Louis le Brocquy, H.R.H.A. b.1916

Gimpel Fils, London, 1968
Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, purchased from the above, October 1968
Gorry Gallery, Dublin

London, Gimpel Fils, and toured to Zurich, Gimpel & Hanover Galerie, Louis le Brocquy, Recent Paintings, 1969, no.40, illustrated in colour on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. 

Louis first started producing ‘head images’ with the ancestral head series of 1964. It was in this year that he discovered Polynesian decorated skulls in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, having lived in France since 1958. The overriding impression of these skulls was a reiteration, within a completely separate cultural context, of the Celtic notion that the head was the human being: "the magic box that holds the spirit prisoner". The encounter had a lasting effect on the artist and his work, leading directly to his on-going series of individual heads (the most recent of which was completed in 2003, Image of Bono, coll. National Gallery of Ireland). Most importantly the heads broke a creative deadlock that had seen the artist destroy all of his output of 1963, some forty canvases.

Anne Madden, whom the artist married the same year as moving to France, has described how "these head images suggested to [Louis] a new human significance. He felt the overmodelling and painting implied a ritualistic laying on of hands, a recognition of the ancestor’s entity, palpable marks from the outside which defined and celebrated the spirit within the reconstituted ancestral head" (1994, quoted in Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939-1996, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1996, exhibition catalogue, p.90). The present work has previously been known as Renaissance Man, although the artist has confirmed that the actual title is the less specific Head of a Man (alternatively Reconstructed Head of a Man). The universality of this title is key as ‘the artist has invested this nebulous space not just with the memory or recreation of one man, but with one man from time immemorial’ (Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Ward River Press, Dublin, 1981, p.45). However, the alternative, later title, does throw some further light on the subject matter. Louis is quoted by Walker commenting on the Renaissance as break-point: "since the Renaissance and until the turn of this century our imagery has remained very largely perceptual, outward-looking and evidently equated with exterior phenomena". Preoccupied with the internal, attempting ‘psychological archaeology’, a pursuit devoid of rationalist, linear development, the artist thus sees himself to some extent as ‘Counter-Renaissance’, and associates himself with Joyce in this respect. Walker further comments that ‘le Brocquy’s head images, although single images centrally placed on the canvas, have nothing to do with a Renaissance Centrist order. On the contrary, the image defies its central placing by floating in an indeterminate space between planes’ (ibid., p.44).

Their existence independent of any standard, linear narrative is thus central to the concept of the ‘heads’, a fact accentuated here by the coloured ground upon which the head floats. The vivid scarlet backdrop to is striking, and rare. Louis was experimenting with coloured backdrops in 1967, showing Reconstructed Head of an Irish Martyr against grey and Reconstructed Head of James Joyce against brown in this year (both coll. Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.). The massive Entremont pictures were to follow in 1968. There is, however, no record in the literature of deviation from these muted earth tones, achieved here with such effect. Barring Head in Darkness, painted the same year, which has a less aggressive yet relatively bright blue ground, Head of a Man is close to unique in this respect. As such it represents a key work that draws on four years of careful and evolving practice, integral to the series and yet also set apart from it. Head of a Man has a dual appeal: it is fully worked and resolved, with the balance between the saturated ground and the delicately impastoed head complementary and harmonious, yet remains gloriously fresh with the joy of discovery.

We are most grateful to Louis le Brocquy for the following additional comment on this work: "Towards the end of the white Presence series I sometimes painted coloured grounds as an added dynamic 'mood' underlying the central image. Such works included the blue Isolated Being (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin), a big red Reconstructed Head of William Blake (French Institute, London), and the deep brown Reconstructed Head of James Joyce (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.). The painting is, in some sense, an image of W.H. (Bill) Walsh, who inaugurated the Kilkenny Design Workshops in 1965" (private correspondence, March 2004).