Lot 51 Louis le Brocquy

Louis le Brocquy HRHA, 1916-2012 FANTAIL PIGEONS (1985) Oil on canvas, 15'' X 18£ (38 x46cm), signed; signed,inscribed and dated 1985 verso, No. 533 Provenance: Taylor Galleries, Dublin (label verso), where acquired by the present owner. Pablo Picasso's globular, iconic spirit was preoccupying Louis le Brocquy when he took time out to paint this lyrical Fantail Pigeon. While Picasso was ''a being in whom the power and joy of life were uniquely personified'' for the artist, the pigeons perch on a playful line of inquiry where apparent lightness of touch screens deep painterly intent. Here is sheer, effervescent pleasure in life and liveliness hovering at a fleeting instant between flight and rest. Urgent swathes of oil, applied as though breathlessly, must achieve the almost impossible task of picturing fluttering, feathery beings. Slow, laborious matter- the heavy oil- meets rapid, gestural action. The art is in the moment. The very delightfulness of the image and the sight that inspired it draw attention away from the challenge at stake. How can oil paint make movement appear? Viewers may wonder how such flickering, flirtatious fantails seem to scatter lines of movement in internally mirrored arcs, using painted marks that echo the moving pictures of the twentieth-century cinema as well as Duchamp's early experiments in capturing motion and velocity in two dimensions. ''Perhaps this is simply a temporary release from the heads and their rather intense reflective consciousness, their tragic aspect,'' le Brocquy thought aloud to an interviewer that year, ''a return to a simple state of being, emerging in its own nature, filling out its little volume ofreality with various natural possibilities of its form.'' Picasso's own painted doves had worked allegorically as a way of picturing peace and love, of imaging aspirations beyond everyday limitations. Not for nothing did the cliché speak of being 'free as a bird'. The birds signalled wonder. Yet le Brocquy's pigeons reached further back into decaying Georgian streets of his Dublin childhood as well to the Parisian boulevards he would stroll later. An early dove painting appeared in 1955. Then in 1956, le Brocqquy found himself feeding a flock of white doves who deigned to reside in the courtyard of Casa Pezzoli, his lodgings while staying in Foggia-Ischia. He sketched them and made images in oil. At Les Combes, Le Brocquy's French home, his house and studio hung on a vine-clad valley where fantail pigeons soared and dived by day, gliding back to their dovecotes each evening for an interlude of billing and cooing. Here began the specific series to which this painting belongs. Considering the pigeons broadly within a life/still life tradition over whose shoulder Edouard Manet beckons, the lemons and apples, lilies, peonies and even goldfish le Brocquy paints throughout his practive offer close encounters with his aesthetic and technical interests at various times. No less ambitious, they open a painterly space into the little incidents the world sometimes offers, chance encounters glimpsed if your willing to look. (catalogue extract taken from Medb Ruane's piece on ''Fantail Pigeons'' (1984))