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Ancestral Heads (c.1964-74)


 

 
Following a period of profound dissatisfaction in which the artist destroys forty-three paintings, virtually the years output (December1963). Anne Madden recounts: 'That blight most dreaded by the artist had crept into him - the loss of inspiration. He had painted himself to a standstill. The paintings he had made appeared to him lifeless, contrived and without meaning, and at the end of the year he did away with them. He felt depressed, powerless.' Le Brocquy himself explains: 'Is it not the struggle of Jacob and the angel ? - the absolute commitment of the painter to his material, in which he can be almost destroyed by his material, defeated ... Sometimes the painter breaks away from the struggle and comes away with nothing. Those are the moments when the work, which is a record of the struggle, is destroyed by the artist, rejected.' The crisis will lead to the emergence of the Head series to become an enduring preoccupation over the next four decades. Discovers a vital source of inspiration in Polynesian heads, Musée de l'Homme, Paris (winter 1964). The artist is profoundly impressed by these objects reconstituting the human presence. As he recalls: 'Skulls, partly remodelled with clay, and then painted in a decorative way, often with cowrie shells for eyes'. Anne Madden who accompanies the artist to the anthropological museum recounts: 'These head images suggested to him a new human significance. He felt the over-modelling and painting implied a ritualistic laying on of hands, a recognition of the ancestor's entity; palpable marks from the outside which defined and celebrated the spirit within the reconstituted ancestral head'. The event kindles le Brocquy's interest in the Celtic head culture: 'Like the Celts 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'. According to Dorothy Walker: 'The crystallisation of his interest in the remote past into a twentieth-century version of the old Celtic notion of the head as "the magic box that contains the spirit" is an intensification of a fundamental obsession: the desire to lay his finger on the pulse of the very earliest manifestation of art in Ireland, somehow to absorb the autonomy of that anonymous art into his creative energy and to re-show itforth in his own very different work'. Embarks on the Ancestral Heads series (c.1964-1975) the fourth distinctive period in the artist's work ...