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THE HUMAN HEAD
NOTES ON PAINTING AND AWARENESS BY LOUIS LE BROCQUY

 

For me, as perhaps for our Celtic and Gallic ancestors, the human head can be regarded ambivalently as a box which holds the spirit prisoner, but which may also free it transparently within the face. Paradoxically, as we know, the face is at once a mask which hides the spirit and a revelation of this spirit. As I conceive it, there lies behind the face an interior landscape which the painter tries to discover. But I know too that this landscape may also be a reflection from within the painter himself. In this sense you peer at this Other, searching for a larger image of yourself, just as Yeats himself, the contemplative man, peered at his own antithetic mask, his opposite - the swift indifferent man – and tried to bring that opposite to the surface of his personality. ___ Yeats was, I imagine, an essentially interiorized mind witnessing the slow dissolution of an outward-looking era. As we know, since the Renaissance and until the beginning of the last century our imagery has remained largely outward-looking and evidently equated with exterior phenomena. Previously, however, it was thought that reality was to be found within the mind itself, within those conceptual images of a world transformed by religious belief. In our own time, true enough, our popular imagery is largely based on the photograph. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 20th century, a profound change occurred in painting when, inspired by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and other visionary artists, we awoke to the renewed conceptual tendency of our age. Likewise in literature Beckett, while still in his twenties, expressed “…awareness of the new thing that has happened, namely the breakdown of the object… (the) rupture of the lines of communication…” and “… the space which intervenes between (the artist) and the world of objects…”. Today we begin to understand anew the nature of this ambiguous space. To see is to transform. Art is a transformer. The hand can act as an independent being to bring about the emergence of the image. The painter must wait for this without imposing his ideas, watching intensely and critically for what may happen. I am convinced that Paleolithic man acted in this way. He was an artist, but above all a seer. There is a brain in the hand. The hand in the cave of Pech-Merle is a personality. A hand-print is a personality. A footprint is only a trace, an imprint. Why? ___ When I am working I do not think, other than in a narrow technical sort of way. Painting is a form of thought within which a wider intelligence plays no important part. It has its own logic. For me, at any rate, there is no question of invention. In painting you can only hope for discovery. Invention for me is recognition. When you are painting, marks combine to form objets trouvés which may be recognized. You try to preserve these and to induce something further. If that works, an entire image may emerge. If not, it will fail. When I was painting Yeats he was my Virgil, my guide in this Other-world. His image gave me stability, reference. However I strayed, trying to realize that image – to make it palpable – he held me on his trail. At times I even had the feeling of touching him. At times I was the charlatan who toyed with the apparition of Yeats, as one might conjure up the dead in spiritualism. You may well object that such an approach is merely subjective. But then the art of the painter depends upon an essentially subjective process. It is even true that the painter continually tends to paint his self-portrait in all things, since what he tries objectively to draw up from the depths of his canvas lies really somewhere in the recesses of his own head. For, such intimate knowledge as you may try to attain of another human being through his works, all that you can know of him, passes behind the billowing curtain of his face. And if this curtain be carefully drawn aside, you are liable sometimes to find only poor traces of yourself. Nonetheless I believe that the hand can lead us away from ourselves and discover our mask; that which is other to ourselves, outside or superior to ourselves. I imagine that Rembrandt displayed the highest intelligence in projecting objectively perceived ideas of himself into his self-portraits. In this sense they are not strictly self-portraits at all, but rather portraits of a man he saw in his mirror, the enlisted sufferer whose suffering he well knew. Perhaps this is the reason for the poignant humility of these works. ____ During the last five years I have painted in various media three long series of studies – of Yeats, of James Joyce and of Federico Garcia Lorca. Although I knew Yeats personally, as a boy might know an uncle or school-master, I have best learned to know each one of these great artists through their work, through my own glimpse of the envisaged worlds which lie behind their three exceptional foreheads. In the case of Lorca, I have been moved to add to the series of paintings further studies in bronze of his forehead, os frontis, in an attempt to touch that broad tabernacle of his vision. Oh, city of gypsies!… Who could see you and forget? Let them seek you on my brow The play of moon and sand. I am aware that this vision lies far away from my own familiar country which gave birth to Yeats and Joyce. Federico, lending his Iberian temperament and his voice to the unheard cries of his people, echoing within what he calls his “astonished flesh”. For me, an Irishman, it was curiously enough the plays of Synge that provided the key to an understanding of Lorca’s fierce, lyrical world. It was only recently that I was told by Mark Mortimer in Paris that Lorca knew and admired the works of John Millington Synge. ____ Ever since I rediscovered myself the image of the head, I have painted studies of James Joyce. I have never known Joyce, but am bound to him as a Dubliner. For it is said that no-one from that city can quite escape its microcosmic world, and I am certainly no exception. Joyce is the apotheosis, the archetype of our kind and it seems to me that in him – behind the volatile arrangement of his features – lies his unique evocation of that small city, large as life and therefore poignant everywhere. But to me, a Dublin man peering at Joyce, a particular nostalgia is added to the universal “epiphany” and this perhaps enables me to grope for something of my own particular experience within the ever-changing landscape of his face, within the various and contradictory photographs of his head, within my bronze death-mask of him and, I suppose, within the recesses of my own mind. Thus almost 120 studies towards an image of James Joyce have emerged in one medium or another. It remains an unending task. For to attempt today a portrait, a single static image of a great artist like Joyce seems to me futile as well as impertinent. Long conditioned by photography, the cinema and psychology, we now perceive the human individual as facetted, kinetic. And so I have tried as objectively as possible to draw from the depths of paper or canvas changing and even contradictory traces of James Joyce; images jerked into coherence by a series of scrutinized accidents, impelled by my curiosity to discover something of the man and, within him, the inverted mirror-room of my own Dublin experience. I myself see these studies as an indefinite series without beginning or end and thus perhaps in tendency counter-Renaissance, as in a sense was also Joyce himself. Possibly their multiple identity may represent a more mediaeval or even Celtic viewpoint, cyclic rather than linear, repetitive yet simultaneous and, above all, inconclusive. They have been for me an adventure – an adventure of discovery – and not without its perils and its fears. We are told that the great naïf painter, Douanier Rousseau, stood terror-struck outside the door of his studio, summoning up his courage to re-enter and confront the marvellous lion which broods over his sleeping gypsy. I confess I felt something of the same fearful hesitation on returning to the door of my own studio in France and to the multiple photographic and other images of Joyce which filled it. I am unable to account for this sudden aversion which overcame me, other than as a fear perhaps of re-entering certain painful aspects of his temperament, of his unending difficulties. In painting Yeats, or Lorca, I never experienced this recoil, this passing shudder. But once back in the studio and facing again those images of James Joyce my fear gave way to those larger feelings of reverence, compassion and wonder which we all share in face of that unique boat-shaped head – the raised poop of the forehead, the jutting bow of the jaw – within which he made his heroic voyage, his navigatio.   Notes on Painting and Awareness, Actes du Colloque ‘Corps-Poésie-Peinture’, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de Nice, Métaphores, No. 5 (Nice, February 1979). Reproduced: Études Irlandaises (Lille: Ceriul, December 1979); Dorothy Walker Louis le Brocquy (Dublin: Ward River Press 1981; London: Hodder & Stoughton 1982) The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (Dublin: Blackwater Press 1982); The Recorder, Vol. 14, No.1 (New York: American Irish Historical Society, 2001) The Bloomsday Magazine (Dublin, May 2003). Louis le Brocquy, The Head Image. Notes on Painting and Awareness, Enrique Juncosa, Foreword, Imma Series 1. Irish Musum of Modern Art, 2006