STUDY FOR RESURRECTION, 1953
Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)During the early 1950s le Brocquy produced a series of works concerning human isolation. The best-known of these works, A Family, 1951 (National Gallery of Ireland co...Read more
During the early 1950s le Brocquy produced a series of works concerning human isolation. The best-known of these works, A Family, 1951 (National Gallery of Ireland collection), depicts a family under emotional duress, their fractured relations exposed under a bare light bulb. Another significant work of this so-called ‘grey period’ is Lazarus, 1954 (formerly property of the Jefferson Smurfit Group, now in a private collection), which was exhibited at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in 1955, alongside the present work. Both works are depictions of the resurrected Lazarus, draped in his burial shroud and stepping forward from the confines of a severely modernist-styled tomb or bunker. The outspread arms presage those of the crucified Christ who, according to the parable, has worked this miracle.
Whilst the subject matter is ostensibly religious, critics at the time understood these works to be primarily investigations into nature of human physicality. Reviewing the Gimpel Fils exhibition in 1955, John Berger wrote:
Even if some are called Lazarus or Resurrection … the theme … is the same. It is ¬– and there is no way of putting it briefly except in a platitude –¬ the mystery of the flesh: the nearness within the nervous system of pain and pleasure: the ambiguity between the body as a cage containing an animal and the body as an expendable servant of the heart: the fact that the same muscles move in the shoulder whether the arm is raised to caress or do violence.1
In Berger’s view the paintings are studies of one man’s contemplation of his own physical being. The artist’s own comments support this thesis:
Originally I remember being moved by the story of Lazarus as a return ¬– miraculous or otherwise –¬ to a heightened awareness of his own being. I saw his head as a black hole of absence, stooped to regard his renewed physical presence. 2
This interpretation allows us to see how the Lazarus paintings prefigure le Brocquy’s later series of ‘presences’ and ‘heads’. The centrality of the vertical human form would be a leitmotif of later works, from the white ‘Beings’ paintings of the late 1950s, to the well-known ancestral heads and portrait heads, floating against a white expanse or void. Thus both Lazarus and Study for Resurrection can be seen as transitional works, leading from the ‘grey period’ (c.1951-54) to the ‘white period’ (c.1956-66), and on to the head paintings of the mid-1960s and beyond.
In Study for Resurrection , the head is a white ovoid shape, set upon a grey risen body. It is perhaps no coincidence that the head should take the form of an egg – the symbol of birth and regeneration. By the following year the head had transmogrified into ‘a black hole of absence’. According to John Russell, the artist had used ‘sketches made from Egyptian mummies’ as a model for the shrouded figure of Lazarus. 3 However, le Brocquy clearly also worked from living models, as seen in Study - man holding a towel, 1951 (sold through Sotheby’s, 16 May 2003, lot 122), a chalk and gouache study of a naked man with arms stretched apart, holding a white towel behind him. Study for Resurrection, 1953, is less overtly a study of the naked human form, and more pointedly a study of one man’s wonder at his own existence.
The original owners of this painting, Sir Robert and Dorothy Mayer, were well-known patrons of the arts, particularly music. Robert Mayer, businessman and philanthropist, was born in 1879 in Mannheim, Germany. He moved to Britain in 1896 and was naturalized in 1902. In 1919 he married Dorothy Moulton, a soprano, with whose encouragement he co-founded the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In later years his philanthropic interests expanded to include the improvement of foreign relations. In 1979 he published his autobiography, My First Hundred Years. He died on 9 January 1985 in London.
1 John Berger, ‘Louis le Brocquy’, The New Statesman, London, 12 February 1955.
2 Louis le Brocquy, quoted on the artist’s website, www.anne-madden.com
3 John Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Ward River Press, Dublin, 1981, p. 10.
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