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Artist: Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Title: Head with Open Mouth (1974) Signature: signed and dated '74 verso with artist's Opus No. 368 Medium: oil on canvas Size: 50 x 50cm (19.7 x 19.7in) Framed Size: 56 x 56cm (22 x 22in) Provenance: Gimpel Fils Gallery, London (label verso); Private Collection Exhibited: Gimpel Fils Gallery, London 1974 - CAT. no. 69A8 a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} Throughout the early part of his career, Louis le Brocquy produced a number of figure compositions, ambitious works displaying a knowledge of developments in contemporary painting while developing his own individual voice. They focused on the complex relationships between people, whether family or s... Read more Louis Le Brocquy Lot 22 - 'Head with Open Mouth (1974)' Estimate: €20,000 - €30,000 Throughout the early part of his career, Louis le Brocquy produced a number of figure compositions, ambitious works displaying a knowledge of developments in contemporary painting while developing his own individual voice. They focused on the complex relationships between people, whether family or social. Then, in the latter part of the 1950s, there was a major shift as he began to concentrate on the individual human presence. He mentioned that he was struck, one day in Spain, at the way a figure glowed in the brilliant sunlight against a white-painted wall. This idea, of a spectral presence emerging from a matrix of light, stayed with him, a symbol of human consciousness. Another major shift in his work happened when, at an impasse in the 1960s, he visited the Musée de l'Homme and was fascinated by painted Polynesian skulls. They brought to his mind the Celtic head cult, and the Celtic notion of the head as a magic box that contained the spirit. That set him off on a path that produced a series of heads, ancestral heads and then, attempting a kind of archaeology of the spirit, reimagined heads of writers including Yeats, Beckett, and Joyce. While in the heads he was attempting to capture a sense of the inner life of each subject, in the 1970s he abbreviated his pictorial language still further, with a series of Heads with Open mouths. Whether intentionally or not, these works inevitably evoked Edvard Munch's The Scream, and it seems reasonable to interpret them as being made partly in response to alarming events in Northern Ireland, as The Troubles took hold. Le Brocquy mentioned a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson of a man peeking through a hole in a canvas wall surrounding a bullfighting ring. He liked the way the photographer kept us on this side of the canvas; we had to imagine the other side. Similarly, he felt, the open mouth in the painting, perhaps a cry of anguish or horror, was a way into an inner world and its fears and challenges. One of Ireland's foremost 20th century artist, Louis le Brocquy was self-taught as an artist. He gained prominence as a painter, graphic artist and tapestry designer and was for many decades a central cultural presence. His work is in numerous public and private collections. Aidan Dunne, September 2023