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Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Ancestral Head (1965)
Oil on canvas, 65 x 54.5cm (25¼ x 21½”)
Signed, titled and dated 1965, with archive no. 156 verso
Literature:
Louis le Brocquy
, Dorothy Walker, Ward River Press, Dublin 1981, Ref. No. 81; numbered 156 in the Artist’s
oeuvre, illustrated p.100
One of the earliest examples of le Brocquy’s highly significant series of ‘Head’ paintings,
Ancestral Head
was directly inspired
by images of Polynesian decorated heads le Brocquy discovered in the Muse de l’Homme during a trip to Paris in 1964.
Further exploration drew him to the ruins of the Celtic oppidum, crude stone sculptures systematically smashed by the
Romans near Aix-en-Provence in the year 123 BC, and the connections with his own culture resonated deeply with the
artist.
The notion of the ancestral head as something to be summoned up, complete or incomplete, was the subject of a group
of paintings in 1964-5. The artist was engaged by the idea of the head as a ‘magic box’ which contained the spirit, and by
attempting to represent the constantly shifting facets of the human condition in a visual form.
The head appears to emerge, gathering shape and form from the background, and presents itself at the surface of the picture
plane.The austere, almost monochromatic colours of this painting, enriched in parts by earthy tones, and the multi-faceted
form floating in an infinite background, representing time and space, give it a timeless quality.
“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.”
With thanks to John Russell and acknowledging Dorothy Walker’s research on the artist.
€25,000 - 35,000
