Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 30th April 2018 at 6pm

52 Louis Le Brocquy HRHA ( - ) reConsTruCTeD heAD of A ChilD (1968) signed, titled and dated ‘69 on reverse oil on canvas 142 x 141cm (56 x 55.5in) Provenance: Gimpel Fils Gallery, Ltd. London (label verso); The Irish Sale, Christies, London, 22nd May 1998, Lot 191; Private Collection Exhibited: Gimpel Fils Gallery, Ltd. London 1968; Gimpel & Nanover, 1969, catalogue no.42 €80,000-120,000 (£69,565-104,347) One of the leading Irish artists of the 20th century, Louis le Brocquy is indelibly associated with the image of the human head. He began painting heads in what we recognize as his own distinctive manner around 1964. Throughout the 1950s, he had produced a series of paintings that developed the motif of the isolated human presence. The spectral human form seems to materialize out of a pure white ground. In time, he felt that he had exhausted this particular path of exploration. It’s reliably reported that, dissatisfied, he destroyed up to a year’s worth of work. Then, one day in the early 1960s, in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, he chanced on a display of decorated Polynesian heads. They struck a chord in his mind with popular, speculative accounts of the Celtic head cult. Like the Polynesians, he thought, the Celts viewed the head as “a magic box that held the spirit prisoner.” These musings led him towards a new way of painting the human head. Rather than merely capturing a likeness, he tried to work towards a sense of the person as a complex, imaginative, multi-layered being. To paint was to attempt “an archaeology of the spirit.” That is what he sets out to achieve in his many celebrated studies of such literary figures as W.B. Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. He does so too in this exceptionally fine painting of a child from 1960 which, with its diagonal format, allows him to directly visualize the magic box that holds the spirit, the essence of being, abuzz with feelings, thoughts, dreams and memories. Aidan Dunne, March 2018.