While it was Sartre who established Giacometti as an existential hero, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also influenced the artistic manifestations of existentialism. Developing from the same point of origin, the existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty diverged when the latter became preoccupied with the role of the body in perception. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception as ‘an opening into and an interaction with the world’ placed the human body at the centre of his philosophy. As Richard Kearney has explained, he believed that the body was not an ‘object among others to be measured in purely scientific or geometric terms, but a mysterious and expressive mode of belonging to the world through our perceptions, gestures, sexuality and speech’. Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the body as the locus of perception resulted in his understanding of existence in terms of visible and invisible rather than being and nothingness.
From ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, 1945, which concentrated on ‘the attempt of the painter to express being’, to ‘Eye and Mind’, 1960, where painting is viewed as ‘an operation of being, as the . . . instance where Being manifests and sees itself’, Merleau-Ponty maintained that, ‘In whatever civilisation it is born from whatever beliefs, motives, or thought . . . painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility. Merleau-Ponty’s concentration on the ‘visible and the invisible’ resonate with le Brocquy’s Presences which hover in a liminal space between presence and absence. Le Brocquy’s preoccupation with the figure and the particularly corporeal nature of the Presences also correspond with Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the body and his assertion that, painting ‘never expresses anything other than the miracle of bodily existence – the miracle of visibility’. In fact, some of le Brocquy’s paintings of this period, such as Isolated Being,1962, with their pertinent titles and partial figures emerging from light grounds, could be illustrative of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that painting is not a succession of events in time but a series of advents of ‘Being’, and that ‘Being’ ‘is nothing but explosion, radiance, and opening and therefore ‘never fully is’.
This idea of painting as a series of incomplete advents in ‘Being’, was based on Merleau-Ponty’s belief that perception had a ‘to–and–fro’ character, caused by the ‘ex-centric and concentric’ directions mediating between the body and the world. The ‘fabric of meaning’ woven from this interaction is what he called ‘the texture of being’, and envelops both body and world’. Both this ‘to–and–fro’ character of perception and the ‘ex-centric and concentric’ directions mediating between the body and the world, resonate with le Brocquy’s Presences,which appear as images of arrested flux between the ‘to–and–fro’ of the figure appearing and disappearing in the white void of the existential universe.
Discussing the advent of the Presences,le Brocquy explained that, after his trip to Spain in 1956 he came to see everything as ‘existing in a matrix of pure white light’, and had the idea of ‘conjuring up images out of nothing, out of light, out of the depths of the blank canvas’. This idea of the matrix of light ‘within which the central image may be realised and held’ is both reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘fabric of meaning’ and resonant with his belief that painting does not depict ‘objects’ but rather recreates the relations existing between ‘light, illumination, shadows, reflections (and), colours’.
As Brent has explained, in his last published work Eye and Mind,Merleau-Ponty came to think of perception as a ‘demand arising from Being’. Thus painting, which he considered the ‘advent of perception’, was ‘an advent of Being; Being manifesting and expressing itself’. The implications of these ideas on the role of the artist are significant as they suggest that painting is less a question of the ‘vision of the painter or the visibility of the world, than of a Being which views itself through the creative vision of the painter and the visible spectacle of the world’.
While le Brocquy did not consciously adopt Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the artist, his belief that the Presences were largely the result of accident and chance, along with his assertion that his work, ‘in league with the artist’s will’, ‘contributed to its own creation,’ encourages a reading of these works in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s view of painting as the ‘advent of Being’.
In 1957, le Brocquy’s suggested that the artist’s struggle with his materials should result in his personality being ‘reborn in the form of a new convention, a painterly restatement of the reality which preoccupies him’. This statement, plus his professed preoccupation with using paint ‘not to symbolise, not to describe the object nor to realise an abstract image, but rather to allow the paint to reconstitute . . . the object of one’s experience’, also resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of painting as the result of the conjunction of ‘Being’, the ‘creative vision of the painter’ and the ‘visible spectacle of the world’.
Whether these comparisons between le Brocquy’s Presences and the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty are a matter of affinity or influence, these works can circulatewithin the existentialist discourse that was specific to the context of their production in post-war London and France. Thus, while he was not a consciously existentialist artist, le Brocquy’s work and his preoccupations with the human condition, presence and being, can be interpreted in terms of the existential climate that he first encountered in London. This speculation is supported by the fact that the work of many of the artists whom le Brocquy knew and admired during 1940s and 1950s has been interpreted in existentialist terms.
As has been established, Alistair Smith identified a ‘close community of concern’ between le Brocquy’s work in the 1950s and Giacometti sculpture. For Robert Melville writing in 1961, le Brocquy’s Presences identified him as ‘an adherent of the aesthetic of ‘art autre’ who entered into ‘an intimate collaboration with his raw material’ and joined Jean Dubuffet in conceiving it as ‘a bearer of knowledge. Melville’s reference to art autre is supported by le Brocquy’s admiration for Jean Fautrier who impressed him by showing how ‘something material could be impregnated by a kind of psychic element and become a person’. Although the more serene Presences have little in common with the deeply scarred surfaces of Fautrier’s Otages,le Brocquy’s use of rough impasto, sand and horsehair in images including Woman,1959, suggests that they shared an interest in material and texture, and a common effort to express ‘psychic presence’ through paint. As Frances Morris has written, ‘Existentialism for art autre . . . provided a context and a language which took the artist’s action as a register of authenticity and his marks as an affirmation of essence. Art was to be an activity performed by the whole man.’
Morris also explains that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as ‘mans’ anchor in the world, the interface between consciousness and the world of objects and materials’, provided a means to conceptualise the ‘expressive gesture’ of art autre and supported the associated artists in their belief that ‘art should arise from an encounter with materials, that materials are what unites and differentiates man and the world of objects’. Le Brocquy’s claim that, the artist’s struggle with his materials results in ‘a painterly restatement of the reality’ suggests that, while his expressive gesture was more serene than Fautrier’s, his Presences may be read in these terms.
Although le Brocquy was familiar with the work of his French contemporaries, the artist with whom he has most often been associated is Francis Bacon. The subject of a series of le Brocuy’s head images from the late 1970s, the two men met in London in 1951 and remained friends and admirers of one another’s work for the next forty years. While several critics have remarked on the similarities between their work, Anne Madden is quick to point out that ‘Bacon saw no resemblance to his own work, but recognised both Cézanne and Giacometti in Louis’. However, as Alistair Smith has suggested,
Bacon’s work displays for us the blood, sinews, bones and indefinable interior of the human physique’, that is part of the subject matter of the Presences …no matter how differently it was expressed, Bacon and le Brocquy shared a common need to strip away the veneer of the skin.
Bacon’s association with existentialism began in 1949 and, as David Mellor has pointed out, Bacon joined Giacometti as the dominant figures of London’s existentialist artistic milieu of the early 1950s. Sharing the figurative focus and expressive gesture of his continental contemporaries, Bacon also emphasised the role of chance and accident in his work. As he told David Sylvester ‘I feel that anything I’ve ever liked at all has been the result of an accident on which I have been able to work’. Bacon’s invocation of chance is reminiscent of Brocquy’s claim that the image ‘contributes to its own creation’ , and his vision of the painter as ‘an archaeologist of the spirit, patiently disturbing the surface of things until he makes a discovery which will enable him to take his search further’. Despite this similarity, as Smith suggests, ‘Bacon’s ‘existential’ insistence that there is no spiritual dimension to life is . . . at total variance with le Brocquy’s avowedly agnostic view’. While Smith concludes that ‘it is one of life’s oddities that two such divergent thinkers could share, for a time, an ostensibly similar way of describing humanity’, a consideration of the artistic climate within which they worked suggests that le Brocquy, like Bacon, was influenced by the climate of existentialism, albeit an existentialism owing more to Merleau-Ponty than to Sartre.
Despite the often invoked connections between Bacon’s work and existentialism, in his 1975 review of David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon, le Brocquy quoted Bacon’s assertion that ‘I think, that man now realises he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason’, and then declared, ‘in spite of the above, Bacon is not I think remotely existentialist’. Instead, le Brocquy argued that Bacon was ‘essentially dramatic, like Rembrandt, or Delacroix or Goya, or Turner; all of whose paintings in comparable ways tend to come across directly on the nervous system’. Suggesting that he regretted the ‘absence of a dramatic mythology’ in modern life, le Brocquy quoted Bacon’s claim that,
Of course, I think that, if one could find a valid myth today where there was the distance between grandeur and its fall . . . it would be tremendously helpful. But when you’re outside a tradition, as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s own nervous system as one possibly can.
Rather than an existentialist, le Brocquy concluded that Bacon was a despairing optimist ‘passionately attached to life’. Despite le Brocquy’s assessment, the motif of the affirmation of life in the face of the absurd is a trademark of the writings of Albert Camus, whom Mellor suggests was more significant to British artists than Sartre. Le Brocquy’s reading of Bacon as a ‘despairing optimist’ may then reveal more about his own work than that of his contemporary. As John Montague observed, while there is violence in Bacon’s art, le Brocquy’s paintings are ‘not images of destruction but celebration, attempts to touch the spirit … to make the immaterial palpable’. Herbert Read also felt that le Brocquy’s work was more positive than Bacon’s and after seeing an exhibition of his heads, Read wrote to Louis, ‘I did not find any pale echoes of Bacon in your work. Your vision is essentially different, more affirmative, less destructive … Your ‘faces’ are faces of love not hate’.
Perhaps this optimism, along with what Melville saw as his ability to preserve ‘human grace and dignity as a potential’, was a result of le Brocquy’s continued faith in the human spirit . That he had spent the duration of the Second World War in the relative peace of Dublin, rather than in London or Paris may have contributed to his positive outlook. Yet, it is also possible that le Brocquy’s lack of despair can be attributed to his continued connection with Ireland and the sense of national identity he had discovered during his first period abroad in the 1930s. Unlike Bacon who lamented his lack of a ‘valid myth’, le Brocquy’s embrace of his Irish identity was to provide a ‘dramatic mythology’ which inspired his art for the next forty years. If his illustrations for Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin represent a literal engagement with Irish myth, his portraits of native literary heroes engage with the more recent mythology of the Literary Revival and attempts to ‘invent’ an Irish national culture. Within this context, Bacon’s yearning for a dramatic mythology may be partly attributed to his failure to embrace his own Irish origins and his subsequent feelings of rootlessness and alienation. Free from these afflictions and able to draw on cultural identity as a resource, by the early 1960s le Brocquy was moving away from the universalism of the Presences towards the lineage of his Ancestral Heads and ultimately to his multiple portraits of Irish modernists that have themselves become icons of modern Irish art.
In an interview in 1987 Louis le Brocquy argued ‘art is in its essence most truthful or valuable as an emanation of the society or culture behind it’. Although he is now considered to be the ultimate Irish modernist artist, le Brocquy’s Presences are an emanation of the artistic climate he encountered in post-war London; a climate steeped in both Kleinian psychology and existentialism. While contemporary critics recognised that the Presences could be situated within the current discourses of psychology and existentialism, since the 1960s the emphasis on le Brocquy’s Irishness and the impact of his later work, have obscured the international context of these paintings. While his ‘avowedly agnostic view’ and belief in ‘human grace and dignity’ may have prevented le Brocquy from becoming an existentialist artist in his own terms, considering his Presences within the international context of contemporary existentialist and psychological discourses reveals the extent to which these enigmatic works are a ‘truthful’ and ‘valuable’ product of their artistic milieu.
Daniel F. Chamberlain, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’ in Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century, ed. Chris Murray, (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 217.
Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 73.
Chamberlain, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, p. 217.
Gary Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 74.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, The Primacy of Perception,trans. James M. Edie, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 165-6.
Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, pp. 104-5.
Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, p. 190.
Chamberlain, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, p. 217.
Chamberlain, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, p. 217.
Le Brocquy in Russell, ‘Introduction’, Louis le Brocquy, ed. Walker, p. 13.
Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception,p. 171.
Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, p. 95.
Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, p. 95.
Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, p. 95.
Brent, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, p. 95.
Brian Fallon, ‘Le Brocquy Exhibition at the Hop Store’, Irish Times, 14 September, 1989.
Le Brocquy to Cooke, p. 38.
Le Brocquy in Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 88.
Smith, Louis Le Brocquy, p. 17.
Robert Melville, Louis le Brocquy, exh. cat. (Zurich: Galerie Charles Leinhard, 1961), quoted in Walker (ed.), Louis le Brocquy p. 42.
Le Brocquy in Fallon, ‘Le Brocquy Exhibition at the Hop Store’.
Le Brocquy in Fallon, ‘Le Brocquy Exhibition at the Hop Store’.
Morris, ‘Introduction’, Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55, p. 22.
Morris, ‘Introduction’, Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55, p. 22.
Le Brocquy to Harriet Cooke, in Walker, Louis le Brocquy, p. 38.
Le Brocquy bought Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, 1953, in 1955. Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 87.
Including John Russell and John Montague. Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 36.
Smith, Louis le Brocquy,p. 20.
Mellor, ‘Existentialism and Post war British Art’, p. 54.
Francis Bacon in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon,(London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), p. 53.
Le Brocquy in Fallon. ‘Le Brocquy Exhibition at the Hop Store’.
Le Brocquy to Michael Peppiatt, Art International, Oct. 1979.
Smith, Louis le Brocquy,p. 20.
Smith, Louis le Brocquy,p. 20.
Le Brocquy, ‘Review of Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester’, Introspect, no. 1, 12/1975, in Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, pp. 87-89.
Le Brocquy, ‘Review of Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester’, in Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 89.
Bacon cited by le Brocquy in Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 89.
Le Brocquy in Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 89.
Mellor, ‘Existentialism and Post war British Art’, p. 54.
Montague, ‘Primal Scream’, p. 4.
Read to le Brocquy 17 April 1967 cited in Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy, p. 165. Read was referring to le Brocquy’s exhibition at Gimpel Fils in March–April, 1966. Letter from le Brocquy to the author, 5 June 2004.
Melville in Walker (ed.), Louis le Brocquy,p. 41–43.
Although he was born in Ireland, Bacon left at nineteen and never identified with Ireland. Recent attempts to stress his Irish origins have centred on the relocation of Bacon’s studio to the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane.
Le Brocquy to Fallon, ‘Le Brocquy Exhibition at the Hop Store’.
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