Beschreibung:

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Signature: each canvas signed and dated on reverse; also with various notes regarding presentation
Medium: oil on canvas; (hexaptych)
Size: 33 x 40in. (83.82 x 101.60cm) Provenance: Christie's, The Irish Sale, 22 May 1998, lot 194; Private collection In his catalogue essay 'Jawseyes', for an exhibition of portraits by Louis le Brocquy (1916-2012), the poet John Montague (1929-2016) referred to the images as 'manscapes', and what he saw as 'le Brocquy's re-invention of the portrait'. (1) Montagu...Read more In his catalogue essay 'Jawseyes', for an exhibition of portraits by Louis le Brocquy (1916-2012), the poet John Montague (1929-2016) referred to the images as 'manscapes', and what he saw as 'le Brocquy's re-invention of the portrait'. (1) Montague could write from personal experience as the subject of Reaching. Homage to John Montague (1968). Montague has described how he came to know the artist best during the 1960s, when he was Paris Correspondent with the Irish Times. (2) le Brocquy and his wife, artist Anne Madden lived in the south of France and regularly visited Paris, and Montague relates how they socialised with fellow artists and writers, or visited exhibitions of le Brocquy's work on show there. The interest was mutual with the artist providing the cover illustration for Montague's collection A Chosen Light published in 1967, the year before the portrait. Montague reminisced about exploring art with Louis le Brocquy at major collections, describing the artist's responses to the finer points of display, the positioning of artworks or the way they were mounted. That same attention to detail is evident in this example. Reaching comprises six panels arranged in two rows of three within an enclosing frame; the central two panels with dark, textured grounds, and the four flanking panels with white. While particularly reductive in method, comprising sparse surfaces punctuated with impastos of paint applied to suggest embodiment rather than illusionistic description, smudges and layers are scraped to reveal both human frailty and resilience, through symbolic bone and flesh. The portrait in the upper centre is a brooding study evoking deep immersion in thought, surrounded by a suggestion of metaphorical hands reaching for something elusive, barely within grasp. The Head Series, to which this painting relates, emerged in 1964 inspired by a visit to the museum of anthropology in Paris and continued for a number of years until the artist took on the very different challenge of the images for Thomas Kinsella's The Táin, published in the year following the Homage portrait of Montague. As with his portraits in general, this one alludes to the head as a container of the spirit and imagination, with the face as a kind of veil, both revealing and shrouding. In this exceptional example, the expression and the language of gesture evoke the fugitive processes of creativity and its hard-won achievement. Dr Yvonne Scott January 2018 1. Louis le Brocquy Studies Towards an Image of James Joyce, Galleria d'Arte San Marco dei Giustiniani, Genoa, 1977. Texts by le Brocquy and by John Montague. See Anne Madden Le Brocquy, Louis Le Brocquy Seeing His Way, Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, p.210. 2. John Montague, 'Poet John Montague on Louis le Brocquy', Irish Times, 26 April 2012.