Adam's The Antoinette and Patrick J.Murphy Collection 23rd October 2019

119 www.adams.ie The Antoinette & Patrick J. Murphy Collection | 23rd October2019 105 BRIAN BOURKE (B.1936) View from the Roosevelt Island Elevated Tram Oil on canvas on board, 61 x 46cm (24 x 18“) Exhibited: Taylor Galleries, Dublin 2000, Catalogue No.18. € 1,000 - 1,500 106 BRIAN BOURKE (B.1936) View from the Roosevelt Island Elevated Tram Oil on canvas on board, 61 x 46cm (24 x 18“) Exhibited: Taylor Galleries, Dublin 2000, Catalogue No.16. € 1,000 - 1,500 surprising in an artist whose style of drawing is intensely sculptural. Initially he modelled small heads, a mere ten centimetres high, in plaster, which were then cast in bronze or fibreglass. He produced an exhibition of sculpture, again mainly Heads, though somewhat larger, in 1971 and again in 1985, which is when Tanzanian Woman and Head of a Woman were produced. Then in 1986 he even took two years off to work solely at this medium. These sculptures occur in variant forms. According to the artist the edition was usually of three, but no two are the same. Tanzanian Woman for example exists in a painted bronze version but our version is patinated only. Likewise, with Head of a Woman, also called Female Head and Torso which is painted, but the reproduction in Five Decades however, is of a differently painted version. Both works have the same model, Jayne Manning, a Tanzanian woman who was working in Galway and whom the artist describes as ‘one of the early Black faces in Galway in the eighties. She didn’t like Ireland and its racism’. He did a number of drawings of her as well as the sculptures. In an article in the Sunday Times the late Dorothy Walker stated that she had ‘always found his images of women to be among his most successful works as in…his many painted bronzes of women’s heads’. In the first sculpture, and remembering that Bourke was interest- ed in African Tribal art, much of which he saw in Belgium and Holland, the face, with its prominent upper lip, has a more pronounced African look. The nose is chiselled into a tight hard geometry, the ears are swept-back, the eyes downcast, and the chin is somewhat rounded with high cheekbones. Very noticeably the hair has been reduced, swept back tightly to the skull as if she had donned a swim- ming cap, and rendered only by slightly incised lines: ‘I try to reduce the hair mass so as to get at the face’. What interests him in a sitter is the ‘physical presence, their stance. How the head sits on the neck’. All of this implies a psychological interest: the ways in which physi- ognomy, stance, facial expression and posture delineate the psychology of character. In the first sculpture the neck is thin and stem-like