Lot 18 Louis le Brocquy HEAD OF SAMUEL BECKETT

Louis le Brocquy HRHA, 1916-2012
HEAD OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Oil on canvas, 36 1/2" x 28 1/2" (92.7 x 72.4cm), inscribed on stretcher bar verso.

Exhibited: Louis le Brocquy, Images, 1975-1987, The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaon and the Cultural Relations Committee], No. 43: Guinness Hop Store, Dublin, September-October 1987; Ulster Museum, Belfast, NovemberDecember 1987; Festival Centre, Adelaide, March-April 1988: Westpac Gallery/National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, May-June 1988; Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, May-June 1988.

Illus: Louis le Brocquy: Images 1975-1987, Arts Council of Ireland, 1987, cover (detail); full-page col (detail) p.58.

Louis le Brocquy, perhaps the most esteemed Irish artist of his generation, was preoccupied with the human head as far back as 1964, when he became fascinated by the ancient Celtic tradition of the head as a magic box which contained the spirit. His paintings of generic ancestral heads developed over the following decade. Always interested in the human condition, these austere paintings searched for an abstract concept of humanity that went beyond the identification of physical features.

However, in the mid-1970s, triggered by a commission by a Swedish gallery owner to contribute to a portrait exhibition of Nobel Prize winners, le Brocquys focus shifted dramatically, a transition from his generic ancestral heads to the renowned portrait series of Head Images. These studies, mostly of literary figures whose writings elevated them to the status of icons of Irish culture, included Joyce, Heaney, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. Portraits preoccupied le Brocquy over the next thirty years, representing a significant and distinctive period of his work.

Beckett was a close friend of the artist, with le Brocquy often visiting him in Paris and, also, collaborating on illustrations for some of Becketts work. Although le Brocquy made many portraits of the writer between 1979 and 2005, Image of Samuel Beckett (1987) stands out in its intensity. Painted two years before the authors death in 1989, the craggy, timeworn face has a commanding fierceness and intensity.

It is fascinating to see how the artist balances a convincing description of facial features with a desire to dissolve them. The image of Beckett slowly reveals itself but, just at the point where features begin to solidify, the artist lets go again. It tempts the poetic imagination of the viewer: suggesting and hinting rather than describing. In that respect, there is a continuous line that links paintings like this one to the earlier ancestral heads. In both, le Brocquy searches for a more general sense of human presence, the essence of being that hovers below the surface. When he began to paint identifiable portraits, the artist recognised the futility of trying to make a single definitive image, something static and fixed. He understood that our perception of someone, like Beckett, comes from absorbing multiple sources over time, filtered by memory. This painting embodies that sense of flux, briefly (but convincingly) capturing his fleeting physical appearance but going beyond that to reveal the subjects enormous presence. And when we step back, we see the ageing Beckett convincingly: spiky wisps of hair, craggy weathered skin, penetrating sunken eyes.

The surface of a le Brocquy portrait is wonderfully seductivepale and ethereal at the edges, becoming denser, with rich colour at the core. The play between opaque and transparent elements gives the work a luscious fluidity. Portraits like this one also have a sense of solemnity and grandeur, without the slightest hint of informality. There is a formal symmetry, with an aura of light around the head in the tradition of medieval religious art. Extraneous details have been eliminated and the background is simplified so that all the colour, texture and emotional intensity is concentrated on the head of Beckett, that magic box that holds his creative spirit.

Dr Frances Ruane. HRHA

November 2024