Louis le Brocquy Odalisque III Looking at Manet - Olympia 2006 oil on canvas 114 x 162cm
What is this thing called love? On a crisp Monday morning in Dublin's Kildare Street, Pat Taylor carries the good chair into a quiet room at Taylor Galleries, the better for me to sit and look at Louis le Brocquy's new paintings. Eight canvases pause there, set to leave for Gimpel Fils Gallery in London where they'll hang from 24 November, opening just two weeks after le Brocquy's 90th birthday on the 10th.
Le Brocquy calls them Homage to his Masters, the words a way of honouring his life-long conversations with the work of Manet, here especially, and with Goya, Cézanne and Velázquez, among others. Face-to-face, you see a dialogue with Manet's Olympia (1863), Goya's Doña Antonia Zarate (1805-6) and Cezanne's Four Apples and a Knife. He engages with two Velázquez: The Dwarf Don Sebastian de Mora (1643-4) and Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Facade (1630). But beneath appearances, worlds of art and history merge. There, Titian greets Ingres under a cool Henry Moore, while Picasso plays solo boules. Giacometti leans against a perilously slender tree.
Watching the conversations is like eavesdropping on a passionate debate about art itself. Are the paintings paraphrases of his Masters' work? Or might they embody much of what le Brocquy's professional life is about, drawing attention to his life's work and to the place of painting in the human condition?
The tiny still-life Looking at Cézanne's Four Apples and a Knife measures only 20 x 26 cm, marginally larger than le Brocquy's Caroline (1956). You could hold this in your hands. A finely-wrought pathway of colour spills light from a plate where apples nest (Fig 2).
Whiteness - that classical Spanish hue le Brocquy links to Being - creeps off the rim as from a palette, leaving sculpted planes who show themselves without insisting. Thin charcoal marks figure-like notations. The centre holds compositionally, the stems are gone.
The very idea of homage invokes le Brocquy's formation as an artist, where he learned from looking at the work in the National Gallery of Ireland, as well as in London, Paris and Geneva. There in 1938, works from Museo del Prado, including both the Velázquez he cites, found sanctuary from the terrors of the Spanish Civil War Picasso pictures so awe-fully in Guernica.
A mighty terrain is being covered, or uncovered as may be. This traversing relies on an intense kind of looking, for artist and viewer, so that what you see at first - a likeness, a familiar composition - is not the image held in memory when you leave the scene.
There's a topography at play, as though a Google Earth search engine was invoked to fly through the ups and downs between the 17th century and the 21st, between Velázquez and the artist himself. The terrain edges through each pictorial plane, undulating rather like Rembrandt paints swathes of robes.
What might it mean, this homage from a homme-of-âge? Le Brocquy's colleague Francis Bacon dialogued powerfully with Velázquez through works such as Pope Innocent X. In 2000, Lucien Freud's After Cézanne turned Cézanne's Afternoon in Naples into a difficult, nagging look at human relationships, at where and how you stand in relation to another. Le Brocquy's Picnic (1941) had already spoken to this painting by Cézanne.
The privileged conversation with Manet's Olympia may guide the viewer. Four large canvases named and numbered Odalisque. Looking at Manet's Olympia measure 114 x 162 each, giving them a special scale and, perhaps, status. Here is the love thing.
Desire, sensuality and sexual possibility emerge variously through paintings looking at the very idea of a reclining female nude. In 19th-century France, Victorine Meurent's want-me eyes had so shocked Parisian judges that Manet's image of her was rejected because it broke taboos, yet 140 years later, Olympia is among the world's most iconic paintings of desire and seduction, of love dangled like a chic leather glove.
Inviting Olympia into the conversation means bringing along works with whom Manet dialogued - chiefly Giorgione's Venus Asleep (1510), Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538-39) and Ingres' Odalisque with a Slave (1840).
But rather more is at stake for le Brocquy. Olympia lay beneath his rite-of-passage painting, the work that brought him to public rejection yet went on to be lauded at Venice, win a powerful critical reception and become a metaphor of how curiously (and laboriously) Ireland teetered into modernity.
Now in the National Gallery of Ireland, godfathered by Loughlin Quinn, A Family (1951) stripped deliciousness out of Manet's composition to transform it structurally into a still, spare study of isolation and relationship. Charles Gimpel, founder of Gimpel Fils after surviving Auschwitz, acted as midwife when A Family was first shown at his gallery in June 1951.
Dublin thought differently when the major work premiered at Theo Waddington's in December that year. A perniciously Irish row followed when Dublin Corporation forbade the Hugh Lane from buying it. Outraged letters fought the battle for modernity in the editorial pages, with anti-Modernists lining up against the Zeitgeist and winning the day, that day.
Le Brocquy's Odalisques feature individual women pictured allegorically in the dance of love. Only one figure, Odalisque I, is open-eyed, her green irises opaque with enigma (Fig 8). What is a woman? What is this object of desire? She sleeps, she reclines, she wakes in the act of pleasuring herself or having been pleasured. Her delight questions an artist's delight in the act of making, whispers of the delight a lover imagines in the quest to find a beloved.
Lyrical colours lure you in, as though you're set to see an after-Botticelli, but just as you get there in Odalisque IV, a down-turned lily in the drooping hand of a boy attendant reminds you it's not quite that neat (Fig 5).
Close up, the figures embody other strokes than Manet, with torsos refusing aesthetic perfection when robust legs or feet splay after Picasso's African-inspired bodies that also intrigued Henry Moore (Fig 1 & 7). Ideals rarely measure up. Tough topographical markings score the terrain, sometimes staggered as though caught in a cinematic or Duchampian motion. That cat from A Family purrs though the lower planes.
The intrigue with figure as it reveals or conceals human subjects provokes particularly close observations of Goya and Velázquez' cited portraits, both refugee paintings now back in their homeland. The portraits assert fierce subjectivity, whether Antonia's passion in repose caught in subtle cruciform composition that fades into space (Fig 9), or the haunting gaze of Don Sebastian, whose image has survived for some 360 years (Fig 4). At stake is a question about how a portrait speaks to a subject's presence and particular way of being, about what the tradition of painting might offer open-endedly to a more uncertain present.
Tradition is observed closely too in le Brocquy's Looking at Velázquez-Villa Medici, Grotto-Loggia Facade where classical composition provokes his most visible topography (Fig 3). Here, paint and line invoke the whiteness of presence and absence explored throughout his own oeuvre, notably in work from the mid-1950s, after A Family won recognition in Venice. Figures evident in the Velázquez fade into questions, lingering spirits of something you can't quite see and so must peer at to scrutinise.
Pacing the exhibition in the rhythm of how A Family showed itself back in 1951 - London, then Dublin - echoes the repetitions glimpsed throughout this particular conversation. A dialogue with art and with time.
Medb Ruane is a writer and a member of AICA.
All images ©The Artist.
Events celebrating Louis le Brocquy's 90th year.
Marking the artist's ninetieth birthday presentation, until 22 November 2006,
Tate Britain.
Louis le Brocquy, Prints, Fenton Gallery, Cork until 2 December 2006.
Homage to his Masters: New Paintings, 24 November 2006 - 13 January 2007,
Gimpel Fils, London.
Louis le Brocquy, Portrait Heads: A celebration of the artist's ninetieth birthday,
until 14 January 2007, National Gallery of Ireland.