Anne Madden (b.1932)
Chemins Éclairés (1988)
Triptych, Oil on canvas, 195 x 339cm (76¾ x 133½")
Signed, inscribed and dated 1988 on verso

Exhibited: Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris 1989; Kerlin...

Anne Madden (b.1932)
Chemins Éclairés (1988)
Triptych, Oil on canvas, 195 x 339cm (76¾ x 133½")
Signed, inscribed and dated 1988 on verso

Exhibited: Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris 1989; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 1990; RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin 1991; Limerick City Gallery of Art 1991; Anne Madden - A Retrospective Exhibition

Provenance: Collection of Noeleen and Vincent Ferguson; Private Collection, Ireland

Literature: Anne Madden - A Retrospective Exhibition with Introductory Essay by Aiden Dunne, Dublin 1991, Illustrated p. 63, Catalogue No. 50

 

The illuminated paths in Anne Maddens triptych are, figuratively, paths of light, and they are depictions of an actual path, aglow amidst the enveloping shade of the garden: the path to her studio. The studio, which she shared with her partner Louis le Brocquy, was built in 1962 at their home, Les Combes, in the foothills of the Alps above Nice. Les Combes, and specifically the studio, was the centre of their daily life for close on three decades they returned to settle in Ireland in 2000.

 

In 1984, Madden was devastated by the sudden death of her younger, much loved brother, Jeremy Madden Simpson. Over the following years, she found herself adrift in mourning him. She likened it to being confined in a dark room, and eventually felt that she was in exile from the studio; painting held no appeal. Talking to Samuel Beckett in 1987, she explained her predicament. He later wrote to her saying that she must deal with the darkness, express it, rather than trying to elude it. She took his words to heart, compiling a volume of Jeremys writings - and trying to find her way back to the studio.

 

This process engendered a number of paintings partly built around the metaphorical opposition of light and dark. Light was the possibility of life, hope, creativity, and darkness was the state of being cut off from all of those things. The studio is not just an atelier, a workshop, it is the centre of life, a generative space. The illuminated path is a way out of darkness, back to life in all its contingency and promise.

 

Madden was born in Chile. Her father was Irish, her mother Anglo-Chilean, and they moved to England when she was about four. Ireland became important as she visited her fathers relations in Co. Clare with him, discovering and spending time in the Burren, thereafter a landscape of central imaginative importance to her. In 1950, she seriously injured her spine in a riding accident, necessitating serious surgery. When she and Louis le Brocquy (they married late in the decade) moved to France, it was largely because the climate was more amenable to healing her bones.

 

From the 1950s onwards, Maddens exceptionally ambitious paintings fuse elements of the extraordinary Burren environment, its vast skies, limestone pavement and stone monuments, with the techniques and scale of American abstraction. Gradually her range of reference diversified to encompass the city of Pompeii, some classical mythic narratives, Odyssean voyages and the Aurora borealis. If mortality and mourning have been consistent underlying concerns, so too is a sense of creative possibility and wonder, and a rapt appreciation of beauty.

 

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