contemporary Irish Art Society, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2005); On Reflection, Modern Irish Art from the 1960's to the 1990's, 'A Selection from the Bank of Ireland Collection', Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2005); The West as metaphor, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2005); Rugby Collection, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Warwickshire (2005); The White Stag Group, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2005); Eye of the Storm: The IMMA Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2005). The artist delivers 'The eighteenth International Health Lecture', Notes on Painting and Awareness, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin (November 14 2005).
326 Medb Ruane, ‘Homage to his Masters’, Irish Arts Review (Dublin, Winter 2006).
327 Louis le Brocquy, 'Artist's Note', exhibition catalogue Louis le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes, Later Homage, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 14 January - 30 March 2007.
328 Mick Wilson, 'To look, and then to look again, once more', exhibition catalogue Louis le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes, Later Homage, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 14 January - 30 March 2007.
329 Barbara Dawson 'Unfailing Eye', exhibition catalogue Louis le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes, Later Homage, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 14 January - 30 March 2007.
330 Louis le Brocquy, 'Artist's Note', exhibition catalogue Louis le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes, Later Homage, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 14 January - 30 March 2007.
331 Mick Wilson, 'To look, and then to look again, once more', exhibition catalogue Louis le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes, Later Homage, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 14 January - 30 March 2007.
Odalisque I.
Looking at Manet. Olympia, 2005
oil on canvas- 114 x 162 cm- AR764
Looking at Velazquez
Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Facade, 2005
oil on canvas, 103 x 89 cm, AR766
Looking at Velazquez
The Dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora, 2005
oil on canvas, 103 x 89 cm, AR767
