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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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Bacchanalia and Processions
Goldman’s essay concludes with the comment that the theme of Travellers:
… embodies the spirit of revolt itself, of that most constructive revolt which begins with the destruction of every obstacle in the path of the new life that is to grow on the débris of the old, when the paralyzing yoke of institutionalism shall have been broken, and man left free to enjoy Life and Laughter.39
As the character, Paul Ruttledge, expresses it:
When everything was pulled down we would have more room to get drunk in, to drink contentedly out of the cup of life, out of the drunken cup of life.
Thus the Travellers’ outlook is associated with the bacchanalian theme that found expression in another significant series by le Brocquy, that of the Processions. The series comprises two complementary but oppositional themes which could be interpreted as expressing the Apollonian and Dionysian modes, as defined by Friedrich Nietzsche.40 The Procession with Lilies theme was prompted by a newspaper photograph, published in 1939, depicting a procession of girls, some holding lilies, as they left the Franciscan Church of Adam and Eve on Merchant’s Quay, Dublin. The photograph, sent to the artist by a friend, eventually prompted a series of images carried out between 1962 and 1995. The girls, with their white dresses and lilies – symbols of purity – are the epitome of order, restraint, harmony and beauty. By contrast, a related series, Children in a Wood, painted between 1954 and 1962, was based on a 17th century Dutch painting entitled Boys Playing with a Goat (1650s), now attributed to Cornelis Bisschop. This painting on which the series was based shows a bacchanalian or Dionysian scene.41As Peter Murray described it:
The scene in Boys Playing with a Goat, with its pagan overtones, is the antithesis of the Christian rite of passage depicted in the Dublin photograph: the boys’ procession through the forest as uninhibited as the procession of girls is decorous.42
The uninhibited games of the children and their closeness to nature has certain analogies with the Traveller children, and reminded le Brocquy of his own childhood games in the forest which he remembers as ‘a magic place’, a kind of Eden. The goat which features in the image has long been associated with rites to celebrate Eros and Priapos. For centuries, imagery depicting bacchanalia commonly featured satyrs – mythical half-goat, half-man creatures, cavorting and playing the pan-pipes. Pan-pipes were associated with the desires of the flesh, unlike Apollo’s stringed instrument which was identified with the spirit. The goat is the central character also in Puck Fair, the annual festival in Killorglin, Co. Kerry, described by Richard Hayward in 1946, and coinciding with the time when le Brocquy was working on the Traveller series.
It was all a grand excitement in this quiet countryside, and it must have been like this every year for countless centuries, for nothing seems to me more surely the survival of an ancient pagan feast than this age-old gathering under the patronage of a male goat, known in Kerry as a puck.43
At that time, it seems the festival was closely associated with Travellers, as Hayward describes rather colourfully. While such descriptions may owe as much to the imagination of the writer as the actuality of the event, they nonetheless serve to highlight and promote the kind of connections that were made in people’s minds.
And then over the bridge, along the road to right and left, were the caravans of the gypsies and the distinct and smaller portable habitations of the tinkers. A great riot of nomadic colour this, with swarms of children playing under the caravans, or about the openings of the lower tilts, and the buxom brightly-shawled women busy taking silver in exchange for news of dark-avised strangers whom they saw in the upturned palms of laughing country boys and girls.44
Evans, writing in 1957, also comments on the fair as a traditional gathering place for Travellers:
The business of the fair is the sale of livestock, and as with many another large fair it is a traditional gathering place for the tinkers who in Ireland take the place of the gypsies.45
There have been a number of explanations for the role of the goat, including the legend that a goat somehow managed to warn the town of advancing Cromwellian forces. However, Evans is one of several who suggest that “it is more reasonable to see Puck as a symbol of fertility”.46
Le Brocquy’s tapestry, Garlanded Goat (1949-50), forms part of the Travellers series and was prompted by the Puck festival with its horse trading and strong traditional associations with Travellers. The chaotic event, as described by Hayward, was an occasion of drinking, dancing, laughing, fortune-telling and carousing – another bacchanalian event. However, le Brocquy’s goat is, according to the artist, a she-goat – prompted by, but not an illustration of, the Puck Fair, an unusual example of his prioritising of the place of the female. It is related also to an earlier painting entitled Goat in Snow, which also depicts a female goat.
War
The subject for the mural in Williams’ public house in Tullamore was Cúchulainn and Queen Medb. Le Brocquy does not remember now the circumstances which led to the choice of subject, but surmises that he would have known it through his mother, and the particular subject from Irish legend may have been prompted by the relative proximity of Medb’s seat in Roscommon. This represents an unexpected, early connection between the Travellers series and the legend in the artist’s career. Le Brocquy returned to the theme when he was commissioned to carry out the series of images for the text of Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin, published in 1969 by Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press. The Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle-Raid of Cooley, is the central epic of the Ulster cycle which recounts how Queen Medb of Connacht gathered an army in order to gain possession of the most famous bull in Ireland which was owned by Daire, a chieftain of Ulster. Due to a debilitating curse afflicting the men of Ulster, the teenage Cúchulainn was left to defend Ulster single-handedly.
Working with this text provided a new and difficult challenge for le Brocquy as he explains:
I realised that this was something very ancient, something that had been guarded and came down from the earliest Celtic era in Ireland.47
He recounts that the stories had first been handed down by word of mouth by story-tellers and subsequently recorded by monks at different periods, despite the non-Christian theme. Le Brocquy felt that it was inappropriate:
… for an artist, the illustrator, to attempt to describe circumstance, the clothes, the shields. And so I didn’t know where to turn. I really did not know where to turn.48
He explored a number of avenues for inspiration, looking to primitive and pre-Christian sources in French and Spanish cave drawings. Finally, he found a solution:
… eventually, it was solved for me by oriental calligraphy, those marvellous Japanese brush strokes, their spontaneity. Gesture had to be spontaneous. I also saw it as a way of avoiding commenting directly, describing. I was intent on not describing.49
The images consequently do not come across as illustrations as such, subservient to the text, but function as a parallel text, in the spirit of the original. Le Brocquy explains: “to put it the other way around, I call them shadows thrown by the text”.50
The images began as drawings, adapted to fit into the text, and were then developed into a series of lithographs and finally translated into the magisterial tapestries. The works convey both the individuals, isolated in their resolve and fear, and the massed troups, mapped out across the landscape of their campaign or ordered into serried ranks, as in the tapestry Cúchulainn VI (1977). In this ancient saga of conflict, a powerful female maintains a significant presence, in common with the Travellers theme.
The Travellers series was carried out in the wake of the Second World War also, to some extent in sympathy with the plight of the gypsies who had suffered at the hands of the Nazi regime. This regime had chosen to visualise itself in terms of Apollonian classicism. The culture they adopted was one of strict, linear order and an aesthetic of harmonious beauty that could find no place for the creative Modernist artists who, sharing the fate of the gypsies, were branded as ‘degenerate’. Such repression was the very opposite of all that the Travellers stood for and the Modernist aesthetic that le Brocquy developed to represent them was consequently appropriate.
The post-War period brought with it fears of nuclear power, exemplified in images such as Fearful World (1948), which prophetically anticipate widespread and long-lived terror. In Fear of Cain in the same year, addresses a similar concern, converging the Travellers with the Eden theme, which infers that the consequence of irreconcilable differences is the irretrievable loss of paradise.
Allegory
In 1950, le Brocquy designed a large tapestry entitled Allegory. It might be regarded as a pivotal work with elements central to the theme of the Travellers, but embodying much of what will be carried on into other themes. In common with the tapestry, Adam and Eve in the Garden, the cycles of nature are inferred by the presence of the sun and the moon. In Allegory, there is the additional inference of the fragility of life in the inclusion of the ancient symbol of fate, the unwinding skein of wool - but it embodies a vital note of optimism. As le Brocquy points out:
In Allegory the man under the Sun holds a skein of wool, wound in by the woman in the area of the Moon, from which the child emerges.51
The theme of ‘tinkers’ or Travellers is seen by many as a quintessentially Irish subject and this artist’s interest was prompted by witnessing their sojourn at the edge of a town in Ireland. However, this brief introductory exploration will hopefully add to the significance of Louis le Brocquy’s interpretation, not only beyond the narrow limitations of a local or even national reading, but in wider international and interdisciplinary contexts. In particular, it may prompt further evaluations of the complexity and interconnectedness of these and of those other major themes in the oeuvre of this prodigious artist.
39 Emma Goldman, op. cit.
40 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, first published 1871.
41 Bacchus was the Roman name for Dionysus and rituals in the past involved drunkenness and sexual abandon.
42 Peter Murray, ‘Eros and Thanatos’, in Louis le Brocquy, Procession, exhibition catalogue, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery and Taylor Galleries, Cork and Dublin, 2003, unpaginated.
43 Richard Hayward, In the Kingdom of Kerry, Dundalgan Press, Dundalk, 1970; first published 1946, pp.230-31.
44 Ibid.
45 E. Estyn Evans, op. cit., p.257.
46 Ibid.
47 Interview, op. cit.
48 Ibid.
49 Interview, op. cit.
50 Ibid.
51 Correspondence with Louis and Pierre le Brocquy, 15th May, 2006.