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Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Being (60)
Oil on canvas laid on board, 25 x 17cm (9¾ x 6¾”)
Signed. Signed, inscribed and dated 1957 verso.
Being
forms part of a series of paintings which le Brocquy began in 1957, under the umbrella title,
Presences
. The term, like
Being
is ambiguous, having both a specific and a universal application. The
series is characterized by the dominant use of white, applied thickly, broken only by small, carefully
considered areas of brilliant colour, and enriched by their own impastoed textures. Most, like
Being
,
represent a single, haunting figurative presence.
le Brocquy, like many post-war artists was fearful of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and his
work revealed that sense of human fragility.
Being
both reflects that widely experienced anxiety and a more personal one, for the artist, in the
mid-1950s as his fiancé, the young painter Anne Madden, endured three serious spinal operations,
spending most of the year 1957 enveloped in a plaster cast.The clinical whiteness of the plaster - also
used by artists in the gesso with which their canvases are often prepared, may have had an influence on
the appearance of
Being
. Certainly his fiancé’s medical condition must have inspired le Brocquy, who
had painted Lazarus emerging from the tomb just three years previously, with further thoughts about
existence and non-existence.The critic, John Berger believed that all this work is concerned with ‘the
mystery of the flesh; the nearness within the nervous system between pain and pleasure, the ambiguity
between the body as a cage containing an animal and the body as an expendable servant of the heart’.
(Berger, ‘Louis le Brocquy,’New Statesman, London, Feb. 1955 quoted in Louis le Brocquy, Paintings,
1939 -1996, IMMA., p 33 )
But another influence, too, was important in the shaping of this and the other works in the series. In
the summer of 1955, the artist travelled through Spain for Ambassador magazine looking at textile
designs. The tour marked a turning point in his career. ‘One day while passing through a village in
La Mancha in shimmering heat, I stopped spellbound before a small group of women and children
standing against a whitewashed wall. Here the intensity of the sunlight had interposed its own reve-
lation, absorbing these human figures into its brilliance, giving substance only to shadow. From that
moment I never perceived the human presence in quite the same way. I had witnessed light as a kind
of matrix from which the human being emerges and into which it ambivalently recedes, with which
it even identifies’.
Being
represents just such a moment, when the figure is drained of colour by the brilliance of the light,
which makes the textural marks even more important as bearers of meaning, and directly anticipates
his later work.
Catherine Marshall, March. 2015
€8,000 - 12,000