EMERGENT BEING, 1962
Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)1956 and the mid 1960s. Today, paintings such as Travelling Woman with Newspaper, 1947, A Family, 1951, and hi...Read more
1956 and the mid 1960s. Today, paintings such as Travelling Woman with Newspaper, 1947, A Family, 1951, and his haunting portraits of Irish
writers are le Brocquy’s most celebrated works. However, during the late 1950s his growing reputation in the international art world was based on
this series of evocative paintings that breached the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.
In 1946, after spending the war years in Dublin, where he played a fundamental role in the establishment of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art,
le Brocquy moved to London. There, he quickly became part of the avantgarde artistic circle that included Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Initially
working on the series of paintings inspired by Ireland’s Travellers, by the early 1950s he had embarked upon his Grey Period works. Executed in a
limited palette of white, greys and browns, this series, which includes A Family (National Gallery of Ireland), is dominated by figures trapped in
claustrophobic, cell-like interiors. These images resonated with the zeitgeist of the post-war period when recent memories of the Holocaust,
the plight of refugees throughout Europe and the threat of atomic war weighed heavily on the conscience of the world. As le Brocquy has
explained, in those post-war, cold war days we, all of us, walked in the fear of eventual nuclear disaster obliterating civilised life and returning
those who were unfortunate enough to survive to Palaeolithic circumstances (See note i below).
The Grey Period works expressed some of these fears, but by the mid 1950s le Brocquy was exploring new territory. The resulting Presences also
tapped into the atmosphere of the era, in this case the climate of existentialism.
An ethical body of thought that centres on the uniqueness and isolation of individual experience, existentialism treats human existence as
unexplainable and emphasises man’s freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of his acts. In its twentieth-century incarnation,
existentialism was centred on Paris, and in particular the writings of Jean- Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By the early 1950s,
young British artists and critics who had studied in Paris, including William Turnball, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and David Sylvester were
creating art influenced by existentialism in London. They shared a particular respect for the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whom Sartre had
championed as an existentialist hero (See note ii below). As Alistair Smith has suggested, the abstracted figures in the Presences are reminiscent of Giacometti’s
skeletal sculptures. Recalling that the two artists met briefly at the Venice Biennale in 1956, Smith concludes that while there is “...only a general
physical resemblance’ between le Brocquy’s Presences and Giacometti’s sculptures, there is ‘a close community of concern, a cast of mind which
unites their work – the human being isolated, vulnerable and frontally disposed within the emptiness of time itself” (See note iii below).
Although le Brocquy was not a self-declared existentialist, as a friend of Francis Bacon and an admirer of Giacometti he worked within an artistic
milieu dominated by existentialist ideas. After their first meeting in London in 1951, Bacon and le Brocquy remained friends and admirers of
one another’s work for the next forty years (See note iv). Several critics have remarked on the affinities between their approaches, but Anne Madden
points out that, “...Bacon saw no resemblance to his own work, but recognised both Cézanne and Giacometti in Louis” (See note v below). As the poet John
Montague has 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” (See note vi below). Yet, as 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’ (See note vii below).
While Emergent Being bears little aesthetic relationship to Bacon’s work, the triptych Trilogy dating from 1963 (lot 45 in this sale), has clear
affinities with the latter’s visual violations of the human body. In an interview in 1987, Louis le Brocquy argued that, “...art is in its essence most truthful or valuable as an emanation of the society or culture behind it” (See note viii below). Although he is now considered to be the ultimate Irish modernist artist, his Presences are an expression of the artistic climate he encountered in post-war London, a climate steeped in existentialism.
Dr Riann Coulter
New York, April 2009
Notes:
i Louis le Brocquy quoted in Anne Madden le Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy: A Painter Seeing his Way, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994, p. 84.
ii David Mellor, Existentialism and Post War British Art, Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55, ed. Francis Morris, London: TATE, 1993, pp. 53–54.
iii Frances Morris, Alberto Giacometti, Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55, p. 105.
iv Alistair Smith Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939–1996, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1996, p. 17.
v Le Brocquy bought Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, 1953, in 1955. Madden le Brocquy, p. 87.
vi Including John Russell and John Montague. Madden le Brocquy, p. 36.
vii John Montague, ‘Primal Scream: The Later Le Brocquy’, The Arts in Ireland, vol. 2, no. 2, 1973, p. 4.
viii Smith, q.v.,p. 20.
ix Le Brocquy quoted by Brian Fallon, ‘Le Brocquy Exhibition at the Hop Store’, Irish Times, 14 September, 1989.
- Auction Details
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Lot 42 The correct title for this work is Sandymount, 1986. It was originally sold through the Taylor Galleries, Dublin. With thanks to the artist for this information.
Lot 63 This lot is now withdrawn from the auction
Lot 89 The attribution to George Petrie is uncertain and we are now offering this watercolour as an anonymous 19th century work.
Lot 205 The artist name should read, Robert Taylor Carson.
Lot 210 The artist name should read, Sloan.
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