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Louis le Brocquy Allegory and Legend
Introduction. Yvonne ScottLouis le Brocquy Allegory and Legend, The Hunt Museum, Limerick, 16 June - 24 September 2006
Dr Yvonne Scott is the Director of Triarc, the Irish Art Research Center in the Department of the History of Art, Trinity College Dublin.
www.triarc.ie
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Creation, Procreation and Maternity
The association of Travellers with their origins in their closeness to nature, their characterisation as uninhibited, their status as outcasts and their wandering lifestyle, collectively have parallels with the theme of the Eden series. The Biblical myth of creation and the subsequent loss of paradise, are realised in two of le Brocquy’s most celebrated tapestries, Adam and Eve in the Garden (1951-2) and Eden (1952). The connected ideas of creation and of being an outsider, are of crucial interest to the artist. An unusual subject, Man Creating Bird (1948), links the concept of origination/creation with the Travellers. This work shows a monumental figure with a bird held high, as though performing an act of magic. This work is prophetic of scientific developments, as le Brocquy points out:
… a man creating a bird was something which I imagined that eventually - because of what had happened up to then - man’s power of invention was almost infinite and the scientific thrust could, would, produce unimaginable results, entering the realms of our idea of God.23
Creativity is more commonly associated with the women, however, in terms of their procreative role. The Traveller society that le Brocquy presents is predominantly matriarchal; women dominate his images as the most powerful and memorable figures. In an ethnic group he interprets as characterised by family and community, the place of the female is central. The drawing, Nativity, Connemara (1945), emphasises the women’s role as child-bearer, and various images illustrate her responsibility for taking care of the children. The tapestry Travellers (1948), for example, shows a young woman with a clinging toddler. The ubiquity of children in the images is borne out by experience. Scholarly research has demonstrated the high fertility rate of the women: early marriage ensured a long reproductive span and a recent study suggested that even into the 21st century, the average Traveller woman has as many as eleven living children.24 While commentators from the settled society have suggested that Traveller women are neglectful mothers, anthopologists who have studied their values indicate an alternative reality.25Le Brocquy found his limited exposure to Traveller families in the 1940s revealed them to be caring and the children as happy and secure in their sense of belonging.
Children one found scuttling in between them all. And they were sublimely happy, the children. Really enjoying themselves. And they were quite severe with them – I mean they would give them a cuff on the ear. But they were assured, they knew where they were. In short, they belonged.26
Sick Tinker Child (1946) shows the mother’s concern for a child’s welfare, fear about where the infant will be taken and whether it will be returned to her. The artist explains the work:
Sick Tinker Child … you see the child is being carried out … I saw this happen. A child being carried out to a doctor who is one of the settled group so there is a certain added terror to it too. What would happen to the child, would the child be kept. Hence the gesture of the sister.27
Fairground under Bray Head (1949) includes, in the foreground, a little girl with a doll, demonstrating the kind of socialisation towards a nurturing role that takes place from an early age and also links the Traveller series to a range of works involving children with dolls that was to follow.
The women also appear to take responsibility for the domestic chores. While Traveller men engaged in various forms of employment such as tinsmithing, horsedealing, and more recently in various forms of trade, in le Brocquy’s images the male figures are rarely shown engaged in work. Tinkers Resting (1946) ironically shows the female carrying a pail, while Tinkers (1946), dominated by three half-length male figures, includes tiny vignettes of women at work in the background.
Le Brocquy was fascinated with the family relationships and defined Traveller life by a familial and community cohesion that he appears to find lacking elsewhere. As has been noted by several commentators, including S.B. Kennedy28 and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith29, Le Brocquy characteristically shows groups of people psychologically turned away from one another demonstrating the essential mutual independence and indivisibility of a person. However, his representations of Traveller groups are notable for the way they cohere and even merge one into another. This suggests the close proximity to one another of their existence for various practical reasons. The watercolour sketch, Fire (1946), is an apt example. The entire community may have only the one source of heat, so all huddle around it in a circular composition whose core is defined by the silhouetted hands. Hands are a particular feature of le Brocquy’s figures and worth noting for the senstitive way that they are allowed to articulate on behalf of the body.
Matriarchy and Origination Myths
The most iconic of the matriarchal figures, however, is Tinker Woman with a Newspaper (1947-8) who dominates the space with her monumental presence. Described as the masterpiece of the series, it has been suggested that Willem de Kooning saw this work when it was on display at the Stedelïjk Museum in Amsterdam in the show Twelve Contemporary British Painters in 1948-9. Certainly, le Brocquy’s figure anticipates de Kooning’s treatment of women. However, more significantly, le Brocquy indicates an awareness of the interest among certain major European artists in the 1930s and 1940s in matriarchal themes whose philosophical origins can be traced to J.J. Bachofen’s concept of Mutterrecht, or ancient matriarchy.30 This text explores the concept of primitive matriarchal societies and associates women with the forces of nature. Some of the ideas presented were particularly attactive to those who felt disillusioned with the superficial values of contemporary society and valorised a time when nature and instinct determined relationships. Visually, it embodied a rejection of the classicising tendency of academic art insitutions, in favour of Modernist fragmentation and archaic idioms. Thematically, it favoured chthonic themes addressing creation, sexuality and death - chaos, eros and thanatos. The originary myths encapsulated bacchanalian/Dionysian themes of ecstasy and inebriation, in place of the rational, logical Apollonian themes associated with the tastes of bourgeois society for academic art.
Artists seeking appropriate prototypes to express such ideas looked not only at ‘foreign’ primitivism, but also to the pre-Christian era of their native cultures. Picasso, it is known, explored his native Iberian sculpture. While Le Brocquy may not have been familiar with Bachofen directly, he was aware of contemporary developments in Europe and their underlying concepts. As a generalisation, women were depicted as dangerously seductive or determinedly noncompliant – a direct challenge to traditional representations of women as virginal and submissive. In this context, le Brocquy’s Tinker Woman with a Newspaper is groundbreaking, particularly in the Irish context, in its depiction of a defiant and intransigent woman.
The elemental nature she represents is described by the artist:
She struck me as being as unalterable, and true to her nature, as a tiger or tigress. Something that was ‘over there’ and in its own way as wild if not as savage, and elemental.31
The newspaper symbolises the world of law and order that she rejects:
And so I painted her. I don’t think she really had the newspaper in her hand, I can’t remember that. But I painted the newspaper, her world crushing the newspaper, because the newspaper to me was the symbol of what lay out there with the settled people.32
The newspaper as a symbol of the settled community and bourgeois society in contrast to the anarchical one of the Travellers, is referred to in W.B. Yeats’ play, Where there is Nothing (1902). The central character, Paul Ruttledge, was a landlord who gave up his aristocratic lifestyle to become a Traveller having got ‘the wandering into his blood’. In one version of the play, he refers to “these neighbours of mine, they think like newspapers, they think in packs.” [117]. He goes on to say:
When I hear these people talking I always hear some organized or vested interest chirp or quack, as it does in the newspapers … [120-23]
I would like to have great iron claws, and to put them about the pillars, and to pull and pull till everything fell into pieces ... [143-48] 33
The analogy to the Old Testament character, Samson, who uses his strength to pull down the edifices of his enemies, identifies Ruttledge – together with the travelling way of life he embraces - as the embodiment of social subversion in a play that is seen to attack the pillars of society: the middle classes, the State, and the Church.
Lady Gregory, in the opening lines for her essay, ‘The Wandering Tribe’, published in 1903, makes reference to this dichotomy also:
When poor Paul Ruttledge made his great effort to escape the doorsteps of law and order – from the world, the flesh, and the newspaper – and fell among the tinkers, I looked with more interest than before at the little camps that one sees every now and then by the roadside for a few days or weeks.34
The interpretation of the Travellers’ lives as anarchic and oppositional to that of ‘despotic’ society is borne out in an essay published some years later in 1914. Emma Goldman refers to the play as being “as true an interpretation of the philosophy of Anarchism as could be given by its best exponents”, and she poses the question “Is there a despotism more compelling and destructive than that of the facts of property, of the State and Church?”.35
Nationalism and Modernism
While the Travellers were addressed in the literature of a number of exponents of cultural nationalism – Douglas Hyde, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Jack Yeats and Lady Gregory – their presentation of them in opposition to the values of middle-class Catholic society proved problematic in some cases. Such plays were marginalised and opportunities to perform them were limited. As MacLaughlin has argued, anti-Traveller racism in the opening decades of the century was not confined to Ireland:
… the fusion of social Darwinism with bourgeois nationalist ideas about homeland, property, hygiene and respectability then contributed to a radical disavowal of Gypsy and other Traveller cultures and lifestyles.36
Nomadic lifestyles involved the abandonment of claims on property and consequently denied Travellers the rights associated with property ownership. Irish nation-builders fused these ideas of social progress with nationalism and rural fundamentalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, prioritising the values of settled property owners. As MacLaughlin summarises:
‘Tinkers’ were perceived as a people without either a history or a homeland, serious deficiencies indeed in a country where attachment to land could reach primal proportions, and where political recognition and respectability was sought in an international arena where claims to nationhood could be seriously jeopardised through ‘racial inferiority’ or association with nomadic cultures and practices.37
Travellers, despite the early association with the rural populations of the West and their identity as part of pre-Christian Ireland, were ultimately seen as having no place within a nation whose identity was based on ownership of property, and the fixity and commitment that it demands.
Theoretically, nationalism can be seen as in many respects the opposite of Modernism – though major Irish artists in the first half of the 20th century sought to combine them, with varying degrees of success. At its simplest, nationalism involves a sense of identity based on recognisable and established common features, shared by a population. It consequently tends to look to the past, sometimes with a nostalgic perspective. By contrast, Modernism is associated with anarchic rejection of the past, the immediacy of contemporary life, and/or progress towards a future. The nomadism of the Travellers, their preference not to be tied to specific places, and the difficulty of establishing any kind of accurate history to verify their origins, which were in any case often believed to be ‘foreign’, places them outside the nationalist tradition.38 Le Brocquy’s method of representation of the Travellers is adapted from Cubism, developed to create a shifting and fragmented idiom appropriate not only to this theme but to his subjects generally which have in common their anarchical philosophy.
23 Interview, op. cit.
24 Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers, Racism and the Politics of Culture, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2000, p.210.
25 Ibid.
26 Interview, op. cit.
27 Ibid.
28 S.B. Kennedy, ‘Louis le Brocquy. The Spanish Shawl’, Great Irish Artists from Lavery to Le Brocquy, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1997, p.132.
29 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith, ‘The Human Image Paintings of Louis le Brocquy’, Notes, 2003, quoted in Pierre le Brocquy, op. cit.
30 The influential text by the Swiss philosopher, J.J. Bachofen, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World was first published in 1861.
31 Interview, op. cit.
32 Ibid.
33 Russell K. Alfpach, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, The Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1979, pp.1074-5.
34 Lady Augusta Gregory, ‘The Wandering Tribe’ (first published 1903), reprinted in Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish, by Lady Gregory, Kennikat Press, Inc., Port Washington, N.Y., 1967, p.121.
35 Emma Goldman, ‘Where there is Nothing; a synopsis and analysis of the play by William Butler Yeats’, in Richard G. Badger, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, The Gorham Press, Boston, 1914, p.252-60.
36 Jim MacLaughlin, op. cit., p.129.
31 Interview, op. cit.
32 Ibid.
33 Russell K. Alfpach, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, The Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1979, pp.1074-5.
37 Ibid., p.138
38 Numerous studies have take place to attempt to establish the origins, and there seems to be general consensus among respected academics that these are largely conjecture.