Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (b.1916) Still Life with Book and Penny (1941) Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 43cm, (14 x 17'') Signed with initials Exhibited: Louis Le Brocquy Exhibition ''Early Heroes Later...

Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (b.1916) Still Life with Book and Penny (1941) Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 43cm, (14 x 17'') Signed with initials Exhibited: Louis Le Brocquy Exhibition ''Early Heroes Later Homage'', The Hugh Lane City Gallery, 14th February - 30th March 2007 Louis le Brocquy's 90th birthday exhibition in 2006 emerged as a homage to what this homme-of-?ge called his 'masters,' namely Goya,Velasquez and C?zanne. Each plays a lifelong role in le Brocquy's practice. Here, this special early work marks the lasting relationship between Paul C?zanne's painting and the artist as a younger man. Still Life with Book and Penny sets up a conversation with C?zanne's Nature Morte avec Pendule (1870), known affectionately as La Pendule Noire, a work about art and about time, specifically the clock and living room of realist writer ?mile Zola. Le Brocquy has called it 'ominously moving.' The very idea of homage invokes Le Brocquy's formation as an artist, where he learned from looking at work in the National Gallery of Ireland, as well as in London, Paris and Geneva.Determined to wrestle with the great questions of modern art, le Brocquy embarked on an odyssey that at first brought opprobrium and censure from what passed as the Irish art establishment. Dr. S.B. Kennedy reminds us what was at stake. ''To a contemporary eye le Brocquy's work of the early 1940s may appear largely academic in treatment, but at the time it was seen as unacceptably avant-garde by the art establishment of the Academy.'' What le Brocquy identified as ominous in the C?zanne still life may concern a schism between past and present, a point where the spirit of modernism erupted and could not be contained. Like a genie released from a bottle, a new age brought change not only in art but also in politics and society, with the rise of science, psychoanalysis, trade unionism, universal suffrage - and world wars. Intriguing here are the differences between master and pupil, as well as the similarities. C?zanne's painting places a large conch shell above the horizon line, letting it perch like a subterranean creature beside a pretty domestic tea cup. Behind and to the right, Zola's gritty black clock emerges on a pedestal of darkness, from which it might wag a finger if it still had hands. Le Brocquy plays with that composition, transforming the serrated shell into a rise and fall of whiteness, light and full as Velasquez. The whiteness is a classical Spanish hue le Brocquy later linked to Being, the pale, hand-picked hydrangeas and orange flowers a whispering of the allegorical meanings ascribed in traditional Dutch still life. Brightness occupies the space of darkness seen in Zola's room,opening other conversations that operate symbolically against the backdrop of a darker hearth. Point of view extends from a human height, instead of a looking-up-towards in the C?zanne. The key symbolic transformation is the placing of a hand-bound, ornate old book and a penny. Something is being said about tradition and knowledge, about how value is calculated and about what you clasp, what you hold dear. Perhaps the penny is a sign of luck too, a wondering about fortune and destiny, about chance and the odds of tossing an ordinary coin. Medb Ruane, May 2007

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