Anne Madden

Irish Arts Review

Anne MaddenAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 37-40Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491904 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

ANNE MADDEN

A nne Madden's recent art has been centred around her discovery

of Pompeii. "Pompeii" she says "seized hold of

my imagination because of its apocalyp tic end - it is both a memory and a

mirror, a sort of condensation of our possible end by a nuclear holocaust. People and dogs seized and held in death in their everyday gestures, a whole city snuffed out as it went about its business, a door that closed. It lay buried for nineteen centuries under twenty metres of lava, and when it was excavated, it revealed itself mainly in the form of doorways and windows - all the roofs were gone.

"But above all, for me, it was the astonishing frescoes in the Villa dei

Misterii, of the Dionysian rite: the initiation into the knowledge of the gods, sexual initiation as a 'divine' experience. Wine played its part as a transformative and magical element.

"What led me to the discovery of these frescoes and then to Pompeii was an old post-card of the Flagellata figure which my father had kept from a visit there. I found it after his sudden death

when I was fourteen, and I always carried it around with me.

"In one of those blind periods in one's life as a painter - dark, nerveless states of being, filled with subterranean rage at being cut off from 'the vivid thing' as John Banville calls it in Doctor

Copernicus, I made hundreds of draw ings of this figure, which became for me a metaphor for the initiation into light, knowledge, the light I was after but was cut off from. I think that the subject of my painting is light, on which colour depends of course - and therefore also darkness. Anyway, the Flagellata then insinuated herself into the paintings, first of all because a small drawing of her dropped out of my hand by acci dent on to a much larger drawing, and I just left her there in the margin."

The image of the dog recurs in numerous paintings. "I was struck so forcibly by that dog; our Great Danes sleep like that, with their legs in the air.

I find that image immensely touching." Many of Anne Madden's Pompeiian

paintings incorporate an image of the Deposition, based on a painting by the Flemish artist Roger van der Weyden, which she saw in the Spanish city of Granada. The Deposition most curiously

Anne Madden is an Irish artist whose work has been exhibited and acclaimed not only in Ireland

but also in Britain, in France and in Spain. Dorothy Walker, a leading writer and authority on

contemporary Irish painting, talked to the artist as she prepared

for her first individual show in New York City.

resembles the composition of the Flagellata figure from Pompeii, and again the artist made hundreds of draw ings of the figure of Christ from this

Deposition, some almost abstract in their emphasis on the triangular con figuration: the diagonal slant of the dead body of Christ with one arm dropping vertically to the ground.

Talking about the subject, which is a recurring preoccupation of European painters since early Christian times and in which Francis Bacon in his conversa tions with David Sylvester is also interested,' Anne Madden admitted: "The Deposition was my first theme, much to the disapproval of my so-called teachers at Chelsea School of Arts and

Crafts. My return to it is all associated in my mind with the Dionysian. We are all a mixture of Dionysian and Apollo nian, as is painting itself. It is to me an image of great sorrow, and I wanted to incorporate both the horror and the pathos of it. The sudden and violent deaths of my father when he was still young, and of my sister and her hus band who left three children, and then of my younger brother last year, have filled me with outrage as well as with sadness."

Anne Madden's brother, Jeremy, was a gifted young film-maker when a student at the Royal College of Art, London, in the sixties. I remember quite vividly his short film Tune, made for his degree, a delightful Beckettian piece about a man remembering a tune and whistling it slightly wrong, to the fury of his companion. Paddy Maloney, then a promising young musician at the start of his 'Chieftains' career, played the tune on his tin whistle. There was no dialogue, just the images and the music. Jeremy Madden-Simpson also wrote perceptive art criticism, notably about Brian King's time-piece in Rosc

'80, and he was an amusing debunker of famous persons. One of his most hilar ious party pieces was to mimic a con versation between Francis Bacon and Anne Madden's husband Louis le Broc quy, in which he caught the speech and mannerisms of both illustrious painters to stitch-giving perfection.

Anne Madden adored her young brother and was shattered by this fur ther tragedy in her family when he died suddenly last year. Her most recent paintings are of Antigone burying her brother Polynices, for which she was walled up by Creon. "I think I am also trying, unsuccessfully so far, to bury my

brother - in much the same way and for the same reasons as one paints - because the image inhabits one, and until it is externalised and given form and thus resolved, you go on carrying it around until it becomes unbearable."

The doorways which struck her so forcibly in Pompeii were already evolving from the powerful Megalith paintings of the early seventies. "When I felt I was coming to the end of the

Megalith series, I introduced a horizon tal line at the top of the vertical form,

making an opening - for me an opening in my painting as well as an exit from these vertical canvases. These openings, doorways, windows, are metaphors of the artist's vision, openings into possible space, psychic and physical, interior and exterior, of the mind and of matter.

"Artists are fundamentally pre occupied with the nature of reality - their own in relation to the universe, and their vision comes from the con centration of mind and senses on these questions. What is matter, what is light, what is space? Physicists are beamed on to the same questions: the nature of the universe, of what 'is'. Though the ex

pression of the artist's vision of the world is apparently material, the con stituents of his art are abstract: space, form, colour, light. These are his subjects.

"This formal expression is necessarily founded upon its own antecedents, constructed in its own language and car ried beyond tradition into further revelation by artists of great vision. All the arts combine to form an immense fabric which accompanies man through history, through each age, models of a world reconstituted, re-seen and re enacted, enabling man to perceive him

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

ANNE MADDEN

self in the world. "The artist has to pursue his vision

with all his powers, never be diverted from his way. There are plenty of people around trying to do this either from ignorance, fear, or jealousy; the false artist especially (and the false scientist) who. will divert the thing off course with a lot of rhetoric and a con cern with power. Picasso knew all about this. He talked of it and said these people posed a very real danger to art. As Louis has often told me, Schroedinger spoke to him of the parallels between the creative artist and the creative scientist, the academic artist and the academic scientist, the false artist and the false scientist."

As well as being passionately inter ested in the theory and philosophy of art and of physics, Anne Madden is also concerned with the physical act of painting. "For me painting implicates the whole body. Paul Valery said that the painter takes his body with him so the size of the canvases I work on are determined by my own size and reach, and correspond to them. Painting is both sensual and sexual - (in the sense of being potent, its potency is a sort of virility in the paint) - coming from that mysterious place, the bedrock of one's being, carried by instinct, conducted through the whole body to the hand for the mise en oeuvre.

"But the thing can only happen dur ing the act of painting, when one must bring together maximum risk with max imum control. Sometimes, then, one can surprise oneself. But when the painting is carried through in its own terms, it is inevitably diverted and to an extent blocked by these terms. So a finished painting becomes boring to me. What

interests me is what is possible, what lies ahead, what I haven't done. The filling out of that possible space on the blank canvas. Even though that holds its own terror."

Anne Madden's work has been based on specific themes over the years, the mountain, the road, the megalith, or the recent windows and doorways. In each, she says, "I see figuration in my work as

metaphor: the mountain is a symbol of the spiritual journey, the road a symbol of life's journey. The doorway (of the mind) is a formal metaphor for the threshold - of life and death, interior and exterior space, dark and light, open and closed space, thought and being, mind and matter. The cruciform of the window in the recent paintings incor porates light in its prismatic colours and of course the cross itself is a charged symbol: the instrument of Christ's death, a symbol of burden, the ancient symbol of the four points of the Zodiac. It's also the Greek equinoctial symbol, the plan of the neolithic passage graves, cross-roads, and even a primitive symbol of the figure of a man. For me, the image is important as an emotive charge, as in the megalith series, even though it often became abstracted to the point of disparition. What interests

me in painting is the articulation of the pictorial space, or void. Painting only functions, whether it be figurative or abstract, if the elements of which it is constructed - colour, light, form, space -. are rendered eloquent. Whether the image disappears behind the canvas, or

whether it remains visible, is not very important to me, as long as the painting functions as a pictorial space.

"But finally art, like life, is its own subject. Abstraction and figuration have

been polarized in this century. I don't think there is any need for this division any more - they can get along fine

together. "Art is the expression of the apotheosis

of our humanity. It shows us our pos sible grandeur. It is what we leave behind us, our residue, what is left of that humanity by which we can value ourselves and be evaluated. It is our most noble aspect, and is the other side of our barbarity."

Anne Madden spent her early child hood in Chile and her formative adolescence in Ireland in a remote part of Co. Clare. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art and Crafts, Lon don, and now lives much of the year in

France, but for most of her adult life her art has been rooted in the landscape and history of Ireland. Her painting has generated an interaction between the land and the artefacts which have been

made on it from earliest times, such as the menhirs and great standing stones of the West of Ireland.

Her discovery of Pompeii coincided with a live development in her art, paradoxically opening on to a dead city. The Pompeiian doorways and window openings have been shown in major exhibitions in the Galleria Maeght, Bar celona, the Fondation Maeght at St Paul de Vence, the Joachim Becker Gallery, Cannes, and at Rosc '84, Dublin. They will be shown at the Armstrong Gallery, New York, in October 1986. Anne Madden is represented in Ireland by the Taylor Galleries, Dublin.

Dorothy Walker NOTE

1. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames ck Hudson, London, 1975.

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