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Lot Essay
Louis le Brocquy is a remarkable man, totally self taught by studying Old Masters in galleries across Europe, being particularly influenced by Spanish art. However he also looked at his contemporaries and it is synthetic cubism which is obviously the vital influence in this painting, particularly the later development of cubism as seen in the work of Picasso in the 1930s. His method of study was inevitable as in Ireland before the war artistic education was limiting in its extremely narrow outlook. A country who rejected the gift of a Rouault was clearly not the place to learn. A few artists, whom he knew, like Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, had studied in Paris and during the war a number of foreign artists came to live in Ireland and called themselves the White Stag group. This also helped to widen the artistic scene.
Condemned Man is a work dated 1945 and shows with its elegant pale shades and cubist forms how completely he had absorbed these new and old ideas. He was always deeply interested in human beings and this work precedes his more famous series of paintings of Tinkers. When soon afterwards he went to live in London he became in the fifties, a member of the Howard Society for Penal Reform and this painting is his own, earlier statement of his abhorrance of capital punishment, still then a feature of the Irish legal code. He had also through a doctor friend of his mother heard about the dreadful conditions of prison life and in 1945 he was only too well aware of the horrors of prisoners in concentration camps. The condemned man knows he is moving from the light into the darkness of death, half his face has already disappeared. His frightened, anxious expression, his hands clutching his chest as though they might save him from his fate or give him courage as he shrinks into himself, fills the onlooker with sorrow and compassion. He is surrounded by symbols of freedom which he may think of but he does not see, the black cat walking freely through the bars, the tiny figure of a man waving, stands above him and below the flowers with their delicate blues and pinks adorn the right hand corner. Other symbols like the light bulb remind one of Guernica and indeed his broken face also has hints of Picasso.
The brushwork is notable with its changes from a patch of grey with rain-like strokes to quietly hatched brown and areas of pure, strong white. The strength of these shapes gives the work another dimension, near abstraction. But above all it is a tragic picture, and yet simply beautiful with its gentle colours. One of le Brocquy's greatest paintings.
We are very grateful to Anne Crookshank for providing the catalogue entry for this lot.
Condemned Man is a work dated 1945 and shows with its elegant pale shades and cubist forms how completely he had absorbed these new and old ideas. He was always deeply interested in human beings and this work precedes his more famous series of paintings of Tinkers. When soon afterwards he went to live in London he became in the fifties, a member of the Howard Society for Penal Reform and this painting is his own, earlier statement of his abhorrance of capital punishment, still then a feature of the Irish legal code. He had also through a doctor friend of his mother heard about the dreadful conditions of prison life and in 1945 he was only too well aware of the horrors of prisoners in concentration camps. The condemned man knows he is moving from the light into the darkness of death, half his face has already disappeared. His frightened, anxious expression, his hands clutching his chest as though they might save him from his fate or give him courage as he shrinks into himself, fills the onlooker with sorrow and compassion. He is surrounded by symbols of freedom which he may think of but he does not see, the black cat walking freely through the bars, the tiny figure of a man waving, stands above him and below the flowers with their delicate blues and pinks adorn the right hand corner. Other symbols like the light bulb remind one of Guernica and indeed his broken face also has hints of Picasso.
The brushwork is notable with its changes from a patch of grey with rain-like strokes to quietly hatched brown and areas of pure, strong white. The strength of these shapes gives the work another dimension, near abstraction. But above all it is a tragic picture, and yet simply beautiful with its gentle colours. One of le Brocquy's greatest paintings.
We are very grateful to Anne Crookshank for providing the catalogue entry for this lot.