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, wrote 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.' References External links www.lebrocquy.com 1951 paintings Irish paintings Modern paintings Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland