Louis le brocquy biography definition
Louis le Brocquy
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Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. Leaving Ireland in 1938 to study the major European art collections in London, Paris, Venice and Geneva, he returned in the 1940s where he participated in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, departing for London in 1946 where he soon became prominent on the contemporary art scene. Later he began to exhibit internationally and - representing Ireland - won a major prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956. In 1958 he married fellow artist Anne Madden and left London to work in France.He received an invitation, in December 1966, to collaborate with publisher Liam Miller on a new translation of Ireland's oldest saga, An Táin Bó Cúailnge. Accepting, le Brocquy spent much of the next three years visualising the project, before its publication in 1969. His lithographic brush drawings for The Táin were celebrated by critics, and would endure as one of the crowning achievements, and culturally significant artworks, of his career.
The artist would enjoy continuous acclaim throughout his long career, which spanned over six decades and can be broken up roughly into ten, sometimes overlapping, periods; the Tinker (1945-1948), Grey (1951-54) and White (1956-66) periods, the Ancestral (1964-75) and Portrait (1975-2000) Heads, his series of Still Lifes (1981-1998), Processions (1984-92) and Irish Landscapes (1987-94), before his Human Image (1996-05) and, finally, the Homage (2005-06) series towards the end of his career and life.
Le Brocquy is recognised by many as one of the greatest Irish artists of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest of any era of Irish art. He was made Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1975 and received the Freedom of the City of Dublin in 2007. The realisation of over £1.7 million for his 1951 painting A Family at auction in 2000 was a record at the time for an Irish artists work, placing him among a very select group
Louis le Brocquy
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 fr Louis le Brocquy (1916-2012) Longevity alone is not cause for national celebration and it is le Brocquy’s reputation as Ireland’s greatest, and most commercially successful, living artist that merits such festivities. Yet, in many ways le Brocquy’s art seems an unlikely focus for national pride, not least because his move to London in 1946 marked the beginning of fifty years of self-imposed exile. In an increasingly culturally heterogeneous Ireland, definitions of national identity are subject to much debate. Within this context it is worth investigating the extent to which, throughout the 1950s, this celebrated Irish artist was producing work that can only be fully understood within an international frame. My aim is not to deny the connections between le Brocquy’s art and Ireland, but rather to acknowledge the British and international influences that have contributed to his oeuvre. As Róisín Kennedy has observed in relation to le Brocquy’s art, ‘the framing of a work of art within national boundaries imposes considerable limitations on the ways in which it is read both critically and art historically’. Situating the Presences within an international context, contributes to both a broader understanding of le Brocquy’s work, and a less introspective vision of mid-twentieth-century Irish culture. * * * Although I was born in Dublin . . . and brought up entirely in Ireland, I do not remember feeling particularly Irish . . . Then, one day in my twenty-first year, I . . .
Life] 1916- [orth. err. Le Brocquy]; b. 10 Nov., Dublin, 5 Sion Rd., Dublin; son of Albert Le Brocquy, a second-generation oil-company proprietor of Belgian descent, his father having been a chemical engineer and first Belgian consul in Ireland with manufacturing and business premisses at Harold’s Cross, the son of an ex-cavalry officer in the Belgian Army who came to Ireland to mount the Belgian cavalry and married a Kilkenny woman [?Murphy]; his mother was Sybil [née Staunton], a writer on Jonathan Swift; ed. Miss Sweeney’s school at Mount Temple (where Lolly Yeats taught art on Saturdays), and St. Gerard’s School, Bray; self-trained painter; eloped with and m. Jean Stoney, in London, Dec. 1938, on advice of his mother Sybil; a dg., Sèyre born shortly after; introduced to Ralph Cusack, moving into his cottage at Cap Martin, May 1939; visited Venice alone to see Biennale paintings; left Menton in Sept. 1939; settled at 15 Fitzwilliam St., Dublin; painted Girl in White (the actress Kathleen Ryan - who was later disfigured in an accident), RHA 1941; painted Belfast Refugees, 1941; painted pituitary glands in operation for Dr. Adam McConnell; 1940; separated from Jean Stoney, 1941 - though she retained his name in her professinal life as a pediatrician; established studio at 13 Merrion Row with his sis. Melanie; joint exhibition, Dec. 1942; became acquainted with Erwin Schrödinger, de Valera’s guest at the DIAS (Burlington Rd.), 1943; on the rejection of work by selection committee of the annual RHA, he established the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, a salon des refusés, with Mainie Jellett (Chairman), Evie Hone, Norah McGuinness, Ralph Cusack, Jack Hanlon, SJ, and Margaret Clarke (wife of Harry Clarke), at the suggestion of his mother Sybil; lectured on colour to Dublin University Experimental Science Soc., Oct. 1943; painted Young Woman with Iris, being a portrait In November 2006 Louis le Brocquy celebrated his ninetieth birthday. In Ireland the occasion was marked with exhibitions at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hunt Museum, Limerick and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane. Elsewhere, there were shows at Gimpel Fils – his London dealer for over sixty years – Galerie Jeanne-Bucher in Paris and at TATE Britain where his painting Tinkers Resting, 1946, was on display.