Ladies Who Paint and Lunch
cypher
My Blog - http://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/
Yesterday I visited I.M.M.A. with my friends - principally we went to
the the Lucian Freud exhibition again. But first we looked around the
Anne Madden retrospective in the Irish modern art museum. To say that
I don't like her work is an understatement - she is everything I hate
about women's art - technically glib and incompetent, derivative,
kitsch, sickly feminine and superficial in the extreme. But I tried to
at least look around with an open eye.
BTW here is a link to her website -
http://www.anne-madden.com/MaddenPages/annemadden.html
The exhibition started well with her early self-portrait with a pallet
(somewhat derivative of Bernard Buffet) and first abstracts in the
1950's - but 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 Nicholas De Stael. Then in the 1970's
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 pastiches of his far more original
and heartfelt canvases of the 1950's. 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 am convinced Anne Madden is not a great painter - in fact I know she
isn't. She is typical of many women in the art world - strikingly
beautiful, privileged, glibly intelligent, with a natural aptitude
towards art - the trouble is things come too easy for such women -
there is 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 has none of the dirty
raw power of her female contemporaries like Paula Rego or Louise
Bourgeois - they are great artists - she is a mere lady who lunch's
with delusions shes part of a tradition stretching back to Cezanne. 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 - its utterly gob-smacking!
Which is not to say that she hasn't been successful - she has in fact
been disproportionately successful thanks to a 'lucky' marriage to
Ireland's most revered living painter Louis Le Brocquy an even more
nationalistic over-praised, over-hyped and over priced Irish
mediocrity.
Going from her hotel lobby art to Lucien Freud's muscular, grand,
weighty canvases of raw human flesh and psychologically stripped human
beings was mind blowing in the extreme. I could spend days in this
Freud exhibition and find more and more in it. The internal,
anatomical grammar to his brushstrokes - is astounding. His
brushstrokes are 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 am hardly fit to clean his brushes. But his art
inspires me it elevates me and it fills me with so much joy that I bow
in humility to this master - his art is truly a gift to humanity.
Later my girlfriend I dropped into The Douglas Hyde gallery - housed
in Trinity College Dublin. It has 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 artist can
draw, paint or sculpt in the ancestral sense - their art is 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) might say:"its all a load of miscellaneous rubbish!"
BTW here's a link to that very funny and very true film on the Paris
art world of the 1950's
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/547351/index.html
In what is 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 is a understatement - they are everywhere in
Dublin. Most of these pastishers of Tuymans' tend 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 analyzing the meaning of Tuymans really profound paintings and
covering their mucky tracks. Stealing his brushstrokes is easier for
them - he often painted the brushstrokes in vertical strips that echo
the bands of a poorly printed photo - but I know where they come
from. Tuymans art is profound in the ways it intellectually and
sensually reinterprets the mediated images of the magazine, book,
television, cinema screen and web-page. His work really does 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 of disturbing crop-shots of sad and evocative
photos - in dull whites, grays, powder blues, dull or glossy blacks,
ochers and greenish creams - and executed in less than a day) was
arrived at from a place of great philosophical depth and seriousness -
it is easily copied - and those copies have no such gravity. I
honestly think his influence has 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
haven't even the Wit to add one other influence to their stolen art to
make it more distinctive and original) they have pretty much abdicated
all right to be called artists.
My Website - www.thepanicartist.com
My Blog - http://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/