Louis Le Brocquy
Being (no. 44)
Oil on Board, 25.5 x 18cm (10 x 7¼")
Signed

 

Provenance: With Gimpel Fils Gallery Ltd, London, January 1958 where purchased by Mrs Anthony Hunter; With Pyms Gallery,...

Louis Le Brocquy
Being (no. 44)
Oil on Board, 25.5 x 18cm (10 x 7¼")
Signed

 

Provenance: With Gimpel Fils Gallery Ltd, London, January 1958 where purchased by Mrs Anthony Hunter; With Pyms Gallery, London; Private Collection Dublin

 

Being forms part of a series of paintings which le Brocquy began in 1957, under the umbrella title, Presences. The term, like 'Being' is ambiguous, having both a specific and a universal application. The series is characterised by the dominant use of white, applied thickly, broken only by small, carefully considered areas of brilliant colour, and enriched by their own impastoed textures. Most, like Being, represent a single, haunting figurative presence. The figure appears to emerge, gathering shape and form from the background, and presents itself at the surface of the picture plane.

Le Brocquy, like many post-war artists, was fearful of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and his work revealed that sense of human fragility. Being both reflects that widely experienced anxiety and a more personal one, for the artist, in the mid-1950s as his fiancée, the young painter Anne Madden, endured three serious spinal operations, spending most of the year 1957 enveloped in a plaster cast.

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