Bryan Robertson
Catalogue Introduction to the exhibition Christopher Le Brun Paintings 1991-1994 at Marlborough Fine Art London 1994.

Bryan Robertson and Christopher Le Brun
Interview. Lindos, Rhodes. April 1997 and January 1998.

Caroline Collier
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at Nigel Greenwood, London. Flash Art no.124 October/November 1985

Charles Saumarez Smith. Christopher Le Brun
Introduction to the monograph Christopher Le Brun Booth-Clibborn Editions 2001

Christopher Le Brun and Cecilia Powell
Constructive, Investigative and Truthful. Christopher Le Brun interviewed by Cecilia Powell on J.M.W. Turner and Watercolour. Published in the Turner Society News August 2006.

Christopher Le Brun. Giorgio Morandi
This essay was published in the catalogue for the exhibition 'Giorgio Morandi Etchings' at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

Christopher Le Brun. Representation
Paper delivered to the Royal Academy Forum. Published by Architectural Review November 2004

Donald Kuspit
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at Sperone Westwater, New York. " ..the Watteau of the new expressionism..." Art Forum vol.XXVII, no.1, September 1988, p.136

Ebbsfleet Landmark
Artist statement and description of the proposal for a 50 metre high sculpture.

Eileen Myles.
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at Sperone Westwater. Art in America, December 1988, p.154

John Aiken. Paradox and Modernity
Written for issue no.4 of the Slade Magazine c.1999. John Aiken is the Slade Professor.

Jonathan Glancey. A Chip off the Old Block
Jonathan Glancey on how a sculpture by Christopher Le Brun became the template for the office of the future. Published in The Guardian, 8th March 2004

Mario Cutajar. Fade into Darkness
Christopher Le Brun at the Art Center College of Design and L.A. Louver Gallery. Review. Artsweek March 1993.

Mark Francis. Interview with Christopher Le Brun
Fig-1, 50 projects in 50 weeks. 2000

Norbert Messler
Review of the exhibition at Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne. Artscribe International 1988.

Patrick Elliott. Four Riders
From Contemporary British Art in Print. Booth-Clibborn Editions 1995

Patrick Elliott. Seven Lithographs
From Contemporary British Art in Print Booth-Clibborn Editions 1995

Patrick Elliott. The Wagner Prints
From Contemporary British Art in Print. Booth-Clibborn Editions 1995

Stuart Morgan
Exhibition review. Christopher Le Brun at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery. Art Forum November 1985.

Tony Godfrey. Finding the Figure in the Landscape
Christopher Le Brun and his recent work. Catalogue essay . Arnolfini Gallery 1984

Christopher Le Brun. Giorgio Morandi

This essay was published in the catalogue for the exhibition 'Giorgio Morandi Etchings' at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

I

How different these motifs are from the grandeur of a Mont Saint-Victoire, how unsuitable for a life's work. Why so remote from the painter's natural homeland of the great pictorial themes? Our questions are not of the motif, but of Morandi's relationship to it.

Cubism's later phase, with its emphasis on our perception and experience of the world, now appears as a development towards the increasingly naturalistic. It prefers the tactile and immediate to the pictorial. Its relativism has become the common sense of today, merely true.

Morandi counters subtly under the disguise of the recognisable; for him, seeing is metaphysical in nature, with another purpose, the imaginary. To the eye a painting is a surface. To the mind it is a surface suffused with absence. Morandi's unity of light and space permits the fluency of thought which enhances the atmosphere of the semantic and the symbolic. He is the heir to Mallarme, the poet of self-imposed distance.

Thus a type of secretiveness, of the deliberately withheld occurs in his work. Where once the artist was a source of illumination, now he is seen as standing between the motif and ourselves, a source also of doubt and darkness. Pentimenti are no longer discreet corrections but obliterations. Concepts of opacity and silence appear, emphasizing the guarded solitude of the private imagination.

It is as if what we see is all he could salvage or admit. Here is the wreck of the art of the West, lacking its costumes and stories, where now only a behaviour remains, mimicking its patterns of echo and citation, a thinking hand.

Now the memory is the eye's castle, hoarding the concentrated intensity that makes enduring work possible.

These etchings are metaphysical without being uncanny or strange. They have none of the failings of idiosyncrasy or distortion. In our time of variety tending to incoherence, it is rare to see what almost appears to be a letting-go, or loosening of ambition, so confirming what is perhaps by definition central, a type of natural classicism. Almost alone in recent times, Morandi preserves an innocence in the simplicity of his forms; his is a position free from didacticism or the self-righteousness of reform. No image here is reduced to fetch and carry meaning like a sign. This is detachment, High Art, the rarest of all appearances because without willed intention.

Without narrative or drama, Morandi's images evoke meaning powerfully, with a stillness and continuity of presence that seems to epitomise classical modernity (1). Yet he never satisfies our curiosity for meaning: roads terminate abruptly and centrally; there are circular paths, high walls and nets; our attention is thrown upwards into whiteness or pushed far to right and left. It is as if tact withheld us from intrusion. The groups into which these objects gather, or the ragged edge that contains them, reminds us of Chardin: 'Painting is an island whose shores I have skirted' (2). Yet if Morandi's candid and stoic nature takes as its theme secrecy (and they have something of the ivory tower about them, these tall bottles and houses among trees), it is also true that he is an artist whose sensibility is most open and undefended. Despite the apparent guarded appearance of these works, he has a susceptibility to sensation that proves his stature.

Deep space is rare in these works, and unlike our own school of landscape, the horizon is the source neither of sanctuary nor of transcendence. It is a distance resistant to anecdote. This desire of the eye for depth of space, for a world, is an energy of considerable power. When held back, or frustrated, its force may be spread laterally throughout the picture plane. The aerial perspective of pictorial art creates time and then thought and then memory; but here we see thought embedded in material means, which seems all inflected foreground.

A different type of thoughtfulness arises, changed from dreaming - the dreaming of connectedness and memory - to questioning, typically in confrontation with the still, present and near. See how often Morandi guides us to a distance which is in fact a gap, an empty place, challenging us to transform it whilst threatening the reluctant return of disbelief. The distant is no longer a place, but the sense of the enigmatic, a directionless all pervasive space, a type of interior.

What was arguably most tender and conjectural; the distant island, Cythera, the grace-note of landscape from Claude to Turner, is savagely excised by Picasso and is absent, yet felt, in Morandi.

The analytical and existential has come to possess all thought's prestige in our time, and with the closing of the picture-plane we achieve that self-awareness that comprises the prison of modernity.

II

The motif is not the subject but the object. Neither does the motif most directly indicate the world. The artist is the subject. It is the touch by the subject that is the world. In these lozenge-shaped forms and volumes, Morandi restores the touch-patches of Cezanne to objecthood.

How appropriate that the chemical processes of etching occur largely invisibly, often continuing in the artist's absence. Even when the artist is drawing on the plate, the image is reversed and replaces light with dark. Guessing, remembering, he needs perhaps an image known by heart. The copper or zinc is brightly reflective and dazzling, it mirrors the hand also when darkly and lugubriously varnished. With burnishing and polishing the first light and marks can be recovered from subsequent layers. In its clear places the print gives a light almost without texture, and where paper appears to become light it mixes with the immaterial. Working flat, the artist stares down into the plate like water, where the depths of all possible picture-planes appear.

Etching is painting's glass dictionary where all things are light. Each image can be seen lying on the wreck of its predecessors. It is a reef of images whose marks, like barnacles - remember the acid biting the plate - cling to and obscure the mother-form sustaining them.

If painting is like a creature, physical and substantial, then etching is its neo-platonic form, its idea, the structural grammar of chiaroscuro with the finest ornament of line; the Latin of the eye.

This is the world read as if in a dictionary of touch and all the artist's depths are in this surface.

Whilst Picasso's inventions have dominated this century, Morandi has seemed to stand apart. With Balthus and Giacometti, he is yet another exile. But by his patient attendance to his work, thinking with a different thoughtfulness, he kept open a shadowed path to a great and humane culture; the memory of the hand of Titian, Velasquez, Rembrandt, the death-defying trope of the West.

He shares a mastery of composition with Daumier, and of tone with Daubigny, particularly with the latter's simply-ordered twilight of close values. Dependent on the solicitude of seeing, the atmosphere of his pictures, arising unwilled from a quality of thought, shows him hesitating always between the light of the heart and the light of the world - between a finer light and light. He was, as T.S Eliot remarks of Tennyson 'the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist' (3).

Notes

1. We should disassociate Morandi from the cliche of authenticity that now surrounds the inarticulate and simplified. The forms of silence also change. Thinking of his narrow range of motifs, we might also recall Diderot, 'Chardin copies himself most frequently, which makes me think his works cost him dearly'.

2. Reported by the brothers De Goncourt, French XVIII Century Painters trans R. Ironside, 1948

3. From T.S Eliot, In Memoriam, selected essays of T.S Eliot, London, Faber and Faber, 1932