FIElD DAy REVIEw 170 Fig. 1: Louis le Brocquy, A Family (detail), 1951 Oil on canvas, 147 x 185 cm Ambivalent Collection National Gallery of Ireland © the artist Homecomings: Louis le Brocquy, Francis Bacon and the Mechanics of Canonization Lucy Cotter In 2001 two significant homecomings were celebrated in the Irish art world. The first surrounded the public opening of Francis Bacon’s studio in Dublin, the city of the artist’s birth. Following a donation by Bacon’s sole heir, John Edwards, the entire studio was dismantled at its location at Reece Mews in London, transported, and painstakingly reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane). The second homecoming was the donation of Louis le 1 Medb Ruane, ‘Le Brocquy’s, The Family’, Brocquy’s A Family (1951), a Irish Arts Review, 19, 1 (2002), 22–23, 23. painting that had been central to FielD DAy Review 7 2011 171 FIElD DAy REVIEw historic debates on modernism in the Irish Keith Vaughan, Robert MacBryde, Robert 2 For an overview of context, to the National Gallery of Ireland Colquhoun, Josef Herman, John Minton, British art in the post-war period, see David Mellor, in Dublin. When le Brocquy represented Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud. ‘Existentialism and Post- Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956, the The tension between abstraction and War British Art’, in F. painting had been awarded the prestigious figuration haunted them all. Most were Morris, ed., Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism, Nestlé-endowed Premio Aquisitato prize influenced by Pablo Picasso’s legacy of 1945–55 (London, 1993), and had hung in the company’s Milan abstracted figuration, which many had 53–56, and Margaret offices until 2001, when it was acquired by become familiar with thanks to Jankel Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in an Irish businessman for donation to the Adler, a Jewish Polish artist who moved to Postwar Society (London, National Gallery. Medb Ruane described London during the war. Writing about le 1998). See also Martin the homecoming of le Brocquy’s Family as Brocquy’s solo exhibition at the Leicester Harrison, ed., Transition: The London Art Scene in ‘an honouring of the prophet in his own Galleries in 1948, critic Maurice Collis the Fifties (London, 2002), land’.1 In contrast, the relocation of Bacon’s refers to the artist as a leading exponent for a specific analysis of studio to the city of his birth might aptly be of ‘a school closely allied to the group of figurative artists. 3 Dorothy Walker, Modern dubbed the return of the prodigal son, given French painters who, inspired by Picasso’s Art in Ireland (Dublin, that Bacon was sent out of the country in Guernica, seek to express the portentous 1997), 45. disgrace at the age of sixteen when his father fatality of the times’.4 Although they appear 4 Maurice Collis, Time and Tide (1948), cited on le had the first inklings of his homosexuality. rather different in retrospect, the works Brocquy’s official website The coincidence of the homecomings that consolidated Bacon’s and le Brocquy’s at http://www.anne- was a fortuitous tribute to a lifelong positions in post-war Britain — Studies for madden.com/LeBPages/ chronology8.html (accessed friendship that was forged between these Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) 1 September 2011). two Irish-born artists in London in 1951 and A Family (1951), respectively — would 5 Some of Bacon’s comments at a time when they were considered two then have been seen to share these qualities. from letters and exhibitions are recorded in Anne of the most significant up-and-coming From the time they met, Bacon is said Madden and Louis le ‘British’ painters. Their friendship was to have seldom missed one of le Brocquy’s Brocquy, Louis le Brocquy: not surprising, given that the two artists regular exhibitions at Gimpel Fils gallery. A Painter Seeing His Way (Dublin, 1994). See Louis le were raised in Ireland in similar Anglo- He later expressed this interest in personal Brocquy: Portrait Heads, A Irish upper-middle-class circles; they were correspondence and through his writing of Celebration of the Artist’s both self-taught painters and they shared a catalogue essay for le Brocquy in 1976, Ninetieth Birthday (Dublin, 2006), for reproductions a love for the Spanish masters. While their an uncharacteristic gesture for Bacon. Le of a number of the Bacon contemporary framing and reputations Brocquy showed his admiration for Bacon portraits. hardly allows them to be discussed in a through an extensive series of portraits shared framework, le Brocquy and Bacon painted in 1979 as part of his Portrait were then counted among a relatively Heads series.5 Today, the two are rarely small group of artists in London who addressed in relation to one another, worked figuratively in a period dominated not least because their works have been by abstraction.2 Art historian Dorothy taken up in different national canons. Walker recalled: ‘The period of the fifties, Bacon has been canonized as one of the not only in London but all over the most significant British painters of the Western world, was a period of abstract twentieth century, while le Brocquy is often painting, of saturation tachisme or abstract referred to as ‘Ireland’s greatest artist’. expressionism when figurative painting Le Brocquy’s role in post-war British art was totally out of fashion.’ Hence, Walker history is no better known than Bacon’s suggests, le Brocquy and Bacon could share birth and upbringing in Ireland. The their ‘continued isolation as figurative occasion of the two homecomings offered painters in an abstract world’.3 an opportunity to redress this situation. In Le Brocquy and Bacon were, to be doing so, it raised wider questions about the precise, among a small, loosely affiliated mechanics and politics of national canons circle of artists working with the figure in and, crucially, about their impact on the London in the mid-1950s, which included aesthetic reception of the work in question. 172 AmbivalENT HOMECOMINGS 6 Róisín Kennedy, ‘Made Despite the scale of the two acquisitions, of Bacon’s London studio to Dublin thus in England: The Critical these surrounding issues were rarely raises the question of Bacon’s eventual Reception of Louis le Brocquy’s A Family’, Third addressed at the time of the homecomings. re-canonization as an Irish artist. Despite Text, 19, 5 (2005), 475–86. In an isolated article published in 2005, the scale of the studio acquisition, the 7 In my formulation, I draw art historian Róisín Kennedy recuperated Irish art world at large was remarkably on Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. the story behind the early British reception silent about this possibility. Yet the issue of Gabriel Rockhill (London, of A Family.6 She recalled that le Brocquy identity seemed to occupy people’s thoughts 2009), 50. was based in London when he painted nonetheless. At the launch of Francis the work, having been recruited by two Bacon’s Studio (2005), a book celebrating London gallerists as an emerging artist the studio acquisition, writer Conor Cruise in Ireland. Bringing artists from Ireland O’ Brien introduced Bacon as ‘one of the was one of the few ways to broaden the horsing people, a people divided by the scope of British art at a time when travel to Irish Sea’, a covert Anglo-Irish referent that mainland Europe was out of the question. almost seemed designed to foreclose issues Cecil Phillips of the Leicester Galleries and regarding national identity. Hugh Merrell, Charles Gimpel of the newly established the publisher, opened his speech with the Gimpel Fils gallery made a trip to Dublin observation: ‘Bacon was, above all, an looking for new artists to supplement their international artist.’ gallery programmes. They visited the Irish The gulf that separates le Brocquy and Exhibition of Living Art (a salon refusé for Bacon in art discourse today is partly the work that had been rejected by the annual result of the mechanics of canonization, Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition) and which were established in the nineteenth singled out le Brocquy’s work, inviting century in the context of nascent him to move to London to be represented nationalisms in Europe. Canons thus have by their galleries; an offer that le Brocquy a fundamentally singular national nature. gladly accepted. During the immediate This goes against artists’ typical locatedness post-war period, an active promotion of in different places at different times in British art was under way, supported by the their artistic development, as well as the government drive to celebrate Britishness complexity of many individuals’ cultural to boost the morale of the depleted post- and artistic affiliations. Because related war nation. In the ten years following spheres of reference coexist and intermingle his departure, le Brocquy went from in artworks themselves, the process of being perceived as an Irish artist to being canonization often becomes a symbolic perceived as a British artist and then back battlefield over values that are both aesthetic to being an Irish artist again, thanks to an and social. Elements in an artist’s work that active process of curatorial framing and have been underplayed or overshadowed reframing. Kennedy’s essay traces the early to secure the investments of one canon will instability of the artist’s national identity be highlighted in relation to another and and raises questions about the long-term vice versa.7 Changes in perception of an effects of his recuperation as an Irish artist, artist’s national belonging thus inevitably following his selection for the Irish pavilion bring about new ways of looking at his or of the Venice Biennale in 1956, after which her work, as I will examine in relation to le his success in Britain declined.