Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

We can trace the growth of the professional intimacy between Louis and Gimpel Fils in their correspondence. Sheaves of carbon copies of business letters are spliced in the files with sheets of crisp writing paper which carry Louis’ liquid calligraphy. Many are written from the south of France where Louis and Anne moved in 1958 to give Anne the warmth and the dry air that she needed to recover from her back operation. Very early on it is clear from the correspondence that, to Louis, these are not just business letters, but letters to a friend:
‘We’ve found a wonderful bed of fossils, seemingly of the Chalky Cretaceous period (I suppose!) about 60-100 million yrs ago. Anne has a fantastic eye – like a buzzard in the Carmargue we saw last week! – and has the finest ‘positive-fossil’ snail complete and about 6” across.’18
Family news, observations of people and landscape, turns of phrase that assume an immediate understanding pepper these communications between artist and dealer. There are some wonderfully graphic descriptions, for example Louis writes of the new swimming-pool at their house in Carros in the Alpes Maritimes that it ‘boils with children splashing about.’19

There is a mutual understanding between Louis and Charles of what particular kind of motive force each has to contribute to keep the show on the road: from the one part a gallery home, white welcoming walls, a market constituency and financial backbone, courage and an acceptance of risk; from the other part an outflow of paintings, certainty of delivery, certainty of shock, and, again, courage and an acceptance of risk. That Louis le Brocquy and Gimpel Fils have achieved such a happy sixty year partnership is down to one thing in the end, a lifetime’s trust and a sensitivity to the other’s role. Louis made this clear to Charles after less than ten years together:
‘It would not enter my head under any circumstances to make an arrangement outside Peter and yourself. … (No-one knows more fully my complete loyalty to you both). … Of course I am hoping, and even presuming that these feelings are mutual and that you would both wish to continue with our arrangement, subject, as you say, to modifications acceptable to both sides.’20

Louis destroyed a large quantity of work in 1963, during a period of despair and uncertainty. As Anne put it, ‘that blight most dreaded by artists had crept into him – the loss of inspiration. … He had painted himself to a standstill.’21 Destruction is part of the creative act, just as fire is part of the rebalancing of nature. This would not be Louis’ only mass destruction. He wrote to Kay Gimpel in 1988:
‘Since getting back from New York in November I’ve been working until 2 days ago on the seemingly impossible task of illustrating Joyce’s Dubliners [for the Dolmen Press, Dublin]. 6.30 each morning. 116 drawings. Some 600 destroyed. Inevitably I have failed to measure up to the task, but it has been a revelatory experience for this Dubliner.’22
In chucking out the old to make room for the new, Louis came to understand, in conversation with his friend the artist Joan Mitchell, that the paintings he had destroyed had in fact been painted by Henry, ‘the monkey which lurks in us all.’23 What the destruction led to was a clearing out of the closets, an ending of an interregnum. In destroying over forty works, Louis allowed a new period in his life to begin.

At Anne’s suggestion, she and Louis went to Paris, where, at the Musée de l’Homme, Louis discovered the Polynesian head cult: skulls overlaid in clay and painted magically to preserve the presence within. This discovery led him to the Celto-Ligurian head cult in Roquepertuse and to their central settlement at Entremont in the French Midi, destroyed by the Romans in that retrospectively neat year BC 123. From these revelations a number of paintings emerged: first, the anonymous Ancestral Heads, followed through the later 1960s by the long series of Head Images of artists whom le Brocquy regarded as ‘exceptional instances of human consciousness’. Among these are W. B. Yeats, whom le Brocquy knew when he was in his teens, Joyce, Lorca, Picasso, and his friends Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett. The Head Images are not portraits. When working on the head of Samuel Beckett, le Brocquy remarked:
‘I’m not making a statement at all, you know, I’m simply trying to discover, to uncover, aspects of the Beckettness of Beckett, the Baconness of Bacon. …
I try to paint the head image from the inside out, as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency. What one is left with at the end … is the suggestion of some turbulence going on beneath the picture surface, beneath the external appearance of the image.’24

There is a passage in the early Irish stories of the hero Cú Chúlainn describing the seven pupils he had in each eye, which ‘glittered with seven gem-like sparkles.’ 25 On his face Cú Chúlainn had four moles – blue, crimson, green and yellow. What a face; and what extraordinary literary imagery coming out of the enlightened land of Ireland in the so-called dark ages. ‘Like the Celts,’ le Brocquy said, ‘I tend to regard the head as this magic box containing the spirit. Enter that box, enter behind the billowing curtain of the face, and you have the whole landscape of the spirit.’26 Reflecting on the period ten years later, le Brocquy realised that an essential break had occurred:
‘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.’27

Le Brocquy’s colour, beyond the guiding presence of white, stands out in sharp points, jewel-like, shocking, granular, glittering with ‘gem-like sparkles’, held within the white surface which is ‘a matrix within which the central image may be realised and held.’28 The artist revealed a secret of his alchemy to Michael Peppiatt:
‘With an oil, I usually make a very rough sketch in charcoal first. Then I take the brush, tip it with a little blue, say, on one side and a little Indian red on the other and I make these free gestures round the area of the eyebrow or the chin or wherever. And sometimes a suggestion of an image – a kind of objet trouvé, if you like – begins to emerge … all I can say is that there has to be an element of accident, or discovery, or surprise all the way along, so that the emergent image is not so much made by me as imposing itself on me, accident by accident, with its own autonomous life.’29

In the Gimpel Fils files there are letters from Louis to Kay and to René Gimpel written in the 1970s and 1980s that throw light on the artist’s processes in the Head Images. To René Gimpel Louis wrote in 1988,
‘For a number of years, as you know, I’ve been trying to evoke from the variable appearance of the human face a further less tangible thing, an underlying landscape as it were.’30
This brief remark provides a key to the Head Images, landscapes of the person, the artist’s scan beneath the surface of the skull, reconstructed in the face:
‘Appearance is very important to me as a painter. In the head images it signals identity. In reaching out towards an underlying reality, I constantly refer to external appearances – not in the solid Renaissance sense, but simply to identify the whatness of, say, an apple, a forehead or a lower lip.’31

Le Brocquy’s work began to reach a wider public through Dorothy Walker’s monograph Louis le Brocquy, first published with an introduction by John Russell by the Ward River Press in Dublin in 1981. Correspondence in the Gimpel Fils files suggests that this book had a protracted birth, and while its publication marked le Brocquy’s acknowledgement as Ireland’s greatest living artist, it nevertheless demanded a continued commitment between artist and dealer in an uphill struggle for sales of paintings. Dorothy Walker’s book discovered new audiences and understanding for the artist, and a widening public airing for his work. But as if through a counter-current, purchasers from Gimpel’s New York gallery Gimpel-Weitzenhoffer in 1983 came from a highly specialised group. The artist commented wryly:
‘Ironically, as you know, the book has made no change in selling my difficult work and, were it not for the totally unexpected success in New York I’d be a bit despairing. As it is, both in France and NY every single sale has been recently to various museums, art historians, art critics, galleries and artists! A weird state of affairs and encouraging in a way. But as [Serge] Poliakoff (who spoke worse French than I do) once said: ‘Assez prestige! Maintenant l’argent!’32

While painting his Head Images, year in, year out, in the 1970s and 1980s, le Brocquy found concurrent inspiration in the Irish landscape. He showed a group of landscape watercolours at Gimpels in 1988, and wrote of them to René:
‘But landscape itself is, after all, an entirely subjective experience which has little to do with the actual, objective geology or vegetation of the regarded area, and you may yourself have noticed that, in these small watercolour landscapes you are showing, nothing whatever is recognisably specified. Nothing is described other than the act of looking.’33
Le Brocquy had painted landscapes since the 1940s, and until the series shown at Gimpels in 1988 had done so ‘to relax the mind.’34 The watercolours of Irish landscape create yet another distinct group of works in le Brocquy’s output, one in which the artist abstracts himself from the subject. In this they are fundamentally different from the Head Images because in the landscapes he encourages both the medium and the subject to present themselves to him, allowing them to emerge largely of their own accord.

The identity and essence of Ireland floods onto the paper in the landscape watercolours, through intimation and accident. Water is both the medium and the subject. The paper is wet, all or in part, being soaked or dabbed at random with a wet brush. The colour goes where it will within the invisible boundaries laid by the master magician, Ireland’s Prospero of painting. One landscape feature may emerge boldly, then melt back into the colour that surrounds and supports it, the whole continually evolving in changing patterns of water, colour and flickering light. They are distillations of a lifetime’s experience, the discoveries of an astonished traveller on returning home.

In 1996 le Brocquy ‘felt impelled to return some thirty years to the Presence paintings, hoping to discover some further aspect of our inner reality.’35 In these paintings, which he came to group together as Human Images, the artist developed rhythmic textured backgrounds from which the central figure could form and, ambivalently, radiate outward. The earliest Human Images, of 1996, are isolated features – ear, mouth, navel – alone on the canvas emerging from a void, initially without the central vertical that characterises the Presences. As the series progressed, the human form, male and female, appeared gradually from the void, more often as a standing figure but in two or three instances emerging as a crucified or fallen man within the encompassing shimmer of the reticulated surface. With these works le Brocquy perfected the use of thin attenuated glazes laid all over the canvas, brilliant red, blue, viridian green, thinned to homeopathic quantities with white spirit. The canvas weave imparts a delicate undulation to the surface, which gradually builds up into a texture characteristic of skin pigmentation.

Into his ninth decade le Brocquy is, through the Human Image paintings which were exhibited by Gimpel Fils in 2001 and 2003, continuing to explore, discover and learn:
‘I believe I have gradually learned from these last paintings something of the paradox that - although the essential and ultimate state of the human individual is aloneness - each one of us remains part of our physical, metaphysical, social and cultural environment, 'breathing,' as it were, inhaling and exhaling, absorbing and reaching outward within its complexity.’36
Throughout his life, le Brocquy’s sources have been the human being, the strivings of great artists, and nature. Nature, perhaps, most of all – overwhelmingly in the landscape watercolours, and in the paintings of figures within landscape as seen in the series Processions (c1984-1992), and indeed in le Brocquy’s enriching still life, flower and dove paintings, made from the early 1980s to 1998. Le Brocquy is one of the greatest living painters of nature and its spirit, grown out of a lifetime’s fascination with natural forms and their expression within the landscape. He sees the human being as part of the rhythm of nature as a whole:
‘I have learned to perceive the human presence as part of a wider background that has taken the form of a rhythmic, pulsatory force from which the central image emerges and into which it, in turn, expands. Some days ago I was interested to discover, on a beach in West Cork, not dissimilar rhythmic pulsations, naturally sculpted in the sand by an outgoing tide.’37
Here we see le Brocquy unconsciously echoing the actions and impulse of one of his artist-forebears, J. M. W. Turner, who was one day noticed at the edge of the Thames ‘squatting on his heels … looking down intently into the water … apparently the object of his interest was the patterns made by the ripples at the edge of the tide.’38

Louis returns continually in his talk and writing to ‘my Masters’, who speak as clearly now as they did centuries ago. They knew how to express themselves in paintand Louis constantly seeks their masterly experience. ‘I have always been fascinated by the horizontal monumentality of traditional Odalisque painting,’ he told an audience at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002 when A Family was received into the Irish national collection:
‘Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Velazquez Rokeby Venus turning her back on the Spanish court, Goya’s Maja clothed and unclothed, Ingres’ Reclining Odalisque in her seraglio and finally the great Olympia of Edouard Manet celebrating his favourite model, Victorine Meurent.’39

There was no model for Louis le Brocquy’s Odalisques, though the artist admits that there are ‘remembrances back to Anne, as she was, in a way.’40 The figure exists within the canvas only. In the Odalisques there are many oppositions and confrontations with Louis’ work from the later 1950s: in them le Brocquy is returning to his beginnings and seeing them anew. In 2005 he wrote:
‘Finally I have come to think that painting – the act of painting – has somehow enabled me to reach towards, even to touch something of our inner human reality.’41
The figures are horizontal, where the Presence and Human Images are predominantly vertical. The Odalisques have a depth of space, where earlier imagery existed within a few inches beyond and in front of the picture plane. They are of the entire body, whereas in the past le Brocquy has considered the head alone, or the body partially uncovered within the painting’s colour field. They are fully fleshed, whereas in Presences the artist looks beyond the skin to the bones and viscera. The Odalisques are colourful, they are presented within a setting of bed, sheets and pillow, they are luxurious and voluptuous, and they are, above all, European.

The paint in the Odalisques has the cursive, reticulated quality that began its evolution through le Brocquy’s brush in the later Head Images, such as those of Samuel Beckett from the mid 1990s, and throughout the Human Images. Its line flows out and around the figures, sheets and flowers as if the subject was being viewed under shallow water, through milk, or even through tears. This fluidity extends to the focus of the paintings. Whereas in earlier works the eye may have settled in the landscape of the navel, mouth or spinal column, here no single point detains. Instead the lines of white and light carry the eye about to caress the subject and to direct it first to here, then to here and then to here. These are lover’s paintings which reach back across the oeuvre and complete a circle whose line began when Louis le Brocquy’s first stood transfixed in front of Manet’s Olympia in the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1938.

21 Madden, p. 144.

22 To René Gimpel, 5 Dec 1988. Gimpel Fils Archive.

23The Head Image, p. 11

24The Head Image, p. 25

25 Nancy K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, 1995. Quoted in Proinsias MacCana, ‘The Cult of Heads’, essay in Louis le Brocquy and the Celtic Head Image, Albany, New York State Museum, 1981, p. 16.

26The Head Image, p. 23.

27 Harriet Cooke, Irish Times, 25 May 1973.

28 Robert Melville, Louis le Brocquy, Galerie Leinhard, Zurich, 1971.

29Head Image, p. 24

30 To René Gimpel, 5 Dec 1988. Gimpel Fils Archive.

31The Head Image, p. 10.

32 To Kay Gimpel, 4 Feb 1984. Gimpel Fils Archive

33 To René Gimpel, 5 Dec 1988. Gimpel Fils Archive.

34Louis le Brocquy, the Irish Landscape, Gandon Editions, 1992, p. 7.

35 Communication with the author, August 2006.

36 Statement quoted on the artist’s website, www.lebrocquy.com, 2006. [nb Louis: websites are improper footnote refs – may I instead use ‘The artist in conversation with Pierre le Brocquy, 2005’?]

37 ibid.

38 Walter Armstrong, Turner, 1902, p. 131. Quoted James Hamilton, Faraday – The Life, 2002, p. 238.

39 Louis le Brocquy, address at the National Gallery of Ireland, 27 May 2002.

40 Conversation with the author, July 2006.

41 Chronology, p. 1.

Abbreviations in the notes:

Chronology:
Louis le Brocquy Chronology; unpublished typescript prepared by Pierre le Brocquy, 2004.

The Head Image:
Pierre le Brocquy (ed.), Louis le Brocquy, The Head Image; conversations with George Morgan and Michael Peppiatt, Gandon Editions, Dublin,1996

Madden:
Anne Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, A Painter Seeing His Way, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin,1994

Abbreviations in the notes:

Chronology:
Louis le Brocquy Chronology; unpublished typescript prepared by Pierre le Brocquy, 2004.

The Head Image:
Pierre le Brocquy (ed.), Louis le Brocquy, The Head Image; conversations with George Morgan and Michael Peppiatt, Gandon Editions, Dublin,1996

Madden:
Anne Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, A Painter Seeing His Way, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin,1994