82
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
114
Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
THE TÁIN. MAGIC CHARIOT, 1991
signed with initials in the weave on reverse by maître-lissier,
René Duché and numbered lower right; with certificate of
authenticity sewn on reverse, signed, numbered, titled and
dated by le Brocquy and Duché
Aubusson tapestry; Atelier René Duché; (no. 2 from an edition
of 9)
72.5
by 50.7in., 184 by 129cm.
Provenance
:
Taylor Galleries, November 2000;
Private collection
Whyte’s, 29 November 2005, lot 112;
Literature
:
Louis le Brocquy: Aubusson Tapestries
,
Thomas Agnew & Sons,
London, 2001, unpaginated (illustrated)
Louis le Brocquy was living in France with his young family when he
received a life-changing invitation, in December 1966. Publisher Liam
Miller wanted him to collaborate with Thomas Kinsella on a new
translation of Ireland’s oldest saga. Le Brocquy penned an enthusiastic
affirmative that Christmas Eve and spent much of the next three years
visualising
An Táin Bó Cúailgne.
In September 1969, Dolmen Press
published it as
The Táin
.
The Táin
was born of some eighty stories about the
Ulaidh
,
a prehistoric
people who lived in the north and north-western regions of what is
now called Ireland. Part epic, part soap opera, the tales were vivid,
vicious, inconsistent and often rather rude. Oral versions survived for
long enough to be collected by scribes, whose fragmentary manuscripts
are now in Trinity College and the Royal Irish Academy.Translators and
writers such as Lady Gregory and W.B.Yeats had retold some of the
Cúchulainn tales – and Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
drew on its meandering
style - but Thomas Kinsella’s
Táin
was the first widely-accessible version,
especially when Oxford University Press’ 1970 paperback followed the
de luxe and limited editions produced by Dolmen Press.
The Táin
marked a unique cultural moment, for Ireland and the world.
The State had just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising
and was driving ahead with Seán Lemass’ Second Programme for
Economic Expansion. By 1969 when it was published, Northern Ireland
was in conflict, and global events such as the Prague Spring, the
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, as well as
wars in Vietnam, Angola and elsewhere, underlined its themes of
invasion and carnage. Meanwhile,The Beatles sang “All You Need is
Love.”
Its impact was instant. Although characters like Cúchulainn and Ferdia,
Medb and Aillil, were local, the collaborators translated them into a
crisply contemporaneous style that resonated through the cultural
hierarchy. It engaged lovers of art, language, music and Celtic studies, as
well as popular culture.
The Táin
became an Irish
Iliad
,
with Cúchulainn
as a Superhero reincarnating to a new age of rock, cartoons and
animation.
The images le Brocquy called ‘shadows thrown by the text’ became so
iconic that it is almost impossible now to imagine
The Táin
differently.
Yet no one had visualised the full saga previously and no artist from
Ireland had engaged so thoroughly with pieces of writing in so
collaborative a way. Le Brocquy made hundreds of drawings, many of
which appear in the de luxe and limited editions, with a handful printed
in the paperback and a precious twenty in tapestry. Communication was
difficult in those pre-digital days because he was in France and Miller
was in Dublin, so that many key design decisions relied on sending
letters through the post.
Le Brocquy’s innovative, daring approach cast the saga as a virtual
alphabet composed of spontaneous, inky letters.This shows
immediately in
Army Massing
,
where marks cascade in rivulets that
resemble both chain mail and hand-writing, and in the H-shaped
Cúchulainn confronting Ferdia.
Different ages and cultures whisper
through the images - and through the twenty tapestries made during
1998-2000,
when le Brocquy collaborated with
maître-lissier
René
Duché, whose firm had recently been awarded the honour
Meilleur
Ouvrier de France
.
Cuchulainn’s
Warp Spasm
,
for example, speaks both
of calligraphic marks from Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
and Yves Klein’s
bodily-marked
Anthropometries,
as well as cave paintings traced by
prehistoric peoples.
The translation into tapestry, via le Brocquy’s
Táin
lithographs, crested
on the momentum from oral to written traditions, from drama to poetry
and from visual culture to music. Duché’s subtly-textured cottons and
wools freed le Brocquy’s black-on-white marks into a textured, sensual
material that illuminates the sense of a blot or stain without definite
edges, which is what he wanted. Here, the statuesque shapes let le
Brocquy grow the book’s relatively modest scale into a life-affirming
series of interconnected images that speak to each other like letters in a
phrase or sentence. Le Brocquy’s hand reaches out through each one.
Medb Ruane
April 2012
€
15,000-
€
20,000 (
£12,000-£16,000 approx.)