Adam's Important Irish Art September 26th 2018

48 38 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Image of James Joyce (Opus 424) Oil on canvas, 70 x 70cm (27½ x 27½’’) Signed verso and dated (19)’79-88 Provenance: With Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris; with Taylor Galleries, Dublin, where purchased by current owner. In Dorothy Walker’s monograph on le Brocquy, the artist describes the spiritual and technical problems with his images of Joyce. ‘’It is said that no Dubliner can quite escape from the microcosmic world of Dublin, and in this I am certainly no exception. James Joyce is the apotheosis, the archetype of our kind and it seems to me than in him-behind the volatile arrangement of his features-lies his unique evocation of that small city, large as life and therefore poignant everywhere. But to a Dublin man, peering at Joyce, a particular nostalgia is added to the universal ‘’epiphany’’, and this perhaps enables me to grope for something of my own experi- ence within the ever-changing landscape of his face, within the various and contra- dictory photographs of his head which surround me, within my bronze death-mask of him and, I suppose, within the recesses of my own mind. Indeed I think that this preoccupation of mine is not altogether unlike that of the Celts of prehistory, with their oracular cult of the human head, the mysterious box which holds the spirit prisoner. To attempt today a portrait, a single static image of a great artist such as Joyce, ap- pears to me to be futile as well as impertinent. Long conditioned by photography, the cinema and psychology, we now perceive the human individual as facetted, kinetic. And so I have tried as objectively as possible to draw from the depths of paper or canvas these changing and even contradictory traces of the man. In this fragmentary search I have seemed at times to encroach on archaeological ground. Is there archae- ology of the spirit? Certainly neither my will nor my skill has played any essential part in these studies. For the fact is that many of them emerged entirely under my ignorant left hand-my right hand being for some months immobilized in plaster. So it would appear that no dexterity whatever was involved in forming these images, which tended to emerge automatically, so to speak, jerked into coherence by a series of scrutinized accidents, impelled by my curiosity to discover something of the man and, within him, the inverted mirror-room of my own experience”. € 60,000 - 100,000