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2007-08. 'Freedom'; 50th wedding anniversary

 

Awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of Dublin (May 2007), the highest and most prestigious award the City can bestow. To date 76 people have received the 'Freedom' since it was instituted in 1876. Past recipients include Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bill Clinton and Bono. The Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, hosts the last exhibition celebrating the artist's 90th birthday (January 2007), Louis le Brocquy. Homage to his Masters, sixteen works shown alonside masterpieces by Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Kitagawa Utamaro. Eimear McKeith reports in The Sunday Tribune: 'Early Heroes (1939-1945) demonstrates how, as a young, self-taught painter, he absorbed the influences of western European artists, as well as the compositional techniques of 18th century Japanese prints. While their role in his development is unmistakable, he never stooped to the level of copyist. 'The Picnic', when shown alongside Degas's 'Beach Scene', is a revelation. Likewise, 'Southern Window', with its green shutters, oblique viewpoint and strong colour contrasts, directly references Manet, whose 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens' is included in the exhibition. 'Girl in White' reveals Manet's influence as well, while also showing a debt to Whistler (it is a pity, therefore, that no work by Whistler is featured in the exhibition). Often overlooked paintings such as 'Belfast Refugees' and the 'Goya inspired Girl in Grey' likewise demonstrate a remarkably assured, talented young artist. Fast-forward 60 years to Later Homage (2005-2006), a series of paintings in which he acknowledges his debt to those early masters. This is the first time these works have been shown in Ireland, having been exhibited in London late last year. The "homage" is achieved by painting his own versions of famous works of art: 'Looking at Goya' is a reconfiguration of Goya's portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate, while for 'Looking at Velasquez' he has painted the dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora, as well as a landscape of the Villa Medici in Rome. The phrase "looking at" is carefully chosen, underscoring his study of these painters but also reminding the viewer that this is his own particular vision - his way of seeing. The works are filtered through his style, merging out of shimmering layers of paint, as if through a distinctive le Brocquy gauze. While the idea of paying homage is admirable, the principal problem with his 'versions' is that they (quite literally) pale in comparison with the originals. The intense beauty of Dona Antonia Zarate's gaze becomes blurry and masculine in le Brocquy's work, while the powerful character-study of Velasquez's Don Sebastian de Mora in le Brocquy's version is somewhat soulless...'339 Mike Wison observes: 'Villa Medici Grotto-Loggia Façade, The Dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora and Goya's Dona Antonia Zarate - here are images and ideas that have a prior claim upon our attention: they are occasions of looking, and looking again, which will not be exhausted in a single totalising moment of judgement or indeed of translation or interpretation. When I look at an image such as le Brocquy's Looking at Velazquez. Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Façade (2005) I feel myself to encounter an image that also has this prior claim on my attention, something that will be - that has already been - an occasion of looking, and looking again, and looking yet once more. This image, of all the images in this show, haunts me. In this image where the architecture vaporises into trees; where the artificial and the organic dissolve into one another; where all that is solid melts into air and on into nothing; where the dark opening repeats itself and seems to intimate that even as things repeat themselves they fall away: it is in such an image that I find the whole complex knot of the grand tradition attenuated and imposed upon my thinking. Imposed but not resolved. I am forced to look again. It is a welcome opportunity to do so in the context of this ambitious and thoughtfully considered exhibition of both new and familiar work. It remains but to go and look for oneself.'340 Included in The Francis Bacon Studio - 'A selected display of correspondence', Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2007); (I’m Always Touched) By Your Presence, Dear - 'New Acquisitions', Irish Museum of Modern Art (2007); Treasures from the North - 'Irish Paintings from the Ulster Museum', National Gallery of Ireland (2007); Le Corps et son double, Galerie Jeanne-Bucher, Paris (October 2007), alongside Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Joàn Miró, Pablo Picasso, Nicolas de Staël. The artist and his wife, the painter Anne Madden, celebrat their 50th wedding anniversary. Married to Anne Madden at Chartres Cathedral on April 8, 1958 (Chelsea Registry, London, March 31,1958), the artists first met in London in November 1956, thereafter sharing numerous studios. Anne Madden will become a lifelong ever-present inspiration for the artist: 'For many years we worked together in the same studio where Anne, beyond her own painting became my third eye, my muse."341 As early as 1957 he will paint the first of a long series of works inspired by her, Young Woman (Anne) (1957; A.R. 0020). The work is regarded as seminal in le Brocquy's oeuvre and belongs to a notable series of white-on-white compositions. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith notes: 'The title refers to le Brocquy's wife, the painter Anne Madden, who was seriously injured in a riding accident in the mid-1950s and had to undergo a series of painful operations on her spine. Le Brocquy remembers "being filled with an irrational anger at the aggressive implications of this surgical carpentry" and goes on to note that, quite apart from his personal feelings of anger, the spine literally continued to form the backbone of the 'Presences.'342 According to Alistair Smith: 'The fact that the painting mimicked the visual circumstances of the artist's life is important, but more important, if less tangible, were the emotions of the situation - the natural anxieties, apprehensions of mortality ... The voluptuous aspect of the female torsos, and the fact that wounding (as in surgery) is part of their subject matter, is clearly the result of the powerful mechanism of sublimation. Despite the origin of the work in his personal life, le Brocquy was alive to the more universal aspect of what was forming on his canvas ... His paintings quickly came to form a far more generalised statement on humanity, both male and female, both palpable and ethereal.'343 In December 1967, in face of the tragic death of his wife's sister and brother-in-Law in an air crash over the Andes, Chile, le Brocquy will paint a series of works on dark backgrounds, including Young Woman with Cut Flowers (1967-70; A.R. 240), Woman Grieving (1967; A.R. 198), and Image of Anne, study in absence (1967; A.R. 197). These powerful evocations of death in turn revived the deep impact made on the artist by the Celto-Ligurian vestiges at Entremont near Aix-en-Provence, culminating in the large-scale Stele: Hommage à Entremont (1968; A.R. 219, Fondation Maeght, St Paul). In the early 1970's le Brocquy will again turn to Anne Madden in a series of portrait heads, many of which will be completed twenty-five years later. These works will anticipate the celebrated 'heads' devoted to literary figures and fellow artists which le Brocquy commenced in 1975, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Seamus Heaney and Bono. Thomas Kinsella's The Táin is translated into Chinese. The artist approves the use of his illustrations for this edition published by Hunan Education Press & Yingpan Brother Publishing Co., Ltd, Beijing (May 2008). Past translations of The Táin have been published in German, French and Spanish.   339 Eimear McKeith, ‘Louis, Louis, even at 90, much to see’, The Sunday Tribune (Dublin, 25 January 2007). 340 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. 341 Louis le Brocquy, interview, Anne Madden. Painter and Muse, television documentary directed by Bill Hughes, Mind the Gap Productions, 2005. 342 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 'The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy', notes, 2003. 343 Alistair Smith, 'Louis le Brocquy: On the Spiritual in Art', exhibition catalogue Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 - 1996, (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, October 1996 - February 1997), p. 16.

Anne Madden and Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 2006. Photograph © Amelia Stein