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

126 113 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Study Towards an Image of Garcia Lorca (1977-78) Oil on canvas, 146 x 114cm (57.4 x 44.8“) Signed and dated (19)‘78 verso Provenance: With Galerie Maeght, Paris. Exhibited: RDS, ‘ DEARC - Celebrating 150 years of the RDS Taylor Art Award ’, 2011. Literature: ‘DEARC - Celebrating 150 years of the RDS Taylor Art Award ’, illustrated p.30. Reference: BAC8004-B5343 € 60,000 - 100,000 In 1964, having reached a creative impasse, Louis le Brocquy visited the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and was struck by a display of Polynesian painted skulls, partly reconstructed with clay. He thought they were a striking way of evoking the lost human presence. In his mind they struck a chord with the Celtic cult of the head, which configured the head as a kind of magic box containing the spirit. Together with his own recent attempts at finding a different way to embody the human presence in paint, they set him on a course that was, essentially, to engage him for the rest of his life. Echoing the antiquity of much of his sources, he first addressed the question of revivifying the spirits of the deep past. These spectral presences are conjured from, as the artist put it, a matrix of light. He looked to some Irish historical subjects, and to his own family history, attempting to capture a sense of his father as a young man, for example. Commissioned to make an aquatint of a Nobel prizewinner in 1975, he chose WB Yeats. He made several studies and realised that each partial view was somehow truer than the “visual finality” of a conventional portrait. His portrait heads were “reconstructions” and then “studies towards an image of…” With a certain inevita- bility (as a fellow Dubliner, he noted), he was drawn to try James Joyce as a subject. Yeats, Joyce and later Beckett, who he knew well personally. But he also reached further afield with a critically acclaimed series of studies of the great Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Lorca was an attractive subject be- cause he was in several respects an outsider in his own country. His life was cruelly ended prematurely, yet his writing came to exemplify essential aspects of Spanish identity, revitalising traditional forms of cultural expression, but with a modern sensibility. Le Brocquy said that he came to him via the work of John Milling- ton Synge, who of course did much the same in Ireland. Le Brocquy went on to create sculptures based on Lorca’s imposing forehead. Aidan Dunne, August 2019.