Anne Madden's work is replete with the excitement of discovery and an unbridled enthusiasm for painting, writes Aidan Dunne
As one half of one of Ireland's most celebrated artistic marriages, Anne Madden has never felt even slightly in the shadow of her husband, Louis le Brocquy, professionally or, indeed, personally.
As her current retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art demonstrates, she has been, from the first, a significant creative force in her own right, and she is also formidable as a person, forthright and definite in her views. The most recent paintings in the show are a series of big, boldly patterned, brightly coloured evocations of the Aurora Borealis, and the earliest pieces relate to the distinctive limestone landscape of The Burren in Co Clare.
In both, and in pretty much everything made in between, there is a palpable sense of the excitement of discovery, a fundamental liveliness and an enthusiasm for the act of painting.
This may have to do with the way Madden works. "All of the Aurora Borealis works came from one, original painting. I never planned them, I found that they were just going on. Half the time I think they paint themselves. There are no sketches, I just launch straight into the painting. I like doing that, it's exciting, it allows for an instinctive way of working, it's a way of tapping into areas beneath consciousness, things can happen."
She was taken with the sight of the Aurora Borealis when flying across the North Atlantic. "I read that they were visible from Ireland, and I've seen the photos, and I fancied I had seen them from the ground here, but," she owns up, "I couldn't swear to it." The paintings, though, are not about the northern lights as natural phenomenon per se. As ever, Madden is interested in finding images that encapsulate many layers of potential symbolic meaning. Light has been a central motif in her work for decades. "For me, these paintings are a continuation of the idea of light as a metaphor for the search for something beyond." She liked the fact that the aurora stems directly from the sun.
Some of her previous series of Icarus paintings feature in the retrospective. The mythic Icarus fell to his death when he flew too close to the sun and the wax that held together his wings melted.
"For me, Icarus represents the artist as an ambitious, transgressive figure, someone who must always strive for the impossible, who operates outside of conventional rules and parameters. In a sense, failure is inevitable, you can never get there, you are trying for something unattainable, but the point is that you have to try for the unattainable." Madden was born in London in 1932. Her father was Irish, her mother Anglo-Chilean, and they were based in Chile, where she spent the first four years of her life, before the family moved to England.
It's fair to say that she found something like her spiritual home, though, when she accompanied her father to Ireland and stayed with her godmother, Audrey Douglas, near Corofin in Co Clare. The Burren became her own imaginative landscape, a real but magical place that seemed to offer everything she needed in her work, and she enjoyed idyllic times there in her teens. "It was and remains," she says, "the most beautiful place in the world to me." Her life, it has to be said, has been dogged by a series of personal tragedies, including the premature deaths of her brothers and her father. She herself suffered severe spinal injuries in a riding accident in 1950. She attended the Chelsea School of Art and had begun to exhibit in London when she was forced into a long period of immobilisation by a series of operations on her spine. During this frustrating time, much of it spent in full body casts, she met Louis le Brocquy, and they married in 1958. Because the climate was reckoned to be kinder to her healing bones, they moved across the Channel to France, and eventually found a beautiful location in which to settle in the south, at Les Combes, near Nice.
"It was an exile, and there were practical reasons for being there, but it was also enriching and fruitful. It was home. I don't feel very Irish or very French or very anything, and see myself as a European, really, and a citizen of the world." Ronnie Tallon designed an elegantly modernist studio for them and for many years they worked side by side in its bright, generous space. They have always maintained a presence in Ireland, however, and have eventually come to spend most of their time in Dublin, where they both have studios - separate ones, about half a mile apart.
FROM HER EARLIEST DAYS as a painter, Madden drew on the world of The Burren that she had absorbed so thoroughly during her teens and on subsequent visits. At first she was interested in the form and texture of the landscape. If you visit the exhibition, it quickly becomes apparent that she works habitually in series of paintings rather than in isolated pieces. "I don't even think of paintings as single things. One is always after something, and when a particular piece seems resolved on its own terms, because I haven't arrived quite where I wanted to, I immediately want to start another, and so on."
In the early Burren-inspired paintings, series of remarkably free abstract compositions evoke both the material substance of stone and the fluid processes of its formation and erosion. She had warmed to the Italian painters of the early Renaissance, but her work was also informed by current developments in abstraction, including colour-field painting. In time her focus shifted from the ground to the skies of The Burren or, more accurately perhaps, she began to delve into the invisible aspects of place, evoking its mythic and historical dimensions in terms of its personal meaning to her. In her paintings, the stone monuments prominently distributed throughout the region become abstracted, elegiac presences, guardians of a deep past with its layers of memory and loss. There is a sense of brooding tragedy to many of the atmospheric paintings of this time, deriving from both personal and public contexts.
The motif of an opening or window has been apparent in her work from the start, and it dominates the paintings and drawings related to her encounter with Pompeii and its Villa of the Mysteries. Pompeii is in itself, of course, a residue of and monument to disaster and calamitous loss. In Madden's images, the window or portal becomes an opening between worlds, or the point of initiation, as represented in the obscure rituals once enacted in the Villa and recorded in the fragments of paintings on its walls. As an idea, the moment of transition is widely applicable: from innocence to experience, life to death, the material to the spiritual world.
AS IT HAPPENED, BESET by further family tragedies, she found herself, as she put it, "confined to a dark room", extremely dispirited and unable to work. She recorded her return to the studio in an uneasy series of paintings literally based on the path through her garden. While these sit relatively uneasily in her oeuvre as a whole, they did lead to something outstanding, her Sea-change series in which the studio itself is a space of hope, a bright as opposed to a dark room, suspended against luxuriant blue expanses. While, she notes, the blue expanses "must have been influenced by the infinite blue of the Mediterranean, the skies I was always looking at, that wasn't conscious. It just sort of seeped into the work." How does it feel to see her work, including her early work, in one place? "I think you're always most interested in your most recent work. But it is really interesting for me to see everything laid out like this. I see links that I hadn't seen before. It's not that I've forgotten about certain things - I remember it all very clearly, I carry it all around in my head. But I see it more clearly as being part of a continuum. I don't think anything would happen without the previous painting in the sequence. It's a double journey, you know? The journey in paint and one's own journey through life are inextricably linked, and the paintings are inseparable from my life."
A staunch defender of art's capacity to touch the soul of things, Madden's commitment to painting as an essential human activity has weathered the storms of artistic prejudice and fashion over the last several decades. She is particularly gratified that Imma director Enrique Juncosa has responded so warmly to her work. "It has been wonderful. His faith has been very important to me, and he has curated the show brilliantly, very much with the rooms in the Royal Hospital in mind. As far as I'm concerned it could not be better." In the end, she feels the ultimate test of what she has done comes when the viewer is face to face with it. At that point, she says: "I hope the paintings can stand up and speak for themselves without me having to babble on about them."
Anne Madden: A Retrospective is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until Sep 30. Anne Madden: Painter and Muse is screened in the Lecture Room at Imma at 11am and 4pm until July 10
