LOUIS LE BROCQUY, R.H.A. | STUDY (MAN WITH A TOWEL)

Gimpel Fils, London;

Sotheby's, London, 16 May 2003, lot 122;

The Ava Gallery, Clandeboyne, Bangor, 2007, where purchased by the present owner

Painted in 1951, Study (Man with Towel) belongs to the artist's seminal 'Grey Period'. It also heralds, pictorially and conceptually, the artist's ongoing exploration into the human condition.

Standing beneath a rudimentary lamp, a nude man bows his head. Arms extended, he holds up behind him a white towel, creating for himself a sort of photographic backdrop. The lightbulb is a familiar prop in le Brocquy's early work - it appears in the Condemned Man of 1945 (Private Collection) and, more famously, in his magnum opus of the Grey Period, The Family (coll. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) also painted in 1951. On both occasions this product of modern technology serves to illuminate an oppressive, cell-like environment, within which it simultaneously manages to illuminate the gross shortfallings of man's spiritual progress.

In the present composition, the symbol of a faltering modern society is juxtaposed with one of the most enduring gestures of the visual language. The man's pose is unmistakeably that of Christ at the Crucifixion. It is a motif that le Brocquy returns to time and again, most memorably with Lazarus (1954, sold in these rooms 18th May 2000, lot 161) - for which the present work may have been used as a study. In this context, it is also easy to propose an analogy for the white towel as a sort of burial shroud. However, it is not the specifics of the religious imagery that are important. As John Berger explained in 1955 (New Statesman, February 1955):

`The theme of all of [le Brocquy's Grey Period paintings] is the same. It is...the mystery of the flesh: the nearness within the nervous system of pain and pleasure: the ambiguity of the body as a cage containing an animal and the body as an expendable servant of the heart: the fact that the same muscles move in the shoulder whether the arm is raised to caress or to do violence' (John Berger, quoted by Alistair Smith, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-1996, 1996, p.33).

The muscles of the figure are clearly delineated according to the artist's then current practice. It took another five years for le Brocquy's exploration of the body as a cage for the soul (spirit) to take on the more abstract and elemental pictorial form of the Presences and the Human Images. Study (Man with Towel) is nevertheless a pivotal image. It announces the move away from the narrative rhetoric and the group compositions towards the exclusive concentration on the single human entity as an irreducible symbol. In this way, the present important and formative work points the way forward to everything that le Brocquy since achieved.