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A Family (painting)
Encyclopedia
"A Family" is an oil on canvas by Louis le Brocquy
. Depicting a stark human condition in the aftermarth of World War II, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Curator
of Irish Art
at the National Gallery of Ireland
notes: 'The mother, lying on a table, leaning on one arm, stares out with quiet dignity while a menacing looking cat peers out from beneath the draw sheet. In the background the father sits, head bowed, in a pose suggesting total dejection. He appears to be oblivious to the small child holding a bunch of flowers; a symbol of hope. The three somberly painted figures inhabit a grey concrete bunker, lit by a bare bulb. The theme of this disturbingly bleak work is the nature of individual isolation and the breakdown of societal norms.'
"A Family" sparked controversy when a group of art patrons offered to present the painting to the Dublin Municipal Gallery
in 1952. The gift was rejected by the Art Advisory Committee on the grounds of incompetence. Ineffectual protests were led by fellow artists within a small dynamic group supporting contemporary art. The event mobilised modern art haters and open hostility was aired in letters sent to the press. Viewed as an 'unwholesome and satanic distortion of natural beauty', the aversion was summed up in an opinion published by the Dublin Evening Mail
: 'There is a place for monstrosities in the College of Surgeons - there are plenty there - and it would give me much pleasure to find a place for things like "The Family" [sic] ... It is not given to man to see into the future, but I am quite certain that in another 100 years the works of Turner
, Constable
, and a Galaxy of true artists, whose work is still with us, will be cherished and admired, while things like "The Family" [sic] will have returned to the oblivion from which they never should have emerged. As notes Dr. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘The artist's image of stark reality in the shape of the terrifying uncertainty of the post-War era and the resultant isolation of the family unit shocked rather than comforted. One letter writer to The Irish Times
stated unequivocally that the picture in question is as remote from beauty as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. The figures are bestial, horribly misshapen with heads and faces of idiots. If ordinary people met such figures in the streets they would flee from them in terror. The critic Tony Gray saw no tenderness in the forms portrayed. Rather he felt that they were "depressing and frightening" and the sombre palette merely "enhanced the despair of his theme." The Evening Herald headlined its review "What is it all about" and castigated the le Brocquy exhibition for representing what it called "the left in art" (an oblique reference to modernism). The artist was accused of having gone the way of everything sensational, shallow and ephemeral. The 'Man About Town' column in the Evening Mail believed that the whole composition was "bewildering and repulsive" (the length of the woman's neck seemed to be especially abhorrent!). A rhetorical question implying a negative reply was posed, "What is the aesthetic value of these distortions"? An editorial in the same newspaper broadened the enquiry to a consideration of the genuine value of modern art in general. John Ryan, however, will write in the Dublin Evening Mail: 'Louis le Brocquy discovered his peculiarly individual mode of expression early in his career and courageously employed it even when doing so meant that he had to discard a style which promised a fashionable and lucrative future as a portrait painter in the traditional manner. That pedestrian opinion has not forgiven him for this revolt against its standards was amply proved by the deplorable attack on the painter in the Evening Herald recently. Le Brocquy's stand and his subsequent development as an artist, however, won him the admiration and respect of intelligent opinion wherever his work has been shown. In great Britain he is accepted as one of the handful of really brilliant painters of this generation, while America in so far as she has had the opportunity to judge has reacted similarly. Despite the strictures of the Evening Herald it is satisfactory to note that the exhibition itself has been an outstanding success in every respect.'
First exhibited in London at Gimpel Fils in June 1951, the painting attracted considerable praise. John Berger
observed in Art News and Review: 'Le Brocquy is completely free of contemporary tendency to cosmic megalomania. It has become pretentious to talk of an artist's humility, yet that is what distinguishes his work; his studies testify to his patience, and his final, large picture to his refusal to evade simple but difficult problems by relying on the grandiose cliché ... The right-hand half of the very large Family group is, by itself, the finest bit of contemporary painting I have seen for a long time, and I am now convinced that le Brocquy is one of the really promising (in this case that infuriating word is not an excuse but an achievement) British [sic] painters of his generation.'
The picture later received critical acclaim. In June 1956 Louis le Brocquy represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale
and "A Family" was awarded the Nestlé-endowed Premio Aquisitato. The painting was subsequently given historical recognition in the exhibition Cinquante Ans d'Art Moderne (World Fair, Brussels
, 1958), held to be one of the most ambitious attempts to trace and categorise the development of painting and sculpture from Cézanne and Rodin
to that date. A Family will return to Ireland fifty years later to be displayed in the National Gallery of Ireland. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch Curator of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland will observe on this occasion: 'A Family is rightly recognized as a seminal painting in the history of 20th-century Irish art. It is not only an important transitional work in the artist's oeuvre but one anticipating modernism as an everyday style in Irish art. All of this is implicitly acknowledged in its being on display to the public. To date, the exception to the policy of only displaying work by dead artists in the Gallery is the continuous acquisition of portraits by contemporary artists for the National Portrait Collection. Le Brocquy is the only living artist to have a work on show as part of the permanent collection. As Medb Ruane has pointed out, the prophet has finally been honoured in his own land.’
writes in Art News and Review: 'His style has developed and changed; his colours are pale and severe - the Family is mostly grey; his forms, in their movement both across and into the picture, are precise. This finesse implies - because le Brocquy's motive is always human - a tenderness which is not sentimental, and a sense of wonder which is exact; one thinks twice about the quite ordinary but in fact miraculous construction of any man's back, having looked at the father in the Family.'
According to the art critic John Russell
: 'In the early 1950s, above all, he came before us as a man who was looking for the image that would compound all other images. Anyone who was around at the time and concerned with what was called "post-war British art" will remember the painting called "A Family".' Louis le Brocquy explains: 'I have always been fascinated by the horizontal monumentality of traditional Odalisque
painting, the reclining woman depicted voluptuously by one Master after another throughout the history of European art - Titian
s' Venus of Urbino
, Velázquez
' Rokeby Venus turning her back on the Spanish Court, Goya's Maja
clothed and unclothed, Ingres'
Reclining Odalisque in her seraglio
and finally the great Olympia
of Édouard Manet
celebrating his favourite model, Victorine Meurent
. My own painting A Family was conceived in 1950 in very different circumstances in face of the atomic threat, social upheaval and refugees of World WarII and its aftermath. The elements in its composition correspond in some ways to those of Olympia, if not to Manet's cool sensuality. The female figure in A Family may be seen to take on a very different significance. The man, replacing Manet's black servant with bouquet, sits alone. The bouquet is reduced to a mere wisp held by a child. The Olympian black cat in turn becomes white, ominously emerging from the sheets. This is how A Family appears to me today. Fifty years ago it was painted while contemplating a human condition stripped back to Palaeolithic circumstance under electric light bulbs.'
Louis le Brocquy
Louis le Brocquy is an Irish painter born in Dublin. His work has received many accolades in a career that spans seventy years of creative practice...
. Depicting a stark human condition in the aftermarth of World War II, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
of Irish Art
Irish art
The early history of Irish art is generally considered to begin with early carvings found at sites such as Newgrange and is traced through Bronze Age artefacts, particularly ornamental gold objects, and the religious carvings and illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period...
at the National Gallery of Ireland
National Gallery of Ireland
The National Gallery of Ireland houses the Irish national collection of Irish and European art. It is located in the centre of Dublin with one entrance on Merrion Square, beside Leinster House, and another on Clare Street. It was founded in 1854 and opened its doors ten years later...
notes: 'The mother, lying on a table, leaning on one arm, stares out with quiet dignity while a menacing looking cat peers out from beneath the draw sheet. In the background the father sits, head bowed, in a pose suggesting total dejection. He appears to be oblivious to the small child holding a bunch of flowers; a symbol of hope. The three somberly painted figures inhabit a grey concrete bunker, lit by a bare bulb. The theme of this disturbingly bleak work is the nature of individual isolation and the breakdown of societal norms.'
"A Family" sparked controversy when a group of art patrons offered to present the painting to the Dublin Municipal Gallery
Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is an art gallery funded by Dublin City Council and located in Charlemont House in Dublin, Ireland. Charlemont House was originally the town house of James Caulfeild, the 1st Earl of Charlemont and was designed by Sir William Chambers.Previously called the...
in 1952. The gift was rejected by the Art Advisory Committee on the grounds of incompetence. Ineffectual protests were led by fellow artists within a small dynamic group supporting contemporary art. The event mobilised modern art haters and open hostility was aired in letters sent to the press. Viewed as an 'unwholesome and satanic distortion of natural beauty', the aversion was summed up in an opinion published by the Dublin Evening Mail
Dublin Evening Mail
The Dublin Evening Mail was between 1823 and 1962 one of Dublin's evening newspapers.-Origins:Launched in 1823, it proved to be the longest lasting evening paper in Ireland...
: 'There is a place for monstrosities in the College of Surgeons - there are plenty there - and it would give me much pleasure to find a place for things like "The Family" [sic] ... It is not given to man to see into the future, but I am quite certain that in another 100 years the works of Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
, Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...
, and a Galaxy of true artists, whose work is still with us, will be cherished and admired, while things like "The Family" [sic] will have returned to the oblivion from which they never should have emerged. As notes Dr. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘The artist's image of stark reality in the shape of the terrifying uncertainty of the post-War era and the resultant isolation of the family unit shocked rather than comforted. One letter writer to The Irish Times
The Irish Times
The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...
stated unequivocally that the picture in question is as remote from beauty as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. The figures are bestial, horribly misshapen with heads and faces of idiots. If ordinary people met such figures in the streets they would flee from them in terror. The critic Tony Gray saw no tenderness in the forms portrayed. Rather he felt that they were "depressing and frightening" and the sombre palette merely "enhanced the despair of his theme." The Evening Herald headlined its review "What is it all about" and castigated the le Brocquy exhibition for representing what it called "the left in art" (an oblique reference to modernism). The artist was accused of having gone the way of everything sensational, shallow and ephemeral. The 'Man About Town' column in the Evening Mail believed that the whole composition was "bewildering and repulsive" (the length of the woman's neck seemed to be especially abhorrent!). A rhetorical question implying a negative reply was posed, "What is the aesthetic value of these distortions"? An editorial in the same newspaper broadened the enquiry to a consideration of the genuine value of modern art in general. John Ryan, however, will write in the Dublin Evening Mail: 'Louis le Brocquy discovered his peculiarly individual mode of expression early in his career and courageously employed it even when doing so meant that he had to discard a style which promised a fashionable and lucrative future as a portrait painter in the traditional manner. That pedestrian opinion has not forgiven him for this revolt against its standards was amply proved by the deplorable attack on the painter in the Evening Herald recently. Le Brocquy's stand and his subsequent development as an artist, however, won him the admiration and respect of intelligent opinion wherever his work has been shown. In great Britain he is accepted as one of the handful of really brilliant painters of this generation, while America in so far as she has had the opportunity to judge has reacted similarly. Despite the strictures of the Evening Herald it is satisfactory to note that the exhibition itself has been an outstanding success in every respect.'
First exhibited in London at Gimpel Fils in June 1951, the painting attracted considerable praise. John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
observed in Art News and Review: 'Le Brocquy is completely free of contemporary tendency to cosmic megalomania. It has become pretentious to talk of an artist's humility, yet that is what distinguishes his work; his studies testify to his patience, and his final, large picture to his refusal to evade simple but difficult problems by relying on the grandiose cliché ... The right-hand half of the very large Family group is, by itself, the finest bit of contemporary painting I have seen for a long time, and I am now convinced that le Brocquy is one of the really promising (in this case that infuriating word is not an excuse but an achievement) British [sic] painters of his generation.'
The picture later received critical acclaim. In June 1956 Louis le Brocquy represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
and "A Family" was awarded the Nestlé-endowed Premio Aquisitato. The painting was subsequently given historical recognition in the exhibition Cinquante Ans d'Art Moderne (World Fair, Brussels
Expo '58
Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World’s Fair, Brusselse Wereldtentoonstelling or Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles, was held from 17 April to 19 October 1958...
, 1958), held to be one of the most ambitious attempts to trace and categorise the development of painting and sculpture from Cézanne and Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
to that date. A Family will return to Ireland fifty years later to be displayed in the National Gallery of Ireland. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch Curator of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland will observe on this occasion: 'A Family is rightly recognized as a seminal painting in the history of 20th-century Irish art. It is not only an important transitional work in the artist's oeuvre but one anticipating modernism as an everyday style in Irish art. All of this is implicitly acknowledged in its being on display to the public. To date, the exception to the policy of only displaying work by dead artists in the Gallery is the continuous acquisition of portraits by contemporary artists for the National Portrait Collection. Le Brocquy is the only living artist to have a work on show as part of the permanent collection. As Medb Ruane has pointed out, the prophet has finally been honoured in his own land.’
Background and influences
A Family belongs to the artist's Grey Period (1951-55). Widely acknowledged as the artist's masterpiece from this period, the painting marks a shift in palette from the comparatively colourful work of the late forties to predominant whites and greys. The art critic John BergerJohn Berger
John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
writes in Art News and Review: 'His style has developed and changed; his colours are pale and severe - the Family is mostly grey; his forms, in their movement both across and into the picture, are precise. This finesse implies - because le Brocquy's motive is always human - a tenderness which is not sentimental, and a sense of wonder which is exact; one thinks twice about the quite ordinary but in fact miraculous construction of any man's back, having looked at the father in the Family.'
John Russell (art critic)
John Russell CBE was a British American art critic.-Life and career:John Russell was born in Fleet, Hampshire, England, in 1919. He attended St Paul's School and then Magdalen College, Oxford....
: 'In the early 1950s, above all, he came before us as a man who was looking for the image that would compound all other images. Anyone who was around at the time and concerned with what was called "post-war British art" will remember the painting called "A Family".' Louis le Brocquy explains: 'I have always been fascinated by the horizontal monumentality of traditional Odalisque
Odalisque
An odalisque was a female slave in an Ottoman seraglio. She was an assistant or apprentice to the concubines and wives, and she might rise in status to become one of them...
painting, the reclining woman depicted voluptuously by one Master after another throughout the history of European art - Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
s' Venus of Urbino
Venus of Urbino
The Venus of Urbino is a 1538 oil painting by the Italian master Titian. It depicts a nude young woman, identified with the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance palace. It hangs in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The figure's pose is based...
, Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
' Rokeby Venus turning her back on the Spanish Court, Goya's Maja
Majo
Majo or Maja , also Manolo and Manola after the most popular names, were terms for people from the lower classes of Spanish society, especially in Madrid, who distinguished themselves by their elaborate outfits and sense of style in dress and manners, as well as by their cheeky behavior.They...
clothed and unclothed, Ingres'
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...
Reclining Odalisque in her seraglio
Seraglio
A seraglio or serail is the sequestered living quarters used by wives and concubines in a Turkish household. The word comes from an Italian variant of Turkish saray, from Persian sarai , meaning palace, or the enclosed courts for the wives and concubines of the harem of a house or palace...
and finally the great Olympia
Olympia (painting)
Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet. Painted in 1863, it measures 130.5 by 190 centimetres . The nation of France acquired the painting in 1890 with a public subscription organized by Claude Monet...
of Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
celebrating his favourite model, Victorine Meurent
Victorine Meurent
Victorine Louise Meurent was a French painter and a famous model for painters.Although she is now best known as the favourite model of Édouard Manet, she also was an artist in her own right, who exhibited repeatedly at the prestigious Paris Salon...
. My own painting A Family was conceived in 1950 in very different circumstances in face of the atomic threat, social upheaval and refugees of World WarII and its aftermath. The elements in its composition correspond in some ways to those of Olympia, if not to Manet's cool sensuality. The female figure in A Family may be seen to take on a very different significance. The man, replacing Manet's black servant with bouquet, sits alone. The bouquet is reduced to a mere wisp held by a child. The Olympian black cat in turn becomes white, ominously emerging from the sheets. This is how A Family appears to me today. Fifty years ago it was painted while contemplating a human condition stripped back to Palaeolithic circumstance under electric light bulbs.'