WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

132 87 Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) IMAGE OF PICASSO, 1983 oil on canvas signed and dated on reverse; numbered [490] on stretcher on reverse 39 by 39in. (99.1 by 99.1cm) Frame Size: 47 by 47in. (119.4 by 119.4cm) Condition: This work appears to be in very good condition. There canvas is taut and stable. There are no signs of craking or flaking of the paint. The surface is clean. Provenance: A Distinguished American Collection; Sotheby’s, 9 May 2007, lot 137; Private collection Exhibited: Galerie Municipale des Ponchettes, Nice,1985, details untraced; ’le Brocquy, Images of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Federico García Lorca, Picasso, Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, 1975 – 1987’, Guinness Hop Store, Dublin, September to October 1987, with tour to Belfast, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane, catalogue no. 32 (illustrated) ’Clearly it is not possible to paint the spirit. You cannot paint consciousness. You start with the knowledge we all have that the most significant human reality lies beneath material appearance. So, in order to recognise this, to touch this as a painter, I try to paint the head image from the inside out, as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency […].’ 1 When he was commissioned in the early 1980s to contribute a portrait of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) to the Musée Picasso in Antibes, Louis le Brocquy had an established reputation as a painter of portraits of major cultural figures, both posthumous and living. The images ranged from some known mainly through reputation and legacy, like James Joyce and WB Yeats, to others he knew well as friends or collaborators, like Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett. Louis le Brocquy’s Portraiture Head series was inspired in particular by creative writers and artists whose work had impacted in some way on his own perspectives. It has often been observed that le Brocquy was an admirer of Pablo Picasso. Like him, le Brocquy lived for many years in the south of France, and was familiar both with Picasso’s work and his seminal significance in the development of Modern art internationally. Some of le Brocquy’s most iconic examples combine an empathetic response to familiar themes relevant to his personal experiences in Ireland, together with the fragmented, cubistic forms of international Modernism associated with Picasso. Significant examples include le Brocquy’s ground-breaking ‘traveller’ series, as well as the prize-winning, A Family (1951) that had represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956. 2 Le Brocquy’s celebrated portrait series was initially triggered by his visit to the anthropological museum, the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris in 1964. Picasso was one of a number of artists who had sparked a response to the earlier art forms associated with Primitivism, but le Brocquy’s interest here tended to be driven mainly by a more personal concept of ancestry, as his observations suggest: ‘For me, as perhaps for our Celtic and Gallic ancestors, the human head can be regarded ambivalently as a box which holds the spirit prisoner, but which may also free it transparently within the face.’ 3 Following his series of evocative, but anonymous ‘Ancestral Heads’ that emerged in the 1960s, le Brocquy went on to develop his portrait series of creative individuals leading, in the 1980s, to the commission for a portrait for the Musée Picasso in Antibes. The present work was among the series of portraits of Picasso submitted at the time, from which the selection was made. Louis le Brocquy’s series of portrait heads of major writers, poets and artists, provided a means to combine aspects of their appearance, personality, and creativity. However, rather than single, one-off representations, le Brocquy’s practice was to explore the subject through a series of images in recognition not only of the multi-faceted, complexity of any individual, but also their creative evolution over time. Le Brocquy, in explaining his approach, quoted the words of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Erwin Schrödinger: ’Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown and what appears to be plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing.’ Le Brocquy observed also, in relation to James Joyce, but in comments that could equally well apply to his exploration of Picasso: ‘It remains an unending task. For to attempt today a portrait, a single static image of a great artist … seems to me futile as well as impertinent.’ 4 His representations of Picasso are consequently multiple as he sought to represent something of the various and shifting dimensions of his subject. The present painting shows the head as though emerging from a muted, white/grey background. The concentration on the head alone gives emphasis to the creative imagination rather than its recognisable physical manifestation. Streaks of colour serve to obscure surface detail, while inferring the contours of the skull and facial musculature. The head is positioned just slightly left of centre and is presented frontally. While some of le Brocquy’s portraits suggest that the subject is immersed in their own thoughts, in this work, Picasso seems to be engaging directly; the intense gaze is locked compellingly with that of the viewer in an interchange of mutual scrutiny, emphasising Picasso’s vital significance in his ground-breaking artistic re-interpretation of the visible world. Séamus Heaney’s words seem particularly apt when, in an essay on Louis le Brocquy’s head images, the poet concluded with reference to: ‘ … an image that has seized hold of the eye and will not let it go.’ 5 Dr Yvonne Scott November 2020 1 Louis le Brocquy, quoted in ‘An Interview with Louis le Brocquy by George Morgan’, Louis le Brocquy: The Head Image, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1996, p. 12. 2 For an analysis of Louis le Brocquy’s ‘traveller’ series, see Yvonne Scott, ‘Louis le Brocquy, Allegory and Legend’, The Hunt Museum, Limerick, 2006, pp. 11-25. 3 Louis le Brocquy, ‘Notes on painting and awareness’, in Dorothy Walker (ed.), Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1981, p. 147. 4 Louis le Brocquy, ‘Notes on painting and awareness’, pp. 139, 151. 5 Séamus Heaney, ‘Louis le Brocquy’s heads’, in Louis le Brocquy, 1981, p. 132. €150,000-€200,000 (£133,330-£177,780 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot87