8 / Portrait Heads

Embarks on the Portrait Heads series (1975-2007), the fifth distinctive period in the artist's work.Assessing the artist prior to the advent of his celebrated portrait heads of literary and artistic figures, Dorothy Walker writes in Hibernia: 'He emerges with a form of art which is, I think, unique in the world of art at present. While classical in terms of brush-stroke oil painting, it is beyond the avant-garde in terms of social concern, and is of the immense over-riding concern for the anguish of the individual'. The motivation comes about through a commission by the Swedish gallery-owner Per-Olov Borjesson to assemble a portfolio of thirty three aquatints of Nobel prizewinners by international artists. This commission was the catalyst which inspired the artist to paint a long series of evocative heads of literary figures and fellow artists, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Seamus Heaney and Bono. Le Brocquy remarks: 'From among the several Irish Nobel prizewinners at that date - Beckett had not yet received his award - I chose Yeats as my subject, having known him when I was a boy and because of his vast and mysterious personality. I made a number of studies for my final aquatint, and was struck by their diversity. It was then I realised that a portrait can no longer be the stable, pillared entity of Renaissance vision - that the portrait in our time can have no visual finality'. John Montague observes: 'So the le Brocquy who rejected an early career as a portrait painter finds himself, as all artists do, back where he started, but with an added richness'. According to Alistair Smith: 'Le Brocquy found himself painting study after study in watercolour, charchoal and oil, as a form of preparation for the final print. That aquatint, concluded in the suggestive, vestigial manner of some of the earlier Heads, showed the poet full-face, hovering within the white "matrix" of space and time ... The etching bears the title Study towards an Image of WB Yeats, as did many of the other pictures of Yeats which le Brocquy created in preparation for this image, and which he was to continue to create after its completion' The artist explains: 'In order to produce a human image which has some kind of contemporary relevance, you have to recognise that certain factors which have arisen in the last hundred years have revolutionised the way we look at things. Because of photography and the cinema on the one hand, and psychology on the other, we can no longer regard a human being as a static entity, subject to merely biological change ... Replacing the single definitive image by a series¯ of inconclusive images has, therefore, perhaps something to do with contemporary vision, perceiving the image as a variable conception rather than a definitive manifestation in the Renaissance sense ... Repetition, on the other hand, implies not linear but circular thought, a merry-go-round interpretation of reality, another form of completion, another whole, which can be entered or left at any point. This latter counter-Renaissance tendency is, curiously enough, already evident here and there within our Irish tradition, from the Books of Kells and Lindisfarne to Finnegans Wake.' ... | CHRONOLOGY OF A LIFE PORTRAIT HEADS

According to John Russell: 'There was from the very beginning a blanched look about many of his paintings: pure white light, pure white walls, pure white skin. Bone-white, chalk-white, almond-white were the adjectives that come to mind. Around the mid-1950's that whiteness, which had been simply a prevailing tonality, became the very element and substance of the paintings'. Embarks on the 'White Period' Presence paintings (c.1956-66) the fourth distinctive period in the artist's work. The generic term is first attributed during the exhibition 50 Ans d'Art Moderne, World Fair, Brussels, 1958, where it is remarked that in his latest work the human figure is no longer an abstraction drawn from living beings. Rather it has become a magic presence. The artist explains: 'An essential break occurred, where I began to concentrate on a single image emerging from a canvas, in which the composition, in the conventional sense of the word, had been destroyed or ignored. Quite a painful decision, in fact. I had always based myself on being a traditional painter in that I maintained that composition was important; all that had to be thrown out ... Then, later, I had the idea of conjuring up images out of nothing, out of light, out of the depths of the blank canvas, as it were.' According to Brian Kennedy: 'The theme which in its first phase was to occupy him for almost a decade, gradually became a vehicle of exploration for the whole of his later career'' Dorothy walker notes: 'His heads of writers derive directly from his earlier heads of ancestors, as being spirits, like the great father-figures of Yeats and Joyce, who still influence our consciousness. He is not interested in the traditional portrait, the single static image, feeling that photography has superceded the documentary role of the painted likeness. He is primarily interested in creating an image of a human face which by its own autonomy as a work of art will convey the inner presence of a human personality with greater intensity than any depiction, however skilled, of external appearance. He seeks among multiple images of the same person an epiphanic flash of what lies hidden behind "the billowing curtain of the face", and to make palpable what is sensed in the image of an individual trapped within the canvas. His method is distinctly Proustian, in which the "quick" of the epiphany is caught by involuntary accident'.--Prompted on his choice of subjects the artist explains: 'I'm drawn to their work, yes, certainly, and in each case, before beginning to paint, I have tried to steep myself as deeply as possible in it. On the other hand, I don't think of them so much as famous or brilliant men but as vulnerable, especially poignant human beings who have gone further than the rest of us and for that reason are more isolated and moving. Above all, I was drawn to the journey they had made through life and the wide world of their vision'. Anne Crookshank observes: 'Although le Brocquy studies intensively the background of the figures he paints, reads what they have written, and much of what has been written about them, his works are not didactic. They seem so authoritative that they can be awe-inspiring. But, in fact, they require the viewer's cooperation for real understanding. They do not aim at instantaneous revelation. Sometimes the veils are lifted and a vivacious, flickering reality seems to pour out of the canves, but this is rare. They are themes with infinite variations, meditations of quiet, still beauty'.