Head of a Man is a significant example of the 'Head' paintings by Louis le Brocquy, a major series that was begun in 1964 following a fallow period in his creativity when, dissatisfied with his output, he destroyed forty-three paintings.(1) Throughout his career, le Brocquy sought to express what he described as the human reality beneath the material appearance. When he visited the Musée de l'Homme, the museum of anthropology, in Paris that year, certain of the exhibits resonated with him, and the imagery sparked by the experience proved a turning point in his work. He saw there what he described as the Melanesian/Polynesian image of the human head, which represented for him:

'The mysterious box which contains the spirit: the outer reality of the invisible interior world of consciousness.'(2)

Arising from this encounter, le Brocquy began his Head series. The earliest examples make reference to ancestral figures, legendary characters whose histories are uncertain - a combination of folklore and history, but fundamental to a sense of origins and lineage, of links to the past giving them relevance in the present. He conceived of this relationship therefore as circular rather than chronological. This initial group gave way to a series of heads growing in tangibility and presence, but that remained initially mainly anonymous, as in the present work, Head of a Man, 1968. This work bears evident stylistic and conceptual links with its predecessors, and also points the way that the series will ultimately develop, as a re-conception of portraiture.

The brushwork recalls the gestural idiom that defined significant examples of Abstract Expressionism in the US, and that became familiar to audiences based in London during the post-World War II era, particularly during the 1950s when Louis le Brocquy lived there. He became familiar with the exhibitions of American art on show in the major art venues; these provided a context in contemporaneous Modernist strategies, part of the milieu in which the artist developed his own, distinctive, methods and interests. He was largely self-taught, so did not rely on established conventions - a situation that created its own challenges but also facilitated experimentation and originality. Late in the 1950s, he evolved his 'torso' series 'as an image of the human presence' (3), characterised by white impasto with threads of colour. While white may evoke a wraithlike intangibility on one hand, and is a recognised symbol of purity, for the artist it is also understood in scientific terms as referencing wholeness, scientifically combining all of the colours of the spectrum. Louis le Brocquy's interpretations suggest both the vulnerability and the resilience of the human body, as well as its capacity to communicate and to evoke an emotional response. That series of work represents a significant change of method and interpretation from the earlier phases that are characterised by a flatter, more angular format, and are more oriented to narrative than the increasingly symbolic evocations.

Despite the hiatus of 1963, the Head series provided a natural evolution from the white 'torso' images. Head of a Man is shown as disembodied, but yet has a significant presence; the features remain undefined, yet convincing. The off-white background has intimations of box-like spatial depth, indicated in shades of grey. Highlighted with broad brushstrokes in white, tinged and streaked with subtle strands of colour for texture and vibrancy, the head emerges in the centre of the perfectly square canvas, surrounded by fragments that suggest the process of resolving into a unity. As the French poet Jacques Dupin observed of Louis le Brocquy's early Head series: 'What it offers is not the appearance of a face but its inner construction, the facets and tensions of a being in the act of becoming.'(4)

Dr Yvonne Scott
October 2018


FOOTNOTES

1. Louis le Brocquy, p.139.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p. 138.
4. Jacques Dupin, The paintings of 1964-1966, in Dorothy Walker (ed), Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1981, p.104.