LOUIS le Brocquy has been given a retrospective exhibition before the present one: at the Municipal (now Hugh Lane) Gallery in Dublin 30 years ago. At that time, aged only 50, he already seemed very much a senior figure in Irish art, whose beginnings lay back just before the second World War. And, in fact, as early as 1939 his painting Southern Window had been bought for that same Municipal Gallery by the Haverty Trust. (He was also seen there in 1978).

Today, he seems relatively unchanged and curiously ageless, though he was glad to leave much of the preparatory work for the exhibition to his son Pierre - "I could never have done it without him." Neither did he get involved in the actual hanging, although he fully approves of the way in which the IMMA Director, Declan McGonagle, has arranged the exhibition. Le Brocguy feels that the "interpenetration of the periods" of his work has brought out aspects of which he himself was not fully aware.

Today he lives part of the year in the South of Fiance and part in Dublin, where just now he is building a studio. Since 195,8 he has been married to the painter Anne Madden, and this year they both exhibited in Paris during the Imaginaire Irlandaise promotion there. In the past decade he has had numerous exhibitions abroad, including Japan in 1991. For the IMMA show, the much respected Alistair Smith has written the catalogue essay. Meanwhile, the new Taylor Galleries is showing a number of his most recent paintings.

Stylistically le Brocguy has travelled a long way, from his relatively conventional early works to the slightly cryptic, almost disembodied paintings of today. He is, he says, "completely self-taught if you can call `self-taught' the example of the Masters. Example is a pretty good teacher! After all, I have obviously studied the art of the past very closely; that is all I had to start with. And I started way back in time, instead of with my immediate predecessors in the 19th century.

He was, he says, still a very traditional painter when the RHA in 1942, rejected his painting The Spanish Shawl, in which the familiar le Brocguy whites began to appear. "Dissatisfaction with the RHA had been building up for a Iong time, and to me this was the last straw. I was still painting in a very 19th-century way, but not sufficiently, so for the academicians. This general dissatisfaction led directly to the founding ofthe Irish Exhibition of Living Art in the following year, in which Mainie Jeltett and Evie Hone were closely involved, and le Brocguy's study in Merrion Row was a venue for intense discussions. Sibyl, his mother, was also active.

THE IELA, he stresses, was not set up in direct confrontation with the RHA; it was more of an "alternative" or even extension to it. Dermot O'Brien, the PRHA, he found to be "a liberal man" and he still respects the late Sean Keating. The new artists had influential critics and helpers on their side: James White ( "a young, forward-looking critic"), David Sears of the Irish Independent, Ned Sheehy of the Dublin Magazine, Stephen Rynne and Arthur Power.

Victor Waddington was the go-ahead Dublin dealer of the epoch but in fact le Brocguy only had a single exhibition with him, since he went to London, in 1946 and was taken up by Gimpel Fils. In the postwar era he outgrew his earlier style, and in London he mixed with the avant-garde which included Lucian Freud Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and the Polish Jewish emigre Jankel Adler - who is often said to have influenced him. Bacon was still an outsider then, and when le Brocquy bought a painting from him and hung it in his studio in Battersea, he was struck by the way in which people pointedly ignored it - "it was as though in the Ritz Hotel, with all the old ladies having their tea, a man had come in and dropped his pants, and there was a conspiracy to ignore him. If I drew the attention of some critic to Bacon, the reaction was almost angry: `Who does he think he is Velazquez?' In 1951 he was the centre of a Dublin cause celebre, when his painting A Family was bought by the Friends of the National Collections and presented to the Municipal Gallery, which rejected it. "My old friend Sean Keating said it was unacceptable and unworthy' and Mrs Kathleen Clarke, the widow of the 1916 hero, said it was `obscene.'" The Living Art people and influential friends stood behind him, however, and in 1956 the same painting won a major prize in the Venice Biennale - a considerable honour, which made le Biocguy known internationally. It was also included in the important exhibition at Brussels, Fifty Years of Modern Art.

At that time he says, the influences on a contemporary painter were unavoidably French - "American art was not heard of yet. Of course, there had been Russian art and German art, but the German Expressionists were not very popular, though they were known. And then, of course, they had been placed in the obscene category by the Nazis, and all of them, from Kokoschka to Schlemmer, had been fighters for human dignity and the right of expression.

It was also the time when abstract art grew strong internationally, even dominant, and though le Brocguy was and is - friendly with many abstract painters including Patrick Heron, he himself was not drawn into it. "I always regarded abstraction as an important part of all painting, but I am so obsessed by appearances, and what lies behind appearances, that I have never been tempted to create abstract art. I am, above all, concerned with a kind of psychic skeleton, a psychic presence the essential guilty of a human being which remains invisible.

It was this quality which, in Paris, drew him to Giacometti and to a very different artist, Fautrier. Giacometti as a man he knew slightly, and he became a friend of his brother Diego; with Fautrier's paintings: "I was impressed by the way in which he showed how something material could be `impregnated' by a kind of psychic element and become a person. He was also deeply impressed by the lectures of the great physicist, Schroedinger (brought to Dublin by de Valera in the war years), particularly as they applied to what he himself had learned in a non-theoretic way from the very act of painting. And Byzantine art, which he looked at closely in Torcello and other centres, gave him a sense of directness and confrontation which he found "vital and very moving."

The effect of Giacometti's work on him, he says, is something which he "would not dream of denying," and the same applies to Francis Bacon (though Bacon told him frankly on several occasions that he could not see his own influence in le Brocguy's work) However, he thinks an artist such as Graham Sutherland was virtually "overwhelmed" by the example of others and rather lost his own artistic personality, while he himself resisted that degree of influence" because I am, after all, a very different kind of person from the great Francis Bacon or Giacometti."

Le Brocquy agrees that there have been periods in his work in which he has given up the more obvious appeal of colour: "for some reason, I have tended to abjure colour spread out in the way Matisse, for instance, would have used it. I cannot explain that, other than to say that I always had a very strong feeling about white, and the nature of whiteness." It is often from whitish or greyish surrounds that his imagery emerges.

"A thing which has been growing with me for many years," he says, "is a strong distaste for the kind of personality cult which is mostly a production of mass media and mass communications. The moment any kind of painting is looked at or assessed, the man himself is put forward in a way which almost obliterates the work.

I have always felt that the work itself is in its essence most truthful,or valuable as an emanation of the society or culture behind it. As I grow older, I regard myself less and less as a cultural individual. I am inclined - you might say to regard my legs as being Palaeolithic legs lent to me for lifetime.