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. Representation
Paper delivered to the Royal Academy Forum. Published by Architectural Review November 2004
When Caspar David Friedrich claimed, “The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself. If he sees nothing within himself he should also forego painting what he sees before him…”, he not only captured the essence of Romanticism; he also posed a fundamental question with which art has been concerned ever since. If, as Friedrich states, perception and imagination throw up truths at least as important as objective “reality”, the issue is how to find ideas and techniques for representation which avoid contingency and randomness, and allow the work of art to establish significance and meaning.
Representation in art achieves significance [or depth] when it relates to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by substitution. Just as in the forest the great trees depend for their size and majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works which nourishes their potential to convey meaning.
George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of resonance as “the field of prepared echo”. With this image he vividly conveys the working of the canon of western art. It is the agreed ‘given’ of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value, and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density high culture is impossible. In such a “field”, new ideas and how they speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood.
An analogy in the visual arts might be to picture a loose grid, existing in three spatial dimensions and evolving over time. Within it, compositional formulae and repeated patterns in favoured dispositions come to acquire meaning. We see them superimposed comparatively in our imaginations. The differences and symmetries create allusion, and resonance. On this imaginary field memories gather and grow by association and proximity. In Western painting the field comes to develop separate spaces: foreground, middle distance, background. Each has its own defining archetypes, of colour, character, story and form.
We sense the existence of this implicit format most strongly in Poussin, Claude and the subsequent development of the picturesque. This imaginary, and seemingly tacit agreement within pictorial culture has had such lasting potency that I think of it, certainly in relation to my own work as an artist, as virtually a death-defying given of apparently transcendental significance. In modern times it breaks to the surface in Cezanne, and then in Cubism. In rising to explicitness, however, its effect is changed fundamentally.
Since the late 19th century, these complex features of compositional memory which dominate the pictorial, relational art of the west, have been tested. During the 20th century, aesthetic characteristics such as formal reduction and singularity, rather than illusion and metaphor become pre-eminent. Truth resides in the concrete and the objective. Simplicity is synonymous with honesty. Only the everyday (always the street and never the palace) is authentic.
In the case of the first generation of American abstract painters such as Rothko and Clifford Still, a grand and brave simplicity is certainly achieved. But I would argue that their work is still [in mid-century] in touch and dependent on art historical memory and references to the former model. At such close range [50 years] their aesthetic denials and adventures retain meaning.
Yet the possibility for creating this web of meaning, allusion, memory and association did not of course entirely disappear in the 20th century. The pair of exhibitions at Tate Modern on Konstantin Brancusi and Donald Judd early in 2004 shows the contrast. Each finds the poetic in apparently irreconcilable worlds. Subjective compared to objective, carved to assembled, refined to raw. It is a division which runs through 20th century art between the associative and the putative re-presentation of “reality”. A powerful example of the persistence of this imaginary field in late 20th century art is seen in the work of the painter Philip Guston. He, like myself, has felt the compelling pull of this invisible model which suffuses Western art. Guston’s paintings with their tidal shifts towards and away from representation, show a grid-like sensual abstract painting interpenetrating figurative, illustrative pictures. Depictions and thought-touches seem to emerge from the wealth of the painter’s memory, giving them an interiority akin to the reflexiveness of literature. His paintings exist within a mature metaphysical realm for the projection of emotion and form.
What I am arguing for is a more organised form of subjectivity along the lines of Caspar David Friedrich’s injunction. It is a Classical and informed subjectivity, depending on thoughtfulness and reflection, and its effect is to allow pictures to maintain their elusiveness and privacy even when their meaning is manifestly present in the public realm.
