Venerated, but controversy was never far away

Louis le Brocquy, who died yesterday aged 95, was so venerated a figure in the Irish arts world that it is often forgotten how controversial a figure he had sometimes been.

As a young, self-taught artist in Dublin, he helped found the Irish Exhibition of Living Art of 1943, a contemporary showcase that blew the cobwebs off painting and sculpture as they were practiced in Ireland at that time. Later, his painting A Family became infamous when Dublin Municipal Gallery refused it as a gift.

A Family is one of 10 works viewers are being asked to vote for on RTÉ’s Masterpiece: Ireland’s Favourite Painting. Whatever one may think of the programme, le Brocquy’s A Family is widely and justly acknowledged as one of the great Irish artworks of the 20th century.

The painting is one of a series on the subject of the family that le Brocquy produced in the early 1950s, in the aftermath of World War II. A Family describes a bleak scene in a room lit by a single light bulb. A woman lies ill on a table, while a fierce-looking cat peers out from the covers and a girl by her feet holds up a small bouquet of flowers.

A Family was first shown at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London in 1951.

A year later, it was shown in Dublin, and a group of art lovers offered to buy it for £400 to present to Dublin Municipal Gallery.

The gallery’s advisory committee refused, citing the artist’s “incompetence”.

The painting later won a prestigious prize, the Premio Acquisito Internationale, when le Brocquy represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956.

Businessman Lochlann Quinn had the foresight to buy A Family when it came up for auction in 2001. He paid a record €2.75m for the painting and donated it to the National Gallery of Ireland, where, in 2002, it became the first work by a living Irish artist to be put on display.

The subjects of A Family may seem far from the milieu of privilege that le Brocquy grew up in (as a child, he had some tuition in art from Elizabeth Yeats Butler, sister to Jack and William). But it was typical of the artist to devote attention to the common people.

His earlier Tinker Paintings are a celebration of a way of life that was, in the 1940s, already under threat, long before itinerant workers and families demanded to be known as Travellers.

Le Brocquy’s achievements as an artist were many, but he will most likely be remembered for two distinct lines of work: the Heads series of portraits he produced between 1964 and 1996; and his calligraphic drawings for Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin.

Le Brocquy’s Heads began as a series of studies of anonymous characters, but he soon began to focus on literary figures, such as Beckett, Joyce, Yeats and Heaney. Some wish he had stopped at that: in 2003, there were mixed reactions when he produced a portrait of Bono, which also hangs in the National Gallery.

“It’s an unbelievable honour to have one of the world’s great contemporary painters do your portrait,” said Bono with typical modesty at the time. “If I could have told the 14-year-old Bono that his favourite painter would one day do his portrait for the National Gallery, he probably would have believed it. But that’s puberty for you.”

Around 1967, le Brocquy was asked by Liam Miller, of the Dolmen Press in Dublin, to illustrate a new translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge he had commissioned from the poet Thomas Kinsella — the work was published as The Táin in 1969. “When Liam sent me a script of Kinsella’s translation of The Táin, he described it as a central prehistoric legend,” le Brocquy told the Irish Examiner in 2005. “I was immensely impressed by it, and wanted to capture something of its fantasy and its boastful energy. At the same time, I wanted to omit any allusion to such incidentals as contemporary clothing, weaponry or any other thing that might be seen as description.

“The question was how I would do this. I turned to prehistoric cave drawings and other primitive means of expression, but to no avail. Eventually, however, I found the inspiration I needed in Oriental calligraphy.”

If Kinsella’s translation remains as fresh and vigorous as it seemed when first published in 1969, so do le Brocquy’s brush drawings.

“The drawings are simple marks in printer’s ink,” said le Brocquy. “Like shadows thrown by the text itself.”

Le Brocquy was still in excellent health when he celebrated his 90th birthday at a dinner in Cork hosted by Nuala Fenton of the Fenton Gallery. On that occasion, when asked what advice he might give to young artists, he replied: “I have to say I don’t feel much able to offer advice to anyone, other than that painting, not nature, begets painting; I myself have always been inspired by painters of the past. My earliest heroes were artists like Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya, Manet and of course Cezanne.”