Louis le Brocquy emerged as one of the leading Irish artists of the 20th century. Last November, he celebrated his 90th birthday, and the event was marked by a year-long series of exhibitions and tributes.
He was born in Dublin in 1916, and it was thought that he would go into the family business, the Greenmount oil company in Harold's Cross, but he gave up chemistry in favour of a riskier career as a self-taught artist. He says that he learned how to paint by studying the work of the old masters in museums throughout Europe.
When he returned to Ireland, in 1940, he quickly established himself as a highly capable and progressive presence in terms of his own work, and also in his contributions to public debate. He was a vocal critic of the Hugh Lane's rejection of a painting by the French artist Georges Rouault in 1942, for example. He was one of relatively few individuals in Ireland attuned to developments in Modernist painting, and its impact can be seen in his Traveller and Family series. The art world in Ireland was limited and largely conservative, and, when he was invited to exhibit with the fledgling Gimpel Fils Gallery in London he jumped at the chance and moved across the Irish Sea. In London, he got to know several later prominent artistic figures, including Francis Bacon. He also painted his series of Human Presences, tenuous evocations of human beings against void-like spaces, works that reflected anxieties about the human condition prevalent in a post-war, nuclear world.
After he met and married Anne Madden, however, they moved away from London, to France, eventually settling in the south. Thereafter they split their time between France and Ireland for many years until returning to settle in Dublin. In the 1960s, he worked towards the paintings for which he remains best-known. At a time when he was despondent about his work, he chanced upon decorated Polynesian heads in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Together with ideas gleaned from the Celtic head cult, they led to his long-running series of portrait heads. Rather than conventional likenesses, these paintings are imaginative reconstructions, "archaeologies of the spirit", as they were memorably dubbed. Subjects include the great literary figures Joyce, Beckett and Yeats.
Apart from paintings per se, le Brocquy has worked very successfully across a range of disciplines, including a series of tapestry designs, and his brush drawings for Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin. These widely admired drawings served as the basis for a large body of graphic work. Having turned 90, the artist remains exceptionally productive.
