THIS retrospective exhibition begins with the painting Southern Window, dating from 1939, from the Hugh Lane Gallery and ends with one of the "orifice" canvases painted this very year. Le Brocquy's beginnings appears to have been unimpeachably orthodox; he mastered academic realism far better than most academicians do, as is, shown by the familiar Woman in White - actually a portrait of the actress Kathleen Ryan, who appeared in the film Odd Man Out. When the RHA began to reject his pictures, was it on stylistic grounds or because they sensed in him too, formidable a rival to allow into their own meadow?

When he moved to London, he painted as one of the gifted, mildly avant-garde British generation of the time: Keith Vaughan, Colquhoun and MacBryde, Sutherland, Pasmore etc., even Minton and Craxton. Dublin has long credited him with being influenced by the Polish Jew Jankel Adler, who painted in a Picassoist idiom and the IMMA catalogue acknowledges this, but Adler has all but vanished, so it hardly matters now. Incidentally, in view of le Brocquy's later semi-obsession with white and greyish tones, the striking 1948 picture called Man Creating Bird is full of colour - and temperament too. This was the period of his Tinker works, or "Traveller" as PC demands it today, which excited literary men of the time as well as painters.

The Family of 1951, which created such a rumpus once, is slightly mannered but nevertheless impressive and ably constructed, an essay in "subject" painting in a modernist vocabulary. The Lazarus of a few years later similarly has something faintly contrived about it, yet it too retains considerable presence in a spiky, angular, tension-ridden way. In the later 1950s, le Brocquy left Cubism and Picasso behind and concentrated on shadowy human forms, at times barely hinted at, which emerge tentatively though a nebulous white-grey mist. Perhaps this became rather an impasse in the end, but it was certainly individual and searching, and a work such as Young Woman Washing (which uses more colour than most other pictures of this period) is still arresting.

The bodiless heads which succeeded these have gone on over decades and there have been many of them. Most are of literary men, of whom it seems to me that those of Yeats, Joyce (in particular) and Beckett are the most successful and probing. They evoke a writer's psychological/ spiritual essence rather than his physiognomy and - to state the obvious - are not, portraits in the usual sense. There is also a hint of the cadaver about them, or of those grim photographs of executed men lying in rows which are common in books about modern war; they have the same frontal, fixed and transfixing stare. Le Brocquy has professed an interest in Fautrier, whose series of Otages was based on wartime executions carried out near a mental hospital outside Paris, in which he was then hiding.

In his most recent pictures, he appears to have moved on temporarily, at least from, the heads and concentrates on a single human orifice, often, an ear (these have been seen in number in the Taylor Galleries exhibition which has just ended). Le Brocquy seemingly likes to concentrate over a long period on a single idea and its multiple variations and possibilities, rather than being in a hurry to invent new forms or discover new themes. It may make for a degree of monotony on occasion, but this obsessiveness has its own, inbuilt reward.

Since the exhibition is mounted "thematically" rather than in strict chronological sequence, it is interesting to compare the 1954 Children in a Wood with later versions of the same theme painted in the 1990s. Both, I suppose, are variations on the classical "bacchanal" theme (originally the impetus came from a picture by Nicholas Maes) and they generate a feverish, orgiastic ambience rather than a feeling of youth and innocence.

Speaking for myself, I would have liked to see rather more of the early work and would even have been prepared to sacrifice some of the Heads for this. And while the choice is generally good and thoughtful, there are certain odd omissions: none of the tapestries (which include some of le Brocquy's finest work), none of the superb Tain drawings, which may be over-familiar by know but still represent one of his high-water marks. There are also none of those elegant, lyrical early watercolours and sketches which charmed Dublin more than a generation ago. However, even in a retrospective, you cannot have everything.