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.