Anne Madden

On July 5th 2007, I visited IMMA with Carol and Edward - principally we went to the Lucian Freud exhibition again. First, we looked around the Anne Madden retrospective in the Irish modern art museum. To say that I didn’t like her work is an understatement - she was everything I hated about some women's art - technically glib and incompetent, derivative, kitsch, sickly feminine and superficial in the extreme. However, I tried to look around with an open eye.

             

The exhibition started well with her early self-portrait with a pallet (somewhat derivative of Bernard Buffet) and first abstracts in the 1950s. However, despite their subtle earth tones applied justly with the pallet knife - they were in effect worthless works of plagiarism by a student enthralled by the equally stupid paintings of Vieira Da Silva and the far greater paintings of Nicolas De Staël. Then in the 1970s her abstracts got larger and more colourful - but her zips and fields of colour came straight from Barnett Newman - and the compositions were an emasculated and feminized pastiche of his far more original and heartfelt canvases of the 1950s. By the time, I got to her recent abstract canvases I rebelled like a man who had spent too long in a perfumery - the smell though sweet at first had become nauseatingly toxic. By the final and most recent canvases, my eyes were virtually begging to be closed from the sight of her vast canvases painted in lurid Turkish Brothel colours on Opium - and applied with all the tricks of the home decorator - stippled, sponged, dry-brushed and mopped on.

             

I was convinced Anne Madden was not a great painter - in fact, I knew she wasn’t. She was typical of some women in the art world – strikingly beautiful, privileged, glibly intelligent, with a natural aptitude for art - the trouble was things came too easy for such women - there was no struggle to really swim the depths of existence, no hours spent exploring unfashionable ideas and authors, no attempt to push mere smug facility towards profound pathos, her intelligence merely for show and her beauty - fading every year. She had none of the dirty raw power of her female contemporaries like Paula Rego or Louise Bourgeois - they were great artists - she was merely a lady who lunched - with delusions she was part of a tradition stretching back to Cézanne. In one interview, I heard her drop his name and talk about how every brushstroke for her was a risk - what utter self-delusion, what abyssal self-analysis – it was utterly gob smacking!

             

Which is not to say that she had not been successful - she had in fact been disproportionately successful thanks to a 'lucky' marriage to Ireland's most revered living painter Louis le Brocquy an even more nationalistically over-praised, over-hyped and over priced Irish mediocrity.

            

  

Going from her hotel lobby art to Lucian Freud's muscular, grand, weighty canvases of raw human flesh and psychologically stripped human beings - was mind blowing in the extreme. I could have spent days in this Freud exhibition and found more and more in it. The internal, anatomical grammar to his brushstrokes - was astounding. They were so serious, so intelligent, so varied and ordered - yet passionate that I could weep. I spent so long trying to master his technique and yet I was hardly fit to clean his brushes. However, his art inspired me, it elevated me and it filled me with so much joy that I bowed in humility to this master - his art was truly a gift to humanity.

            

 Later Carol and I dropped into The Douglas Hyde gallery – housed in Trinity College Dublin. The gallery had made a reputation for itself exhibiting the most difficult 'cutting-edge' contemporary world art and this show was as tediously faddish as ever. In the main gallery, there were 'sculptures' by Nina Canell, Clodagh Emoe and Linda Quinlan in an exhibition called Come Together.  None of these artists - could draw, paint or sculpt in the ancestral sense - their art was the junk of the playpen of contemporary conceptual art. It was essentially an exhibition of odds and ends scattered around the big ugly gallery floor - signifying I don't know what - to me as Mrs Cravatte in The Rebel (1960) said:"it’s all a load of miscellaneous rubbish!"

           

 In what was known as The Paradise (a tiny gallery space inside the larger DHG one) there were three oil paintings on MDF by Maureen Gallace. To say I have seen these exact paintings about a hundred times already by other equally piss-poor imitators of Luc Tuymans’ school of oil painting was a understatement - they were everywhere in Dublin. Most of these pastisheurs of Tuymans' tended to take his bleached, faded colour and amp it up into garish colours reminiscent of the little pots of bright colour you find in a Paint-By-Numbers set - thus annihilating the meaning of Tuymans really profound paintings and covering their mucky stolen tracks. Stealing his brushstrokes was easier for them - he often painted the brushstrokes in vertical or horizontal strips that echoed the bands of a poorly printed photo - but I knew where they came from. Tuymans art was profound in the ways it intellectually and sensually reinterpreted the mediated images of the magazine, book, television, cinema screen and web-page. His work really did have both intellectual and formal integrity even profundity. However despite the fact that his technique (to paint alla-prima in oils on commercial shop bought canvases - disturbing crop-shots of sad and evocative photos - in dull whites, greys, powder blues, dull or glossy blacks, ochre’s and greenish creams and executed in less than a day) was arrived at from a place of great philosophical depth and seriousness. It was easily copied, and those copies had no such gravity. I honestly thought his influence had done more to condemn and destroy the art of more student painters than any other living master. By coping him so blatantly and so single-mindedly (most of these plagiarizers had not even the wit to add one other influence to their stolen art to make it more distinctive and original) they had pretty much abdicated all right to be called artists.

The Pampered and The Cursed 2006

Later that week I went to see Inner Worlds Outside in IMMA with Carol, we both adored the show and bought the catalogue. That day by chance two very different art worlds collided (the first the raw fevered world of outsider art which we saw in IMMA and the second in a documentary on the Irish painter Anne Madden (wife of Louis le Brocquy) which I saw later that night on RTÉ 1 was the effete world of upper class snobs who painted as a kind of glorified hobby made big business. These worlds could not be more different. In the first we had poor imprisoned lunatics making art out of a deep inner compulsion - in the second we had the upper classes making pastiches of other major artists work, quoting Cézanne and Da Vinci and talking in their upper class voices of how every brush stroke they made was a risk!

 

Anne Madden the daughter of rich Chilean/English parents - went to the fashionable Chelsea arts school, and married Le Brocquy. Together they built a house and studio in the south of France and made art - so spineless so pretty and vacuous and so much the work of other major artists that it was unbelievable to me that it was taken so seriously. But as upper class toffs they made quite a living for themselves and were considered two of the greatest living Irish artists. The world they inhabited was so contrived, pretentious, and snobbish it made me puke. But then that was the art world for you - it was the playground of the rich and feckless, and as socially contrived and neurotic as any Victorian tea party. Plenty of working class men and women made it as artists and were feted and courted by the rich, but the fact remains - the rich made the rules and the rich held the purse strings. This was something Madden and Le Brocquy understood very well and was part of the reason for their success. It is easy to see why Maddens work sold so well - it was pretty and pretentious but with no edge. It seemed to be challenging but at the same time because it was so much the work of pastiche - it was familiar and unthreatening. Madden took the work of Barnett Newman, Graham Sutherland, and Jackson Pollock and robbed it of any threat, iconoclasm and difficulty - then prettified it to the point of interior decoration. 


In stark contrast the work of Outsider artists like Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli, and August Walla in Inner Worlds Outside and great modernists inspired by outsider artists like Nolde, Klee, Miró, and Dubuffet - throbbed with compulsive creativity at its rawest and most authentic. Contrasting Madden and Le Broquey with these outsider artists was like contrasting a manufactured pop star, whose producers had used every trick and gimmick in the book to lend gravitas to their pap and a great neglected and marginalized Blues guitarist who you hear soulfully without backing tracks, dubbing, or orchestration. Yet again - guess which sold! Inner Worlds Outside, was not an exhibition to go to if you were after oil on French linen paintings. Virtually all of the work was small, on paper and often just with the most modest drawing materials - but what invention - what compulsive filling in of each sheet with a world of ideas! Going around the Inner World Exhibition I was struck again and again by the poetic genius of many of these artists and thought how in the hands of a professional artist with a MFA the same ideas and forms would had been over blown, and spiritlessly conceived and produced. I did not only marvel at the greatness of outsider art - I also lamented at the state of contemporary art and wonder at the causes for the malaise. How was it possible that the more education you gave someone, the more bursaries, travel aids, residencies, and prizes that you loaded upon them - the worse the art they produce? How many of those that stumbled into art - were really born to be artists? How many really had a burning urge to make art - and how many were just in it for what they could get - out of dealers, collectors and arts boards? 


I was convinced that the greatest crime of the artist was vanity! It was only natural for one to seek to be admired by others and have ones efforts endorsed and respected. But this should have never been the driving force of the great artist - other concerns like the communication of ideas and feelings should have take precedence. But far too often the professional artists I observed became crazed with their own creative vanity - wanting to paint bigger and bigger (not better and better) paintings or sculptures. And often this bloating of arts size was a deception meant to hide the fact that the artist was creatively bankrupt. Seeing such small and humble work in the meagre materials - was a shot in the arm to me. It showed just how much could be done with so little - provided one was really a true artist. To be a great artist one had to produce a significant body of work, which could be compared with and evaluated against the work of other masters. But what tribal art, non-western art and outsider art proved was that the greatest artist the world will ever see - could just be living in a cardboard box by the side of the street - the pity was - he or she would never get the chance to prove themselves to the world - because they didn't fit into our society or the world of art. Their talents, like their lives would be thrown away.