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

In her 1981 monograph Dorothy Walker identified le Brocquy’s 1951 painting of A Family (coll. National Gallery of Ireland) as the ultimate contemporary icon of ‘post-war British art’. She went on to comment that throughout the Fifties le Brocquy was working in the "ancient tradition of the ‘major painting’: the work that summed up what a painter stood for and showed what he could do when at full stretch. He did this twice over in 1954, once with Children in a Wood, a free version of a much smaller painting by Nicolaes Maes, and again with Lazarus" (op.cit.).

A Family shows figures in a cell-like interior, dysfunctional in their implied relationships with each other, lit by a scarcely shaded bulb swinging overhead and relieved only by the presence of a young child with flowers. Another closely related work is Man Holding Towel, a powerful 1951 study for the present work (sold in these rooms, a world record for a le Brocquy work on paper, 16^th May 2003, lot 122). In this large pre-meditation a second bare light bulb hangs mournfully above the bowed head, casting unforgiving light across the sculptural torso of the figure below. The bulb motif is recurrent in the immediate post-war works, cropping up first in the Condemned Man of 1945, and the austerity of the period, spiritual and material, permeates this group. Le Brocquy has spoken of the atmosphere of impending threat that was equally tangible in the work of fellow artists at this time, such as Francis Bacon: ‘in these post-war, Cold War days, we all of us walked in fear of potential nuclear disaster obliterating civilised life’.

John Berger linked the present work with the Family pictures in his well-known review of the 1955 Gimpel Fils show:
   ‘The theme of all of them – even if some of them are called Lazarus or Resurrection – is the same. It is – and there is no other way of putting it briefly except in a platitude – the mystery of the flesh; the nearness within the nervous system between pain and pleasure; the ambiguity between the body as a cage containing an animal and the body as an expendable servant of the heart’ (quoted by Alistair Smith, op.cit.). However, as Alistair Smith interprets, this assessment was also ‘peculiarly prophetic of the character of the White Paintings which were soon to follow’.

Lazarus is a transitional image, positioned mid-way between the Family and early Grey pictures, and the subsequent series of Presences, Beings, and ultimately the Heads. A desire to understand ‘the mystery of the flesh’, as Berger put it, is what drives these later investigations. Lazarus provides an initial key. The typical, traditional view of the New Testament character, as imagined by masters such as Rembrandt, was of a corpse wanly relieved to be released from the afterlife, yet still lacking any strength in wasted legs with which to embrace his exhumation. Here, uncompromising within a setting of stark, grid-bound modernity, the disinterred protagonist is seen assuming the pose of Christ on the Cross, head bent but the figure nonetheless erect and triumphant over death. Closer to full abstraction than the artist had ever previously ventured, the advent of new life is nonetheless evident here. It courses through the lower left corner of the canvas, a fresh emerald green enveloping the scarred earth, and Lazarus’ fingertips quicken and upturn with spirit. The latent pessimism that leeches colour and hope from the early Fifties works is here replaced by new promise. The Head series represents a quest of decades, one that continues to this day, to unravel the internal mystery of the human psyche. It can be seen to represent the apotheosis of that which is first unveiled here, as the shroud is cast aside and the stone is rolled away: le Brocquy’s resurrected belief in the innate wonder and possibility of man.