a r t scottish art news
Issue 20 AUTUMN 2013 £3
Artists’ Lives: Ian Hamilton Finlay John Bellany: Justified Painter Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment Lines Lost | Deveron Arts
Scottish Art News 1
ADAM BRUCE THOMSON 6 – 30 NOVEMBER 2013
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ • Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk • www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Adam Bruce Thomson obe, rsa, pprsw (1885-1976) Mary, oil on linen laid on board, 91.4 x 76.2 cms More information available at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/adambrucethomson 2
SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE R.S.A (SCOTTISH 1871-1935) | IONA | 33cm x 38cm (13in x 15in) | Sold for ÂŁ93,000 May 2013
Scottish paintings sell best in Scotland As the leading sellers of Scottish paintings in Scotland, we invite you to include selected works in our forthcoming auction of Fine Scottish Paintings in November 2013. For more information please contact Emily Johnston on 07741 247 225 or email emily.johnston@lyonandturnbull.com
EDINBURGH
LONDON
GL ASGOW
Also forthcoming: Scottish Contemporary & Post War Art - 20th Aug & The Studios of John Cunningham & George Wyllie - 27th Aug . For details, viewing times and illustrated catalogues www.lyonandturnbull.com Scottish Art News 3
SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE, R.S.A. (1871–1935) Black bottle, napkin and green apples signed ‘SJ Peploe’ (lower left) · oil on canvas · 18 1/4 x 22 in. (46.3 x 55.9 cm.) £200,000–300,000
Modern British Art Evening Sale London, King Street • 10 July 2013
4
Viewing
Contact
7–10 July 8 King Street London SW1Y 6QT
André Zlattinger azlattinger@christies.com +44 (0) 20 7389 2681
christies.com
J.D. Fergusson 14th - 28th November
We’d be delighted to hear from you if you have works by Fergusson you wish to loan or sell.
Catalogue available: £15
PORTLAND GALLERY 8 BENNET STREET · LONDON SW1A 1RP 020 7493 1888 · art@portlandgallery.com www.portlandgallery.com
FERGUSSON AD.indd 2
17/05/2013 11:54
8th June - 3rd August
Summer Exhibition 2013 10th August - 7th September
Helen Denerley: Positive Space 14th September - 2nd November
Madeline Mackay Hock-Aun Teh Eugenia Vronskaya
Kilmorack Gallery, inverness-shire, IV4 7AL 01463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk open Mon-Sat 11am-5pm Helen Denerley - Sheep
www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk Scottish Art News 5
CONTENTS The Fleming Collection
Scottish Art News
8 Artists’ Lives: Ian Hamilton Finlay
22 Scottish Art News Round-up 24 James Guthrie: In the Orchard (1985–86)
Between 1993 and 1997, Cathy Courtney, Project Director of Artists’ Lives, made audio recordings of Ian Hamilton Finlay for National Life Stories. As The Fleming Collection opens an exhibition of paintings by Eileen Hogan of Finlay’s garden, Little Sparta, Cathy Courtney shares excerpts from the recordings which provide a rich insight into Finlay’s process and work.
14 Learning to Draw/Drawing to Learn The Glasgow School of Art
Past and present staff and students of The Glasgow School of Art explore the practice of drawing in art and art education through an exhibition at The Fleming Collection. (Stuart Mackenzie)
18 Leave the Capitol An Exploration of Contemporary Identity by the Masters Programme, Edinburgh College of Art
Staff and students from the MFA Programme at Edinburgh College of Art exhibit works on the theme of Identity in the upcoming collaborative exhibition Leave the Capitol at The Fleming Collection. (Louise Thody)
A recent acquisition by the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Life. (Frances Fowle)
26 William Turnbull (1922–2012)
Part two of an interview with the late sculptor and painter William Turnbull. Conducted by Bill Hare between September and October 2012, part two explores the relationship between Turnbull’s paintings and sculpture.
30 Building the Bridge between Science and Art
Matthew Jarron discusses a project funded by the Art Fund RENEW scheme to build a collection of art inspired by the Scotttish biologist and founder of the University of Dundee’s Zoology Museum, D’Arcy Thompson. Mainly remembered for his 1917 book On Growth and Form, written largely in Dundee in 1915, D’Arcy Thompson’s work inspired some of the major artists of the twentieth century and continues to inspire artists today.
34 Lines Lost
As 2013 marks 50 years since the Beeching cuts, Glasgowbased artist Stuart McAdam travels to the north-east of Scotland to walk the dismantled railway lines for a project commissioned by Deveron Arts’ Walking Institute Initiative. (Briony Anderson)
40 John Bellany: Justified Painter
Bill Hare examines the painting of John Bellany and the deep connections between his life and art.
46 Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment
Page 8 Eileen Hogan / Little Sparta. Photo: Cathy Courtney
6
Over 20 years since the last major exhibition devoted to his work, Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment at the Hunterian, Glasgow, marks the tercentenary of this quintessential figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. (Mungo Campbell)
50
Frowning Firs and Foaming Rivers Alfred East (1844–1913) in Scotland. (Kenneth McConkey)
Fine art by fine printers
www.empresslitho.com Scottish Art News 7
Regulars
Editor’s Note
54 Art Market Round-up (Will Bennett) 56 Books 60 Preview 2013
From 3 September to the close of 2013, The Fleming Collection
Scotland + Venice, Palazzo Pisani, Venice
3 September – 9 October), or contemporary responses in a range of
Edinburgh Art Festival, various venues
media to historical paintings from The Fleming Collection (Leave
Mary, Queen of Scots, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
the Capitol: Edinburgh College of Art, 15 October – 16 November, and
William Daniell’s Scotland: Landscape and the Sublime, Kelvingrove
Foundation & Trust (un)coverings), 21 November – 21 December),
Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
each exhibition will take historical artworks as their reflective
68 Listings
starting point, interpreting the past in the present. Experiencing and
will show three exhibitions which have a linked theme in the form of collaboration and artistic response to historical artworks and archival material. Whether this is a reinvestigation of the practice of drawing’s long-established traditions within art and art education (Learning to Draw/Drawing to Learn: The Glasgow School of Art,
experimenting with the old in the light of the new will result in new artworks which not only generate new meaning but challenge our understanding and definitions of art and art practice. In Lines Lost (p.38) artist Stuart McAdam engages with social history as he retraces railway lines in the north-east of Scotland which were lost during the Beeching cuts, while creating a range of artworks in response to their impact. In Artists’ Lives: Ian Hamilton Finlay (p.8) we are given a fascinating insight into the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) and his garden, Little Sparta, through extracts from a recording made for oral history project Artists’ Lives. Since 1997, artist Eileen Hogan has worked on a series of paintings of Little Sparta, which is surrounded and enclosed by the Pentland hills. Both the exhibition Eileen Hogan at Little Sparta (until 17 August at The Fleming Collection) and the audio recording of Finlay for Artists’ Lives afford the reader and viewer a richer understanding of his work.
This issue concludes Bill Hare’s interview with the
late William Turnbull (1922–2012) (p.28). In 1958 Turnbull stated that ‘the antagonist of tradition is its true heir’ (published in the magazine Uppercase). Certainly, although he absorbed the work of other artists around him, Turnbull forged his own path, drawing from, yet unhindered by tradition. In Previews, Scotland + Venice and Edinburgh Art Festival give an indication of the visual art from Scotland that is being showcased to an international audience throughout 2013.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to
this edition of Scottish Art News, and to thank all the advertisers, in particular Lyon and Turnbull, Scotland’s oldest established auction house, for their continued support and generous sponsorship that makes this magazine possible. (Briony Anderson.)
Page 18 Erin Marie Kennett, Cut, Pull, Peak (Hadrian’s Wall), 2013 Harris Tweed fabric, wood frame, 160x200 cm
8
To subscribe to Scottish Art News please complete the subscription form on p.72 of this magazine. Alternatively, contact The Fleming Collection. 0207 042 5730 | admin@scottishartnews.co.uk or complete a subscription form online at www.flemingcollection.com/scottishartnews.php Scottish Art News is published biannually by The Fleming Collection, London. Publication dates: January and June. To advertise and/or list in Scottish Art News please contact: Briony Anderson | 020 7042 5713 | briony.anderson@flemingcollection.com Behind Scottish Art News at The Fleming Collection: Editor: Briony Anderson | editor@scottishartnews.co.uk Gallery staff: Nancy Cooper and Sophie Midgley
The Fleming Collection is widely recognised as the finest collection of Scottish art in private hands and was originally conceived as a corporate collection in 1968 for Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd in the City of London. Since 2000 the collection has belonged to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation which aims to promote Scottish art to a wider audience. The collection consists of works by many of Scotland’s most prominent artists, from 1770 to the present day, including works by the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists, the Edinburgh School and many contemporary Scottish names. Galleries One and Two show regular exhibitions and selected works from the permanent collection. The Fleming Collection | 13 Berkeley Street | London | W1J 8DU 020 7042 5730 | gallery@flemingcollection.com www.flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm Admission Free
Revised design concept by Flit (London) and Briony Anderson Printed by Empress Litho Limited MADE IN LONDON BY FLIT FLITLONDON.CO.UK
© Scottish Art News 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Scottish Art News accepts no responsibility for loss or damage of unsolicited material submitted for publication. Scottish Art News is published by The Fleming Collection but is not the voice of the gallery or The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.
All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.
Peter Graham ROI FRSA
Alpes-Maritimes, oil on canvas, 26 x 26 inches
Scottish Art News Issue 20 is kindly sponsored by:
Cover Image
NEW PAINTINGS
Ian Hamilton Finlay by Lochan Eck with his sculpture, Nuclear
23 November – 24 December 2013
Sail, made in collaboration with
roger billcliffe gallery
John Andrew
134 Blythswood Street, Glasgow, G2 4EL
Photo: John Stoller (1974)
Tel: 0141 332 4027 | Email: info@billcliffegallery.com www.billcliffegallery.com
Scottish Art News 9
ARTISTS’ LIVES IAN HAMILT O N F INL AY In 1997 artist Eileen Hogan visited Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden, Little Sparta, south of Edinburgh with Cathy Courtney who was making an oral history recording with Finlay for National Life Stories’ project Artists’ Lives. For Hogan, this visit began a series of paintings of Little Sparta, which she continued making until 2013. With a selection of these paintings on display at The Fleming Collection until 17 August 2013, Cathy Courtney, Project Director of Artists’ Lives, reflects on the process of recording oral histories, and the rich insight it can provide into an artist’s process and work.
10
Photo: John Stoller (1974)
‘People often say that I had the kind of idea for the garden but other people have made the garden, but in fact I made the garden with my hands, you know.’ (Ian Hamilton Finlay, National Life Stories recording)
Scottish Art News 11
‘Y
ou’re often asked when you take part in exhibitions to compose little autobiographies and I usually put at the beginning “Born in Nassau, Bahamas, or in Rousay, Orkney” because it instantly establishes that nothing in this world’s very, very certain, and also something else, that I was in fact born in Nassau but this seems quite inappropriate and fictional… I mean if you wanted to get an idea of me it would be much better to believe that I was born in Orkney than in the Bahamas.’ So begins Ian Hamilton Finlay’s National Life Stories oral history recording, made between November 1993 and September 1997, approximately six hours of the spoken word. Artist, writer and creator of a remarkable garden, he is a figure around whom myths abound, arising copiously in his lifetime and subsequently (he was born in 1925 and died in 2006). Oral history itself is in part an opportunity for each speaker to create his or her own mythology, consciously or otherwise. Speakers develop an account shaped in their own vocabulary, choosing when to emphasise, when to withhold, where to gloss over and where to confront, so that an examination of the way in which the narrative unfolds can prove as richly rewarding as attention to the overt subject matter. Each voice, its accent and pitch, its changing rhythms, is a potent instrument of revelation. The recordings are archived unedited in the British Library, allowing users, now and in centuries to come, privileged and direct access to the individuals. While it is best to listen with an open mind and attentively, there is of course no reason to listen uncritically. I’d been making life story recordings for NLS for four years when I encountered Ian and was alert to the notion that our cassette tapes (the format of those pre-digital days) were capturing states of mind, assumptions, emotional and intellectual responses as much as facts or accurate memories, so I wasn’t worried by Ian’s opening statement, although he threw it out in part-challenge to see how I would react. I encouraged him to talk about his suspicion of autobiography and biography and to clarify that, unlike most NLS recordings, his was unlikely to follow a route through the chronological stages of his upbringing, adult life and career. Despite the latter qualification, the conversation went on to encompass vivid material about his background and attitude to it, as well as insights relating to his work and associated battles. Ian’s initial experiences of boats – which were to play such an evocative part in his actual and implied imagery – occurred in the Bahamas and after his arrival in early childhood in Scotland (his family was Scottish and his parents’ period abroad was temporary) when there were expeditions to the coast, such as this one: ‘I had another holiday at Aberdeen, and I used to get my auntie to take me down to the fish market at five o’clock in the morning and I would look at the trawlers and 12
Our recordings took place in the porch of Ian’s cottage, high in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh. Drumming rain on the fragile roof was sometimes an accompaniment
sometimes get invited onto a trawler and taken down below and given a cup of tea. And I could imagine no greater felicity than this.’ Given the complexity of his adult engagement with neo-Classicism, it is significant also to learn how rooted he felt staying in his grandmother’s cottage on the Hopetoun House estate. (Hopetoun House was designed by William Bruce and extended by William Adam with an interior completed by John and Robert Adam.) His grandfather and uncle worked there, though as a child Ian was more interested in fishing than architecture. It is tempting to suggest that the man in the neighbouring cottage who ‘on Sundays and special days wore one of those swallow-tailed frock-coats, like I suppose Robespierre wore on the Festival of the Supreme Being’ fed into the ease with which Ian later telescoped time so that the leading figures of the French Revolution populated his inner world as forcefully as many people he encountered in flesh and blood. The description of a dream he felt changed his life – being in a parkland where people walked discoursing, a version of Plato’s Academy – and another actual experience walking up an abandoned railway track in starlight and for which the poetartist sought in vain to find a fitting form to express his feelings, are among the passages in the recording which can help to navigate Ian’s thought processes. If the viewer is sometimes perplexed by the compacted associations in an Ian Hamilton Finlay artwork, his spoken account provides insight into his own struggles: ‘I find working very difficult, exhausting really… especially writing, very tiring… I don’t have an easy relationship with language at all… In the case of my stories… I used to write each story 25 or 35 times, so I would almost know it by heart and start from the beginning again each time. And I really find language a kind of torture’. This self-imposed rigour had a deep source, a committed striving for exactitude and a wish to express something truthfully in relation to the outside world as well as to his own perceptions. ‘If you take anagrams, which I like, that I like the anagrams made from short names because then I feel I haven’t composed the anagram, I’ve only revealed it… the shorter the name the more limited the number of anagrams possible and so the more I like it… I feel I haven’t invented this, I haven’t made it, I’ve only uncovered it, it was there all the time… it’s something pre-existing… that I’ve discovered.’
Ian Hamilton Finlay by Lochan Eck with his sculpture, Nuclear Sail (1974), made in collaboration with John Andrew Pet donkeys at Little Sparta Photos: John Stoller (1974)
Scottish Art News 13
LEFT Ian Hamilton Finlay at Little Sparta in 1997. Photo: Eileen Hogan RIGHT Panzer Leader sculpture by Ian Hamilton Finlay with lettering by Michael Harvey, front garden, Little Sparta. Photo: Eileen Hogan (1997)
If the viewer is sometimes perplexed by the compacted associations in an Ian Hamilton Finlay artwork, his spoken account provides insight into his own struggles
Our recordings took place in the porch of Ian’s cottage, high in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh. Drumming rain on the fragile roof was sometimes an accompaniment. Ian had by then suffered from agoraphobia for several years (though this was to change towards the end of his life) and his physical world was bounded by the poet’s garden, Little Sparta, created gradually over decades, initially with his wife Sue, an embodiment of his remarkable mind and its fertilisation by his autodidact’s library. Capturing something of the paths he had followed as a reader and thinker was as helpful as documenting the incidents of his life. By the 1990s, living alone in the cottage, he used the greater part of the modest space for shelves and shelves of books, large sections of which related to his special interests: classical literature, garden history, the French Revolution and the Second World War among them. As he said, ‘my capacity in working is one of making connections which people don’t usually make, that’s the thing that I can do. But it’s not only making connections, it’s making them in a lyrical way… bringing together disparate things in a way which is not fanciful, not surrealist, not merely to entertain but because you can make valid connections.’ Ian’s art took many forms, including tiny books and other printed matter, painted inscriptions on pebbles and watering cans, bronze-cast sculptures, sundials, dry stone walls, 14
‘It’s really a comment on the nature of tortoises, not on the nature of warfare.’ (Ian Hamilton Finlay, National Life Stories recording)
whole buildings, landscaping, the creation of lochs, and texts carved into stones so vast they required lorries and cranes to hoist them to their resting places, whether in Britain or abroad. The particular mental routes he took were not always easy to disentangle, a contribution, perhaps, to the numerous disputes which encircled him. The NLS recording gave Ian a platform from which to give his version of the 1983 Battle of Little Sparta at which he and his Saint-Just Vigilantes foiled the Sheriff Officer’s attempt to seize artworks in lieu of what Strathclyde Region viewed as unpaid rates on a building which Ian had nominated a Garden Temple (dedicated to Apollo) and insisted should therefore be exempt. From his perspective this related to ‘the central question of our age… the complete secularisation of a culture’. It is easy see how the two sides failed to find a common language in which to have fruitful discussion. Ian’s delight in the drama of the day is clear from his verbal re-living of it, but so is his distress at the long-running antagonism and his shock that he was unable to attain a full public hearing to express his position. Listening, one perceives how Ian’s views consolidated and how fundamentally his stance set him at odds with many others with whom he had to negotiate the world; the most wounding dispute resulted in the cancellation of his dream commission from the French government, to create a permanent work in Paris to mark the bicentenary of the Revolution. A minor but typical instance of his reputation causing misrepresentation occurs in the art dealer John Kasmin’s NLS recording, when Ian is recalled ‘grumpily interested in our visit.’ On checking his 1998 diary Kasmin read from it “‘Oh! Ian Hamilton Finlay benign” – not sulky
‘my capacity in working is one of making connections which people don’t usually make… bringing together disparate things in a way which is not fanciful, not surrealist, not merely to entertain but because you can make valid connections’
– “welcomes us and lets us tour his extraordinary garden. Tiny pots and paths in shade. Open glades, fields, lakes, ponds, everywhere words on stone and curiously sentimental mementos. Concrete poetry becomes private monument park. Some very evocative and successful.”’ As Kasmin suggests, Little Sparta combines majestic sweeps of landscape with domestic-scale enclosures, epic evocations alongside gentle puns and mild humour; one is as likely to come across a beautifully inscribed burial stone for Ian’s cat as a memorial to the confrontation between the Japanese and the Americans in the 1942 Battle of the Midway, a turning point in the war in the Pacific. Returning in 1997, I found Ian mesmerised by television and press coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and discovered that the upholder of the values of the French Revolution was engaged in creating a permanent memorial for a Royal – albeit a black sheep – for the grounds of Kensington Garden’s Serpentine Gallery. (Ian had already been commissioned by the Serpentine when the notion of adapting the work to allude to Diana was mooted.) ‘… like everybody else I was… fascinated in the Diana event, and one of the things that struck me… was the way that it was something completely new… I had never had such an experience in Britain, and it seemed to me that what had emerged in that week was… these two words, The People,… with a capital T and capital P, which of course were familiar to me from the French Revolution, and from people writing on Rousseau and so on… this other thing called The People, which one had read about but had never actually seen, and perhaps had rather treated as being just literary, but like many of those kind of things, they turn out to be really quite real, actual, and there it was, you could see The People… And there are so many elements in it, like her getting buried on that island which immediately recalls Rousseau being buried on the island… And I cut out and put in my scrap album a photo of her brother in the boat laden with flowers, rowing across to this
island. All these things are quite amazing.’ Whatever their scale and materials, Ian’s pieces often started life as ‘wee scribbly drawings’ and throughout his career he collaborated with craftsmen to realise the physical works. NLS projects such as Book Trade Lives and Crafts Lives include life stories with some of them, for example, the book designer Ron Costley and the letter-cutter Ralph Beyer, and Ralph Irving, who since 1991 has worked on the garden, is in the process of making his recording. Shorter recordings remembering Ian exist with his accountant, Eric Wishert, and the American art dealer, John Stoller. Among those contributors to Artists’ Lives whose own work has been deeply affected by Ian’s garden are Janet Boulton and Eileen Hogan. Cathy Courtney is Project Director of Artists’ Lives. Artists’ Lives was initiated in 1990 and is run in association with Tate, where copies of the open recordings are available (participants can close their contributions during their lifetime or for longer to maintain privacy, Ian’s became open in 2012). The Henry Moore Foundation has been a crucial partner, and Ian’s recording was made possible with support from the Foundation and additional funding from Victoria Miro; a copy of the recording is available in Leeds at the Henry Moore Institute. Ralph Irving’s recording is supported by the Yale Center for British Art. For details of National Life Stories at the British Library visit www.bl.uk/nls. Eileen Hogan at Little Sparta Until 17 August 2013 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU t: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30 pm Scottish Art News 15
LEARNING TO DRAWING DRAW TO
The Glasgow School of Art 16
The upcoming Learning to Draw/Drawing to Learn exhibition at The Fleming Collection (3 September – 9 October 2013) is a collaboration with The Glasgow School of Art. Focused on the practice of drawing, staff and students of the GSA, past and present, will explore the practice of drawing in art and art education. Reflecting on traditional and current drawing practice, while also challenging definitions of drawing, the works for the exhibition have been selected by Professor Roger Wilson, Head of the School of Fine Art, and Stuart Mackenzie, Senior Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking. Since the early twentieth century it has been impossible to unproblematically link dependence of quality in art with an agreed set of skills or attributes. For art education this presented a challenge. The liberalising of the curriculum in the 1960s had allowed a release from an ‘academy model’ that insisted on certain measures of competence including observational drawing. The challenge to this orthodoxy, and in particular the centrality of the ‘life room’, came from a new and experimental approach derived from the Bauhaus, aided by the availability of new materials and processes, alongside photo-mechanical, photo-electronic and digital technologies. As a result, the task in the second half of the twentieth century was to develop a credible and consistent educational model that responded to contemporary values, opportunities, technologies and institutions. This has been highly contested territory. Beliefs and practices have been subject to intense critical judgement and often fierce debate, not least as a result of pressures to conform to the demands and operational styles of large institutions. Drawing, however, never went away. It persisted as a challenge to academic novelty. Through its connection to long-established traditions and through the work of current artists, it maintained its status as a credible practice alongside the most adventurous and demanding examples of art’s currency. In preparing for Learning to Draw/Drawing to Learn we are fortunate in having access to an archive of past work and to the growing community of artists who elect to stay and work in Glasgow. The exhibition coincides with the development of new academic programmes centred on drawing, confirming our engagement with this highly relevant practice. – Roger Wilson/Stuart Mackenzie
OPPOSITE Stuart T Mackenzie, Archive, graphite, pen, brush and ink on Arches, Heritage and Somerset paper. Photo: Tonje Ytterstad FROM TOP William Shanks, life study, GSA Archive Joan Eardley, Mule With Cart, 1948–49, black chalk on paper, 21.6x27.5 cm. Pat Black, gift, 1987
Scottish Art News 17
‘As we develop creatively as artistic thinkers we begin to consider the various opportunities and challenges that the drawing process offers us and what we demand of it. As we grow as artists we are not only learning but are becoming more visually eloquent through the drawing process. While learning about drawing is important, the act of drawing itself teaches different forms of contextual awareness, with the development of practical skill helping us to think about the visual with greater clarity. The process of drawing is an allencompassing act, embedded in the experience of “being” in the world, leaving behind a trace, evidence of an activity having taken place.’
‘In the past, with its emphasis on skill acquisition to understand pictorial space – compositional awareness, anatomy, tonal awareness, linear dynamics, proportion – drawing provided a means to represent the world. The introduction of new, mechanical means of image generation and the often perceived conceptual limitations of drawing meant that drawing came to reflect all that was traditional within artistic practice. In the search for change and “newness” through conceptual and applied approaches, drawing was sidestepped as a central process within artistic practice. But many artists have continued to engage with drawing as a central part of their practice, informing their work from concept to completion. In the words of Joseph Beuys – “thinking is form”. Drawing can be seen as an artery system, feeding, nourishing and informing practice, and it has adapted to the contemporary, evolving alongside, and also within, new media and technologies.’
‘It is important that drawing has a central role within the Fine Art curriculum with a clear understanding that drawing continually evolves. Drawing should be recognised as both a process and practice in its own right. Within a curriculum for drawing, the process offers extensive research possibilities in relation to the exploration and investigation of a multitude of subjects, fields, disciplines and media. Its immediacy, portability and adaptability means that drawing can require minimal space and resources, while it can also be the starting point for highly ambitious projects and events across a wide range of media.’
‘We should recognise the benefits of drawing’s history and conventions. It is possible that many institutions since the early 1970s who have “dropped” or removed drawing from taught aspects of their curriculum – viewing the process as outmoded – may have missed this crucial point. It need not be a case of slavishly adhering to what has gone before, but instead be about opening up potential for growth and for the application of new, equally rigorous approaches; opting out is not the option. Contemporary drawing can include many traditional methods while also engaging with new disciplines and arenas within an expanded field of contemporary practice. With its capacity for the exploratory and experimental, as well as the observational, drawing remains a fundamental activity within the visual arts.’ Stuart Mackenzie is Senior Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art.
18
Learning to Draw/Drawing to Learn The Glasgow School of Art 3 September – 9 October 2013 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU t: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30 pm CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Phoebe Barnicoat (year four student), Drawing Sequence, 2013, mixed media on paper Rongwei Zhang (MLITT postgraduate student), Site, 2013, ink-and-water-based varnish on paper Vanessa Larsen (year four student), Monochrome Study, 2013, graphite on paper
Scottish Art News 19
LEAVE THE CAPITOL
In early 2013, following a seminar at Edinburgh College of Art on the theme of ‘identity’, staff and students from the MFA Programme were invited to submit works on this theme. Led by head of the School of Art, Stuart Bennett, artist and lecturer for Postgraduate Taught Programmes Kenny Hunter, with Director of The Fleming Collection, Selina Skipwith, a selection was made from the submitted works, which will be shown in Leave the Capitol (the title is a song by The Fall, an English post-punk band) at The Fleming Collection from 15 October to 16 November 2013.
20
An Exploration of Contemporary Identity by the Masters Programme, Edinburgh College of Art Louise Thody
S
cottish identity has become the focus of renewed debates as social scientists attempt to define ‘Scottishness’ in the approach to the 2014 independence referendum. Scottish identity is often conflated with a mythologised and romanticised historiography bound up with Sir Walter Scott’s ‘invention’ of Scotland. While ‘Scottishness’ continues to be an open question, London-based national media perpetuate their own assumptions of what it means to be Scottish. Defining one’s own identity is one thing but when constructed by ‘the other’, we face issues of essentialism. Within visual culture, ‘Scottishness’ has become shorthand for tartan, thistles and highland landscapes. These recurring clichés are just as likely to be found on shortbread tins as in Victorian romantic painting. Another mythologised image of Scotland is one of a predominantly white, male, working class and industrialised culture. These exaggerated products of our collective imagination chime with Benedict
OPPOSITE Jessica Ramm, Listening Beyond the Horizon, 2013 Photo etching on zinc plate, 65x50 cm ABOVE FROM TOP Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840), A Stormy Highland Scene, oil on canvas John Watson Nicol (1856–1926), Lochaber No More, 1883, oil on canvas Thomas Faed (1826–1900), The Last of the Clan, 1865, oil on canvas The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation
Anderson’s idea of the nation as an ‘imaginary community’ but conflict with the reality of Scotland as a modern, deindustrialised, multicultural and culturally vibrant nation. It is worth asking why these mythical images of Scotland persist. Academic Rob Shields has attributed this to a ‘north spacemyth’ created in Britain’s political and financial capital. He argues this is an exercise in hierarchical social spatialisation and cultural imperialism which separates and subjugates the British north from the pastoral south of the gentry. Such renderings of Scottish myth-making truly began in the Victorian era and are well exemplified in romantic paintings such as Alexander Nasmyth’s A Stormy Highland Scene (1758–1840). Like many Scottish artists of his time, Nasmyth fled to London to seek patronage. Highlandism provided a subject for unionist-nationalist Scots-born diasporic artists who celebrated their ‘Britishness’ in order to secure commissions from their English patrons. ‘Scottishness’ was thus conceived and sold as exoticism, in stark contrast to the modernity and cosmopolitanism found in Victorian London society. Thomas Faed’s The Last of the Clan (1865) and John Watson Nichol’s Lochaber No More (1883) satisfy Victorian English appetites for sentimentality and death in their representation of the Highland clearances. These sentimental genre paintings did not depict barbarous circumstances; instead they served to remind the landed gentry that the freshly depopulated Highlands were open for hunting and shooting. This ‘tartan monster’ myth is alive and well today despite being time-bound and anachronistic. Art which privileges its ethno-nationalistic roots over any aesthetic or artistic value misses the point. Instead of prioritising kitschy representations of imaginary Scottish culture, we should instead celebrate art emanating from Scotland that emphasises its plural civic identities. After all, Scotland as a seafaring nation has always been, in the words of author William McIlvanney, a ‘mongrel nation’. It is hardly surprising that collections of Scottish art like the National Galleries of Scotland, The Fleming Collection and The Scottish Gallery have made cultural assumptions in their representations of ‘Scottishness’. Does this mean that certain gallerists consider there is a vernacular art in Scotland and that ‘Scottishness’ is monolithic? Another cultural assumption links ‘Scottishness’ with ethnic nationalism, equating being Scots-born with Scottish national identity. This type of ‘blood and soil’ nationalism is far removed from the civic nationalism prevalent in Scotland today. A civic Scottish national identity allows room for social democracy and emphasises citizenry over ethnicity. As Neil Mulholland has previously argued in Scottish Arts News, just as there is no unified or singular ‘Scottishness’, there is no such thing as ‘Scottish art’ just as there is no ‘English art’. Scottish Art News 21
ABOVE Suzanne van der Lingen, La Nostalgie des Origines (No. 2), 2011, lambda print on dibond, matte laminate, 60x60 cm La Nostalgie des Origines (No. 1), 2010, lambda print on dibond, matte laminate, 120x120 cm BELOW Kenny Hunter, iGoat (maquette), 2010, resin, jesmonite, paint, 67x25x18 cm
Through this prism, how are we to situate the works of students from Edinburgh College of Art’s MFA programme? Their exhibition Leave the Capitol at The Fleming Collection is an exploration of contemporary identity. While these students are not all ethnically Scottish, there was an expectation for them to respond to themes of Scottish identity. Recurring myths of ‘Scottishness’ are clearly evident, notably Phil Obermarck’s Black Sheep, Erin Marie Kennett’s Cut, Pull, Peak (Hadrian’s Wall) and Fraser Gray’s Union Tartan are direct nods to Scottish symbolism (sheep, tweed and tartan) and Jessica Ramm’s Listening Beyond the Horizon accentuates the landscape tradition within ‘Scottish’ art that has emerged from European Romanticism. However, other artists sidestep ‘Scottishness’ altogether in their explorations of identity, as for example, Suzanne van der Lingen’s La Nostalgie des Origines series which echoes her own personal identity in ethereal and multi-layered family photos. Glasgow-based artist and MFA tutor Kenny Hunter eschews questions of his own national identity and responds to the multicultural identities of London immigrants in his iGoat sculpture. Leave the Capitol represents a disparate response to contemporary identities. ‘Scottishness’ represents just one part of the multi-layering of artists’ personal identities. What resonates here is a multifaceted portrayal of art that emanates from Scotland. There is a tendency in collections of ‘Scottish’ art to champion artists simply because they are from Scotland or to celebrate scenes of a ‘Scottish nature’. To overemphasise ‘Scottishness’ and ethnonationalism is to ignore the plurality of other identities within Scotland and this presents a block to the organic development of Scotland’s cultures. As we edge towards the possibility of an end to the United Kingdom, it seems perplexing that such nostalgic and romanticised representations of Scottish national identity still loom large in England’s capital. This ‘fixing’ of Scottish culture suggests that London continues to control Scotland both spatially and 22
conceptually thus it is no surprise that there is a drive towards Scottish independence. The ambiguous title of the exhibition Leave the Capitol suggests a physical departure from Edinburgh but this may also signify a cultural separation from London and a nod to a break with the Union. Despite this, there is no escape from perpetuating clichés of ‘Scottishness’. While tartanalia and highlandism remain potent symbols of Scottish identity, there are other mythologies which contribute to the Scottish imaginary. Just as Scotland’s multi-ethnic clan system inscribed in the invention of modern tartans is shrouded in mythology, we should consider the SNP’s civic nationalism as yet another attempt to re-invent ‘Scotland’ as a culture. As such, Scottish identities are continually reinvented. By exploring both clichés of ‘Scottishness’ and other contemporary identities, Leave the Capitol demonstrates that art from Scotland is multifarious and diverse, reflecting its history, cultural mythology and heterogeneous modernity. Louise Thody is a PhD student at Edinburgh College of Art.
Leave the Capitol An Exploration of Contemporary Identity by the Masters Programme, Edinburgh College of Art 15 October – 16 November 2013 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU t: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30 pm
FROM TOP Philip R. Obermarck, Black Sheep, 2013, jesmonite and iron Fraser Gray, Union Tartan, 2013, acrylic spray-paint on board, 84x84 cm
Scottish Art News 23
Scottish Art News Round-up Aberdeen Art Gallery has been awarded a first-round pass for £10m of funding from Heritage Lottery Fund in the city’s bid for its ‘Inspiring Art and Music’ redevelopment initiative. Projected over the next four years, the redevelopment programme aims to restore and modernise the art gallery while expanding its temporary displays and special exhibition galleries. A new Museum Collections Centre is to be constructed for 2015, which will display the city’s art collections, as work gets underway on the art gallery ahead of its reopening in 2017. www.aberdeencity.gov.uk
Kirkcaldy Library, Museum and Art Gallery has reopened after an 18-month refurbishment, under the new name Kirkcaldy Galleries. The building’s original features, including the grand marble entrance, have been restored. Combining library, museum, art gallery, cafe and tourist information, the new Kirkcaldy Galleries will JD Fergusson (1874–1961), Eástre (Hymn to the Sun), 1924 Brass (cast 1971). Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art: purchased 1972
open with the exhibition The People’s Pick, a display of works voted for by the public (until 15 September 2013). www.fifedirect.org.uk
Professor Seona Reid has been appointed a Trustee of The Tate Gallery, the announcement coming just a few months before she Timespan and the community of Helmsdale will commemorate
steps down after 14 years at the helm of The Glasgow School of Art.
the 200th anniversary of the Kildonan Clearances with a full
Professor Tom Inns, Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art
programme of events throughout 2013 culminating in August
has been appointed as the new Director of the GSA.
with their Translocation Festival. The programme and festival will
www.tate.org.uk | www.gsa.ac.uk
include talks and tours of the town, flower shows, Highland Games, excavations, social gatherings and more. www.timespan.org.uk
The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London, has been named the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2013 following its £5m refurbishment. The £100,000 award was announced by Ian Hislop at
The highly popular Scottish Colourist Series of exhibitions
a ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum and announced live
concludes with a retrospective of the work of JD Fergusson, one of
on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. The £10,000 Clore Award for Learning
the most influential Scottish painters of the twentieth century. In
was awarded to the Hepworth Wakefield. The two museums were
this major survey of the artist’s career, paintings and sculptures will
among 10 shortlisted organisations for this year’s award, which
be shown alongside archive material relating to his life and work.
included Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Loans have been secured from throughout the UK, including many
www.artfund.org
from private collections, which have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before. The exhibition will explore Fergusson’s early emergence as a Colourist; his time in Paris in the 1910s, where he learned from Fauve
From 1 August 10 new public art commissions will open in
artists such as Matisse and Derain; and focus on his life in Glasgow,
Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Festival 2013. With works ranging
where together with his wife Margaret Morrison he settled and
from the films of Katri Walker to the platforms of Krijn de Koning and
founded the influential meeting and exhibiting society The New Art
the participatory ‘Complaints Choir’, the commissions will address
Club. (7 December 2013 – 23 June 2014, Scottish National Gallery of
themes of dialogue, discussion and debate in a variety of ways,
Modern Art, Edinburgh)
playfully inviting their public audience to join the conversation.
www.nationalgalleries.org
www.edinburghartfestival.com
24
Showing at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Poet, Artist, Revolutionary celebrates the career of a cornerstone figure in the recent history of Scottish art. Exhibiting previously unseen prints, and welcoming the return of two of Finlay’s large-scale sculptural pieces (commissioned by GoMA in 1996), this retrospective will deliver a colourful cross-section of the artist’s practice. www.glasgowlife.org.uk
A new contemporary art programme has recently been launched by Scottish galleries. The initiative, called Generation, is a partnership between Glasgow Life, the trust that runs the publicly owned cultural venues in the city, and the National Galleries of Scotland. Creative Scotland, the national development agency for the arts, screen and creative industries, has given £750,000 to the programme, which will include exhibitions, events and activities specifically geared towards young people. www.glasgowlife.org.uk Victoria Crowe, Peter Higgs, 2013, oil on linen, 114x102 cm Photo: Antonia Reeve
Natural Bennachie, a project coordinated by Scottish Sculpture Workshop in partnership with The Bailies of Bennachie, Forestry Commission Scotland, Aberdeenshire Council Ranger Service and
In June 2013 a new portrait of Peter Higgs by Victoria Crowe was
the University of Aberdeen, has selected four artists to work on
unveiled at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The portrait was jointly
the six-month Natural Bennachie project. Casal+Roubini, Henry
commissioned by the RSE and the National Portrait Gallery of
Coombes, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva and artist collective ~ in the fields
Scotland: ‘Peter Higgs will go down in history as one of the scientists
will start the project in June 2013. Glasgow-based Henry Coombes
whose insights have changed our perception of the world so it is
will work closely with the recent history of the ‘Colony’, which was a
important that he should be recorded in a fitting portrait. Victoria
name given to the crofters who took up residence on the Bennachie
Crowe has achieved that in her painting of him. It is indeed a brilliant
common land in the 1800s, and were ejected after the division of the
portrait. It is very informal. He is shown in his flat in Edinburgh.
comonty in 1859. The work created will be shown at CCA, Glasgow,
There is a window behind him. He is casually dressed and sitting
in November 2013, and will be exhibited internationally in 2014.
in his Marcel Breuer chair, a chair that he bought when Edinburgh
The project is supported by Creative Scotland and Scottish Natural
University appointed him to him a professorial chair. So many
Heritage as part of the Year of Natural Scotland 2013.
portraits nowadays are really little more than photographic images
www.naturalbennachie.org
in a different medium, but here you see vividly why a painted portrait is superior to a photograph; indeed how it is a different kind of likeness altogether. It is not at all showy, however. It doesn’t declare
Artists Alex Hartley and Jon Macleod have been selected to lead
itself to be a painting by the use of lots of fancy brushwork, or by some
the first year of the St Kilda Fragility of Flight Artists Residencies
daft rearranging of reality. It does so by the quality of the thought
by The National Trust for Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage
that goes into it and by the fact that it is a record of an exchange
and Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre. With diverse
between artist and sitter over period of time. It suits the sitter too
practices (including between them: architectural structures
that it is contemplative. It shows him slightly withdrawn, not socially,
integrated into the landscape, installation sculpture, photography)
but in the way that suggests the life of the mind while the products of
the artists will find their inspiration in the hardy ecosystem of St
that inner life, his equations, are written in his own hand beside him.
Kilda and the ornithological community. The works created as a
The glass bowl in the foreground was presented to him by Durham
result of the residency will be on display at Taigh Chearsabhagh
University. The engraved design is based on the expected path of
Museum and Arts Centre in North Uist in 2013–14.
the Higgs particle in an impact diagram. There is an image of the
www.taigh-chearsabhagh.org
Hadron Collider on the wall behind and of particles colliding in front of the window and a hanging lamp.’ (Professor Duncan Macmillan FRSE.) Scottish Art News 25
James Guthrie: In the Orchard (1985–86)
Sir James Guthrie (1859–1930), In the Orchard, 1885–86, oil on canvas, 152x178 cm Purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Museums with the assistance of National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, 2012
26
J
ames Guthrie’s In the Orchard, a masterpiece by one of the leading Glasgow Boys, has been jointly acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Life with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund. Painted during a period of experimentation, the picture represents a moment of transition in Guthrie’s career from tonal painting and rural naturalism to decorative symbolism. It was exhibited for the first time in Glasgow in 1887 and immediately found a buyer, TG Bishop of Helensburgh, who bought the painting for £210. Recently sold at Sotheby’s, it was acquired for just under £650,000. The picture was begun in 1885 during a period when Guthrie was working at Cockburnspath in the Scottish Borders. At this date Guthrie, painting alongside his friend and fellow artist EA Walton, was struggling with the problem of producing a convincingly life-like composition on a large scale. He was joined at Cockburnspath by George Henry, who in works such as Noon (1885, private collection) was interested in imposing a strong sense of pattern and design on his landscapes. Guthrie may have completed In the Orchard at the picturesque artists’ town of Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway, where Henry and the young EA Hornel were developing a more decorative style of painting. On one level In the Orchard can be read as entirely naturalistic: children gathering windfalls in an apple orchard. The young red-headed girl has rosy cheeks, her natural beauty reinforced by the surrounding foliage. The flattened perspective and dense web of colours – bold strokes of complementary green and russet tones – reflect Guthrie’s interest in the decorative. The subject, too, suggests a shift from the direct representation of nature towards a more symbolic evocation of childhood. We know from Guthrie’s preparatory sketches (Scottish National Gallery) for the picture that he originally planned the composition as a woman and young girl in an orchard, with the girl kneeling on the left. He later moved the girl to her current position and added the second child. In Norse mythology apple trees symbolised beauty and rebirth and there is a sense in this autumnal scene of the natural cycle of the seasons. Although the children are engaged in a specific task, they appear strangely self-absorbed and Guthrie may have been influenced by William Kennedy’s Spring of 1882 (Paisley Museum and Art Gallery) which shows two young girls among blossoming trees in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing. Comparisons have also been drawn with Arthur Melville’s Audrey and her Goats (1884–89, Tate, London), an enigmatic work painted in a rich palette, bold strokes and thick impasto, with which Guthrie was very familiar. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1887 as ‘Apple Gatherers’ when it was hailed as ‘one of the most important works by Glasgow artists’. Critics commented on the influence of the French
naturalist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work was greatly admired by the Glasgow Boys. Thereafter the painting was shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, at the Paris Salon (where it received an honourable mention) and at the progressive Grosvenor Gallery in London. Praised by critics for its natural observation and ‘mastery over the grammar of art’ the painting was an obvious choice for Guthrie to send to the Munich International Exhibition in 1890, where it was shown alongside other major Scottish works such as Henry and Hornel’s The Druids: Bringing Home the Mistletoe (1890, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow), David Gauld’s St Agnes (1889, Scottish National Gallery) and EA Walton’s A Daydream (1885, Scottish National Gallery). The exhibition of Scottish paintings took the German public by storm and In the Orchard was described by one critic as ‘a piece of domestic poetry and joy in nature’. The German art historian Richard Muther remarked on the novelty of the Glasgow Boys’ style, characterised by ‘decorative harmony… the rhythm of forms and masses of colour’. In the Orchard marked a new direction in Guthrie’s work and is still regarded as one of his finest canvases. It anticipated later masterpieces such as Midsummer (Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh), completed in 1890, and paved the way for the more overtly ‘symbolist’ woodland scenes by Henry, Hornel and Gauld. Guthrie went on to become a successful portrait painter and President of the Royal Scottish Academy. Today, however, his reputation as one of the leading artists of his generation rests on works such as In the Orchard, which represents such an important and pivotal moment in his career. Frances Fowle is a Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
Scottish Art News 27
WILLIAM TURNBULL
William Turnbull interviewed by Bill Hare (Part Two) In the last issue of Scottish Art News (19) we published, posthumously, part one of an interview with sculptor and painter William Turnbull (1922–2012), which was conducted by the art historian Bill Hare between September and October 2012. As an exhibition of his sculptures, paintings and drawings at Chatsworth House comes to a close, we publish part two of the interview, which explores the relationship between Turnbull’s painting and sculpture.
28
Bill Hare: In 1956 you mad e the s tateme n t for t he Ind ep end ent Group ’s Th is Is Tomo rrow ex h ib it ion at the W hitechap el A r t Galler y that ‘a great deal o f mo d er n sculp ture and painting [is] the sum to tal o f a number o f p o s s ible p er mutations… the o bser ver o r user is o ne o f the units .’ How b ig a par t d o es the co ns id er atio n o f the sp e ct at or ’s reactio n p lay in the mak ing o f your wo r k? Wil l iam Tu rnbu l l : I ’ve never al l owed co nsid eratio ns abou t o ther peo ple to interfere w ith the making o f my wor k . I t’s always nice if so meo ne says they l ike you r wo rk, bu t, and here’s the d if ference, it’s never c hang ed what I d o if they d o n’t l ike it. I th ink initially peo pl e w restl ed w ith my paintings more than my scu lptu re. No o ne was really making these types o f pic tu res back then, certainly no t in B ritain, and it ran very cou nter to what mo st pe op le thou g h t o f as painting to the po i nt that the wo rks were f requ ently b eing physical ly attac ked . There was a large o rang e painting in the Tate in the 1970s and so meo ne sprayed I R A al l ove r it.
I’ve ne ve r se t ou t to shoc k w i t h my wor k bu t my pain t i ngs, e sp e c ial ly ea r l i e r on, did o fte n provoke p e op l e. T h is qu ote pro bably re fe rs to t h is ra t he r t ha n my be ing in flu e nce d by ot he rs i n t he c reat io n o f my wor k , t hou g h i t is su c h a long time ago I can’t remember making it.
‘I think initially people wrestled with my paintings more than my sculpture. No one was really making these types of pictures back then, certainly not in Britain, and it ran very counter to what most people thought of as painting’
BH : In B r i t ish a r t a t l eas t , you are t hat r are pheno meno n – b o t h a scu lp to r and a pai n te r. Within your own practice, what is the relationship between your painting and your sculpture? WT: I’ve always re ga rd e d t he t wo as e q u al ly impo r t a nt . I n some re sp e ct s t he y are bo t h d eal i ng w i t h t he sa me t h ings bu t u si ng d i f fe re nt ma te r ials. I t h ink you can se e t ha t i n t he pa t i nas a nd t he su rface s of t he scu lp t u re s a nd t he pain t ings . T he su r f ace of t he scu lp t u re is as impo rt ant as t he shap e of t he p i e ce it se l f. W he n I f i rst st a r te d cas t i ng i n bro nze, t he ra ng e of col ou r ava i lab l e for a pat ina was ve r y l i m i te d – b lac k a nd a gre e n if you we re lu ck y. I ’d sp e nt a g rea t deal o f t ime whe n I f i rs t ca me to Lond on in t he Brit ish Mu seu m . Af te r l ook i ng a t anc ie n t bro nze s a nd se e i ng t he col ou r and variat io n t he y we re ab l e to ach i e ve, I be gan ex pe r i me nt i ng w i t h ac i ds a nd variou s c he m i cal p roce s se s to d e ve l op o r ‘ re in t ro du ce ’ ma ny of t he col ou rs t he y now u se at t he fou nd r y. T he re is a l ot of t ime spe n t and a l ot of a t te nt i on g ive n to fin ish ing my scu lp t u re s.
d o w ith these ind iv id u als themse lves rather than any movement they may or may no t have been part o f. I ’ve never felt any g reat d esire to be part o f any group o r movement. I n f ac t I can’t really think o f anyth ing wo rse.
BH : Do you see t ha t s i d e o f you r ar t w i t h i n the context o f a ny pa r t icu lar move me n t i n mo d e r n pai nting? WT: I’ve always t r i e d to avoi d b e i ng pa r t o f grou ps . I’ve of te n fou nd myse l f i n t he u n u su al po s iti on whe re I ’ve of te n fe l t a far greate r co nne ct i on to a r t is t s f rom o t he r cou n t ri e s t ha n to ot he r a r t ist s i n Brit ain . You cou l d say my pa i nt i ng was in flu e nce d by t he a r t ist s I me t i n Ne w Yo rk m u c h in t he sa me way my scu lp t u re was in flu e nce d by t he a r t ist s I me t i n Paris , bu t t h is was ac t u al ly f a r more to 23-1958, 1958, oil on canvas. Courtesy Waddington Custot Galleries. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
Scottish Art News 29
‘I’ve never felt any great desire to be part of any group or movement. In fact I can’t really think of anything worse’
BH: You have said that you regard your pain t ings as ‘o bjects ’ and would p refer them to s tand on the f lo o r r ather than hang o n the wall. D oes t hat mean that you w ish them to be regard ed in t he same manner as your sculp ture? WT: I th ink what I meant by that was that I ’ve never regard ed my pain tings as two - d imensio nal o bj ec ts. My pai ntings , certainly po st-19 57, d o n’t refer to anyth ing else, o nly to themselves . Even w ith the earl ier heads and f igu res , which Al ex is intend ing to show at C hatswor th Hou se, I ’ve always tried to th ink of my paintings in th ree d imensio ns. I don’t have a pro bl em w ith them hang i ng on wal ls bu t j u st feel that I l ike the m to have their ow n space and be regarded as o bj ec ts rather than pieces o f twod imensio nal d eco rative o rnamen tation.
FROM TOP Acrobat, 1951 09-1959, 1959, oil on canvas Courtesy Waddington Custot Galleries Photos: Prudence Cuming Associates
30
BH: Have you ever had an exhibitio n consist ing so lely o f your two -d imens io nal wo r k ? If not , how would you feel about that? WT: Wad d ing to n G al l eries had a show of paintings in 2 007 wh ic h so l d ou t. I ’ve been catal o gu ing the wo rks on paper w ith my so ns Al ex and Jo hnny, as
‘I don’t have a problem with them hanging on walls but just feel that I like them to have their own space and be regarded as objects rather than pieces of two-dimensional decorative ornamentation’
wel l as the paintings, and it’s be en ver y interesting to see th ings that I made over 50 years ag o. I ’m happy w ith how my paintings l o o k. W hen I l o o k at them now I feel pl eased w ith what I ’ve c reated. They stil l l o o k g o o d . Ho pef u l ly peo pl e will g et over their id eas abou t scu lptors not being abl e to paint and painters not being abl e to scu lpt and j u d g e the wo rks on their ind iv id u al merit. B o th Ro thko and New man l iked and were very su pp or tive o f my painting. That was always enough fo r me.
B il l H are is a curato r and writer and H onora ry Teach ing Fel l ow in Scottish Art H isto ry a t the University of Edinburgh . Sco ttish A r t News is gratef ul to Al ex Turnbull for h is wo rk in transcribing th e interview and ma king its publ icatio n possibl e. Head, 1955. Courtesy Turnbull Studio
Scottish Art News 31
Building the Bridge between Science and Art Building a collection of art inspired by the Scottish b i o l o g i s t D ’A r c y T h o m p s o n , f o u n d e r o f t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f D u n d e e ’ s Z o o l o g y M u s e u m Matthew Jarron
I
n 1944 the celebrated art critic Herbert Read wrote to the 84-year-old Scottish biologist Professor D’Arcy Thompson, telling him: ‘You have built the bridge between science and art.’ Read was one of many artists, designers and art critics who found Thompson’s work profoundly inspiring. The art historian Professor Martin Kemp has recently claimed: ‘In the worlds of art and architecture, D’Arcy Thompson probably exercised a greater impact than any scientist of the twentieth century’. Born in Edinburgh in 1860, D’Arcy Thompson studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge before being appointed at the age of 24 to the first Chair of Biology at the newly established University College, Dundee (now the University of Dundee). During the 32 years that he spent in Dundee, D’Arcy built up a large Zoology Museum for teaching and research, and was actively involved in the
32
founding of Dundee’s Medical School. In 1917 he moved to the University of St Andrews, where he remained as Professor of Natural History until his death in 1948. Among many notable achievements, he was awarded a knighthood, the Darwin Medal and the Linnean Medal, and served as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Classical Association and the Classical Association of Scotland, reflecting his achievements as both a scientist and classical scholar. D’Arcy Thompson is best known for his 1917 textbook, On Growth and Form, which pioneered the science of mathematical biology, proposing for the first time that the apparently complex ways that organisms grow and the forms that they take could be explained by fundamental rules of physics and mathematics. He showed that there were hidden patterns in nature, and that all organisms were constantly being affected by the forces acting upon him. Most controversially, he appeared to challenge Darwinian theory by demonstrating that sudden transformations could occur from one type of animal to another, according to mathematical principles. Radical in its day, the book has since been hailed as ‘the greatest work of prose in twentieth-century science’. The growth of computer mathematical modelling techniques and the development of evolutionary-developmental biology (popularly known as evo-devo) has led to renewed interest in D’Arcy’s work, with one Italian scientist recently claiming that ‘D’Arcy Thompson simply will be the most influential figure in the future of biology.’ D’Arcy’s influence has spread to many other disciplines. Norbert Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics, acknowledged his debt to On Growth and Form in the landmark book Cybernetics or Control and Communication
Most controversially, he appeared to challenge Darwinian theory by demonstrating that sudden transformations could occur from one type of animal to another, according to mathematical principles
OPPOSITE Daniel Brown, On Growth and Form (Flowers), still from digital art installation, 2012 Presented by the Art Fund to the University of Dundee Museum Collections, 2012 ABOVE Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Overflow, ink and mixed media on card, 1980 Presented by the Art Fund to the University of Dundee Museum Collections, 2012 © Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
in the Animal and the Machine (1948). It also proved an inspiration to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who refers to D’Arcy in his important book on Structural Anthropology (1963). Many modern anthropologists view On Growth and Form as an important source text, and today’s forensic anthropology also uses techniques derived from D’Arcy’s Theory of Transformations. In architecture and engineering, On Growth and Form has inspired creators and practitioners from Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to Norman Foster and Cecil Balmond. The famous diagrams comparing the Forth Bridge to animal and dinosaur skeletons made many designers think about structures in a new way, and D’Arcy’s work on the mechanical efficiency of soap bubbles and the structural tension of dragonfly wings directly inspired the development of lightweight structures such as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and Frei Otto’s Olympic stadium in Munich. In particular, the idea of organisms being constantly subject to transformation through external pressures lies at the root of the theories of emergence, organic architecture and natural design that form a fundamental part of current architectural theory. Like architects, artists were much quicker than scientists in recognising the potential of D’Arcy’s ideas. The sculptor Henry Moore discovered On Growth and Form as a student and its influence can undoubtedly be seen in the series of ‘Transformation Drawings’ that he created in the early 1930s, which use overlapping pencil lines to depict organic forms apparently in the act of morphing from one state to another. Moore was interested in the everchanging possibilities of natural forms, and indeed the term ‘biomorphism’ (used to describe the fluid, organic shapes of artists such as Jean Arp and Joan Miró) was originally used to describe Moore’s work. Scottish Art News 33
The famous diagrams comparing the Forth Bridge to animal and dinosaur skeletons made many designers think about structures in a new way
Moore was soon discussing On Growth and Form with the critic Herbert Read, who introduced it to the St Ives circle of artists including Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. D’Arcy’s work soon found its way around other avant-garde artists, including Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who was based in Britain in 1935–37 and referred to D’Arcy in his posthumously published book Vision in Motion (1947). The second edition of On Growth and Form was also enthusiastically taken up by a group of students at the Slade School in London in the 1940s, including Nigel Henderson, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and the Dundee-born William Turnbull. In 1951, Hamilton staged an influential exhibition called Growth and Form at Herbert Read’s new Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). In 2003, Hamilton described the impact of D’Arcy’s book: ‘It opened my eyes to the idea that the world is as it is because it must follow certain mathematical principles. He describes phenomena, like the spirals on a cauliflower, so that you see it has to be this way, because time and the activity of growth are related. It is a beautiful notion; it hangs in the mind as an explanation of life itself. Organisms start as a single cell, and then this cell splits into two, then two into four and then 8 and 16 and 32 and so on… That this procedure should create something as 34
complex as a human being is magical. That it should produce this extraordinary object at the end is one of the mysteries of existence. Thompson describes it in that way.’ Along with another D’Arcy enthusiast, Victor Pasmore, Hamilton would go on to become an important teacher at the Department of Fine Art in King’s College, Newcastle. The new Basic Design Course they introduced proved to be hugely influential on art schools around the country, and it included many On Growth and Form-based exercises. Through teaching such as Hamilton’s and exhibitions at the ICA, the work that D’Arcy wrote in Dundee in the 1910s became fully integrated into British contemporary art years after his death. Since then, many other artists have been drawn to his work, from Jackson Pollock to Andy Goldsworthy. Thanks in part to artists such as Damien Hirst, Polly Morgan and Tessa Farmer, the past few years have also seen an increasing interest in the creative possibilities of natural history collections, which has been clearly seen in the growing number of artists using the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee (which houses D’Arcy’s surviving collection of specimens, models and charts). In December 2011, the University of Dundee Museum Services became one of only six museums in the UK to receive funding from the Art Fund’s RENEW scheme, being
Through teaching such as Hamilton’s and exhibitions at the ICA, the work that D’Arcy wrote in Dundee in the 1910s became fully integrated into British contemporary art years after his death. Since then, many other artists have been drawn to his work, from Jackson Pollock to Andy Goldsworthy
awarded £100,000 over two years to build a collection of art inspired by D’Arcy Thompson, to be displayed in the museum and in special exhibitions on and off campus. The RENEW project aims to increase awareness among contemporary artists of the potential of such collections and introduce them to D’Arcy Thompson’s revolutionary ideas. So far, we have acquired works on paper by some of the key twentieth-century artists such as Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore and the St Andrews-born Wilhelmina BarnsGraham. Barns-Graham not only drew on D’Arcy’s work but also knew him when she was a child. We have also purchased significant works by more recent artists who have found inspiration in D’Arcy’s work, including Will Maclean, Susan Derges and Peter Randall-Page. As well as buying existing works, we have also commissioned new pieces, including a digital installation by Daniel Brown that was premiered at Dundee’s ‘Light Night’ last November. The project has been accompanied by a series of exhibitions in Dundee and St Andrews, with more to follow in other venues. An important aim is to get young, contemporary artists engaging with D’Arcy Thompson’s work, and last year we held the first artist’s residency in the Zoology Museum, which was undertaken by the Londonbased Scottish artist Lindsay Sekulowicz. We have also undertaken a number of projects with students at Duncan of
Jordanstone College of Art & Design (part of the University of Dundee), and are currently planning a project at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Various publications are also planned, including a special themed issue of the journal Interdisciplinary Science Review exploring the artistic and scientific legacy of D’Arcy Thompson. Matthew Jarron is curator of Museum Services at the University of Dundee. The University of Dundee is always delighted to hear from anyone wishing to be involved in the project – please contact museum@dundee.ac.uk. For details about the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, where you can see many of the works on display, visit www.dundee.ac.uk/museum.
OPPOSITE Model of chicken embryo development by Les Fils d’Emile Deyrolle, c.1890s D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, University of Dundee Museum Services ABOVE Susan Derges, Arch 2 (Winter), cameraless photograph, 2007–08 Presented by the Art Fund to the University of Dundee Museum Collections, 2012 © The artist/Purdy Hicks Gallery
Scottish Art News 35
A project commissioned by Deveron A r t s ’ Wa l k i n g I n s t i t u t e I n i t i a t i v e Briony Anderson
36
OPPOSITE Stuart McAdam, map of the Aberdeenshire area showing existing and dismantled rail lines RIGHT Passengers at Macduff Station keen to use the trains before the line was closed Courtesy Great North of Scotland Railway Association
2013
marks 50 years since the British Railways Board’s publication of Dr Richard Beeching’s ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ report, which recommended the closure of one third of Britain’s 7,000 railway stations along with 5,000 miles of the 18,000-mile rail network. The north of Scotland was particularly affected by the line closures which had a deep impact on those living and working along its routes. Author and railway expert David Spaven believes that three of the 10 worst closures were in Scotland, with the 43-mile Aberdeen – Fraserburgh route among these. By the early 1970s the transition from rail to road was complete for many living in the north of Scotland and this historical shift is to form the basis of Lines Lost, a project by Glasgow-based artist Stuart McAdam. Commissioned by Deveron Arts, a contemporary arts organisation in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, the core of the project is McAdam’s proposal to walk the area’s dismantled railway lines from which a series of talks, events and artworks will emerge. The recent renewed debates surrounding the Beeching cuts brings into sharp focus the idea of journeying and in particular the idea of ‘slow travel’, a concept which Deveron Arts has been investigating through a programme of events, residencies and projects within the local community. It is an area of specific personal interest for both McAdam and Director of Deveron Arts, Claudia Zeiske. For Zeiske, the journey itself can become the destination: ‘In a fast moving world, where arriving has become more
important than the journey – we miss so much’. (She recently undertook a five-day train journey to Lapland.) It isn’t, however, just this corner of the north-east of Scotland which is exploring slow travel. McAdam points out that the city of Perth has been granted ‘Cittaslow’ status as part of a global network of towns trying to improve the quality of life for its inhabitants. Cittaslow’s list of aims includes increasing alternative mobility such as walking and cycling, with places throughout the town for people to sit down and rest. But within the context of Lines Lost there is a paradox. Slow travel was forced upon many communities. Far longer and less pleasant journeys by road became the only means by which to travel from the towns, giving ‘slow travel’ a very different meaning for those from whom the choice was removed. McAdam will spend three months in Huntly although he has already been working with ideas for the project for many months. His work has been increasingly focused on ideas surrounding slow travel and he has been countering the rapid speed and fragmented nature of our journeys through a series of projects which allow him ‘to feel every bump in the road’. His previous projects centred on the journey have mostly involved the artist himself undertaking long journeys by various means. In A Proposal (2010) the artist cycled from his home in Scotland to Utrecht in the Netherlands where he used to live. In Union (2012) he constructed a wooden canoe with artist Neil Scott (who he has often collaborated with) using it to travel along Scottish Art News 37
The dismantled railway lines he will walk are represented on the maps as dashed lines. On his maps he will trace his journey with pencil, the lines once again becoming complete
Passengers at Carnie Junction just before the line was closed Courtesy Great North of Scotland Railway Association Former station at Knock. Photo: Stuart McAdam
38
Scotland’s internal waterways. In the same year he undertook a cycle trip through Belgium and France to Switzerland following the line of the western front trenches of the First World War. For Lines Lost the artist has proposed a journey by foot along the once well-travelled dismantled railway lines, now faint traces on the land – what McAdam has called ‘ ready-made lines in the landscape’. McAdam has been slowly making his way through the Beeching Report, a dense governmental paper, trying to gain an understanding of the context in which the decisions were made. But studying maps has proved much more fruitful, particularly comparing maps from the 1920s and ‘30s with contemporary maps. For an artist interested in slow travel, which allows him to note changes and details along the routes he walks, it isn’t surprising that he is happier studying maps, identifying the changes on paper. In this sense the map becomes for the artist what a pencil and sketchbook are for a landscape painter. The nineteenthcentury Bradshaw Guides have also proved a useful source of information about the towns and their inhabitants. These historical guides have perhaps more of a focus on the journey, and the experience of journeying itself. Although keen to remain impartial – his work is not overtly political in its intention – it would be impossible for him to consider the work without recognising the controversy and impact of the cuts. During the protests against the closures, local people in the Borders town of Hawick sent a replica coffin on the last train out of town, addressed to the transport minister. (With the closure of the Waverley Route, Hawick was nearly 50 miles from the nearest railway station.) This particular act of protest has stuck with the artist. Throughout the project he will invite various people to join him on the walks, from local people to those with specialist knowledge, possibly also local politicians and other artists. The project traverses a terrain which is both poetic (the artistic gesture) and political (the context). The work of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is of particular interest to McAdam. In 1995 Alÿs walked with a leaking can of blue paint throughout São Paulo, ‘painting’ a line, a poetic gesture. In 2004 he re-enacted this but followed a portion of the ‘Green Line’ that runs through a municipality of Jerusalem (The Green Line, 2004). Rather than being restricted to any particular medium, McAdam’s work evolves in relation to the nature of the project, producing various outcomes (drawings, collage, three-dimensional objects, film, performance, writing), although the outcomes often take the form of mapping and drawing. He traces his journeys both by hand onto the maps themselves and by GPS, which enables him to collect data quickly. The dismantled railway lines he will walk are represented on the maps as dashed lines. On his maps
Archive photograph of staff at Portsoy Station. Courtesy Ross Kerby/GNSRA
he will trace his journey with pencil, the lines once again becoming complete. There have been a number of recent exhibitions (for example Walk On: 40 years of art walking from Richard Long to Janet Cardiff, touring, 2013) and publications, which have been exploring the idea of walking as art. A recent publication by David Evans, The Art of Walking: a field guide (Blackdog Publishing, 2012), begins with a proposal from the artist Peter Liversidge: ‘I propose that you put down this book and go outside’. There is a loveliness in the simplicity of this proposal while it also speaks of the increasing number of artists making contemporary artwork that deals with walking, privileging open landscape over the studio. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the representation of the modern artist as wanderer, for example in Gustave Courbet’s Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854), had shifted to its practice as the avant-garde sought to merge art and life. Walking as a creative activity has nonetheless, in many cases, come to be represented by objects displayed in museums.
Currently there seems to be an increasing interest in art that involves walking, echoed by a resurgence of popular interest in nature and landscape writing. It would seem as if the further nature feels from us, distanced more and more from how we live and work, the more demand there is for work which re-engages with landscape, memory and the environment. Perhaps, in relation to the premise of Lines Lost, German writer and academic WG Sebald is relevant. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald walks in East Anglia recording his journey which becomes the catalyst for evocations of people and cultures past and present. There is a refusal to allow the past to fade from memory. The north-east landscape McAdam will walk into and across, has been marked by the building, running and closure of the railway lines. It is a landscape altered by human presence – artifice in the moment of its beholding long before it becomes a subject of representation. Landscape ‘naturalises a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as it were simply given and inevitable’ (WJT Mitchell, Landscape and Power, The Scottish Art News 39
University of Chicago Press, 1994, p.2). Where much artistic representation of landscape tends to obliterate history, McAdam instead looks to reawaken a consciousness of history through time spent walking, observing and engaging with the landscape. He is keen to make people aware of what
Line as it is today looking back towards Cairnie. Photo: Stuart McAdam
With McAdam’s first walk involving trudging through overgrowth at an average speed of 1 mph, this route will prove tougher than the cycle paths of his childhood along disused lines in Renfrewshire
40
happened 50 years ago. As many of the lines are now largely overgrown, reclaimed by trees, it is easy to be unaware that a line ever existed. With McAdam’s first walk involving trudging through overgrowth at an average speed of 1 mph, this route will prove tougher than the cycle paths of his childhood along disused lines in Renfrewshire. Although many railway tracks have become walking paths (in the UK there are more than 1,500 miles of cycle pathway which have been built on old rail track), because Huntly sits outside the boundary of the Cairngorms National Park it has missed out on funding which possibly could have seen the disused lines being repurposed. This fact may lead to another proposal, a proposal for a new use for the lines. McAdam comes to the north-east as an outsider, as a tourist perhaps, as someone who did not witness the impact of the cuts. But for him this is less a negative aspect or hindrance, but rather the opportunity to engage much more fully – with all his senses – with the area and local people. It can often be the case that one engages less fully with what’s familiar, what’s on the doorstep, in contrast to an unfamiliar environment. Finding his way along new lines in a new place allows for him a heightened consciousness and interest. He points to the fact that Beeching himself was very much an ‘outsider’ when he wrote his report, unaware of the patterns of life of the local inhabitants. The academic and writer Robert Macfarlane has talked about walking as a way of ‘special seeing’, a means to explore ‘the ongoing puzzle of how the landscape shapes us’. The project has immediate strength from the outset. As a proposal it is rich in subject matter and the specificities of the outcomes of the project will emerge as the project progresses. For now, McAdam isn’t sure how the outcomes of the project will manifest themselves, but he is relatively certain that any outcomes, whether in sculptural, pictorial or written form, are unlikely to be displayed in a gallery setting and are far more likely to be found in a public space like a train station, or within the landscape itself. It isn’t necessary to define his practice through categorisation. His work involves journeying, it’s socially engaged, performative, fine-art based and although his work is interested in boundaries and how they become imprinted on the land, within his practice, boundaries are irrelevant. During his undergraduate studies at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, his work involved walking – walking the city of Dundee while drawing on the ideas of
Guy Debord and the Situationist International (1957–72) and their engagement with the city in alternative, personal and creative ways, defying the commercial logic of the modern city. The works McAdam made as an outcome of these walks were often linear, whether lines on maps or line drawings. But recently he has become more interested in tone and shading and colour. Perhaps this project echoes this different way of seeing; the lines are but one aspect – the means for him to walk and explore – but it’s the spaces in between, the villages, towns and people, who made, used and lost the lines, for whom you suspect this project will have most resonance. In The Waves by Virginia Woolf, one of the book’s characters says that ‘as we walk, time comes back’. This thought is certainly apt for an artist’s journey without a clear destination. We can’t walk back into a previous time but the project doesn’t allow us to forget. By walking the lines and mapping the walks, he is also in some way mapping the lives of those living there, seeking an understanding of ourselves in relation to the landscape we travel through.
As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival Stuart McAdam and Director of Deveron Arts, Claudia Zeiske, will lead a discussion about the relationship between art, walking and transport in Scotland, after a walk around Edinburgh. Lines Lost Discussion, 1 August 2013, 4pm Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh www.edinburghartfestival.com/events www.deveron-arts.com
Briony Anderson is editor of Scottish Art News.
Bridge in Kinnoir forest. Photo: Stuart McAdam
Scottish Art News 41
J ohn B ellan y J u st i f i e d Pa i n te r Painting or art generally, as such, with all its technicalities, difficulties and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language — John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 1843–60 Expressionism denies its own status as a language – a denial that is necessary given the Expressionist claim to immediacy and stress on self as originary — Hal Foster, Art in America, 1983
42
F
or those, like me, who were privileged to be at the opening of the Scottish National Gallery’s magnificent exhibition John Bellany: A Passion for Life, marking the artist’s 70th birthday, it was a special occasion to celebrate and remember. The most striking feature about the works that held their allotted place on the walls of the grand salons of the Royal Scottish Academy was their epic scale, both in physical size and imaginative vision. All could now see that Hugh MacDiarmid’s rallying call in his essay Aesthetics in Scotland (1950) for a new ambitious ‘giantism’ in Scottish art and culture had been fully achieved with these sublime paintings of John Bellany. In contrast, wheel-chaired under his towering achievement, the frail and stormtossed figure of the artist clearly indicated that Bellany had, at great physical cost, drawn constantly on deep forces within himself in order to have produced such an awesome and sustained body of art. If Bellany has had an undaunted ‘passion for life’, it has been equally matched by his unflinching commitment to his art, regardless of the demands that have been involved for his own self and unfortunately, by consequence, those close to him. This situation he has always fully realised and accepted, as he defiantly stated in 1966, ‘I believe that it’s imperative that one is really excited and overwhelmed by the things one paints or writes about.’ Looking at Bellany’s painting within a wider art historical context – which he expects of us as well – this unswerving dedication to art and life as a necessary interdependent relationship is one of the essential characteristics of a distinctive strand of Modernism – that highly problematic artistic phenomenon termed Expressionism. Yet despite the ongoing difficulties of a secure definition, Bellany must surely be regarded as a true expressionist, and needs to be placed in the company of such giants of that modern movement as Van Gogh and Munch. This being the case, the question has to be asked: what distinguishes these particular artists and their painting within the complex histories of Modern Art? It cannot just be the often disturbing, even violent, nature of their subject matter, for this is also the case with much of the avant-garde, from Dada to Damien Hirst. If therefore it is not subjectmatter content which sets Expressionism apart, is the difference, as Hal Foster claims, to be found in the way these artists formulate their medium of expression, where the artist’s immediate presence seems so keenly felt by the use of direct and spontaneous brushstrokes of raw jarring colour and distorted forms? Certainly all such striking features might be expected to be found in expressionist art, but most of these obvious tropes can be readily faked and cynically parodied, as could be seen with the brief outbreak of Neo-
OPPOSITE Self-Portrait, 1966, oil on board, 159.8x142 cm Collection of the artist ABOVE My Father, 1966, oil on hardboard, 122x91.2 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © John Bellany
Underneath the father’s workworn, weather-beaten hands he holds a painting of two fishermen by his son, which simultaneously reveals that his son’s love of art is the reason why he too, like his father, cannot be a ‘mariner’
Scottish Art News 43
ABOVE The Bereaved One, 1968, oil on hardboard, 91.5x91.4 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art RIGHT Pourquoi?, 1967, oil on board, 173.6x180.2 cm. Collection of the artist
Expressionism on the international art scene during the 1980s. Such dubious exercises in stylistic simulation and contrived ‘immediacy’ are convenient examples of what Foster calls ‘the expressive fallacy’. However, I would contend that Foster’s blanket term should not necessarily be taken as a universal critical put-down of Expressionism and that by using a currently unfashionable biographical, rather than a theoretical semantic approach, one finds that there are a number of authentic expressionist painters who resist and challenge Foster’s accusations. John Bellany is such an artist. Needless to say Expressionism is not just another considered career choice for the aspiring artist, but the inevitable outcome of a certain set of social and personal conditions which have inextricably imposed themselves on such an artist as Bellany. Thus one of the central factors in the making of a genuine expressionist is the need for total integration of their life with their art – not some vague notion of art ‘reflecting’ life, but a state of mutual interdependence. Yet paradoxically this driving desire of the expressionist artist is invariably thwarted as the merger of art and life cannot be successfully achieved because of the artist’s own historical circumstances and emotional personality. For instance, Van Gogh’s art is deeply motivated by utopian ideals for a return to a primitive harmonious community; yet sadly he himself was burdened in real life with a suspicious and even misanthropic nature. Munch’s art is also driven by a profound longing for union, in his 44
case, with the female presence, but he constantly found to his bitter cost that women from his own personal experience proved to be devious and destructive. Turning now to our third northern European expressionist and the ‘catch 22’ impasse which John Bellany had to confront: on the one hand, he was blessed by being born into the kind of caring and supportive community of fisher folk of which Van Gogh could only dream – ‘my childhood was idyllic’, as Bellany himself put it. Yet on the other hand, to fulfil the compulsive demands required to become a totally committed expressionist painter, he had to forsake, but certainly not forget, his former life in order to follow his ordained artistic calling. Thus constantly pulled between two irreconcilable attractions which cannot be mutually accommodated Bellany summed up his position, ‘I love to paint, whenever I am painting. At heart, however I am a mariner.’ Yet as Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued in his anthropological writings it is out of such irresolvable social or personal dilemmas – what the ancient Greeks called ‘aporia’ – that myth emerges, and there is undoubtedly a strong mythic dimension to the art of John Bellany. The emotional and psychological tension created by the divided loyalties at the heart of Bellany’s personal and professional situation is poignantly captured in one of his most moving family portraits. My Father (1966) is an unusual work within Bellany’s oeuvre, in that for once the figure is not presented frontally and looking straight out
Allegory, 1964, oil on canvas, 212.5x413.5 cm. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
towards the artist, but has his head turned obliquely away to gaze searchingly into a mysterious space created within the picture itself. Yet despite this lack of eye contact there still seems to be an unspoken empathy and understanding between father and son. In this painting the father, who unselfishly chose to give up his inherited, but highly dangerous life as a fisherman because of his wife’s anxieties over his safety at sea, declares his superior devotion on his tattooed arm – ‘True Love, Nancy’. Underneath the father’s work-worn, weather-beaten hands he holds a painting of two fishermen by his son, which simultaneously reveals that his son’s love of art is the reason why he too, like his father, cannot be a ‘mariner’. Another common trait of expressionist painting is the intense focus on visual analysis of the artist’s life through the constant use of self-portraiture. This does not only require intense self-scrutiny by close and constant observation, but usually also involves some form of self-dramatisation, with the artist creating a cast of selfappointed roles and self-directed scenarios. For example, in an attempt to come to terms with his conflicting desires between wanting to be both mariner and artist, Bellany painted Self-Portrait (1965). In the manner of Courbet and Van Gogh’s painter/worker, he presents an image of himself dressed as a towering figure in full fisherman’s gear, standing on the quay of a fishing port. Yet for all this pictorial posturing Bellany also discreetly reveals to us that
in the end his true vocation is to be an artist by showing in his hand his paint brushes, the tools of his real trade. The other important commonality which binds Bellany to Van Gogh and Munch is that they were all brought up in the northern European Protestant faith of either Lutheranism or Calvinism. Although each reacted to this inheritance differently, they all drew deeply on their early religious experiences and readings of biblical literature to fire up the subject content and iconographical significance of their art, thus challenging Foster’s accusation that Expressionism is only concerned with ‘immediacy and stress on self as originary (sic).’ Bellany in particular, in his richly-referenced work, continually draws on his scriptural knowledge and his creative relationship with the art of the past. For instance his profound artistic and theological questioning come together in his harrowing paintings entitled Pourquoi? (1967). Within these extremely disturbing works he draws upon the iconography of Christ’s Passion in religious painting, as well as the harrowing images of Goya’s Horrors of War, in his resolute determination to confront universal evil in the form of the mutilated victims of the Holocaust. Furthermore Bellany also uses his religious inheritance, and the biblical beliefs he was brought up to follow, in order to examine his own spiritual condition. This can be seen in another of his memorable family portraits, The Bereaved One (1968) in which Bellany’s bedridden widowed grandmother sternly stares out at the Scottish Art News 45
Bellany constantly returned to the crucial issue of sin and salvation which stalked his life and haunted his imagination
46
young artist with the same severe judgemental gaze found in a Byzantine icon. Lying before this figure of matriarchal spiritual authority is the family Bible spread out on the bed and significantly opened at the Gospel of St John, with its message of divine love and forgiveness for those who truly believe and repent their sins. Punishment and redemption are recurring themes throughout Bellany’s art and usually have a highly personal dimension to them. Up until his miraculous escape from the threatening clutches of a self-inflicted liver-damaged death in the 1980s, Bellany constantly returned to the crucial issue of sin and salvation which stalked his life and haunted his imagination. Consequently only epic paintings of high moral and spiritual integrity could do full service and justice to the all-pervasive themes of good and evil, righteousness and redemption, thus turning his paintings into great visual sermons. In such work the central tenets of the Christian faith are addressed and transformed in a highly personal and symbolic manner, from the crucified fish triptych of Allegory (1964), through to the sacred ritual of the sacraments obliquely implied in the grotesque fish gutting of Obsession (1968). All these spiritual battles and personal doubts, which had long tormented this passionate Scottish artist, are brought together to confront each other in Bellany’s supreme multi-layered masterpiece, the ironically entitled Homage to John Knox (1969). It is little wonder then that Bellany has consequently been enthralled by that seminal analysis of the Scottish psyche, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, where the Calvinist themes of predestination and free will, and the interdependence of sin and salvation are played out to their devastating conclusion. Significantly Bellany pays homage to his literary predecessor in an imaginary portrait, where in biblical mode, but in this case wearing an appropriate tartan plaid, the good Ettrick Shepherd (1967) is seen tending his flock, but is also ominously being stalked by his doppelgänger’s satanic schatten. Scottish Calvinism is an extreme religion of Manichaean contrasts, especially when it comes to blessed rewards and eternal punishments. Yet interestingly Bellany felt it necessary to turn to ancient Greek myth to devise an appropriate scenario of retribution for his fallen state. As a concurrent pictorial commentary on his relentless alcoholic assault on his liver, Bellany produced a series of paintings in the 1980s on the theme of the Olympian gods’ vengeance visited on the original rebellious hero of mankind – the firestealing Prometheus. Within Bellany’s painting, however, it is the artist himself who is the substitute victim of divine wrath and appropriately it is his own familiar, the puffin, who is the relentless agent of his pain and suffering. Yet through the gospel promise the manacles of punishment that bind the sinner to his sin can also be transformed
OPPOSITE The Obsession (Whence do we come? Who are we? Whither do we go?), 1966 Oil on board, 212x242.6 cm. Courtesy City Art Centre, Edinburgh © John Bellany ABOVE The Ettrick Shepherd, 1967, oil on canvas. The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation © John Bellany
into the unbreakable bond of faith. The great Victorian maritime hymn sung in the chapel of Bellany’s ‘idyllic’ childhood asked the searching question: ‘Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?’ Against all the odds it seems so. Despite everything he himself, and all the contingences of his life and art, have thrown his way, John Bellany still retains a tenacious grip on his own personal destiny and an unwavering faith in his artistic mission. Hopefully this will continue to be so for a good time to come. Bill Hare is a curator and writer and Honorary Teaching Fellow in Scottish Art History at the University of Edinburgh.
Poetry written in response to Bellany’s work, and etchings made in response to the poems, will form a collaborative exhibition John Bellany and George Bruce – The Sea Folios showing at The Watermill gallery until 22 July 2013. The Watermill, Mill Street, Aberfeldy, PH15 2BG t: 01887 822896 | www.aberfeldywatermill.com The exhibition John Bellany: A Passion for Life was held at the National Galleries of Scotland from 1 November 2012 to 27 January 2013. Scottish Art News 47
Allan Ramsay Mungo Campbell
300
years after his birth, Allan Ramsay (1713–84) is best known as a portrait painter whose elegant style, particularly in his portraits of women, sets him apart from his British contemporaries. Over 20 years since the last major exhibition devoted to his work, Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment will be the major event marking the tercentenary of this quintessential figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. The exhibition, and accompanying publication, based on significant new research will examine the intellectual context in which Ramsay painted a number of his most important portraits, including that of Hunterian founder Dr William Hunter. Bringing together important loans from British public and private collections, the exhibition will centre on a selection of the finest works from across Ramsay’s 30 years as a painter. Among those from private collections are portraits which have rarely, if ever, travelled for exhibition. Also featured are the artist’s drawings, some of the most beautiful by any British artist. Published books, pamphlets, and other materials will help illustrate Ramsay’s fascinating place in the intellectual and cultural life of Edinburgh, London, Paris and Rome in the middle of the eighteenth century. Allan Ramsay was born in Edinburgh, shortly after the union of 1707. His father’s literary fame and social and intellectual connections in Scotland and beyond provided the young painter with a strong sense of his own position in the world. Ramsay’s career took him from the small but important Scottish group of patrons among whom he found his first sitters, to the Hanoverian court of King George III and some of the most fashionable and influential salons of London and Paris. Ramsay was naturally sociable and a capable linguist, and away from his studio he was deeply engaged in the issues of his day, from the global political economy involving British interests in India and North America, to matters of taste, antiquarian discovery and literature. A close associate and friend of many key figures at the heart of the Enlightenment in Britain, Ramsay’s published writing included significant works on art, politics and archaeology. New research undertaken for the exhibition explores the importance of Ramsay’s Scottish background, his association with the women who formed such an important part of these circles, and his lifelong interests in antiquarian and literary matters. For all his success, public recognition for Ramsay’s career as a painter was waning well over a decade before he 48
Flora MacDonald © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
That one or two key portraits by Ramsay have remained in the wider consciousness after two centuries, might probably be put down to the importance of the sitter rather than the painter
Lady Caroline Fox, Baroness Holland (1723–74), 1766. Private collection. Photo: Dave Penman-Moonfleet Photography
Scottish Art News 49
died. A dramatic numerical decline in production has long been ascribed to an accident which damaged his arm in 1773, the discomfort from which he apparently lived with throughout his last years. While this undoubtedly finally curtailed Ramsay’s work in the studio, new research clearly shows that the artist’s whole career had followed a very different path to that of contemporary ‘rivals’, William Hogarth or Sir Joshua Reynolds. By the late 1760s, Ramsay’s long-held ambition for recognition as a writer, a thinker, and as an engaged and active member of the social, intellectual and political circles from which he drew his sitters, had come to fruition; his facility at painting had perhaps provided a means to an end, and in choosing to frame his career in rather different terms to those more commonly pursued by contemporaries, it is not altogether surprising that Ramsay’s reputation should have proved so vulnerable so rapidly. By contrast, firstly Hogarth, and then, most notably, Reynolds, through his portraits, his writing and lectures on art, his position as first President of the Royal Academy, were overwhelmingly predominant presences in the formation of our understanding of a national visual culture during the eighteenth century and in the immediate formation of its historiography. If Ramsay could not avoid entirely the commentary of a clientele whose frequent response was to place him in competition with Reynolds, he appears to have done all he could to remain away from ‘contest’ on the public stage; if his reputation and subsequent influence was dimmed as a consequence, it can be argued that his painting, in the last years of his active career, was able to follow a path which avoided the clamour of fashion and celebrity, finding instead a powerful resonance with the finesse and frank honesty achieved in the very greatest portraits by his finest European contemporaries. From the outset, Ramsay had sought to place himself on a European stage. By the late 1760s, it could well be said that he had accomplished this ambition through his brush. He enjoyed considerable financial security and could afford to turn his attention elsewhere. While it is therefore not altogether surprising that Ramsay’s reputation as one of the finest portrait painters of the Enlightenment in Britain should have become so diminished in the minds even of some of his closest associates at the time of his death in 1784, it comes as something of a shock that his career should ultimately have been memorialised in obituaries with commentary on his writing rather than his painting. The writing itself has equally been almost entirely eclipsed by the passage of two centuries, a common reputational fate of many capable artists and writers, but one which, even by the early nineteenth century, almost entirely removed Ramsay’s name from British art history. That one or two key portraits by Ramsay have remained in the wider consciousness after two centuries, might probably be put down to the importance of the sitter rather than the painter. 50
Ramsay’s relationship with many of his most important sitters was an unusual one, somewhat distinct from the conventional and professional business transaction which so defined the common studio practice of contemporary portraiture
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment will seek to turn that perception on its head and to underline that it was no accident that it was Ramsay who produced the defining portraits of two of the most influential figures of the European Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. From his upbringing and education in the Edinburgh of post-union Scotland, through his apprenticeships in the studios of some of the last great exponents of the Italian Baroque, to his intellectual curiosity across contemporary debates in philosophy, politics, economics, antiquarianism and taste, Ramsay found himself uniquely well-equipped to seize the moment when, in 1766, the opportunity presented itself to portray two of the key intellects of his age. Following significant new research, the exhibition and publication will show that one of the prime reasons Ramsay accomplished this task so successfully was precisely because he was not Reynolds; the Scot’s relationship with British art can be seen to be a rather more complex story than the traditional account of a career-long rivalry might suggest. Ramsay, ambitious though he undoubtedly was, scarcely saw himself engaged in a professional and commercial struggle against the competition which so defined the careers of contemporary portrait painters. The evidence suggests that intellectually, financially and socially, Ramsay had defined himself and his painting in altogether different terms, almost from the outset. Ramsay’s relationship with many of his most important sitters was an unusual one, somewhat distinct from the conventional and professional business transaction which so defined the common studio practice of contemporary portraiture. From Richard Mead and William Hunter, through Rousseau and Hume, to Grisel Stanhope and Caroline Fox, our knowledge of Ramsay’s encounters with his sitters is characterised by relationships which went far beyond the fulfillment of a commercial arrangement. The possibilities inherent in portraiture, what our powers of perception can and cannot achieve as we attempt to understand our fellow companions, were questions which lay at the heart of much
William Hunter © The Hunterian
eighteenth-century discussion surrounding the nature of our humanity and our comprehension of our place in the world. Ramsay, together with many of his most significant sitters, was closely associated with those debates. The significance of his portraits, their creation and their continued presence in the surroundings which fostered the very social interaction at the core of such debate, will have escaped neither artist nor sitter. Ramsay did not paint for the audiences attending the growing number of public exhibitions; although a member of the Society of Artists, he never exhibited with them. Nor did he join the Royal Academy at its foundation in 1768. A profitable and socially important facet of his art, his royal portraiture, found its way onto the quasi-public walls of palaces and diplomatic residences across the expanding British Empire. The work which represents the other facet, exquisite portraits, imbued as likenesses with empathetic honesty, and the animation of lively exchange and conversation among friends and intellectual equals, was painted for an ever more closely defined circle of well-travelled and intellectually able aristocrats
and their families. These were scarcely seen outside those circles from the first, only occasionally engraved for wider consumption, and rarely discussed in art-historical discourse. It is these wonderful paintings which represent the greatest joys of Ramsay’s art, the greatest treasures of this exhibition. Mungo Campbell is Deputy Director of the Hunterian at the University of Glasgow. Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment 13 September 2013 – 5 January 2014 The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ Admission £5/£3 t: 0141 330 4221 www.glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday 11am–4pm
Scottish Art News 51
Frowning Firs and Foaming Alfred East in Scotland Kenneth McConkey
F
ew folk in Scotland this year will be celebrating the centenary of the founding of the art gallery in Kettering, and the death of the artist, Sir Alfred East, who gave it its name – yet there is every reason to do so. While he is remembered today for paintings of Japan sponsored by The Fine Art Society, and large Cotswold landscapes at the Royal Academy, little is known about his early career in Glasgow. East was born in the Northamptonshire town in 1844 into a family of boot and shoe manufacturers. When the firm was expanding Alfred, following his marriage in 1874, moved to Cathcart as its Scottish representative.1 It was in the ‘second city of the Empire’, while growing the business, that he attended classes at The Glasgow School of Art, and discovered his latent abilities as a draughtsman. In 1869 the school had obtained a substantial endowment from the engraver, James Haldane, and for a time the words ‘Haldane Academy’ were added to its name. It moved to new premises at the Corporation Buildings in Sauchiehall Street and early morning and evening classes were added to the curriculum, enabling those men who worked during the day to develop their skills outside business hours.2 Rubbing shoulders with younger students like John Lavery and William Kennedy, East’s artistic ambition flourished.3 Listening to the current talk about successful Scots painters, led him, now well into his 30s, to review his career and eventually to leave the security of the firm. By 1880, the conversation had begun to change. Pictures filtering through into annual exhibitions of the 52
OPPOSITE A Frosty Sunset, c.1888, Tullie House Gallery and Museum, Carlisle ABOVE The Last Days of the Tuilleries, 1882. Courtesy Roy Hargrave Fine Art
Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts that caught the attention were those painted by Dutch and French painters and they were lent, more often than not, by Scottish collectors. They revealed a taste for landscape and figure painting en plein air, following new teachings that questioned the dogma of the art school system. The only way to stay in the swim was to go to Paris to further one’s art education. So at the age of 37, the former shoe salesman registered at the overcrowded atelier Julian – at the same time as Lavery, Kennedy, Thomas Millie Dow and Alexander Roche. One of the few precious images we have of this time is an etching of the last days of the Tuileries Palace, sacked during the Commune and now, in the miserable winter of 1882, being demolished. It complements Kennedy’s painting of the subject. Small watercolours place East in Barbizon in the spring when he realised that the most interesting work at the Salon was produced by modern realists working in the countryside. His first exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1883, Dewy Morning, was reputed to have been the result of his time spent there.4 At this point East was already showing his work in Glasgow, Paisley, Dumbarton, Kilmarnock, Stirling and Edinburgh; he had painted along the banks of the Clyde and made forays to the East Neuk of Fife.5 Work from these early years comes directly from recognisable sources. We might relate watercolours such as A Glimpse of the Clyde, Helensburgh for instance, to the popular ‘sheep in snow’ compositions of Joseph Farquharson, a painter who East evidently admired.6 While the older artist’s settings are generalised and East’s are specific, it is difficult now to understand the appeal of such chilly, brooding landscapes
and the transformation we might expect, following his Paris experience, was apparently on hold. The painter was evidently unwilling to reject formulae that might be successful with the more traditionally-minded Scots collectors. Thus while the younger men were painting in the kailyard, the Glasgow Herald reported, in December 1883, that East had just returned from the Highlands and had ‘got towards completion a large upright [canvas] of A Highland River in Spate’.7 This is almost certainly A Wintry Dirge, (unlocated), shown at the Royal Academy in 1884 and an exercise in the universally popular and romantic ‘land of Rob Roy’ landscape.8 This picture was one of the first of a series painted at Killin in Perthshire, where the Dochart and Lochay rivers flow together over falls leading into the western end of Loch Tay. Flat rocks at the confluence made it possible for the painter to get close to the scene and to the island in mid-stream known as Innis Bhuidhe, the burial place of the McNab clan. This ‘Dark Island’ fired the imagination and became the subject of one of East’s two Academy pieces in 1885.9 He had caught the spirit of the place and according to The Magazine of Art, ... the little isle, with its frowning firs, the foaming river, the lowering cloud canopy, with its streak of luminous sky behind the dark mountains, are ominous with mystery and gloom.10 Although by this time East had moved to London, he had not given up on Scotland, and indeed, during that summer he returned to the Highlands.11 He also retained his Glasgow studio for at least two more years, his peripatetic existence signifying a painter who was keen to keep all his options open.12 The Academy exhibitions of 1887 and 1888 both contained ‘autumn’ canvases probably painted in Perthshire, alongside a final Killin picture, A Frosty Sunset.13 New London connections, specifically with The Fine Art Society in 1888, would take him off to paint in Cornwall and from there to Japan the following year – and the regular contact with the Falls of Dochart was severed. Nevertheless, it is worth asking what image of Scotland this English artist presented. Although he not only saw the work of Salon stars like Bastien-Lepage, but also travelled to Barbizon to experience at first-hand the enormous student enthusiasm for the work of Millet and Corot, these influences counted for little when a living had to be made and a family supported.14 Only in later years Scottish Art News 53
The Dark Island, 1885, unlocated Courtesy Sotheby’s
would the ‘silver twilights and rose pink dawns’ of Corot have their effect. In the 198os, unlike Lavery, East must have been acutely conscious of the great risks he was taking, and as a late starter he could ill afford experiment. The Killin suite effectively separates him from his younger student friends, emerging as the radical Glasgow Boys. It shows a painter keen to make haste. He needed to be successful, and while he might admire the work of his Scots contemporaries, there already were successful formulae that could be adopted and developed, and these were represented by the more mature and successful London Scots. The Killin canvases remind us of the power of ‘highlandism’, as practised by Farquharson, Peter Graham, John MacWhirter, John Everett Millais and many others. Mountains are shrouded in mist, rivers are always in spate, and trees, the shapely evidence of grand design in East’s later canvases, are bruised and battered in this romantic world of ‘gloamin’ and ‘mirk’. Kenneth McConkey is a specialist in British and Irish art at the turn of the twentieth century, and the author of many books and articles. Since 1978 he has selected, catalogued or contributed to exhibitions in Britain, the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan. Latterly he has produced monographs on Sir John Lavery and Sir George Clausen in 2010 and 2012 for Atelier Books. With Paul Johnson, he is co-author of Alfred East: Lyrical Landscape Painter (2009).
1. See Paul Johnson and Kenneth McConkey, Alfred East, Lyrical Landscape Painter, 2009, (Sansom and Co), pp. 10-11. 2. For background information on the Haldane Academy and The Glasgow School of Art see G Goldie Killin, ‘The Glasgow School of Art’, in The Palette, Glasgow School of Art Annual, 1922, pp. 12-14; John M Groundwater, Glasgow School of Art Through a Century, 1840–1940, 1940 (privately printed by Glasgow Corporation). 3. East and Lavery remained friends – the latter borrowing East’s studio in Spencer Street, Westminster, in 1896. Lavery gave several small Moroccan canvases to East and painted at least one sketch of the painter’s daughters. 4. This picture remains unlocated. 5. Johnson and McConkey, 2009, p. 61. He would go on to show at Stirling and Dundee. 6. Farquharson’s A Joyless Winter Day, (Tate Britain) shown at the Royal Academy in 1883, was for instance one of his most successful works. 7. The Glasgow Herald, 12 December 1883, p. 4. 8. In the Land of Rob Roy was the title of an untraced East landscape shown at the Paisley Art Institute in 1885. 9. The Dark Island, 43.5 x 72 ins remained in the artist’s family until its sale at Sotheby’s on 19 November 1980, as Rapids. The Art Journal, 1885, p. 226, regarded it along with East’s Where the Sunlight Lingers, as ‘promising works’. A smaller version, 22 x 36 ins dated 1884, was donated to Glasgow Art Gallery in 1918 by the trustees of George Dickson. A further Dochart picture, Where Rapids Roar, 24 x 36 ins was sold at Christie’s South Kensington, 29 June 2011. 10. ‘Current Art III’, The Magazine of Art, 1885, p. 430. 11. The Glasgow Herald, 4 December 1885, p. 10, notes that East had spent the summer,’ partly in the neighborhood of London and partly in the Highlands of Scotland’. 12. See The Glasgow Herald, 7 March 1887, p. 8. 13. East showed An Autumn Afterglow (Dudley Art Gallery) in 1887, and An Autumn Morning, (Manchester City Art Galleries) in 1888. 14. See Johnson and McConkey, 2009, pp. 12, 87. Corot and Millet both died in 1875 and the popularity of their work in Britain and internationally continued to rise throughout the 1880s.
Sir Alfred East: Centenary Exhibition 31 July – 28 September 2013 Alfred East Gallery, Kettering Museum and Art Gallery Bowling Green Road, Kettering NN15 7QX t: 01536 410333 | www.kettering.gov.uk 54
EILEEN HOGAN AT LITTLE S PA R TA
11 JUNE – 17 AUGUST
THE FLEMING COLLECTION A N
E M B A S S Y
F O R
S C O T T I S H
A R T
13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU w w w. f l e m i n g c o l l e c t i o n . c o m Tu e s d a y – S a t u r d a y 1 0 – 5 . 3 0 FREE ADMISSION Exhibition sponsored by:
Scottish Art News 55
2013 Art Market Round-up
Auction houses often hog the headlines but it is galleries which are
formed 173 lots at the auction. In a busy saleroom all but 13 sold with
the foot soldiers of the art market, encouraging contemporary artists,
almost half fetching more than their high estimates.
helping with the development of collections, dealing with artists’
estates and sometimes changing public perceptions. The vital role that
added its buyers’ premium, which is about the price that a single top
they play was emphasised by recent sales of works associated with two
of the range Colourist painting fetches these days, but buyers went
very different Scottish galleries at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh.
away with all manner of good things. Hunter’s charming ink and
watercolour sketch Wash Day, once in Honeyman’s collection and
The first was 40 Years of St Andrews Fine Art: The Complete
The auction totalled £338,300 once Lyon & Turnbull had
Collection comprising the remaining stock from the gallery run for four
estimated at £300 to £500, sold for £1,900 on the hammer. The Big
decades in the Fife coastal town by Jim and Margaret Carruthers.
Orange Cat by Douthwaite, a rather tragic figure who died in Dundee
They set up their business in the early 1970s at a time when the
in 2002, which had been estimated at £1,200 to £1,800, fetched a
market for Scottish art was at a low point. Over the years St Andrews
record hammer price of £4,200. The highest hammer prices in the
Fine Art helped raise the profile of Scottish artists, squeezing in up
sale were £19,000 for the Victorian painter Waller Hugh Paton’s
to 600 pictures for exhibitions that Jim and Margaret themselves
Summer Evening, Penlester, Arran and £14,000 for Anne Redpath’s
describe as ‘more Royal Academy than Charles Saatchi’. On one
twentieth-century work White Roses. Not big money by art world
occasion their guest of honour, the artist James McIntosh Patrick,
standards but a fitting tribute to one of Scotland’s best-known east-
opened an exhibition from a soap box at the gallery door much to the
coast art galleries.
amusement of the crowd queuing around the block.
in Edinburgh from 1966 until it closed in 1992, doubling up as a
It may have lacked the glamour of the big specialist Scottish
art sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s but it worked. The couple befriended and helped Scottish contemporary artists such as Joe McIntyre and John Mackie and found themselves drawn to sketches and minor works by well-known names, providing a crucial entry point into the market for collectors. They acquired collections of affordable works by artists such as Sir William McTaggart, Charles McCall, Pat Douthwaite and William Johnstone and handled the Colourist George Leslie Hunter’s sketchbooks which were formerly owned by Dr TJ Honeyman.
Appropriately some of the Hunter sketchbooks were
in the sale at Lyon & Turnbull which marked the final chapter of St Andrews Fine Art. Jim and Margaret closed the gallery in 2008 but had continued to deal on behalf of their clients and their portfolio of artists. Now they have finally retired and their remaining stock
56
The Demarco Gallery was a powerhouse of creativity
performance venue during the Edinburgh Fringe. Jane MacAllister was Deputy Artistic Director to Richard Demarco, making many of his ideas work and helping to transform Edinburgh into a centre of cultural excellence. Following the death of her husband Justin Dukes, the founding Managing Director of Channel 4 Television, she decided to sell her archive and art collection relating to the Demarco Gallery at Lyon & Turnbull as she concentrates on a new career and bringing up their children.
The archive was particularly fascinating, including more
than 100 letters written to Jane by the poet George Mackay Brown, a recorded interview with Joseph Beuys, books by and Christmas cards from Ian Hamilton Finlay along with rare catalogues, brochures and leaflets providing a unique record of the Demarco Gallery’s history. Estimated at £2,000 to £3,000, it sold for a hammer price of £4,000. Some 150 paintings, works on paper, posters and sculptures by Scottish artists such as William Wylie, Peter Howson and Demarco himself and artists from elsewhere including Beuys and Barry Flanagan were also auctioned for three- or four-figure sums.
The Demarco Gallery was a complete contrast to St
Andrews Fine Art: cooler, more urban, more international and OPPOSITE FROM TOP George Leslie Hunter (1879–1931) Wash Day, ink and watercolour, 11.5x18.5 cm Artist’s original sketchbook from the collection of TJ Honeyman Sold for £1,900 Waller Hugh Paton RSA., RSW. (1828–95) Summer Evening, Penlester, Arran, 1875, oil on canvas, 71x123 cm Sold for £19,000 ABOVE Joseph Beuys (1921–86) The Scottish Symphony/Celtic Kinlcoh Rannoch, 134.5x30.5 cm Sold for £900 RIGHT Paul Neagu (1938–2004) Royal Hyphen, wood and metal construction, 63.5x63.5x89 cm Sold for £9,000
operating across a much broader cultural spectrum. It promoted links with Eastern Europe, established international connections for Scottish artists and was not afraid of clashing with the Scottish artistic establishment. But the two sales at Lyon & Turnbull have provided us with a timely reminder of just how important galleries have been to the development of Scottish art over the past few decades. Will Bennett is the former Art Sales Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph who now works for the arts consultants Cawdell Douglas.
All images courtesy Lyon & Turnbull
Scottish Art News 57
Books
Raeburn is inextricably linked to the Enlightenment in
Scotland, a concept that itself defies strict definition, but is generally understood as a period of time that began in the mid-eighteenth century and continued into the first few decades of the nineteenth, when Edinburgh enjoyed a burgeoning reputation as ‘the Athens of the North’ and was an intellectual, cultural and economic hub. During this time, as Lloyd explains in the book’s introduction, Leith was a trading port of global significance, and this trade bought great wealth to the city of Edinburgh. This in turn facilitated a greater demand for luxuries, including portraits, among the newly wealthy mercantile class, meaning that the commissioning of portraiture was no longer the sole reserve of Edinburgh’s great institutions, the aristocracy and landed gentry.
The Enlightenment in Scotland was very much a male-
dominated phenomenon and, correspondingly, it is frequently argued that Raeburn was more successful in his treatment of male subjects than female ones. This notion is addressed in the publication by the emerging scholar Jordan Mearns. He argues that nationalism, Henry Raeburn: Context, Reception and Reputation
and a feeling that Raeburn’s male portraits of the Enlightenment
Viccy Coltman and Stephen Lloyd (editors)
intelligentsia perhaps better encapsulate a sense of national identity,
Edinburgh University Press, 2013
have led to his portraits of women being unjustly eclipsed. He argues
Paperback £29.99
that Raeburn’s depictions of women differ from his male portraits as the modes in which he depicted female sitters show a greater
A new publication Henry Raeburn: Context, Reception and Reputation,
awareness of London’s portrait fashions; this is illustrated by the clear
co-edited by Stephen Lloyd and Dr Viccy Coltman, has brought
comparisons drawn between Raeburn’s portrait of Lady Gordon-
Scotland’s premier portrait painter back into focus. Despite a towering
Cumming (exhibited at the RA, London in 1817) and Lawrence’s
reputation in his native Scotland, Raeburn has not achieved the kind of
portrait of Isabella Hutchinson (1803–15). Mearns observes that they
wider acclaim enjoyed by his English near-contemporaries Reynolds,
are more compositionally daring than his male portraits. In many
Lawrence and Gainsborough. This multi-authored volume, which
cases female subjects did present the artist with greater aesthetic
brings together 14 essays on the painter by different scholars, aims to
potentialities, and Raeburn’s depictions of women show greater
recover Raeburn from his artistic isolation, examining the wider social,
variety in the sitters’ poses, expressions and clothing. Indeed, it is
economic and political contexts in which his art was able to flourish.
often argued that Raeburn’s archetypal portraits of the seated male
scholar, depicted with accoutrements against a dark background,
Raeburn was a prolific and highly successful painter,
producing over 1,000 canvases in his lifetime. His professional success
head and face illuminated, are undeniably formulaic. In this chapter,
was facilitated not only by his undeniable talent, but also, we learn,
Mearns also draws attention to Raeburn’s sensitivity to age as well
his work ethic and friendly, sociable demeanour. He forged his entire
as character, which led him to produce sympathetic portraits of older
career in his native city of Edinburgh, in which he was a well-known
female sitters, such as his portrait of Mrs Malcolm (1820).
and highly respected figure, and where he was born in 1756 and died
in 1823. He was much decorated in his lifetime, receiving a knighthood
treatment of faces, and these always form the focus of his portraits.
from George IV and the appointment of King’s Limner in Scotland in
It makes particular sense that the head, as the seat of reason and
1822, in addition to his election as a member of the Royal Academy
intellect, would be privileged in his portraits of male Enlightenment
in London in 1815. Raeburn’s life and work are generally considered to
figures. It is argued by Matthew Craske in the publication that
be under-researched, and this new book reveals that there were many
Raeburn’s spontaneous style of painting (he was known to have
facets to the artist, aside from his chief incarnation as ‘portrait painter
painted directly onto the canvas without any preliminary drawing)
of the Scottish Enlightenment’. Its chapters variously remind us that he
allowed his sitters to appear more relaxed, therefore lending a pleasing
was also a businessman, an intellectual and a committed family man.
intimacy and directness to his portraits. His broad style of painting
58
It is often noted that Raeburn was particularly skilled in his
Sir Henry Raeburn, Portrait of Isabella McLeod, Mrs. James Gregory, c.1798, oil on canvas Fyvie Castle, Aberdeenshire Reproduced by kind premission of The National Trust for Scotland Photo Library
enabled the artist to very effectively suggest the character and
addition to other Scottish painters. His decision to base his entire
presence of his sitters. Despite his great sensitivity to the character
career in Edinburgh, not relocating to London, was in many ways
and individuality of his sitters Raeburn was not considered a ‘flatterer’
a brave one; the latter was Britain’s portrait capital, as well as the
in the manner of Lawrence or Reynolds. He evidently admired
centre of its empire. We learn that the only point at which Raeburn
intelligence, spirit and a sound sense of morality in his subjects, and
briefly considered moving to London was in the aftermath of the
was able to gently suggest these qualities in his depictions, both
financial troubles that sadly dominated the latter years of his life.
male and female, wherever they were present. It is perhaps because
it represents such a departure from his standard mode of grounded,
within London’s art scene through exhibiting annually at the Royal
relatively modest painting that Raeburn’s outstanding ‘beauty
Academy. Interestingly, we learn that only a tiny handful of the
portrait’ Margaret Macdonald, Mrs Scott Moncrieff (c.1814), has
portraits he sent down to be exhibited in London over a 30-year
received such particular attention among Raeburn’s oeuvre.
period were of women, suggesting that the artist felt his male
portraits likely to incite greater critical interest and a more positive
Raeburn’s relationship with London is addressed in a
However, Raeburn did manage to maintain a presence
number of the book’s chapters. Coltman reveals that portrait painting
reception. We learn too in Stana Nenadic’s essay that his portraits
in this era was a highly competitive commercial enterprise, in which
of women were completely unrepresented in the 50 or so engraved
Raeburn, despite his perceived artistic isolation, was frequently
prints of Raeburn’s work produced in the artist’s lifetime. There
competing for commissions against esteemed London artists, in
was great demand for prints of this type in Edinburgh during the Scottish Art News 59
latter decades of Raeburn’s life, and they were an effective way of expanding an artist’s audience, although it appears not to have been an area that particularly interested Raeburn. Works of this type were often kept in portfolios by wealthy collectors, or framed and displayed on walls, and tended to depict eminent male sitters who played an active part in shaping contemporary society. Evidently there was no demand for prints of unknown female sitters who lacked a role in public life.
Lloyd reveals in the book’s first chapter how the collapse of
Raeburn’s family shipping business, Henry Raeburn & Co., ultimately led to the artist’s bankruptcy in 1808. Poignantly, this meant that
Rethinking Highland Art: The Visual Significance of Gaelic Culture/
towards the end of his life, a time when he should have been able to
Sealladh as ùr air Ealain na Gàidhealtachd: Brìgh Lèirsinn ann an
enjoy the fruits of a lengthy, highly successful career, Raeburn found
Dualchas nan Gàidheal
himself owing huge sums of money, under great financial strain and
Macdonald, M, Lindsay, L, Waite, LJ Bateman, M (editors)
forced to work harder than ever. This unfortunate episode forced him
Royal Scottish Academy, 2013
to become even more commercially minded as an artist, and also to branch out into property development projects in Edinburgh.
This new book puts the art of Scottish Gaelic culture back on the
map, and creates a new focus for its understanding. It is the result
Raeburn was by all accounts a convivial and learned man
himself, and was very much a part of the strata of society he was
of research by, among others, Murdo Macdonald, John Purser, Will
paid to depict; his sitters were, in general, his intellectual and social
Maclean, Arthur Watson, Meg Bateman, Lesley Lindsay and Norman
equals. Indeed, the portraits for which he is best known depict men
Shaw. The book is an outcome of the AHRC funded project: Window
much like himself, who played an active role in shaping Enlightenment
to the West/Uinneag dhan Àird an Iar: Towards a redefinition of the visual
culture in Scotland, generally through links with institutions, in
within Gaelic Scotland, a project that placed the study and practice
particular the University of Edinburgh. His quietly dignified, unflashy
of visual art at the heart of an interdisciplinary project, which drew
portraits are the natural visual corollary of an intellectual culture
together researchers at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and
which prized all that was rational, moral and benevolent, providing
Design (University of Dundee) and the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (University
us with a uniquely insightful overview of Edinburgh’s Enlightenment
of the Highlands and Islands).
society, while also revealing the painter himself to be a man of great
sensitivity, intellect and sociability. This new publication offers great
and English. Central to the book is a visual essay which takes further
insight into a remarkable artist who holds a unique position in the
the final project exhibition Uinneag Dhan Àird an Iar: Ath-lorg Ealain
canon of Scotland’s best loved painters. It also marks a watershed
na Gàidhealtachd/Window to the West: the Rediscovery of Highland Art,
in Raeburn studies, and will undoubtedly pave the way for further
held at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 20 November 2010 – 6 March
fruitful research into other areas of Raeburn’s life and work.
2011. The exhibition was described as ‘a ground-breaking exhibition…’
(Helen Dyson, former gallery administrator at The Fleming Collection, read
in The Times, but perhaps the critic of The Skinny summed it up when
History of Art at The University of Edinburgh.)
she noted that it engages ‘with the historic legacy without once
This is a pioneering dual language publication in Gaelic
slipping into banal sentiment.’ It is the hope of the research team that the same will, in due course, be said of this book.
It is a book to which The Fleming Collection has made
a major contribution through its interest in the research that went into it (chronicled in earlier editions of Scottish Art News) and that is reflected in the reproduction of several images from The Fleming Collection. Furthermore it would not have been possible to publish it in this carefully illustrated form without the generous support of the PF Charitable Trust. (Murdo Macdonald is Professor of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee.)
60
first time love letters from Joan to the married Audrey Walker, which she wrote almost daily, and that reveal not only the everyday details of Eardley’s life in the fishing village of Catterline, but the close and intimate relationship that the two women shared. The letters, and a tribute Audrey wrote following Eardley’s death, have been embargoed up till now. They provide a new understanding of a relationship that nurtured and sustained Eardley throughout many lonely days and nights in Catterline.
There is a danger of romanticising artists like Eardley,
with her absolute devotion to her work, and life spent immersed in the landscapes of her subject matter. There is a potential for mythologising inevitably exacerbated by her tragically early death at the age of 42. Andreae’s book, while also bringing a fresh assessment of her work, and review of her critical reception, offers an important Joan Eardley
perspective on a side of Eardley’s life that was deeply connected with
Christopher Andreae
the work she made. ‘You’re there anyway, in my paintings’, Eardley
Lund Humphries, 2013
reassured Walker when she was unable to attend one of her London
Hardback £40
shows. Eardley as a remote figure in the landscape, facing down a storm with her canvas and paints, is but one aspect of the woman she
‘Lonely people are drawn to the sea’. So begins Edwin Morgan’s poem
was. This book illuminates some others. Eardley once remarked that
about Joan Eardley and her work Flood Tide. This twentieth-century
the more you know something, the more you can get out of it. These
artist certainly cuts a solitary figure in the popular imagination,
insights into the life of this complex and singular artist can only add
spending much of her life living alone, fiercely dedicated to her work.
to our understanding of her work.
Best known for her dramatic sea and landscapes and unsentimental
(Katie Baker.)
portrayal of 1950s Glasgow slum children, Eardley worked with an intense drive and determination. Christopher Andreae’s latest book casts new light on the life and relationships of this pioneering artist, offering a portrayal of the person as well as the painter.
Andreae presents to the reader some fascinating vignettes
of the artist: Eardley as a young student, struggling with a friend to drag an enormous Victorian easel to the artist Josef Herman’s studio; with close friend Audrey Walker climbing down an icy cliff in the dark to carry up an enormous board in the teeth of a ferocious gale; Eardley nailing old canvases to the beams of her leaky cottage, creating a painted ceiling which glowed in the firelight. Eardley emerges as someone who grappled with her art in every way, doggedly working away in all elements, rushing out between breaks in snowstorms, spending whole days painting on the shores of wild and raging seas. She was undoubtedly a grafter for whom struggle and adversity were part of the process, often at the expense of personal comfort or care.
Yet she was also someone who, despite spending a
great deal of time alone, nevertheless had a number of important and enduring relationships in her life. Her friend Margot Sandeman recalls her as a compassionate person with early ambitions to be a
Joan Eardley, Fishing Nets, 1963, oil on board, 48x51 cm © Estate of Joan Eardley Courtesy The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
doctor, and the families she lived alongside and painted in the tenements of Glasgow remembered her with great fondness. Her relationship with her mother was warm and supportive and the book quotes extensively from the many letters Eardley wrote to her. She even took under her wing for a time the troubled young artist and friend Angus Neil. Most significantly, Andreae has published for the Scottish Art News 61
P review
Hayley Tompkins, Digital Light Pool (Orange), 2013 Acrylic on plastic trays, stock photographs, wooden boxes, glass, plastic bottles, watercolour Installation view Scotland + Venice 2013: Sworn/Campbell/Tompkins Courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps, New York and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster, Glasgow Photo: Ruth Clark
62
2013
Scotland + Venice 2013 1 June – 24 November 2013 Palazzo Pisani, Calle de le Erbe, Cannaregio (off Campo Santa Marina) 6103 www.scotlandandvenice.com The Venice Biennale is the largest and most prestigious visual arts exhibition in the world, and will this year celebrate its 55th International Art Exhibition. This will be the sixth presentation from Scotland + Venice, jointly produced by Creative Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland and British Council Scotland. The exhibition will be displayed in the Palazzo Pisani, a venue which will doubtless offer considerable inspiration for this year’s artists, all of whom take history and the passing of time as key focal points in their work.
For 2013 Scotland + Venice will be curated by The
Common Guild, who will present three of Scotland’s most compelling and consistently interesting artists: Duncan Campbell, Hayley Tompkins and Corin Sworn. Previous Scotland + Venice presentations have included Turner Prize-nominee Karla Black and winner Martin Boyce. 2013 will mark 10 years since Scotland’s first participation; an exhibition that included Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling. The Common Guild’s commitment to dynamic internationalism alongside presenting artists’ work in interesting and engaging ways, means that its aim to offer access to world-class contemporary art experiences and discussions are realised. Meanwhile, Creative Scotland’s vision is that Scotland will be recognised as one of the world’s most creative nations – one that attracts, develops and retains talent, where the arts and the creative industries are supported and celebrated and their economic contribution fully captured; a nation where the arts and creativity play
Corin Sworn in front of Untitled, 2013 at Palazzo Pisani (S.Marina) Photo: Marco Secchi/Getty images for Scotland + Venice © 2013 Getty Images
a central part in the lives, education and well-being of the population.
Scotland’s involvement in the Venice Biennale acts as
an important factor in the national representation of Scotland, and indeed the promotion of the richness and diversity of its contemporary visual art. For Katrina Brown, Director of The Common Guild, the 2013 project will ‘continue to foreground our artists and the wealth and breadth of talent here’. Amanda Catto, Chair of Scotland + Venice Partnership and Portfolio Manager for Visual Arts at Creative Scotland commented that the project has ‘emerged as a significant international platform, promoting artists at the highest level internationally and building Scotland’s reputation as a centre of excellence in and for the visual arts’.
Duncan Campbell is known for his film works that blend
archive documentary material with fictional and imaginary elements. His films, which have been described as ‘slippery biopics’ have focused on visionary protagonists, such as car-maker John DeLorean (Make it New John, 2009) or Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin (Bernadette, 2008). Campbell says that the Biennale ‘represents a unique opportunity: to make work that has currency’. As with each of the artists, the importance of providing the overlooked or disregarded past with a renewed meaning and importance is key in Campbell’s Scottish Art News 63
Duncan Campbell, It for others (still), 2013 16mm film transferred to digital video, 50 minutes. Courtesy the artist
work. With old newsreels, photography and commercials, he builds
objects that she describes as being sampled from the world as we
contrary tales of people, time and place, in which the picture is
know it. In 2004 she was shortlisted for the Becks Futures Prize, and,
forever shifting depending on who is holding the camera. Born in
much like Sworn, anticipates the ‘mysterious’ atmosphere of Venice
Belfast in 1972, Campbell graduated from The Glasgow School of Art
as having an informing and exciting connection to her work. Tompkins
in 1998, and has lived and worked in the city ever since.
describes her works as ‘organic’, calling them ‘objects’ rather than
paintings or sculptures, with each small part contributing to a work
Corin Sworn creates atmospheric installations that weave
fiction and history through film and objects. What Sworn describes
which must be navigated around. This aspect is especially pertinent
as the ‘formidable and thrilling’ prospect of working at the Venice
as for Tompkins the installation of her works is not just part of its
Biennale and its ‘dramatic and intriguing atmosphere’ must surely
display but part of the work itself. For the Biennale Tompkins has
correspond well with her work. Sworn’s videos, installations and
made acrylic paintings mixed with found digital images in plastic
drawings address ways in which human subjectivity is woven into
trays which were previously wall mounted, but which now cover the
overarching social trends and specific cultural forms. Her works are
floors and link the spaces across the rooms. Tompkins completed
loaded with references to late nineteenth-century world fairs, early
an MFA at The Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and like Sworn and
twentieth-century experimental schooling and dystopian Hollywood
Campbell lives and works in Glasgow. In this light, these three
movies. Rather than fetishising these as objects of nostalgia, she
artists promote a city which continues to be at the forefront of the
seeks to show how each affects space for imagination, action and
international contemporary art world.
agency. Sworn, who was raised in Canada and now lives in Glasgow, initially studied psychology at university. Her installation explores the ways objects can circulate stories and histories, creating a space for the tributaries of thoughts which counteract her academic background. Sworn is currently artist-in-residence at St John’s College, Oxford, in association with the Ruskin School. Hayley Tompkins makes intensely delicate paintings and painted
64
Sophie Midgley is gallery administrator at The Fleming Collection.
Edinburgh Art Festival 1 August – 1 September 2013 Various venues t: 0131 226 6558 www.edinburghartfestival.com Edinburgh Art Festival will celebrate its 10th year with more than 45 exhibitions across 30 museums showcasing works by a wide range of artists, from Turner Prize winners to emerging artists. Ensuring that every festival is different, an events programme and series of commissions – this year based around the theme of ‘parley’, an invitation to discuss and resolve conflict in military terminology – will run alongside the exhibition schedule.
New publicly-sited commissions by artists whose
practice invites the public into a dialogue with the work (in some cases dependent on a dialogue) will be found across the city from 1 August to 1 September. ‘Parley’ will see Trinity Apse, one of the oldest surviving buildings in Edinburgh, become a new venue at this year’s festival when the fifteenth-century gothic kirk is made home to giant installation Wind Pipes for Edinburgh (1 August – 1 September) by artist Sarah Kenchington. Over 100 decommissioned organ pipes have been gathered by Kenchington from salvage yards and eBay and assembled into a musical machine dependent on public participation to make sound. Requiring at least six willing bodies to man the bellows, Wind Pipes is the first of the artist’s works to be played by an audience rather than by herself.
Spanning locations across the city, Peter Liversidge’s
Flags for Edinburgh (1 August – 1 September) aims to engage visitors in conversation, inviting them to help create the work. Liversidge has invited anyone in Edinburgh with a flag pole to fly a white flag
Gabriel Orozco, Untitled, 2001 Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
bearing the word ‘HELLO’ as ‘a simple welcome across the rooftops’ during a month that sees the city’s population double in size. Robert
artist. A highlight of the exhibition will be a series of large geometric
Montgomery’s work similarly turns text into something profoundly
works on acetate made in the mid-1990s, never before exhibited.
physical with the Scottish-born, London-based artist creating poems
for the public, which are shown outside of the gallery space on
October) at Talbot Rice Gallery will celebrate the 50th anniversary
billboards, carved in wood or composed in light. Montgomery will
of the Korean American artist’s first solo exhibition and is the first to
make a new site-specific sculpture for the city as part of ‘parley’.
take place in Scotland. Originally trained as a musician, Paik (1932–
(Edinburgh Fire Poem, 1 August – 1 September)
2006) explored video, satellite transmissions, robots and lasers in
his artistic practice and his use of technology in art continues to be
Every Tuesday evening during August informal discussions
Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds (9 August – 19
will be held between ‘parley’ artists and specialists in science,
influential today. International art meets Scottish practice in The
literature and education. Other events include the EAF Film Club
Vodnjan Collective: Croatia Scotia at Doubtfire Gallery from 3 – 31
on Wednesday nights with artist films curated by a different artist
August. Comprised of 10 artists based in Scotland, The Vodnjan
each week and Lines Lost, a guided walk by artist Stuart McAdam,
Collective presents works created in response to a period each artist
culminating in a discussion led by McAdam and Claudia Zeiske,
spent in Vodnjan, a small town on the Istrian peninsula of Croatia.
Director of Deveron Arts, about the relationship between art and
walking (1 August, 4pm).
exhibition of over 100 photographic portraits dating from 1916 to 1968
by Man Ray opening at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (22 June
Throughout the festival the Fruitmarket Gallery will be
Photography has a strong presence in 2013 with an
showing work by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. Taking Orozco’s The
– 22 September). In a demonstration of Man Ray’s leading position
Eye of Go from 2005 as a starting point, the exhibition,Thinking in
among the Dada and Surrealist artists, the exhibition is the first major
Circles (1 August – 18 October), will explore the reverberations of the
museum retrospective of his photographic portraits and will include
circular motif through sculptures, photographs and paintings by the
images taken by the artist of his lovers, friends and contemporaries. Scottish Art News 65
Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast
at the City Art Centre (15 June – 8 September) will show early work by such photographic greats as David Bailey, Corinne Day, Mario Testino and Cecil Beaton. Taking advantage of unprecedented access to the New York, London, Paris and Milan archives, curator Nathalie Herschdorfer gives a unique opportunity to see early work by over 80 photographers.
Open Eye Gallery’s exhibition Alberto Morrocco: Drawing
on Life (12 August – 4 September) will span the artist’s entire career, with abstract compositions, landscapes, portraits and classical studies on show, many for the first time. Scottish-born, Edinburghbased James Lumsden will show his highly personal yet abstract paintings at the Scottish Arts Club (20 – 31 August). Built up through layers of translucent glazes, each work maintains a balance between the organised and the unplanned. Fleece to Fibre: The Making of the Large Tree Group Tapestry at Dovecot Studios (2 August – 14 September) focuses on the process behind weaving Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group painting of 1975. Alongside the tapestry will be a series of commissioned photographs of those who have contributed to the project. Nancy Cooper is gallery assistant at The Fleming Collection.
FROM TOP Dovecot Studios, Victoria Crowe, Large Tree Group tapestry on the loom, 2013 Robert Montgomery, The People You Love, 2011; Fire Poem, 2012 LEFT Peter Liversidge, Flags for Edinburgh, 2013. Photo: Stuart Armitt
66
William Daniell’s Scotland: Landscape and the Sublime 26 April – 21 October 2013 Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8AG t: 0141 276 9599 | www.glasgowlife.org.uk Open: Monday – Thursday, Saturday 10am–5pm, Friday and Sunday 11am–5pm A new display this summer in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum’s ‘Fragile Art’ space will show work from nineteenth-century landscape and marine painter William Daniell (1769–1837). In recent times the television series Coast has narrated the landscape and history of our island nation’s shores. Back in 1814 it was one man with a small camera obscura and notebook who set out on an epic journey to document it all.
William Daniell’s eight-volume work A Voyage Round
discourse on aesthetics developed his concept of the sublime as
Great Britain (1814–25) is today an extensive and unique record
something connected with an experience of awe, terror and danger,
of the British coastline in the first half of the nineteenth century.
with nature being the most powerful sublime object. By the time
Daniell’s achievement is remarkable not only for the ambitious scope
Daniell was working, this Romantic notion of the sublime had taken
of the project and the record he provides of the landscape and its
a firm hold on contemporary culture and the show at Kelvingrove
inhabitants, but also for the aquatint engravings themselves, widely
revolves around this idea of the sublime in nature. Works by Daniell
regarded as some of the best ever produced. The completed work
such as Loch Coruisq and Fingal’s Cave demonstrate how he carefully
contains 308 aquatint etchings with accompanying commentary. Six
selected scenes to evoke feelings of wonder and fear. Stormy skies
of Daniell’s Scottish scenes will go on display at Kelvingrove – three
and vertiginous mountainsides, dwarfing the boats and figures in
preparatory watercolours and three aquatints.
them, create dramatic images in which people are rendered small and
humbled in the face of nature’s magnitude. Walter Scott suggested
Daniell depicted the steamboats, coalmines and
lighthouses of British shores along with its lochs, caves and
to Daniell many of the locations along the west coast of Scotland
mountains. It is a contrast of subject matter that reflects the concerns
and Daniell dedicated his third volume to him. He also included
and preoccupations of the age he was living in. Society was at the
quotations from his poem Lord of the Isles, as well as referencing
beginning of the industrial revolution with technological advances
Scottish history, literature and legend. Alongside these were the
accelerating at a pace, yet there was also an increasing interest in the
details of ordinary life too – Daniell supplied information about
natural world. In 1757 Edmund Burke had written A Philosopical
contemporary clothing, employment, technologies and science.
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His
Scott was instrumental in establishing the Highlands of Scotland as a tourist destination and Daniell’s volumes reflect the advent of tourism and the area becoming more accessible to people. Cheaper and easier travel meant that it was no longer just the preserve of the rich. Daniell’s work could never have been a populist narrative of the country’s shorelines. The laborious and expensive process of aqua-tinting limited its audience to the wealthy. But it documented a world that was beginning to open up to people as never before. It stands today as a fascinating and revealing portrayal of the British coastline in the final decades before photography. Katie Baker is an artist and writer based in London. ABOVE Loch Coruisq, near Loch Scavig, Skye, c.1815–20, watercolour on paper LEFTStaffa, near Fingal’s Cave, c.1815–18, watercolour on paper © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection
Scottish Art News 67
John Tweed: The Empire Sculptor, Rodin’s Friend Until 8 September 2013 Reading Museum The Town Hall, Blagrave Street, Reading, Berkshire RG1 1QH t: 0118 937 3400 | www.readingmuseum.org.uk Open: Tuesday – Saturday 10am–4pm, Sunday 11am–4pm The name John Tweed is not one that immediately comes to mind when thinking about nineteenth and twentieth-century sculpture and yet he was an important figure within the London-based art society of the period. His sculptures grace locations as prestigious as Horse Guards Parade while other works were erected at sites as far flung as Australia, South Africa and Hawaii. Tweed was both a maker of high-profile public monuments and a sculptor of portraits and smaller personal ideal works. His career after 1914 was primarily involved in the design and making of war memorials.
John Tweed was born in 1869 in Glasgow. His father was a
publisher and Tweed originally entered The Glasgow School of Art in 1882 to study lithography. After his father’s death in 1885 he became a sculpture student and in 1888 became a teacher at the school. He left the GSA in 1890 and moved to London where he began work in the studio for Hamo Thornycroft working on figures of the apostles for J Sedding’s Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Square and the frieze for the Institute of Chartered Accountants. In 1893 Tweed travelled to Paris with the ambition to study under Auguste Rodin, but unable to commit to Rodin’s stipulation of four years’ study he ended up
John Tweed and Cecil Rhodes for Mafeking , John Tweed, c.1930, clay in studio John Tweed: Empire Sculptor, Rodin’s Friend, Reading Museum
entering the École des Beaux Arts, where he was taught by Alexandre Falguière for six months.
This was not the end of Tweed and Rodin’s relationship;
they met again in 1898 at the inaugural exhibition of the International
As well as statues he produced many portrait busts of members of
Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers and began to correspond.
the English aristocracy and used connections made through smaller
In 1900 Tweed and the art critic DS MacColl organised a public
works to gain favour with commissioning committees for larger
subscription for a Rodin sculpture that could be donated to a public
works.
art gallery in London. In 1902 Rodin’s L’Áge d’airain was donated to
the Victoria and Albert Museum and the banquet in Rodin’s honour
personal sculptures, based solely around the human figure; his ideal
at the Café Royal sealed Rodin’s reputation in Britain. Tweed became
works were where his individual ideas about sculpture were worked
Rodin’s friend and his unofficial agent in Britain, helping to arrange
out. Working in both marble and bronze, Tweed produced figures that
sales, sittings and exhibitions. In 1913 Tweed was the go-between for
worked at creating a sense of surface influenced by both Rodin and
Rodin and the National Art Collections Fund in the negotiations as
the New Sculpture.
to the siting of Les Bourgeois de Calais in Westminster. He was also
instrumental in securing the 1914 gift of 18 of Rodin’s sculptures to
Sculptor, Rodin’s Friend is the first to solely consider Tweed since his
the Victoria and Albert Museum.
memorial exhibition in 1934. It introduces Tweed as a sculptor and
displays the range of work that Tweed produced through pieces from
In his own career Tweed received commissions from
Throughout his career Tweed worked on his own more
The exhibition at Reading Museum, John Tweed: The Empire
the Premier of the Cape Colony Cecil Rhodes through the architect
the collection at Reading Museum and through several notable loans.
Edwin Lutyens. Tweed was the only artist Rhodes ever sat for and as
The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book John Tweed:
such Tweed was able to produce numerous busts and statues of the
The Empire Sculptor by Spire Books.
politician for various South African states. Other links to the British Empire included statues of Captain Cook for Whitby in Yorkshire and
Nicola Capon is an art historian who has just completed her collaborative
Melbourne, Australia, Captain Clive for London and Calcutta as well
PhD with Reading Museum on the nineteenth-century sculptor John Tweed.
as numerous commissions for public statues all over Great Britain.
68
Mary, Queen of Scots 28 June – 17 November 2013 National Museum of Scotland Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF t: 0300 123 6789 | www.nms.ac.uk Open: daily 10am–5pm | Admission: £9/£7.50/£6 Mary, Queen of Scots, is one of the most intriguing and controversial figures in British history. Mystery, conspiracy and violence surrounded her eventful life which has inspired many painters, writers and biographers. Born on 8 December 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, Mary was the daughter of Mary of Guise and King James V of Scotland, who was the nephew of England’s King Henry VIII. After the death of her father at the Battle of Solway Moss, Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland at the age of six days old. She was sent to France at six years old to marry the Dauphin who became King Francis II in 1559 but their reign was short as Francis II died in 1560 and Mary returned to Scotland the following year.
As a Catholic monarch in a newly reformed realm, she faced
hostility from her Scottish subjects who were suspicious of her Catholicism and she was severely criticised by John Knox, the leader of the Reformation in Scotland. Her second marriage to Lord Darnley, the father of her son James, was unpopular and ended in murder and scandal; her third marriage to the Earl of Bothwell was even less popular and ended in forced abdication in favour of her son who became King James VI of Scotland in July 1567. Mary fled to England where she hoped to get the support of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I but instead the English Queen had her jailed and after 19 years of captivity she signed Mary’s death warrant. Indeed Mary had been the centre of several plots to place her on the English throne and represented a threat to Queen Elizabeth I. On 8 February 1587 Mary was
Blairs Memorial Portrait © Blairs Museum Trust
beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle. 16 years later, upon Elizabeth I’s death, Mary’s son ascended the throne of England and through him the kingdoms of Scotland and England were united.
Mary, Queen of Scots will explore the myth and reality
surrounding her story and will give visitors the opportunity to form their own opinions about the Queen. With approximately 200 objects and artefacts on display including jewels, maps, letters, furniture, books and paintings, visitors will be given an insight into her character and her interests. The exhibition, composed of nine sections, will re-examine Mary’s life and reign. Several sections will examine the all-important dynastic alliances that were at the heart of Renaissance Europe and will investigate the evolution of the relationships between Scotland, France and England. One of the central sections of the exhibition, ‘Prime Suspect’, will focus on the events which took place on the night of 9 February 1567, when Queen Mary’s husband was murdered and she became one of the prime suspects. Using eye witness accounts, official documents, drawings and the autopsy report on Darnley’s body, the crime scene will be recreated. A series of events will be held along with the exhibition. For details visit www.nms.ac.uk/mary.
Penicuik Jewels © National Museums Scotland
Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Pierre Mendès France University in Grenoble and is a researcher in British studies. She is a member of the French Society for Scottish Studies. Scottish Art News 69
LISTINGS ABERDEEN
The ABERDEEN Fruitmarket Gallery
The Fruitmarket Open Eye GalleryGallery
Gabriel Orozco
David Batchelor: Barbara Rae: PasoFlatlands del Tiempo
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum
1Aberdeen August – Art 18 October Gallery
4 May – 14 July Until 6 August
The Scottish Colourist Series: SJ Peploe
Louise I Give Everything Away Silver: Bourgeois: The Aberdeen Story
45 Market Street EH1 1DF on Life Alberto Morrocco: Drawing
13 July – 19 October
26 October – 16 February 2014 Until 3 March
Tel:August 0131 225 2383 12 – 4 September
The Lure of the Orient
45 EH1 1DF PlanMarket B–SideStreet, A: Photographs by Oliver Godow
fruitmarket.co.uk Rory McEwen: Tulips and Tulipomania
Until 1 March 2014
0131 225March 2383 Until 30
12 August – 21 September
Schoolhill, AB10 1FQ
www.fruitmarket.co.uk Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of
34 Abercromby Place, EH3 6QE Open Eye Gallery
0122 452 3700
Fashion Photography
0131 9872CBE HRSA RA LLD: John 558 Bellany
www.aagm.co.uk
National 2 February Galleries – 20 April of Scotland
www.openeyegallery.co.uk Works on Paper: 7 – 30 January
DUNDEE
Schoolhill AB10 1FQ
Scottish Landscapes: 4 – 20 February
Tel: 01224 523700Gallery Scottish National
Donald Provan: 25 February – 13 March The Scottish Gallery
aagm.co.uk Through American Eyes: Frederic
34 Abercromby Place Paul Reid; Elizabeth Blackadder
The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and
Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch
6QE 2Edinburgh August – 4EH3 September
Museum
Until DUNDEE 8 September
Tel: 0131 558Thomson 9872 Adam Bruce
Reflections from the Tay: Twentieth
Peter Doig: No Foreign Land
openeyegallery.co.uk James Morrison: Paintings of The Somme
Century Scottish Art from the
3The August – 3 November McManus:
6 – 30 November
Permanent Collection
The Mound, 2EL Dundee’s ArtEdinburgh, Gallery andEH2 Museum
JD Fergusson National Galleries of Scotland
Until 11 August
Reflections from the Tay: 20th Century
4 – 24 December
Modern Masters in Print: Matisse,
Scottish Scottish Art National from the Portrait Permanent Gallery Collection
16 Dundas(Scottish Street, EH3 6HZ Gallery) Academy National
Picasso, Dali and Warhol:
Migration Until 11 August Stories: Valentina Bonizzi
0131 1200A Passion for Life John 558 Bellany:
An Exhibition Organised by the V&A
Until Albert22Square September DD1 1DA
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Until 27 January
23 August – 17 November
Ken Tel: 0138 Currie: 230 until 7200 22 September
Through American Eyes: Frederic
Albert Square
Man mcmanus.co.uk Ray Portraits
ChurchRice andGallery the Landscape Oil Sketch Talbot
Meadowside, DD1 1DA
Until 22 September
11 May – 8 September Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik
0138 230 7200
Lucknow to Lahore: Fred Bremner’s EDINBURGH
The Mound EH2 2EL Resounds
www.themcmanus.co.uk
Vision of India
9 August – 19 October
Until 29 Fine September Bourne Art
University of Edinburgh, College,Art Scottish National GalleryOld of Modern
Tickling Jock: Comedy Greats from Sir James Cowie RSA
South Bridge,Colourist EH8 9YL Series: SJ Peploe The Scottish
Harry April Lauder to Billy Connolly
0131 2210 Until 650 23 June
City Art Centre
Until 25 May 2014 6 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ
www.ed.ac.uk/about/museums75 Belford Road EH4 3DR
Coming into Fashion: A Century of
1Tel: Queen Edinburgh, EH2 1JD 0131Street, 557 4050
galleries/talbot-rice
Photography at Condé Nast
bournefineart.com
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Until 8 September
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
GLASGOW Edith Tudor Hart
Dressed to Kill: Fashion, Costume and
From Death to Death and Other Small City Art Centre
2 Mar – 26 May
Dress in Scottish Art
Tales: Masterpieces from the Scottish John Clerk of Eldin (1728-1812)
The House of Annie Gallery of Modern ArtLennox
Until 29 September
National Gallery of Modern Art and the Until 3 February
23 Mar – 30 June Everyday: Niall Macdonald, Laura
Presenting Tomorrow’s Designers:
D. W. Daskalopoulos Barns-Graham: ACollection Scottish Artist in St Ives
Ken Currie Aldridge, Mick Peter, Hayley Tompkins,
Edinburgh College of Art Graduates
Until Until 817September February
16 June – 22Carla September Scott Myles, Scott Fullerton
Until 29 September
Witches Wicked Bodies Scottish and Art in the 20th Century
1 Queen Street EH2 1JD Until 1 September
Citizen Curator
27 – 3 Williams November TheJuly Derek Collection
National Galleries Scotland Niki de Saint PhalleofThe Eric and Jean
Walter Geikie
The Colourist Series: JD Fergusson UntilScottish 24 February
Tel: 0131 Cass Gift 624 6200
October – February 2014
72 December – 23EH1 June 2014 Market Street 1DE
nationalgalleries.org 16 November – 27 October
2 Market Street, EH1 1DE
75 Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR Tel:Belford 0131 529 3993
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Poet, Artist,
0131 529 3993
0131 624 6200 edinburghmuseums.org.uk
Revolutionary
www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk
www.nationalgalleries.org
Until 1 March 2014
EDINBURGH
70
Royal Exchange Square, G1 3AH
LONDON
Arnolfini Ian Hamilton Finlay
0141 287 3050 Fine Art Society
20 July – 8 September
John Mclean, Another Light: Prairie
16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA
The Glasgow School of Art
Journey
0117 917 2300
A Conspiracy of Detail
6 – 26 September
www.arnolfini.org.uk
13 July – 29 September
Ten Paintings by Arthur Melville
167 Renfrew Street G3 6RQ
2 – 17 October
Mount Stuart Contemporary Visual Arts
0141 353 4500
148 New Bond Street, W1S 2JT
Lucy Skaer: A Proposal for Mount Stuart
www.gsa.ac.uk
0207 6295116
Until 31 October
www.faslondon.com
Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, PA20 9LR
www.glasgowmuseums.com
01700 503877
The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery
www.mountstuart.com
‘This Unrivalled Collection’: The
The Fleming Collection
Hunterian’s First Catalogue
Eileen Hogan at Little Sparta
Until 11 August
11 June – 17 August
Pier Arts Centre
Paintings, Poetry, Politics and the
Learning to Draw/Drawing to Learn:
Nathan Coley: Burn the Village,
Science of Ornithology
The Glasgow School of Art
Feel the Warmth
Until 13 September
3 September – 9 October
Until 31 August
Allan Ramsay
Leave the Capitol:
Victoria Street, Stromness, KW16 3AA
13 September – 5 January 2014
An Exploration of Contemporary
Tel: 01856 850 209
University of Glasgow
Identity from the Masters Programme,
www.pierartscentre.com
University Avenue, G12 8QQ
Edinburgh College of Art
0141 330 4221
15 October – 16 November
www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian
Foundation & Trust: (un)coverings
AUCTIONS
21 November – 21 December
Christie’s, London, South Kensington
Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum
13 Berkeley Street W1J 8DU
Modern British Art: 10 July
Permanent Glasgow Boys Gallery
020 7042 5730
8 King Street, SW1Y 6QT
Scottish Colourists Gallery
www.flemingcollection.com
Tel: 020 7930 6074 www.christies.com
Jack Vettriano: A Retrospective 21 September – 23 February 2014
Portland Gallery
Argyle Street, G3 8AG0141 276 9599
Frances Macdonald: 14 – 29 November
Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh
www.glasgowmuseums.com
JD Fergusson: 17 – 29 November
Scottish Contemporary & Post War Art:
8 Bennet Street, SW1A 1RP
20 August
Roger Billcliffe Gallery
0207 493 1888
The Studios of John Cunningham
Michael Clarke: New Paintings
www.portlandgallery.com
and George Wyllie: 27 August 33 Broughton Place, EH1 3RR
October George Gilbert & Shona Barr:
AROUND THE UK
0131 557 8844 www.lyonandturnbull.com
New Paintings November
Alfred East Gallery, Kettering Museum
Peter Graham: New Paintings
and Art Gallery
December
Sir Alfred East: Centenary Exhibition
134 Blythswood Street, G2 4EL
31 July – 28 September
Scotland + Venice 2013
0141 332 4027
Bowling Green Road, Kettering
Until 24 November
www.billcliffegallery.com
NN15 7QX
Palazzo Pisani, Calle de le Erbe
01536 410333
Cannaregio (off Campo Santa Marina) 6103
www.kettering.gov.uk
www.scotlandandvenice.com
SCOTLAND + VENICE
Scottish Art News 71
autumn collaborative series Learning to Draw Drawing to Learn T he Glasgow School of A rt 3 September – 9 October 2013 A reassessment of the practice of drawing by students and staff, past and present.
L e av e t h e c a p i t o l A n Exploration of C ontemporary Identity f rom the Masters Program me, Edinburgh C ollege of A rt 15 October – 16 November 2013 Works by staff and students based around the theme of Identity.
f o u n d at i o n & t r u s t ( UN ) CO v e r i n g s 21 November – 21 December 2013 A curatorial audit of a selection of works from The Fleming Collection and a showcase of new paintings made by the collective in response to this process.
THE FLEMING COLLECTION
72
13 Berkeley Street, London, W1J 8DU |
t:
0 2 0 7 0 4 2 5 7 3 0 | w w w. f l e m i n g c o l l e c t i o n . c o m
FRIENDS of
THE FLEMING COLLECTION
Support Scottish Art with Fleming Collection Membership Becoming a Friend Friends membership enables you to enjoy the gallery and our exhibitions to the full, while supporting young Scottish artists and The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation’s charitable endeavours. Benefits include: Scottish Art News magazine with Director’s Letter delivered to your home twice yearly 20% discount in the gallery shop Invitation to Annual Friends Lecture Monthly Friends eBulletin or postal bulletin Invitation to two private views a year Membership also makes a wonderful gift for anyone interested in Scottish art. Individual membership is priced at £40 per year, with Joint at £60
Becoming a Patron Becoming a Patron is an ideal way to support Scottish art. Your support will help The Fleming Collection to acquire new works for the collection by young, upcoming artists while also helping us to stage exciting and engaging exhibitions with access for all. In addition to the Friends benefits above, Patrons receive the following: Exclusive invitation to a tour of the collection and current exhibition by an artist or curator Invitation to an annual artist-led dinner Invitation to all private views A complimentary copy of each exhibition catalogue, delivered to your home Quarterly Director’s Letter Complimentary entry to all events and lectures in our Friends programme
Friends’ event and artist’s talk at EB&Flow Gallery, 2013. Photo: Nancy Cooper
‘I have loved all the occasions I’ve attended so far, especially artist–led events – keep up the good work!’
‘The events are always well organised, with a warm welcome’
EVENTS We run a varied programme of exclusive events for our members, such as guest lectures, artists’ studio visits and curator-led exhibition tours. Friends receive a discount on ticket prices and are the first to know about new events. Upcoming autumn 2013 events include: Five-day Watercolour Class with Emma Hockley 9 – 13 September, 2–4pm each day £90 Friends | £100 non–Friends Artist Emma Hockley will teach a five-day watercolour class in the unique environment of the permanent collection. Joan Eardley Lecture 12 September, doors 6pm, lecture begins 6.45pm £10 Friends | £12.50 non–Friends. Pay bar Christopher Andreae will talk about his discoveries in researching his new book on one of the most influential and innovative Scottish painters, Joan Eardley.
For further information on Friends and Patrons membership and our upcoming events programme, including purchasing tickets or membership, please contact Sophie Midgley: 020 7042 5784 | sophie.midgley@flemingcollection.com or visit www.flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News 73
Su bs cribe
Scottish Art News One-year subscription UK £9 Europe £14 International £20 I enclose a cheque for £ The Fleming Collection Ltd
Two-year subscription UK £18 Europe £28 International £40
Delivery Address (if this is a gift subscription, please give details of the recipient)
For myself
made payable to
A gift
Title Name
Please charge my credit/debit card (excluding Amex)
Address
Cardholder’s Name Card No _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ Expiry date
Issue No/Start Date
Security No
Postcode
Signed
Tel
Date
I would like my subscription to start with Current issue Issue no:
Please return this form with your payment to: Scottish Art News subscriptions, The Fleming Collection,13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Alternatively order online: visit www.flemingcollection.com/scottishartnews.php, or call +44 (0) 20 7042 5730
Back issues of Scottish Art News (Issues 3–19) can be ordered priced £1 plus p+p To order back issues call +44 (0) 20 7042 5730 or email admin@scottishartnews.co.uk
A R T SCOTTISH ART NEWS
ISSUE 19 SPRING 2013 £3
LAND AND LANDSCAPE: JAMES MORRISON TRACY CHEVALIER ON TAPESTRIES FOR STIRLING CASTLE WILLIAM TURNBULL (1922-2012) THE SCOTTISH COLOURIST SERIES: SJ PEPLOE
Issue 19 | Spring 2013
Issue 18 | Autumn 2012
Issue 17 | Spring 2012
Issue 16 | Autumn 2011
Issue 15 | Spring 2011
Issue 14 | Autumn 2010
Issue 13 | Spring 2010
Issue 12 | Autumn 2009
Issue 11 | Spring 2009
Issue 10 | Autumn 2008
74
Image: Mad Dogs…© Jack Vettriano 1992 www.jackvettriano.com
JACK VETTriANO A RETROSPECTIVE
K e lvi ngr ove Ar t gAller y An d M us euM 21 September 2013 - 23 February 2014 £5/£3 Tickets available now at www.glasgowmuseums.com
www.jackvettriano.com
Scottish Art News 75
2-17 October 2013 the fine art society 148 New Bond Street London w1s 2jt +44 (0) 207 629 5116 pb@faslondon.com
Arthur Melville ARSA RSW (1855-1904) Tangiers (detail), watercolour, signed and dated 93 lower right, 34 x 24 inches 76
Ten paintings by
Arthur Melville
Enquiries: Patrick Bourne pb@faslondon.com The exhibition will travel to bourne fine art, Edinburgh in November 2013.
The Fine Art Society Dealers since 1876