Scottish Art News Issue 22 | Autumn 2014

A R T SCOTTISH ART NEWS

ISSUE 22 AUTUMN 2014 £3

RHYTHMS OF LAND AND SEA 6 - 29 OCTOBER

Now Inviting Consignments for British & Irish Art London, 10 December 2014

Catalogue available upon request An exhibition of Orcadian pictures to mark the 30th anniversary of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s first journey to Orkney.

Artists include: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Stanley Cursiter Diana Leslie Peter McLaren Fred Schley Frances Walker Sylvia Wishart

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ TEL 0131 558 1200 EMAIL mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM IN ORKNEY Initially visiting Orkney to support an exhibition of her work that opened at the Pier Arts Centre on 17 August 1984, Barns-Graham fell quickly under the spell of the islands. Making an impromptu decision, she remained there for six weeks. The inspiration she received from this remarkable place provided her work with a new impetus, resulting in an extensive body of drawings, paintings and collages. Mesmerised by Orkney she returned for a further seven weeks in 1985, the islands continuing to inspire her through future years.

FrAncis cAmPbell bOileAu cAdell Marigolds, Sold for ÂŁ290,500 in london on 22 may 2014

Top: Sylvia Wishart, Bobby Greig's Close, Stromness (detail), 1965, oil on board, 63 x 43 cms Above: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Untitled, Orkney (Sketch), 1984, oil on hardboard, 27.9 x 83.5 cms

Accepting consignments until early October 2014.

Please contact us for a complimentary and confidential valuation of your property.

Consignment Enquiries Jane Oakley +44 (0)20 7293 6132 jane.oakley@sothebys.com sothebys.com

Fine art by fine printers

WILLIAM CROSBIE (1915-1999)

CENTENARY EXHIBITION 7-31 JANUARY 2015

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ TEL 0131 558 1200 EMAIL mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

www.empresslitho.com

Happy Days (detail), 1993, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cms

BOOKS

NEWS 6

Rachael Cloughton

FEATURES 12 Traces of War: Landscapes of the

Western Front Peter Cattrell

20

The Big Push: After The Eve of the Battle of the Somme by Sir Herbert James Gunn A poem commissioned by the Fleming Collection

22

Snapshots of Women at War Maggie Andrews

26

Fleece to Fibre: The Making of the Large

Tree Group Tapestry

Participants in the project share their experiences 30

No Foreign Land: Landscapes from the Fleming Collection Briony Anderson and Katie Baker

35

Reflections on Scottish Independence Artists contribute their thoughts

38

Glasgow Women’s Library Katie Baker

42 Collector’s Daughter: The Untold Burrell Story

Sue Stephen

REGUL ARS 46 Recent Acquisitions

New additions to permanent collections across Scotland 50

Art Market Tim Cornwell

EXHIBITIONS

54 GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary

Art in Scotland

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan

Skye and North Uist

Life as a Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and a

Search for a Unified Identity)

Summerhall, Edinburgh

Mackintosh Architecture

Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

Louise Hopkins

Linlinthgow Burgh Halls, West Lothian

Stan Douglas

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Two Roberts

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Bill Drummond

Various venues

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 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 a regularly changing exhibition programme as well as exhibitions of selected works from the permanent collection.

Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, installation view: Static Gallery, Liverpool, 2011 Courtesy of Studio lost but found, Berlin © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014 Photo: Studio lost but found/Frederik Pedersen (On display at GoMA, Glasgow, as part of GENERATION until 28 September)

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The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 E: gallery@flemingcollection.com flemingcollection.com

A century after the outbreak of World War I, the Fleming Collection marks the occasion with Traces of War, an exhibition of photographs by Peter Cattrell, which continues until 18 October 2014. For this issue, Cattrell explains what lies behind his 20-year-long (and ongoing) project; his selective and subtly symbolic landscapes drawing our attention to the emotive power of their natural forms. In Snapshots of Women at War, Professor Maggie Andrews discusses what is withheld from view in the photographs by George P. Lewis of women working in Scotland’s World War I industries (also on display in Traces of War).

Exhibitions has a contemporary focus with GENERATION’s extensive and nationwide programme of shows, projects and commissions all celebrating the last 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland. Our interest is drawn to The Two Roberts at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, which offers a long-overdue re-examination of the work of Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who fell into obscurity after significant success and early deaths in the 1960s. Exhibitions closes with a show set to continue into 2025. Bill Drummond’s World Tour aptly sums up the GENERATION year, underscoring the lasting significance and international outlook of the work of contemporary artists in Scotland.

Scottish Art News has been running since 2003, developing from an eight-page newsletter to a full-colour print magazine. While it continues to bring the Fleming Collection’s exhibitions into focus, as well as visual arts across Scotland and beyond, it seemed a good moment to refresh the editorial and add some new features. There is now a more extensive news and events round-up, and some of the new additions made to permanent collections in Scotland are highlighted in Recent Acquisitions.

I would like to extend a big thank you to all the contributors to this issue, especially Neil Cooper and Rachael Cloughton. I would also like to thank James Knox for his input, and, of course, all the advertisers who make the magazine’s production possible.

Briony Anderson.

Cover Image Peter Cattrell, Lone Tree, Y Ravine Beaumont-Hamel, Somme, France, 2000 Silver gelatin print

SCOT TISH ART NEWS The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DU United Kingdom T: (0)207 042 5730 E: gallery@flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News is published biannually by the Fleming Collection, London. Publication dates: January and August.

SUBSCRIPTIONS One-year subscription – UK £9 | Europe £14 | International £20 Two-year subscription – UK £18 | Europe £28 | International £40 T: (0)20 7042 5730 | E: gallery@flemingcollection.com

ADVERTISING Briony Anderson T: (0)20 7042 5730 | E: briony.anderson@flemingcollection.com Behind Scottish Art News at the Fleming Collection Editor Briony Anderson Editorial assistance Katie Baker, Catherine Hooper, Sarah Batten Gallery staff Nancy Cooper Design Kirsten Downie | behance.net/kirstendownie Printed by Empress Litho Limited © Scottish Art News 2014. 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 Foundation. All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.

Man & Woman with Animal, charcoal on paper, 80 x 57 cm

CONTENTS

ISSUE 22 / AUTUMN 2014 EDITOR’S NOTE

Joseph Urie

work on paper

1978–2014

13 September to 5 October 2014 Preview 12 September 6–8pm Open weekends 12–5pm, appointments welcome at any other time 45 Dirleton Avenue North Berwick East Lothian EH39 4BL

01620 895057 07981 982464 www.fidrafineart.co.uk info@fidrafineart.co.uk

SCOTTISH ART | NEWS

Janie Nicoll, New Wave – What’s On your Mind?

Collaborative installation at The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, 2013

Dalziel + Scullion, Immersion garment, 2014, courtesy Dalziel + Scullion for Dovecot Studios

GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland Rarely, if ever, has there been an event in Scotland where galleries from Orkney, the Isle of Mull and Stornoway have had their exhibitions programmed alongside shows at the National Gallery in Edinburgh or the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. GENERATION has drawn attention to smaller organisations at work in Scotland, located in places without the advantage of ‘big city’ art scenes, and highlighted their integral role as promoters, facilitators and inspiration for Scottish art over the past 25 years – and for years to come.

For GENERATION, Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, presents Orcadia & Other Stories by Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich. The show provides a survey of the artists’ work to date, alongside new work created especially for the exhibition. Orkney is a leader in the development of tidal and wave energy, but still maintains the more traditional fishing and farming industries. Walker and Bromwich’s longstanding interest in local mythology and energy production inevitably finds a rich source of inspiration in the islands, reflected in their new sculptural work on show.

Comar, a contemporary arts organisation based on the Isle of Mull, programmed an exhibition of works by 7 | ART

Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin inspired by the unique nature of its location. Halperin made a series of research visits to the island, exploring Tormore granite quarry near Fionnphort and producing a body of work that merged geographical phenomena with personal experience. Her solo show at An Tobar, Mull’s contemporary art space, took place earlier this year.

Dundee-based artists Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion’s work for GENERATION will be exhibited between An Lanntair on the Isle of Lewis and Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. The focus of the work is the shifting landscape of the Western Isles as it moves towards the heart of the capital; a transition captured by the artists through photography, video, sound and sculpture to form immersive installations.

The art that has emerged from Scotland over the past 25 years is, according to the organisers of GENERATION, ‘characterised by its diversity, rather than by one particular style or dominant trend’. Such diversity is clearly indebted to the multifarious make-up of Scotland itself and the myriad of influences it provides for artists working there. Venues in the north, while remote and often under the radar, are only peripheral in a geographical sense.

Emerging Art in Unusual Spaces August 2014 marks an exciting merging of moments on Edinburgh’s art scene. GENERATION adds to an already expansive Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) programme, creating an exciting melting pot of artistic activity for the city. In response to the inevitable shortage of gallery space, ad-hoc galleries, residencies and inventive outdoor artworks have emerged.

Interview Room 11 is an artist-led space located in a disused office block on Castle Terrace. In August, it is hosting two solo exhibitions: the first by Glasgow-based artist Janie Nicoll at the beginning of the festival, and, after a quick turn around, the work of Edinburgh-based, Italian artist Alessandro Di Massimo. ‘For those artists wishing to show during EAF, one of the main problems they face is securing a suitable space where they can exhibit,’ says Scott McCracken, one of Interview Room 11’s committee members.

‘The reason we decided to have two solo exhibitions for the festival was down to the fact that it allows two artists to take part rather than only one.’

Garage is another artist run space, comprising three garages and a garden in Edinburgh’s New Town. At weekends, it will exhibit work by more than 20 contemporary artists, making it one of the city’s largest group shows.

Another group show takes place in The Travelling Gallery, a bus-turned-custom-built-art-gallery. Inside, curious visitors will find work by Laura Aldridge, Craig Coulthard, Mandy McIntosh, Hanna Tuulikki, and David Sherry. The bus will travel to eight different locations across Edinburgh, giving people from all over the city a chance to view ceramics, textile wall hangings, digital animations, drawings,

sculptures and film on their doorstep.

Alice Finbow has decided to turn The Manna House Bakery and Patisserie on Easter Road into her artist residence during the festival. She will produce a piece inspired by French novelist Georges Perec, who spent three days in a cafe in Paris describing what he could see and hear in the book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.

Finbow is producing Edinburgh’s own version of the work in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place (in Edinburgh). (Residency 4–10 August; artwork on display 11–31 August.)

Describing themselves as ‘tourists-in-residence’, Stephanie Mann and Andrew Gannon will guide tourists around the city, offering a glimpse of Edinburgh from their unique perspective as artists based there (17 August). Mann and Gannon will use improvisation, collaboration and participation with willing audience members to consider the way content can be generated, observed and documented while on their specially crafted tours.

Not only do these alternative exhibitions offer emerging artists a chance to show work at a high-profile event, they also offer them the opportunity to engage with more varied audiences. For Mann, this was one of the motivations behind the project: ‘Working outdoors, in particular during the Fringe, presents us with opportunities to blur boundaries between the traditional viewer tribes.’

The emerging art scene may not occupy Edinburgh’s more established spaces during the EAF, but it is far from peripheral. By working in unusual and unexpected spaces across the city, these projects are some of the programme’s most exciting and far-reaching.

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Becky Campbell, Short-Lived Settlements, 2012–13, Installation view: Snehta, Athens

Becky Campbell, Short-Lived Settlements, 2012–13, installation view: Snehta, Athens

Fleming-Wyfold Bursary 2014 saw the inaugural Fleming-Wyfold Bursary given to Fraser (b.1989) and Calum (b.1991) Brownlee (Brownlee Brothers), 2013 graduates of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) at the University of Dundee. The bursary, which seeks to help bridge the transition between graduation and professional practice, is a significant award worth £14,000 and is accompanied by a 12-month mentoring programme developed by Curator Susanna Beaumont. The prize was awarded at the February opening ceremony of the annual Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries show in Edinburgh where their work had been selected from that of 62 graduates from Scotland’s art and architecture schools.

The Times art critic Rachel CampbellJohnston, who was on the judging panel, said: ‘RSA New Contemporaries runs the gamut of pretty much every game you can play with art. It muddles your eyes and your head about, so it was challenging to determine a winner. In the end, we went for something that was visually strong, wittily teasing but with historical resonance. We feel that this pair of sibling artists have real potential to develop their ambitions with the support of the bursary.’ Based in their home town of Dundee, the Brownlee Brothers will look to Beaumont for guidance on professional development, from the documentation of their work to the pricing and building of their professional network, as they work to develop their artistic careers.

The Edinburgh of the South Since launching in 2012, the Snehta Residency in Athens has developed increasingly strong ties with Edinburgh’s emerging art scene. Most of the 15 artists who have spent time at Snehta since its inception previously studied at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), including Snehta’s founder, Augustus Veinoglou. Veinoglou is a native Athenian who studied his undergraduate and master’s degrees at ECA, and recognises the impact that time spent between the two cities can have on artistic production: ‘The cultural differences between the two locations are so great that they infuse a feeling of curiosity and criticality. History is deeply rooted in both cultures, and nature is strangely similarly “untamed” and “thorny”,’ says Veinoglou. ‘That often crude and seemingly “arbitrary” space allows artists to develop a unique tool kit for the realisation of extremely interesting artwork.’

Becky Campbell, also an ECA alumna, was the first artist invited to participate in the Snehta programme.

Following her residency, she moved to Athens permanently and now works as part of the Snehta team: ‘I moved to Athens because I had been navigated towards some amazing areas of inspiration for my work that I knew could develop into long-term research material; Snehta also smoothly integrated me into a group of great, knowledgeable people that continue to make my existence in Athens vibrant and expansive.’ Artists-in-residence at Snehta are encouraged to engage with the multicultural and diverse environment of Kypseli, the district of Athens where the programme is based. The result is work that deliberately challenges popular or preconceived notions of the city and its classical past.

As well as appealing to those on the Edinburgh art scene, Snehta has been well received by Athenians.

Edinburgh artists have participated in such events as ArtAthina, one of Greece’s most respected and influential art fairs. The relationship between the two cities looks likely to continue to flourish: ‘One project currently being developed is Another Athens, which will involve creative writers from Edinburgh and Athens writing about their personal experiences and ideas of each city,’ elaborates Veinoglou.

‘Having a more official tie with Edinburgh College of Art in the future is an idea that also really interests us.’

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Katie Paterson , Future Library, 2014–2114, photo © the artist, commissioned by Bjørvika Utvikling and produced by the artist

Katie Paterson’s 100-Year-Long Artwork One thousand trees have been planted in Normarka, a forest just outside Oslo, Norway. In 100 years, they will become the pages of an anthology of books entitled Future Library for the city of Oslo. This poetic project is the brainchild of Scottish artist Katie Paterson and has been realised in collaboration with Bristol-based arts organisation Situations.

Alongside an editorial panel comprising Literary Director of the Man Booker Prize Ion Trewin and former Director of the Oslo city library Liv Sæteren, Paterson will select the first author to contribute to the anthology towards the end of 2014. In total, 100 authors will write for the anthology, one selected every year until 2114. All manuscripts will be held in trust in a specially designed room in the new Deichman Library in Bjørvika until the publication of Future Library.

Scottish artist Katie Paterson is well known for her ambitious projects that encourage philosophical reflection between people and their natural environment. In previous works, she has mapped the dead stars of the universe, created a nano-grain of sand and embedded it in the Sahara Desert and designed a bulb that simulates the experience of moonlight.

Rebuilding ‘the Mack’ It has been announced that the cost of repairing the firedamaged Mackintosh Building of The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is likely to be between £20m and £35m. Speaking to Holyrood’s education and culture committee, the GSA’s Director, Professor Tom Inns, estimated that the restoration project would take up to four years to complete. The UK government has said it will make a ‘significant’ contribution to the cost of rebuilding the art school, and the initiative has attracted a £750,000 contribution from the Scottish government, as well as £5m in match funding.

Brad Pitt and Peter Capaldi have been leading fundraising efforts for The Mackintosh Appeal, which was launched in June. The Hollywood star and the Doctor Who actor have agreed to be trustees of the appeal, which solicits and accepts funds from trusts, companies and individuals in the UK and around the world who want to see the Mack returned to its former glory.

‘It is not in our nature to submit to misfortune and adversity – instead we choose to overcome them with creativity, passion and strength,’ said programme leaders at The Glasgow School of Art in a statement submitted shortly after the fire on 23 May.

The Mackintosh Building, courtesy The Glasgow School of Art

Brownlee Brothers Clockwise from top left: FTP (2013), Council Rocky Fried My Brain (2013), Reign in Blood (2013), For Upsetting my Mother (2013) Works 1 to 3: Velvet, tie-dyed cotton, wood and gold trim; work 4: resin and metal Installation view: New Scottish Artists, the Fleming Collection, London, 2014

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Graham Fagen, courtesy the artist

Built in the eighteenth century, Balmungo House was inherited by Barns-Graham from her aunt in 1960. Courtesy the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Balmungo House For Sale The former home of the late Scottish abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004), is to be sold by the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust. The maintenance of Balmungo House, which is located near St Andrews, Fife, is thought to be financially unsustainable for the trust in the long term, damaging its ability to continue its support of new Scottish art students through grants and bursaries.

Geoffrey Bertram, Chairman of the trust, said: ‘An important role for the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust is to financially support students and artists early in their careers.

This was the artist’s express wish, as she herself benefitted from grants and bursaries during her studies and early years. After commissioning a review of the trust’s activities by external consultants it became clear that to continue to run Balmungo House in its current form will seriously compromise the trust’s ability to disburse funds in the future.’ A new home for the collection of paintings, drawings and prints Barns-Graham bequeathed to the trust will be confirmed in due course, but exhibitions of her work will continue to be organised by the trust, as well as the loan of artworks to public galleries.

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Graham Fagen to Represent Scotland at the 56th Venice Biennale Hospitalfield Arts, a prestigious residency programme located in Arbroath, has commissioned Graham Fagen to represent Scotland in 2015 and will curate the exhibition of his work at the Venice Biennale. Lucy Byatt, Director of Hospitalfield Arts, explains: ‘We could not be more delighted to be offered this opportunity to commission Scotland’s contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2015. It is an outstanding opportunity…to work closely with an artist such as Graham Fagen and to bring to Venice a project that emerges from our work in Arbroath in the beautiful region of Angus.’

Fagen’s practice is defined by its playful and open approach; he works across sculpture, performance, photography, filmmaking, writing and text, drawing upon a multitude of sources and inspiration. Previous works have considered the cultural influences of music, nature and the symbolic power of flowers, urban planning and regeneration.

The role of society, history and the effect of cultural turning points on the lives of both individuals and communities are interests that rest at the core of his work.

During his recent residency at The Glasgow School of Art (GSA), Fagen researched Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the GSA Archives & Collections Centre. Works produced during the residential period were exhibited in the acclaimed solo show Cabbages in an Orchard this summer. His invitation to participate in GENERATION at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art further demonstrates his influential and distinguished position on the Scottish art scene.

From Palazzo Pisani to Woodlands Terrace This year, The Common Guild will exhibit work from Scotland’s entry to the Venice Biennale in 2013 at their gallery at Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, forming part of the GENERATION programme.

‘The works we commissioned from Corin Sworn, Hayley Tompkins and Duncan Campbell for the Scotland + Venice exhibition last year were very much developed with the Palazzo Pisani and the context in mind, but it quickly became apparent that there was a great opportunity to show the work back here at The Common Guild as our contribution to the GENERATION project,’ said Katrina Brown, Director of The Common Guild. ‘Having chosen those three artists to work with on the Venice project and as three of the most compelling artists working in Scotland at the moment, it made sense to extend the relationship and allow audiences here in Glasgow to see the new works – albeit in a different, though comparable setting.’

Each artist will have a solo show in the gallery.

Hayley Tompkins’s Digital Light Pools is the first in the series, followed by Corin Sworn’s ceramic tile mosaic installation, while Duncan Campbell’s film, It for Others (2013), which includes a performance made in collaboration with Michael Clark Company, will conclude the arrangement.

Hayley Tompkins 21 June–2 August Corin Sworn 9 August–13 September Duncan Campbell 20 September–25 October The Edinburgh Art Fair Celebrates its 10th Anniversary Since launching in 2005, the Edinburgh Art Fair has hosted over 350 galleries from Scotland and abroad and welcomed the work of over 5,000 artists to the city. This year marks the event’s 10th anniversary and the fair is scheduled to present 60 galleries from throughout the UK and Europe.

Acknowledging its significance in Scotland’s cultural calendar, it has been chosen as an official partner event of ‘Homecoming Scotland 2014’.

While the fair is by no means restricted to the sale of Scottish art, a large proportion of the commercial galleries present are located in Scotland and represent Scottish artists.

Highlights last year included Hebrides Art, a gallery from Seilebost on the west coast of the Isle of Harris; Dundee’s Gallery Q, which exhibits contemporary Scottish art; and Recoat Gallery, an edgy art space located in Glasgow dealing exclusively in contemporary, urban artwork.

Edinburgh Art Fair 2014, 14–16 November at the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh

Hayley Tompkins, Digital Light Pool (Orange) (detail), 2013 Installation view: Scotland + Venice 2013: Sworn/Campbell/Tompkins Photo: Ruth Clark Commissioned by The Common Guild for Scotland + Venice 2013 Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Wasps Open Studios Throughout October, Wasps Studios will open their doors to the public, providing visitors with a glimpse of the otherwise private and inaccessible spaces where many Scottish artists choose to work. The studios are located across Scotland, from the Scottish Borders to Shetland, and around 400 artists will participate in the event.

Curator Michelle Emery-Barker explains: ‘Wasps Open Studios first started in 2002. Since then, the event has attracted nearly 50,000 visitors. Its success shows a real appetite for audiences to learn more about how and why artists make their work…Wasps Open Studios is a nationwide event and one that celebrates the diversity of studio communities across ages, art forms, practice and experience.’

In addition to opening up the studio spaces, there will be a programme of talks from visual artists and curators, and classes in life drawing, paper-making, photography and printmaking.

Rachael Cloughton is the editor of Line Magazine and visual art editor of The List.

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T TRACES OF WAR LANDSCAPES OF THE WESTERN FRONT Peter Cattrell

o mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the Fleming Collection is currently exhibiting a series of landscape photographs, taken between 1996 and 2013, by Scottish photographer Peter Cattrell (b.1959). Cattrell’s interest in these landscapes of war was sparked by the discovery that his great-uncle died in the initial assault along the Somme on 1 July 1916, the most murderous day in the history of the British Army, when over 20,000 men lost their lives, most within the first hour of attack.

Here, Cattrell gives an insight into his ongoing project, beginning with the first of the many journeys he has made to France to retrace his great-uncle’s footsteps.

In 1989, I made a landscape photography trip to France, and visited Verdun. I then went to the Somme to trace my mother’s Uncle Willie, the artist William Wyatt Bagshawe (1883–1916), at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission archive in Arras. His name is on Sir Edwin Lutyen’s memorial arch at Thiepval, honouring the ‘Missing’ or those with no known grave. On returning to London, I spent a day in the Imperial War Museum library, reading Richard A. Sparling’s book on the Sheffield City Battalion, History of the 12th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment. The destruction of Bagshawe’s battalion on 1 July is described as being: ‘Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying.’

Further research prompted a visit in 1996 to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the terrible day on which he, and so many died. I arrived at Serre at 6am, where the Pals Battalions had held the line, anxious not to miss the moment when the men had left their trenches at 7.30am. After days of shelling the German front line, the troops were made to walk in waves across no man’s land to take the German positions.

But, the wire was intact, leaving them brutally exposed to machine-gun fire. William Bagshawe was in A Company, in the very first wave at 7.20am (10 minutes earlier than intended due to a mine exploding early). He had to lie down in front of the uncut German wire, where he was shot by a sniper, his body probably then hit by shellfire and lost.

Line of Trees Winter Thiepval, Somme, France, 2000 Silver gelatin print

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This project is in memory of William Bagshawe, a landscape artist, who studied at Sheffield Technical College and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. My grandmother was a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, but never talked about her experiences, although she kept all of her brother William’s letters and drawings, and showed them to me as a child. He often drew amusing cartoons and had a considerable sense of humour. In 1915, he exhibited at the New English Art Club in London, and his address was c/o Schwabe, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Randolph Schwabe (1885– 1948) was a contemporary of Bagshawe’s at the Slade, and became a professor there in 1930. A particular fascination I have is with a group photograph taken at Larkhill Camp, Wiltshire, of William and three friends relaxing together, not long before being sent to the Western Front. From the left: Alexander Robertson, a lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield, and a poet who wrote two volumes of war poetry – Comrades, published in May 1916, and Last Poems, published posthumously in 1918; a Mr Bailey, a student at the University of Sheffield, who was injured but survived; my great-uncle; and lastly, Edward Stanley Curwen, from Cumberland, a classics master at Rotherham Grammar School.

CLOCKWISE Watercolour and ink sketch by William Bagshawe of the Moat House, Acton Trussell, Staffordshire. Dated 3 June 1915, this sketch was part of the Randolph Schwabe (1885–1948) archive at Bourne Fine Art in Edinburgh.

Lines of Stubble, near Sunken Lane, Beaumont-Hamel, Somme, France, 2000 From left: Alexander Robertson, H.E.Bailey, William Wyatt Bagshawe and Edward Stanley Curwen pictured taking a break during training at Larkhill Camp, Salisbury Plain, December 1915.

John Copse from German Lines, Serre, Somme, France, 1997, silver gelatin print

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My photographs are of the landscape as it is now, in different seasons and taken over several years. In the cutting of a maize crop, or lines of winter stubble, where men were also cut down by rifle fire, or in mine craters that deeply mould the earth, the land becomes a memorial in itself.

The landscape shows traces of the battlefields and scars of conflict, but also the regeneration of the land to farming.

The copses at Serre – named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – formed the front line, and the Sheffield Pals came out of John Copse. Today, these copses are one, with still much evidence of shell holes and trenches, as they have not been ploughed over.

There is an absence of people and noise; these places are now tranquil, but they often have a powerful feeling and presence.

Every metre has strategic importance, and each contour has meaning. The cycle of yearly ploughing and harvesting brings more munitions and shrapnel to the surface, emerging like strange metallic crops. I have collected and photographed some of these in the studio in extreme close-up – the damage that these small bits of metal caused is wholly out of proportion to their size.

I have extended the project to encompass other interests, including where the Edinburgh City Battalion fought; where the famous poet Wilfred Owen died trying to cross the Sambre–Oise Canal at Ors with the Manchester Regiment a week before the armistice; where the first major engagement of the war occurred for the British around Mons in Belgium; where my father’s uncle fought in Ypres, Belgium; and other notable areas of the Somme campaign such as Delville Wood and Beaumont-Hamel. For me, the research has been as interesting as the resulting photography – there have been so many coincidences and connections. I have discovered that I have taken a photograph of a village from the exact spot my greatuncle had sketched from, have looked through image archives with relations of my great-uncle’s friends and have made many links to people also trying to trace these stories. I am drawn to the front line in personal homage, but also in awe of the significance this area holds for so many people.

Peter Cattrell, April 2014

Sun Beams Delville Wood, Somme, France, 1997 Silver gelatin print

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Victoria Crowe Peter Cattrell (b.Glasgow, 1959) grew up in Edinburgh and read history at the University of St Andrews before switching to study photography, film and television at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication).

In the 1980s, he worked as a fine printer with the celebrated landscape photographer Fay Godwin. Cattrell exhibits widely and teaches photography at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and other colleges within the University of the Arts London.

Traces of War: Landscapes of the Western Front Until 18 October 2014 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–5.30pm (Tuesday to Friday, 10am–5pm through August)

FROM TOP Line of Trees Autumn, Thiepval, Somme, France, 1998, silver gelatin print Barbed Wire, found Serre, Somme, France, 2011, silver gelatin print Sambre–Oise Canal, Somme, France, 1998, silver gelatin print Shell Hole, Sheffield Memorial Park, Serre, Somme, France, 2000, silver gelatin print

Winter Garden, silkscreen, from an edition of 40, 76 x 84 cm

Winter Sequence 14 January –13 February 2015 Monday–Friday, 10.00am–5.30pm (ground floor gallery) 19 | ART

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 20

THE BIG PUSH AFTER THE EVE OF THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME

by Sir Herbert James Gunn Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’.

His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently –

I heard they’re packing old clock parts into trench mortars now, for want of iron scrap. Some wag quips that next time he’s sentry and hears the plop of a minnenwerfer tumbling over, he’ll not blow the alarm, he’ll shout: ‘Time, gentlemen, please…’

As part of the World War I centenary, the Fleming Collection commissioned Scottish poet John Glenday to write a poem in response to its painting The Eve of the Battle of the Somme (1916) by Sir Herbert James Gunn. Painted by Gunn while in service during the war, it is a poignant and deeply moving picture of young soldiers at rest and play before a battle that would claim thousands of lives.

The history of World War I has been a subject of ongoing fascination for Glenday. His 2013 poem The Lost Boy, for example, tells the true story of his Uncle Alexander, who was in the D Battery 307th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery and died in the Battle of the Sambre on 4 November 1918 (the same battle as Wilfred Owen). Alongside his career as a poet, Glenday worked as an addiction counsellor and psychiatric nurse, and his poems are characterised by an understated integrity and humanity.

The poem was commissioned with the assistance of The Poetry Society, whose early history was very much tied in with the World War I generation. The poem and painting are currently on display in Traces of War: Landscapes of the Western Front at the Fleming Collection, London, until 18 October 2014.

We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid. Bravery and cowardice are just two workings of the same fear moving us in different ways. The 8th East Surreys have been given footballs to kick and follow at Zero Hour;

it’s to persuade them from the trenches lest their nerve fail as they advance on Montaubon. I’ve watched men hitch up their collars and trudge forward as if shrapnel and lead were no worse than a shower of winter rain.

This afternoon a few of us went swimming in the mill dam behind Camp. Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. A skylark climbed high over the torn fields on its impossible thread of song:

‘like an unbodied joy’. I don’t know why, but it reminded me of the day we took over from the French along the Somme; it was so tranquil, so picturesque, the German trenchworks crowded with swathes of tiny, brilliant flowers none of us could name.

I believe if the dead come back at all they’ll come back green to grow from the broken earth and drink the gathered water and all the things they suffered will mean no more to them than the setting-in of the ordinary dark, or a change of weather.

Sir Herbert James Gunn, The Eve of the Battle of the Somme, 1916, oil on canvas © Artist’s Estate, The Fleming-Wyfold Foundation

— John Glenday

SNAPSHOTS

OF WOMEN AT WAR Maggie Andrews

O

n display in the Fleming Collection’s exhibition Traces of War: Landscapes of the Western Front is a series of photographs by George P. Lewis (1875–1926), one of two photographers paid by the Ministry of Information to photograph activity on the Home Front.

Lewis’s images of women working in Scotland’s World War I industries come from over 1,300 photographs that he created for the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London in 1918. The War Cabinet had approved a proposal

by Sir Alfred Mond to set up the museum on 5 March 1917, with the aim of recording the contribution from all sections of society to the war effort. Its various committees were avidly gathering whatever material they could. Finding plenty of statistical information, but insufficient illustrations, the Women’s Work Committee decided to encourage interest and acquisitions by arranging an exhibition in the autumn of 1918. After some harassed negotiation, the committee secured the services of Lewis in cooperation with the Ministry of Information. The photographs were shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, and later became part of the national archive. In 2004, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery commissioned Peter Cattrell to produce silver gelatin prints from a selection of Lewis’s negatives held by the IWM.

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Cement bagging, unidentified cement works 1918 (printed 2004) Silver gelatin print Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 24

LEFT TO RIGHT Granite blaster, Messrs Stewart and Co., Aberdeen, 1918 (printed 2004), silver gelatin print, Scottish National Portrait Gallery Spreading refined sugar before bagging, Glebe Sugar Refinery, Greenock, 1918 (printed 2004), silver gelatin print, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester. She writes on domesticity, femininity and war in the twentieth century and is an advisor to the ‘BBC World War I at Home’ project in the West Midlands.

She leads the theme of ‘Gender and the Home Front’ for the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded World War I hub ‘Voices of War and Peace’.

Traces of War: Landscapes of the Western Front Until 18 October 2014 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–5.30pm (Tuesday to Friday, 10am–5pm through August) A selection of photographs by Peter Cattrell and George P. Lewis will also be on display in Remembering the Great War at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh from 4 August 2014 to 5 July 2015.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open daily 10am–5pm (7pm on Thursday)

Women’s participation in industry has become part of our cultural memory of World War I: female munitions workers are icons of the Home Front and fuel the myth that war resulted in social change. Lewis’s portraits appear familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary. His images can be viewed as documents of women’s patriotic contribution to the vital Scottish industries of glass, coal, gas, paper, leather and food. They may not immediately appear to be staged, constructed or selected. The women are not posed facing the camera; they do not directly address the audience as in recruitment posters. Instead, these are ostensibly glimpses, almost snapshots, of women engrossed in their working lives, captured for posterity.

Despite the truth claims of photography, we need to look at it critically. A photograph is not merely an image, a document of the past. It is also symbolic; its careful frame selection carries messages and requires interrogation.

Arguably, the process of nation building, so fundamental to the conduct of war and memories of war in museums, airbrushed many wartime experiences from subsequent historical narratives. Thus, due to the selectivity of these photographs, there is no sign of industrial conflict during 25 | ART

World War I, or the radical politics of ‘Red Clydeside’, or the contribution of lads too young to fight, or the importance of immigrant labour to industrial production.

The photographs were instead structured to allow women to dominate, strongly framed by their industrial environment, its tools, machinery and equipment. The centrality of the working women suggests that they are engaged in heroic endeavours equivalent to those of men in the military. Yet these images are not like those of the soldiers, who, in World War I, were not photographed during battle in the act of killing, maiming or being killed.

Not until the end of the twentieth century, with more sophisticated technology, smaller cameras and looser attitudes to censorship were men portrayed in the business of war. The photographs observing women actively engaged in work therefore draw attention to the safety of their work, differentiating it from men’s dangerous, high-status contribution.

The process of recording women in industrial settings through the medium of photography endorses the assumption that it was something extraordinary.

Such images have become a constituent part of the myth

suggesting these working practices were particular to wartime, and legitimated their disappearance in the interwar economic depression. However, there was nothing new or unique about women’s involvement in industrial production: at the outbreak of war, women made up approximately 25 per cent of the workforce in Scotland, and slightly more in England. Women were clustered in areas where work was transitory or temporary. They were over-represented in industries consistent with the domestic associations of femininity, including textile manufacturing, domestic service, laundry and retail – jobs that, nevertheless, were physically arduous, necessitating women to be on their feet for 12 hours or more a day. This is hidden in these snapshots of women’s working life, for they are momentary glimpses of women’s long, tedious and monotonous days.

Wartime did make women’s work more visible, but produced only a temporary transfer for some women from domestic-based work into employment outside the home.

The number in domestic service decreased, although it remained the largest employer of women even in wartime; significantly, the majority of women continued to be housewives during World War I. Women’s contribution to

the Home Front as wives and mothers is also hidden. There are no images of women’s everyday struggles to make ends meet, to survive when the separation allowance, paid to dependents of soldiers, was delayed in the first months of the war, nor of time spent in food queues when, from 1916, submarine blockades caused food shortages. Both housewives and the working women in these images had their domestic caring role extended in wartime as parcels and letters became vital to the emotional survival of men in the forces. Yet, their anxiety, worry and grief through the years of emotional labour, looking after men physically or mentally damaged by participation in warfare, does not appear.

As intriguing and absorbing as these images are, we must remember they are but a snapshot of one element of the multiplicity of women’s everyday lives on the Home Front. Hopefully, they will serve as a starting point inspiring many further explorations of women’s experiences during World War I.

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 26

Debbie and Frank Harvey, Lonelybield, Kitleyknowe, Scottish Borders, 2013 © Alicia Bruce

Tapestry of Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group, courtesy Dovecot Studios (dovecotstudios.com), 2013

FLEECE TO FIBRE

E

volving from the William Morris Craft Studio at Merton Abbey, Wimbledon, Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh was

founded in 1912 by the Marquess of Bute. In 2012, to mark its centenary, the tapestry studio chose Victoria Crowe’s painting, Large Tree Group (1975), to be transposed into a sizable

THE MAKING OF THE LARGE TREE GROUP TAPESTRY 27 | ART

tapestry, woven using only undyed wool sourced from a range of various sheep breeds across the

Fleeces from the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry’s Bowhill Estate in the Scottish Borders provided much of the wool for the tapestry, as the Duke explains — Herding sheep to a hilltop at dusk, against their natural hefting* instincts to seek shelter low down, is like herding cats. Hither and thither they ranged through heather and bracken, until shepherds and dogs, whistles and shouts brought order and breathy stillness, and as the sharp glancing sunlight glowed deeper, darker and then was gone, the photographer was content.

Coming face-to-face, months later in curator Ben Divall’s beautiful exhibition, with the image of our Borders landscape alongside the magical translation by the Dovecot weavers of Crowe’s Large Tree Group was, for me and all our farming team, a shiver-down-the-spine moment. The notion of threads linking those same sheep and their fleece to the tapestry, of the threads within the tapestry linking them to breeds and flocks and fleeces across the land, was made real. The feeling of deep, almost subconscious satisfaction is difficult to describe. Through two different and enduring mediums, our landscape and lives have been captured for posterity. Tiny though our part was, it was joyful and unforgettable.

Debbie Harvey, smallholder and member of the Broughton Spinners Group — A smallholding with a dozen assorted sheep and a few ‘coos’ can make life interesting in very unexpected ways.

It started with a card from Victoria Crowe with news that one of her ‘Jenny paintings’, the beautiful Large Tree Group, was being made into a 1.8m-square (6ft-square) tapestry and was to be woven from undyed sheep’s wool. Next, came a request for some fleece from my sheep because they graze at Kittleyknowe, once herded by Jenny herself, and so started an unforgettable experience.

A friend, Vicky, spun my sheep’s fleece and, then, spun a fleece on request from Prince Charles – who wouldn’t?! But when we were offered another 10 fleeces to spin, help was needed. Luckily, Vicky was a member of Broughton Spinners’ Group. Spinning meetings took on a wonderfully collaborative nature, and our visits to Dovecot Studios to see the tapestry grow and to marvel at the weavers’ skill and the white, grey and brown yarn was a joyful privilege.

The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, Sion Williams (Farm Manager) and Shepherds John Falconer, Billy Wilson and Keith Young, Bowhill, Selkirk, Scottish Borders, 2013 © Alicia Bruce

UK. Following the Fleming Collection’s 2009 exhibition A Shepherd’s Life: Paintings of Jenny

* To keep to a certain small, local area, or heft, throughout their lives.

Armstrong by Victoria Crowe, the gallery is showing Fleece to Fibre: The Making of the Large Tree Group Tapestry, based around the creation of this unique collaborative artwork.

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 28

Left to right, weavers Freya Sewell, David Cochrane, Jonathan Cleaver, Naomi Robertson, Emily Fogarty, 2013 © Alicia Bruce

Alicia Bruce was commissioned by Dovecot Studios to photograph the project, tracing the journey from sheep to yarn to the completed tapestry — Community collaboration is at the heart of my practice, so Fleece to Fibre was a treat to work on. There are some unforgettable moments from this project. Firstly, Victoria Crowe’s collaborative and relaxed approach to portraiture as she introduced me, via stories and photographs, to shepherdess Jenny Armstrong – Jenny is at the core of the work. Of all the many experiences, people and places involved, certain moments stand out: Frank carrying my very heavy lighting kit across a field; dinner made for us by the Duke of Buccleuch after a mountain-top photo shoot at dusk (involving sheep, shepherds, iPhones, quad bikes and amazing light); meeting and photographing the Flying Flock in Fife and Sue Blacker’s flock in Cornwall (both shoots happened in pouring rain and my muddy knees led to interesting looks on the trains); the hospitality and giggles of the spinners and weavers; two ladies at Blacker Yarns factory working in an almost balletic style; and, lastly, Curator Ben Divall’s commitment, vision and involvement at every stage.

Tapestry Studio Manager and Master Weaver Naomi Robertson and Weaver Jonathan Cleaver, Dovecot Studios — The plan to use undyed wool had been part of the Large Tree Group project from the start. The colour palette of the painting made it a good choice, and the sample woven by David Cochrane made us confident that the painting’s tonal range could be matched by the natural colours of fleece. We were amazed by how much colour we found in the painting, and worked hard to translate it using warm and cool shades.

Although we work with wool every day, the materials for this tapestry felt new because the colours and textures varied and were often unrepeatable. We greatly appreciated the hand-spinners’ ability to respond to what we needed from the fleeces. It was the first time we had worked directly with spinners, and we enjoyed their interest and enthusiasm during the 15 months of demanding weaving.

One yarn that sticks in my memory came from a small amount of wool gathered from Soay sheep on St Kilda in the 1960s and was donated by the National Trust for Scotland. Hand-spinning had given it a texture and colour particularly useful in certain parts of the image, and I used it sparingly as a precious resource.

I was surprised by the emotion I felt when the completed tapestry was revealed for the first time. There was relief at the successful conclusion of a concentrated and challenging weave, but also the realisation that we had made a very powerful and beautiful work.

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL EXHIBITION

VICTORIA CROWE 31 JULY - 30 AUGUST 2014

Fleece to Fibre: The Making of the Large Tree Group Tapestry In association with Dovecot Studios 29 October 2014–14 February 2015 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–5.30pm

Alicia Bruce, photograph by Andrew Rafferty, 2014

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Fleece to Fibre will be shown at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery 30 August–24 September 2014 Inverness Museum and Art Gallery Castle Wynd, Inverness, Highlands IV2 3EB (0)1463 237 114 | inverness.highland.museum Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–5pm

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ TEL 0131 558 1200 EMAIL mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Shadow and Fire (detail), 2013-14, oil on linen, 101.5 x 76.2 cms Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 30

William Crozier (1897–1930) The Slopes of Fiesole, Tuscany (Reverse: Edinburgh from Castle Street), 1930 Oil on board, 57.2 x 43.2 cm Purchased 1990

‘There is no foreign land. It is the traveller only who is foreign’

Jacob More print. dont seem to have it.

Jacob More (c.1740–93), Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo, 1787, oil on canvas, 66 x 89 cm, purchased 2002

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) The Silverado Squatters (Chatto and Windus, 1883)

NO FOREIGN LAND LANDSCAPES FROM THE FLEMING COLLECTION Briony Anderson and Katie Baker

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Alexander Ignatius Roche (1861–1921), Early Autumn, Grez, oil on canvas laid on board, 45.7 x 38 cm, purchased 1993

T

he Fleming Collection began as a corporate collection of paintings intended to hang on the walls of a bank’s offices (Robert Fleming & Co). It had one simple proviso: the work must be by Scottish artists or of Scottish scenes by any artist. As it stands today, the collection is dominated by depictions of land and sea – landscapes comprise 60 per cent of the paintings acquired. Yet, many of these paintings are not of native terrain, but of other places: ‘foreign land’.

A work in the collection by William Crozier (1897– 1930), an unusual double-sided painting of The Slopes of Fiesole, Tuscany (reverse: Edinburgh from Castle Street, 1930), perhaps best exemplifies this: on one side, a scene from a balcony in Tuscany, while, on the reverse, a view towards Edinburgh Castle from Castle Street. As one looks out across the Mediterranean land and sky, the other looks inward, towards the heart of Edinburgh, the eye drawn along and up the curved street.

The earliest landscape in the collection is an Italian scene by Jacob More (c.1740–93), who visited Italy and never left.

Many Scottish artists, including Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840), born nearly two decades later, made similar journeys there. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Glasgow Boys, a loose group of artists who were heavily influenced by European art, looked to France, in

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 32

Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935), Trees at Cassis, c.1913, oil on board, 66 x 77 cm, purchased 1969

‘From grey rooftops on the left rose the mock Gothic spire of the university, then the Kilpatrick Hills, patched with woodlands and with the clear distant top of Ben Lomond behind the eastward slope.

Thaw thought it queer that a man on that summit, surrounded by the highlands and overlooking deep lochs, might see with a telescope this kitchen window, a speck of light in a low haze to the south’ Alasdair Gray (b.1934), Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Books, 1981) 33 | ART

particular the Barbizon School, but also to Holland and the Hague School. The collection has a number of works painted outside of Scotland by the Glasgow Boys. Early Autumn, Grez

by Alexander Ignatius Roche (1861–1921) was painted in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau. Roche, along with John Lavery (1856–1941) and Alexander Kennedy (1847–1928) made their base there from 1883, joining an international community of artists and writers including Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), who first visited in 1875, returning thereafter over three successive summers.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scottish artists continued to be drawn to the landscapes of the south. As they examined international styles, their work was still often engaged with subjects strongly linked to Scotland, such as the land and sea. Journeys abroad made a great impression on the Scottish Colourists, and they brought these experiences and influences back with them to Scotland. Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) first went to France in 1891, and, from around 1903, he made annual painting trips there, often with fellow Scottish Colourists. He settled in a Paris studio between 1910 and 1912, and, although he subsequently returned to Scotland, he continued to regularly visit France to paint, in particular the southern coast at Cassis until about 1930.

Travel further afield is represented in Feluccas on the Nile (c.1885) by Joseph Farquharson (1846–1935). This small oil sketch (probably painted from nature) is in marked contrast to his well-known snow scenes of the north-east of Scotland.

During the late 1880s and early 1890s, he made a tour of Egypt,

Samuel John Peploe, Perthshire Trees, oil on canvas, 72 x 82 cm, purchased 1981

which had experienced a growth of mass tourism on the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

An international outlook among Scottish artists has prevailed throughout the centuries and is a striking and recurring feature of the landscapes within the Fleming Collection. Given the ubiquity of landscapes within Scottish art, the works in No Foreign Land challenge typically romantic associations – Scottish landscape being often synonymous with distant mountains, deep lochs, and vast skies. Instead, a more complex ‘picture’ of the geographic context of Scottish artists’ work is presented.

‘We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time’ T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943)

Katie Baker and Briony Anderson are curators of No Foreign Land: Landscapes from the Fleming Collection.

No Foreign Land: Landscapes from the Fleming Collection 29 October 2014–14 February 2015 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–5.30pm (Tuesday to Friday, 10am–5pm through August)

Joseph Farquharson (1846–1935), Feluccas on the Nile, c.1885, oil on canvas laid on panel 16.4 x 34.9 cm, purchased 1982

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 34

New collaboration by John Burnside & Will Maclean

ACatechism of the Laws of Storms

REFLECTIONS ON

SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE To be published by Art First in Autumn 2014 Size: 220 x 180 mm, soft cover, 56pp ISBN 978-1-901993-73-8

John Burnside’s poetry and Will Maclean’s imagery first came together in a collaborative print–poem commissioned for the opening of Dundee Contemporary Arts in 1999. A Catechism of the Laws of Storms continues the joint projects.

Some years ago Maclean found some dis-bound copies of an illustrated weekly newspaper The Pictorial World of 1882–83 and used the woodcut images to assemble a series of collages, which were then scanned and digitally altered.

The series of collages related to descriptions of storms and hurricanes from nautical books and manuals in Maclean’s collection, in particular The Law of Storms by Henry Paddington.

The collages were shown to Burnside who composed a series of twelve poems in response to the images. Maclean in turn altered a number of the images in response to the poems.

With the Scottish Independence Referendum drawing closer, Scottish Art News asked six artists who have works represented in, or are connected with, the Fleming Collection, to share their thoughts on the upcoming vote.

Adrian Wiszniewski (b.Glasgow, 1958), Reading Allowed, gouache, 143cm x 120 cm (On display in Scottish Figuration, Flowers Gallery, London, until 30 August 2014 and featured in the monograph Adrian Wiszniewski by Alex Kidson, published by Sansom & Co.)

Adrian Wiszniewski In the 1980s, the idea of Britain became unstuck. Everything with ‘Britain’ in it, such as British Coal, British Steel, British Rail and British Telecom, was being dismantled and/or sold off. Mining communities across Britain – in Wales, Scotland and England’s industrial belt – were forced to face the brunt of economic policy borne from political ideology. This asset stripping meant that the south-east boomed. A north/south divide had been perpetrated.

Scotland was forced to re-identify itself and it did so politically, socially and culturally. It no longer felt that validation from London was required before communicating with countries beyond these shores. However, a recurring anomaly was that Scotland found itself controlled by a government in London that it had whole-heartedly voted against. This affront to democracy led to the setting up of a Scottish Parliament with an array of devolved powers. In September, the people of Scotland will decide whether to take full control of the country’s economy. If the answer is ‘yes’ and independence follows, then Scotland will no longer blame London for its woes. This would be a huge cultural shift, but perhaps it would enable the wounds from the 1980s to heal and a healthy relationship to thrive.

Exhibitions Scottish Figuration, Flowers Gallery, London, until 30 August 2014.

The Fleming Collection acquired three prints by Adrian Wiszniewski from The Scottish Bestiary portfolio of prints, published by The Paragon Press, London, 1986.

For further information please contact Art First, 21 Eastcastle Street, London W1W WDD Telephone +44 (0)20 7734 0386. www.artfirst.co.uk

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Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 36

Ken Currie (b.North Shields, 1960), Officers of the Great War, 2014, courtesy Flowers Gallery, (on display in Reflections of War: 100 Years After the Start of World War One, Flowers Gallery, London, until 30 August 2014)

Exhibitions Stare, GoMA, Glasgow, until 2 November 2014 Departure, Peter Potter Gallery, Haddington, East Lothian, 23 August–4 October 2014

Ken Currie I think we must vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum. People living in Scotland should have the power to determine their own government. Independence won’t fix everything, but at least it will give us more control in shaping the kind of nation we want to live in.

The negativity of the No campaign has been deeply damaging. Its central message, that the Scottish people are too weak, too poor and too stupid to run their own affairs, is completely degrading. The truth is, a No vote would be a tragedy for Scotland. As Neal Ascherson recently pointed out: how can anyone wish nothing for their country? Despite the cynical promises, we would be forgotten about and ignored by Westminster governments for generations to come. Decline would be inevitable.

For everyone living in Scotland right now, voting Yes is a matter of existential necessity and the only truly dignified option available to us.

The Fleming Collection acquired The Road (1993–94, oil on canvas) by Flannigan in 1994, Once Upon Our Time (2004), a series of watercolours on vellum in 2004, and Blind Set (2009), a set of eight aquatint etchings in 2009.

Exhibitions Reflections of War: 100 Years After the Start of World War One, Flowers Gallery, London, until 30 August 2014.

Moyna Flannigan (b.Kirkcaldy, 1963), Stare, 2014, oil on linen, 208 x 184 cm, courtesy the artist (on display in Stare, GoMA, Glasgow, until 2 November 2014)

Moyna Flannigan When I am in my studio painting, there are many things that go through my mind when I am trying to transform raw ideas into the visual language of painting. The very last thing I might think about is my nationality. Being Scottish is just something I am. When I show my work internationally, sometimes I’m billed as a Scottish artist and sometimes as British. I don’t care either way. I don’t believe in the notion of a collective cultural identity within Scotland’s borders. From an early age, the idea was implanted in me that there were many interesting things to be found and learned about in the wider world, that what you had in your immediate world wasn’t enough.

The Fleming Collection acquired The Doctor, Nine Heads Study (1993, charcoal on paper)

by Ken Currie in 1995.

Graham Fagen I have been enjoying the referendum debate.

It is an extremely healthy situation.

We are thinking.

Thinking is about debate. Listening to another point of view.

Comprehension. Understanding. And offering new thought.

I like the role social media has in the debate. It has a power beyond institutional control. It has exposed lies and hypocrisy at the root of institutional power.

And, I have been pleased by the direction the Scottish Parliament has taken since devolution, a very different direction to the Parliament at Westminster.

I’m proud to be able to have the privilege to offer my vote on a referendum issue, as part of a peaceful democracy.

A sign that our thinking works.

The only thing I’m sad about is the percentage of people who don’t vote.

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Victoria Crowe (b.Kingston-upon-Thames, 1945) Snow on Snow, oil and mixed media on conservation board, 112 x 75 cm (On display in Victoria Crowe: Real and Reflected, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, until 30 August 2014)

Victoria Crowe A while ago, I spoke to a Gaelic poet who has lived in the Scottish Borders for many years. We were talking of definitions of nationhood and creative work, and agreed that no matter where artists or poets put down roots, that is where their creativity flourishes. Artists have the tremendous freedom to take creative nourishment from any time, culture or philosophy; we are not limited by geography or society.

I’m proud of the country I happen to live in, but I do not want my work to be defined by it, any more than I would wish it to be defined by my sex.

Exhibitions Victoria Crowe: Real and Reflected (Edinburgh Festival Exhibition), The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, until 30 August 2014.

Fleece to Fibre: The Making of the Large Tree Group Tapestry, the Fleming Collection, London, 29 October 2014–14 February 2015.

Victoria Crowe: Winter Sequence, Browse & Darby, London, 14 January–13 February 2015.

Between 1980 and 1999, the Fleming Collection acquired a number of paintings by Victoria Crowe, including works from her series of paintings of the shepherdess Jenny Armstrong, which were shown in the exhibition A Shepherd’s Life: Paintings of Jenny Armstrong by Victoria Crowe at the Fleming Collection in 2009.

Graham Fagen (b.Glasgow, 1966), Scheme for Conscience (detail), concrete, mild steel, ceramic, gold lustre and bronze, 2014, courtesy the artist (On display in Cabbages in an Orchard; The formers and forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen, Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art, until 29 August 2014)

Exhibitions Cabbages in an Orchard; The formers and forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen, Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art, until 29 August.

In Camera, Panorama gallery, La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseilles (with Graham Eatough), 30 August–21 December 2014.

GENERATION, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until 25 January 2015 (Fagen has produced a limited-edition print, Consciousness (2014), to accompany various exhibitions and events featuring his work as part of GENERATION).

Graham Fagen is representing Scotland at the 56th Venice Biennale, 9 May–22 November 2015.

Morag Donkin (b.Edinburgh, 1990) Tree, 2014, oil on canvas board, 12.7 x 20 cm (On display at the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, until 4 August 2014)

Morag Donkin I’ve always been proud to call myself a Scottish artist. The label has always fitted well with me. I was born in Edinburgh, I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, I paint Scottish landscapes, I’m called Morag and my boyfriend plays the bagpipes. But if you ever met me, you’d be surprised to hear I have an English accent. I grew up in Lincolnshire, spending 17 years from the age of 1 to 18 in the small town of Boston, and I don’t think it is the just the Scottish people that have become frustrated with politics.

The independence referendum has given the whole of the UK a chance to consider how well our politicians are doing. How we spend our taxes, how we waste our taxes. I think that if we can make politics more local and relevant to Scottish people, government will be a lot more effective.

Exhibitions Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, until 4 August 2014.

Inspired! 2014, Edinburgh Macmillan Art Show and Sale in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support Charity at Bonhams, Edinburgh, 14 –17 August 2014.

Morag Donkin, Congregational Gallery, Rothbury, Northumberland, 21 August–23 October 2014.

Morag Donkin was awarded the Fleming-Wyfold Award in 2012.

The Fleming Collection acquired a series of screen prints entitled Bell, Rosselle and Nancy (2006) by Graham Fagen in 2006, which will be included in the collection’s forthcoming exhibition No Foreign Land: Landscapes from the Fleming Collection, 29 October 2014–14 February 2015.

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GLASGOW WOMEN’S LIBRARY Katie Baker

One of the more unusual venues used to host GENERATION’s celebration of the last 25 years of Scottish contemporary art is Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL).

But then, this is no ordinary library.

Offering a diverse lending collection of books for, by and about women, from feminist classics to biographies on unsung heroines, as well as a rich archive of materials relating to the lives of women, this is an establishment that has been rooted in Glasgow’s art scene since its inception.

21 Revolutions Exhibition, courtesy GWL

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FROM TOP Glasgow Women’s Library Writer Muriel Gray and Adele Patrick looking through the archive, courtesy GWL Castlemilk Womanhouse workshop, early 1990s, courtesy Claire Barclay Artist Ruth Barker looking through the poster archive, courtesy GWL

Shauna McMullan, 165 Stars Found in Glasgow Women’s Lending Library, 2012, courtesy GWL, digital pigment fine art print on paper

In October, GENERATION will revisit Castlemilk Womanhouse, a groundbreaking collaborative art project coordinated by the arts organisation Women In Profile.

Established to represent women during Glasgow’s year as European Capital of Culture in 1990, Castlemilk Womanhouse was its most ambitious project and became a feminist landmark in Scottish art. It referenced the pioneering American Womanhouse exhibition of 1972, an art experiment in an abandoned house in Los Angeles that addressed the experiences of women. Castlemilk Womanhouse took place in an empty tenement block in Castlemilk on Glasgow’s South Side, inhabiting abandoned domestic spaces to explore creative collaborations between artists and women in the local community. Glasgow Women’s Library has unearthed all the archival material it holds on the project, and artist Kate Davis has made a new work in response, HOUSE WORK CASTLE MILK WOMAN HOUSE, which will become the inaugural exhibition in the library’s newly acquired home in the East End of Glasgow, and a timely reminder of where it all began.

It was from Women In Profile, and the large volume of materials accumulated, that GWL was born.

Established by the hard work of unpaid volunteers, it was 10 years before it could employ a librarian and another four years before it gained an archivist. This is a library and archive that was set up by, among others, designers, artists, ceramicists, playwrights and poets. Art and artists have always been, according to the library’s co-founder Adele Patrick, ‘embedded right at its heart’ and, having been created by artists, it has worked closely with them on a range of projects over the years. It is an approach that, along with its deep commitment to women’s issues and education, has led Patrick to reconsider the library as an artwork in its own right, a socially engaged practice that has been generating and developing projects since 1991.

In 2012, to celebrate its 21st birthday, Glasgow Women’s Library commissioned 21 female artists and 21 female writers, including internationally renowned names like Lucy Skaer and Jackie Kay, to produce new works inspired by items in the library, archive and artefact collections. An exhibition was held at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2013, and a book, 21 Revolutions, was published in 2014 to bring together all of the results. The GWL archive is an eclectic one, shaped by the many donations it has received throughout its history. Anti-suffragette artefacts, clocks, brooches, playing cards, political badges and knitting patterns from the 1940s are just some of the different items that influenced the resulting works, which range from prints and poems to a National Museum of Roller Derby. In one image, which seems to speak directly to the history and legacy of the numerous women who have passed through the library doors, artist Shauna McMullan collected the hundreds of marginal annotations made on the many donated books in the lending library. She created a piece that suggests a constellation of asterisks, calling to mind the sparks and fireworks of inspiration – those moments of sudden illumination when reading, during which a connection is made and the imagination is fired.

It is a fitting work for a library that has been inspiring, encouraging and empowering women for over two decades. As Patrick notes, the GWL has done things the opposite way round to most collections. As they are now gradually professionalising, other libraries, museums and archives are trying to generate the wide access to their collections that GWL has always had. For years, the library led a nomadic existence, moving between various temporary sites as it expanded, until eventually it was given a suitable location in the vacated premises of Bridgeton Public Library in 2013. In the process, Glasgow Women’s Library has been redefining what a library and a collection can be.

This is a library and archive that was set up by, among others, designers, artists, ceramicists, playwrights and poets – art and artists have always been ‘embedded right at its heart’

HOUSE WORK CASTLE MILK WOMAN HOUSE 18 October–18 December 2014 Glasgow Women’s Library 23 Landressy Street, Glasgow G40 1BP T: (0)141 550 2267 | womenslibrary.org.uk Open: Monday to Friday, 9.30am–5pm (7pm on Thursday) 21 Revolutions, edited by Adele Patrick, is published by Freight Books, priced £25, and is available to buy from Glasgow Women’s Library

Katie Baker is an artist and writer based in London.

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Hutton Castle after Sir William Burrell’s alterations.

COLLECTOR’S DAUGHTER THE UNTOLD BURRELL STORY Sue Stephen

Marion with the author at Hillhouse in Ayrshire, 1935

Marion Burrell

The collector’s daughter was my godmother. When she died aged 89 in 1992, I found myself able to reveal littleknown family memories. Marion Burrell (1903–92) was the only child of a strange and powerfully motivated man, and, because of my family links, I have been able to research and record a rare social history that would otherwise have been forever lost.

From modest beginnings, Sir William Burrell (1861–1958) achieved phenomenal success as a shipowner and used the fortune he amassed to become a leading collector of antiquities and fine arts. In 1944, he endowed over 8,000 items to the City of Glasgow and founded the Burrell Collection. From ancient Chinese ceramics and tiny creatures made from jade, the collection extends through ages and continents to include treasures carved from ivory, oriental carpets and embroideries, stained glass and tapestries. Burrell’s love of art is displayed in works by Bellini, Rembrandt and Raeburn, members of the Hague School, French Impressionists and the celebrated Glasgow Boys, whom he came to know through his friendship with Glasgow art dealer Alexander Reid.

The Burrell Collection is unique because it is the work of one extraordinary man. Every human aspect seems to be there, from courtly pleasures to the working lives of ordinary folk. As a Glasgow businessman, Burrell was an immensely ‘human’ being whose sense of romance and pathos can be discovered through his collection; yet herein lies an enigma because his private life was often bizarre. Although my parents and grandparents knew Willie Burrell, I can claim no personal recollection. But in writing about him, I could not stop myself from being drawn to this mysterious man, for the curious magnetism that Burrell had was dynamically accentuated in his brightly captivating daughter.

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FROM TOP Miss Burrell, having changed her name to Silvia, meeting the Queen at the opening of the Burrell Collection, 1983. All photos © Sue Stephen An illustration by Joseph Crawhall of ‘The History of Reynard the Fox’ (c.1896). Marion loved these stories and remembered the prints in her nursery. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection Jade rhyton drinking cup with clambering felines in high relief, Ming Dynasty © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

In writing about him, I could not stop myself from being drawn to this mysterious man, for the curious magnetism that Burrell had was dynamically accentuated in his brightly captivating daughter The Beach at Trouville, The Empress Eugénie (1863) by Eugène Boudin. Marion helped her father to buy this painting. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

William and Constance Burrell had hoped for a son, but Marion’s birth was a trauma from which her mother never fully recovered, and so she was to be an only child.

While she was still in her infancy, her ambitious father saw her potential, and the ailing Constance supported his scheme for the child to become a fluent linguist while raised in solitude by foreign governesses. Pocket money was forbidden so that she would learn the merit of thrift and never be corrupted by her father’s wealth, a regime that was destined to plague her life.

While her mother continued to demand attention, Marion grew up among her father’s collection and learned to share his lifelong passion. After a privileged education in England and a finishing school in Paris, Miss Burrell was shaping up so well that her father indulged her with two London seasons so that she might crown his success with an aristocratic marriage. But, the young lady had a mind of her own and Burrell’s great plan was a failure. Despite the supply

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of noble suitors, there were three broken engagements so Marion exploded in fury and vowed she would never wed. Secret love affairs were to follow, while her mother mistreated her and her father tried to confine her at Hutton Castle without money or transport so that she felt like a prisoner.

During World War II, Marion served as a voluntary nurse, but her life at Hutton became unbearable and, at the age of 47, she fled from her home never to return. Being deprived of financial support, she worked her passage round the world and finally lived out her days in a modest flat in Edinburgh. Although her parents had tried to cut her off without a penny, this irrepressible lady continued to make the most of her life. Her father lived to 96 but never saw the Queen open his magnificent museum; in spite of the treatment Marion received, she never ceased to admire her father and take pride in his astonishing achievements.

Sue Stephen is the god-daughter of Marion Burrell, and took part in the BBC television programme The Man Who Collected the World: William Burrell. She lives in Stirlingshire.

Collector’s Daughter: The Untold Burrell Story by S.M.O. Stephen (Glasgow Museums Publishing, £9.99) is available to buy from the Fleming Collection. All profits received by the author from the sale of this book will be donated to Marion Burrell’s favoured charity, The Royal National Lifeboat Institution. flemingcollection.com Bellini to Boudin: Five Centuries of Painting in the Burrell Collection Until 21 March 2015 The Burrell Collection 2060 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow G43 1AT T: (0)141 287 2550 Open daily, 10am–5pm (11am on Friday and Sunday) Scottish Art News | BOOKS | 46

RECENT ACQUISITIONS Scottish Art News highlights new additions to permanent collections across Scotland Aberdeen Art Gallery has unveiled a new acquisition, Portrait of the Artist and his Wife (1910) by John Macdonald Aiken. This Edwardian tour de force reveals the grandeur, fashions and manners of the period. Aiken studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, the Royal College of Art in London and in Florence.

He was Head of Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen from 1911 to 1914, before serving in World War I; after the war, he became a full-time painter. The portrait was created in the artist’s studio at 183a Union Street, which he shared with other local artists. It inspired Aberdeen Art Gallery’s current exhibition, The Lady and the Vamp: Women’s Wardrobes and World War One, where it is on display.

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In 2012, The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust commemorated the centenary of the birth of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004). As part of the celebrations, the trust gifted certain artworks to selected institutions. City Art Centre, Edinburgh, acquired Untitled – Firth of Forth Series, produced by the artist when she was in her mid-80s. Although abstract in composition, it is informed by her surroundings, in this case, the Forth Rail Bridge. Until now, the City Art Centre had not included any examples of work from Barns-Graham’s late period (mid-1990s onwards), which is often considered to be one of the strongest and most experimental stages in her career. The painting is on display in the centre’s exhibition A–Z: An Alphabetical Tour of Scottish Art, which runs until 16 November.

The Blue Studio was recently presented by The Barns-Graham Trust to the Fleming Collection, London. The work dates from the late 1940s when Barns-Graham was experimenting with a number of different approaches to the treatment of form and pictorial space. The painting will be included in the forthcoming exhibition No Foreign Land: Landscapes from the Fleming Collection from 29 October 2014 to 14 February 2015.

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Further afield in Orkney, the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness has acquired Barns-Graham’s Wreck Warbeth. This new acquisition allows the gallery the opportunity to highlight the role that Orkney played in her work. The ‘wreck’ is a reference to the Norwegian trawler Norholmen, wrecked on the Kirk Rocks at Warbeth, west of Stromness, in 1966. Barns-Graham was fascinated by the colour and abstract qualities of the beached trawler, which lay under the shore at the Stromness Kirkyard for many years.

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Additions to the National Galleries of Scotland collections this year include a portrait of Ian Rankin by Guy Kinder (SNPG), a sculpture by Angela Palmer (SNPG) and a drawing by Pablo Picasso (SNGMA). The oil portrait of renowned crime writer Ian Rankin pictures him in the surroundings of The Oxford Bar, the Edinburgh pub famously frequented by his fictional creation Inspector Rebus and the author himself. The portrait was commissioned from Edinburgh-based artist Guy Kinder by Alexander McCall Smith, the best-selling author and friend of Ian Rankin. Brain of the Artist (2013), a self-portrait by Angela Palmer, uses a unique sculptural technique whereby digital information provided by medical scanners is used to inspire a three-dimensional image. The sculpture is painstakingly built up, plane by plane, from individual sheets of glass, on to which she has engraved the contours of a cross section of her subject, her brain. The large charcoal drawing by Picasso, dated 1912, is from a crucial period in his career; large drawings such as Head are extremely rare and are nearly all in museum collections. In July, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery also unveiled a new commission by Scottish photographer Harry Benson of Her Majesty the Queen. In the portrait, she is depicted in the private study at Buckingham Palace.

National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh has acquired a rare maple cabinet designed by Edward William Godwin (1833–86) and painted by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).

The Cloud Cabinet is the only known piece of furniture made by the two to survive in its original state. Intricately carved with Japanese-style floral, bird and geometric motifs, the cabinet is painted with stippled clouds and butterflies in gold. The butterfly was Whistler’s signature and can be seen on almost all of his work after 1869. Manufactured by William Watt Art Furniture of London, the cabinet was probably intended for either Watt’s stand at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, or for Whistler’s Godwin-designed house, The White House (1878). The cabinet will be displayed in one of four new galleries opening in 2016 to showcase National Museums’ collections of art and design.

Kirriemuir Museum is delighted that the ‘Heart of Kirriemuir’ has found its way back home after Angus Council successfully bid for the Freedom casket and Burgess ticket. This piece of interwar Scottish silverware created by Edinburgh silversmiths Brook and Son was awarded to author and dramatist Sir J.M. Barrie (1860–1937), when he was granted the Freedom of the Burgh of Kirriemuir in 1930. Creator of Peter Pan, Barrie was born in Kirriemuir to a family of weavers and is buried in the town. The sides of the casket are decorated with images of sites in Kirriemuir that held particular memories or significance for him, including his house, the town’s statue of Peter Pan and the Barrie Pavilion. The casket forms part of Kirriemuir Museum’s display of Barrie’s life and work.

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Shetland Museum and Archives has acquired two watercolours

by William Cheyne through a 50 per cent grant from the National Fund for Acquisitions. William Cheyne was born in Lerwick in 1858 and worked as a draper’s assistant for Leisk and Sandeson. Most of his paintings were of the local area and were composed between 1900 and 1940. Shetland Museum has a changing display of recent acquisitions and both the watercolours will be shown in the coming months.

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Glasgow Museums has recently acquired Glasgow Excursion Steamers and American Ship on the Clyde (1832) by Robert Salmon, an important painting depicting a crucial period in Glasgow’s history. Although the work is dated 1832, it actually represents Glasgow Harbour in the late 1820s when steamship traffic was becoming a significant feature on the River Clyde. The painting was executed when Salmon – a native of Whitehaven, Cumbria, and who had worked in London, Liverpool and Greenock – was resident in Boston. The American cotton ship was not simply included to appeal to the American market, rather it reflects the first transatlantic vessels that began trading direct to the heart of Glasgow at this time. This is a fine example of Robert Salmon’s work and complements two earlier works of his in the collection.

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The Treasure Trove system for Scotland operates to ensure that newly discovered objects of cultural or historical significance are preserved in museums for public benefit. Recent chance finds include a substantial strap mount cast in bronze and decorated with roundels of yellow and red enamel. An object like this would have been part of a larger suite used to decorate the trappings of a horse and associated vehicle such as a chariot. Other chance finds include two gold finger rings.

The first is engraved with the legend ‘MY AFFLICTION, MY AFFECTION’, with remains of black enamel in the lettering; the style of lettering indicates a seventeenth-century date.

Such rings were given as gifts from husband to wife and the inscription invokes an ideal of romance and romantic love that entails not just pleasure but the pangs and pains of romantic longing or erotic desire. The second ring has its bezel in the shape of a human skeleton and the interior of the hoop is engraved with the legend ‘COGITA MORI’ (‘remember death’) picked out in black enamel. Items of jewellery like this functioned as memento mori, a reminder of the wearer’s mortality and that one should live a good life on earth in expectation of judgment in the next life.

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University of Aberdeen Museums has acquired Primates (2013), a digital print by Dalziel + Scullion and one of a portfolio of prints by 14 different artists created by the Printmaking Workshop at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in collaboration with the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, University of Dundee. Dundee-based artists Dalziel + Scullion were immediately drawn to the taxidermied presentation of a young chimpanzee among the specimens in the D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948) collection. In their print, the artists have extracted the chimp from its glass case and positioned it to gaze upon its perfect skull, evoking the moment when Thompson similarly scrutinised the young primate.

EXHIBITIONS At the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, until 12 October 2014, approximately 30 drawings, watercolours and prints are on display in First Sight: Recent Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings. Additions to the permanent collection on show include a watercolour by James Skene of Rubislaw inspired by his close friend Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian, a watercolour of Glasgow Cathedral painted by David Roberts in 1829, and a colourful Neapolitan costume study by Giovanni Battista Lusieri from the late eighteenth-century.

A touring exhibition, opening in Glasgow in late 2014, will show highlights drawn from contemporary collections acquired through the Art Fund International (AFI) programme. AFI was established by the Art Fund to enable six galleries across the UK, including the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow, to purchase significant bodies of contemporary international art. The works will come together in a UK tour organised by Hayward Touring, curated by David Elliott and supported by the Art Fund. It launches at GoMA in Glasgow in October 2014 and will travel to Birmingham and other Art Fund International partner venues in 2015 and 2016.

1. John Macdonald Aiken (1880–1961), Portrait of the Artist and his Wife, 1910 Oil on canvas, 180 x 114 cm Purchased in 2014 with funding from the Art Fund, the National Fund for Acquisitions, Friends of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Pilgrim Trust and with income from the Webster Bequest

2. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004), Untitled – Firth of Forth Series, 1996–97 Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 152 cm © Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Presented by The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust through the Art Fund

3. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, The Blue Studio, c.1947–48 Oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm © Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Presented by The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust through the Art Fund

4. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Wreck Warbeth, 1986, Acrylic on hardboard, 106 x 35.4 cm © Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Presented by The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust through the Art Fund

5. Angela Palmer (b.1957), Brain of the Artist, 2013 Engraved on 16 sheets of glass, 35 x 30 x 14 cm Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG)

6. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Head, 1912 Charcoal drawing, 64.9 x 49.5 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), courtesy Sotheby’s This purchase was made thanks to a legacy made by Henry and Sula Walton

7. Guy Kinder (b.1960), Ian Rankin, 2013 Oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG), Presented to the SNPG by Alexander McCall Smith 8. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Harmony in Yellow and Gold – The Cloud Cabinet, c.1878 Bird’s eye maple, brass and gold paint, 221 x 191 x 49 cm Purchased in 2014 with funding from the Art Fund and the National Museums Scotland Charitable Trust 9. Brook and Son Edinburgh, Freedom casket and Burgess ticket, 1929 Silver, enamel and mahogany, 29 x 13 x 15.5 cm Purchased in 2013 with funding from the Art Fund and the National Fund for Acquisitions 10. William Cheyne (1858–1944), Upper Sound, Lerwick and Corn Mills Near Spiggie, 1909 Watercolour on paper Purchased in 2014 with funding from the National Fund for Acquisitions 11. Robert Salmon (1775–1845), Glasgow Excursion Steamers and American Ship on the Clyde, 1832 Oil on panel, 42 x 66 cm © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection Purchased in 2014 with funding from the National Fund for Acquisitions, the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest and the Friends of Glasgow Museums 12. Iron Age enamelled strap mount from East Lothian, allocated to East Lothian Museums Service 13. Gold finger ring with an enamelled inscription ‘MY AFFLICTION, MY AFFECTION’, c.1600, from Montrose, allocated to Angus Museums Service 14. Gold ring with a skeleton on the exterior and the inscription ‘COGITA MORI’, late sixteenth-century, from Culross, allocated to Fife Cultural Trust 15. Dalziel + Scullion, Primates, 2013 Digital print, purchased in 2014 with funding from the National Fund for Acquisitions

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Jonathan Owen (b.1973), Untitled, 2013, nineteenth-century marble bust with further carving, 58 x 30 x 56 cm Courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh Jonathan Owen solo exhibition, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (March–April 2014)

Denis Peploe (1914–1993), Rain Clouds over Skye, c.1950, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm, Denis Peploe: Centenary Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (June 2014)

ART MARKET Tim Cornwell

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Scottish art sales of the last six months seem to be a tale of two cities – or two approaches. Glasgow’s headlinehogging contemporary art scene, heavily focused on the conceptual, produced three Turner Prize nominees this year alone. But how and when does this begin to influence sales and auctions still centred on a more painterly and, dare one say it, Edinburgh style?

We asked Scottish galleries and auction houses, and others dealing in Scottish artwork – a national label that is always hard to define, and may be vehemently rejected – to talk about their proudest sales in the last half year, and not just in terms of price.

At the country’s oldest private gallery, The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, Director Guy Peploe was ‘delighted’ with the sales of 35 of 49 paintings from its centenary exhibition of his father Denis Peploe (1914–93), including Rain Clouds over Skye (c.1950). The son of Colourist Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935), Denis mostly worked in landscapes from western Scotland and the Hebrides, and taught at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). After service in the Special Forces in World War II, his art ‘poured out of him’, but Denis was diffident about following in his famous father’s footsteps, and stepped back from exhibitions until he was in his 70s.

Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery, meanwhile, was ‘very pleased’ to sell a group of works by Jonathan Owen (b.1973) to the National Galleries of Scotland, after a sell-out show.

Owen’s work features in the high-profile GENERATION exhibition, celebrating 25 years of Scottish contemporary art. Born in Liverpool, Owen is an ECA graduate who lives and works in the city. His ‘elegant vandalism’ takes ‘found’ drawings and sculptures and cuts away at the work to shape a whole new image. Director Richard Ingleby says he is glad to see an artist ‘wonderfully received’ by international collectors ‘getting this sort of public validation at home’.

Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh singled out its Butterfly (2014) tapestry created by Master Weaver Naomi Robertson in collaboration with painter Alison Watt (incidentally, a Glasgow School of Art [GSA] alumna represented by Ingleby). Inspired by Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, it was commissioned by Scottish Opera for the newly refurbished Theatre Royal in Glasgow.

On the contemporary scene, insiders wonder how the GENERATION show will offer a re-evaluation of prices.

The Modern Institute in Glasgow, representing Richard Wright, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling, among others, was said to have had brisk sales at Art Basel this year. In April, David Zwirner in New York showed its first exhibition of the Turner Prize nominee and GSA graduate, Karla Black (b.1972), with a large-scale powder floor and a cellophane window. At Christie’s in October 2013, her Unpreventable Within (2009) made from cling film, baby oil and paint, went for £10,000.

At Mary Mary Gallery in Glasgow, Director Hannah Robinson singles out sales of the work of American abstract photographer Barbara Kasten (b.1936) to Vienna’s Generali Foundation and Munich’s Sammlung Goetz, and Glasgowbased sculptor Nick Evans (b.1976) to the Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany. New artists being introduced to collectors include American painter Jonathan Gardner and London-based Jesse Wine (b.1983), whose ceramic sculptural works featured at this year’s Glasgow International festival.

Alison Watt and Naomi Robertson, photo: Michael Wolchover for Dovecot Studios

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Five decades of work by the former Head of Painting at GSA, Jack Knox (b.1936), showed at Cyril Gerber Fine Art in Glasgow this spring, with his Vase of Tulips from the 1970s rated a major sale. The gallery was proud to ‘place with new owners’ The Artist’s Bedroom (date unknown) by George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931), previously shown in a Fleming Collection exhibition on the Colourist.

Turning to auctions, on 1 July Gasthof (2002–04), a painting by Scottish-born Peter Doig (b.1959) sold for a record £9,938,500 at Christie’s, an extraordinary price for a 55-year-old painter. At Christie’s in the same week, a sculpture by Dundee-born William Turnbull (1922–2012), Large Metamorphic Venus (1983), went for a powerful £266,500. Shadow Study (2006–07) by Jenny Saville, born in England in 1970, but first noticed as a GSA student in 1990, sold for £506,500.

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931), The Artist’s Bedroom, date unknown Oil on board, 38 x 43 cm, Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

Sir Robert Lorimer (1864–1929), oak and marquetry inlaid coffer chest, c.1893–94, Bonhams Scottish sale, Edinburgh (April 2014), £11,250

Late-seventeenth-century silver trefid spoon, c.1672–78 Bonhams Scottish sale, Edinburgh (April 2014), £15,000

FROM TOP Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) Dish with Apples, Ginger Jar, Brown Crock, Bottle and Chair, c.1918 Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm Christie’s Modern British and Irish art evening sale (25 June 2014), £902,500 Nick Evans (b.1976), The Nightwatch, 2013 Fibre-reinforced plaster, wrought iron, glass, light fittings, 130 x 70 x 90 cm Installation view: Funktion / Disfunktion, Neues Museum, Nuremberg (November 2013– February 2014) Image courtesy the artist; Mary Mary Gallery, Glasgow; Neues Museum, Nuremberg Photo: Neues Museum, Nuremberg (Annette Kradisch)

At auction, ‘the market can be a rather cruel place and it operates on its own rules and things have to satisfy certain criteria to do well,’ explains Scottish Gallery Director Guy Peploe. For conceptual work, it is taking a step back from the froth. For Colourist paintings, it is looking for exceptional works that are fresh to market. If artworks are unable to fulfil these criteria, there are risks.

The Modern British and Irish sale at Christie’s sold S.J. Peploe’s Dish with Apples, Ginger Jar, Brown Crock, Bottle and Chair (c.1918) for £902,500, double the £300,000– £500,000 estimate and almost a record for the artist. The classic still life was from a group of works formerly in the collection of Major Ion Harrison, a famous early patron of the Colourists. The auctioneer emphasised that putting Scottish works in with modern British paintings has brought them to an international market. But, while the small Harrison group all sold, with works by Peploe, Francis Cadell (1883–1937) and Hunter at prices closer to the £100,000 mark, other Colourist offerings, including Cadell’s Still Life of Pink Tulips in a Blue Jar (date unknown), estimated at £250,000– £300,000, did not find a buyer.

At the other end of the scale, the Scottish auctions threw up delightful finds. Highlights of the yearly Scottish sale at Bonhams included an oak and marquetry inlaid coffer chest (c.1893–94), by Scottish architect and furniture designer Sir Robert Lorimer (1864–1929), which sold for £11,250. A late-seventeenth-century silver trefid spoon, probably by Alexander Galloway of Aberdeen (c.1672–78), went for £15,000, while one of Cadell’s Iona paintings sold for £84,100. At Sotheby’s, Sir Robin Philipson’s Poppies, a painting from 1989–90, went for £68,500, the second highest price for the artist.

Shapes Auctioneers in Edinburgh, meanwhile, has sold Jack Vettriano successfully in the past, but has recently found fertile ground in war medals. One group of mostly World War II medals, including the Military Cross awarded to Arnhem hero Major Francis Anthony Stoddard Murray, went for £16,000, 10 times the low estimate. Good to see a whimsical marketplace still has space to celebrate old-fashioned courage.

Tim Cornwell is an arts journalist working from Edinburgh and Istanbul.

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EXHIBITIONS GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh until 25 January 2015

Steven Campbell (1953–2007), On Form and Fiction, 1990 Installation view: On Form and Fiction, The Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1990

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Although it is perhaps a rather simplistic and formulaic theory on the history of art, the notion that art constantly moves through a dialectic process of action and reaction, still has some validity. This idea works on the principle that each generation of artists rebels against the art of its immediate predecessor, replacing it with something radically different. For example, Neoclassicism reacted against the elaborately ornamental Rococo style with a revival of classical style and a new interest in antiquity.

Looking back over the recent history of Scottish art, it is possible to discern the action/reaction pattern. In the 1970s, abstraction was still a major force and dominated the Scottish Arts Council’s 1982 exhibition Scottish Art Now. As a result, there was an immediate reaction among the emerging Glasgow painters, which led to the neo-figurative craze of the 1980s, a craze that received official recognition in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s celebratory Vigorous Imagination show at the end of the decade. Again, this prompted a devastating response from a group of younger artists with a very different agenda led by Douglas Gordon et al.

As can be seen in the subtitle to this nationwide, multi-venue artistic extravaganza, the GENERATION generation has lasted much longer than its two predecessors, and, at present, shows little sign of being challenged by any new kids on the block. The main reason for this sustained success is that since the early 1990s, innovative artists in Scotland have not belonged to one movement with an easily recognised uniform stylistic approach. Rather, they have developed into a highly varied and disparate artistic community that has skilfully adapted to the changing circumstances that have come its way.

This is clearly demonstrated with the kaleidoscopic array of Scottish contemporary art on offer at the three Scottish National Galleries, which includes both the restaging of significant past exhibitions and installations and specially commissioned works.

One such restaging is of Steven Campbell’s highly influential exhibition On Form and Fiction, first shown at The Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1990, when Campbell (1953–2007) returned to Scotland after spectacular success in New York. For the exhibition, he created a museum-like

setting, complete with benches borrowed from Kelvingrove Art Gallery and dramatic lighting, and covered the walls with a grid of sepia-ink drawings, framing 12 large acrylic paintings. For GENERATION, Curator Linsey Young has successfully reconfigured (with inevitable slight adjustments), Campbell’s highly complex installation with the invaluable support and advice of the artist’s widow Carol.

In this exhibition, Campbell brought together all the innovative visual and conceptual features that he had developed in his earlier paintings, and with immense creative imagination and wit, deconstructed the ‘form and fiction’ of visual narrative inherited from the history of painting. Unlike in grand narrative painting of the past, his pictorial protagonists never reach their goals or fulfil their preordained destiny. This open-ended approach has had a profound influence on Scottish contemporary art, where the visual and the conceptual play off against each other within carefully staged environments of text and context. The successful GENERATION artists stand on the shoulders of this giant of Scottish art.

It is interesting that although Scottish contemporary art post-1990 was seen by many as being hostile to painting, that traditional medium is well represented in the work of Alison Watt, Julie Roberts, Victoria Morton and Callum Innes. GENERATION is accompanied by a helpful guide covering the work of all the artists involved in the various venues throughout Scotland, from Dumfries to Stromness, as well as a useful GENERATION Reader, a collection of texts by artists and critics on Scottish contemporary art over the last 25 years.

All in all, this is a truly ‘landmark celebration’.

Bill Hare is a curator, writer and Honorary Teaching Fellow in Scottish Art History at the University of Edinburgh.

GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR T: (0)131 624 6200 | Open daily, 10am–5pm Until 2 November 2014 Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD T: 0131 624 6200 | Open daily, 10am–5pm (7pm on Thursday) nationalgalleries.org | generationartscotland.org Scottish Art News | EXHIBITIONS | 56

Life as a Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and a Search for a Unified Identity) Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge Summerhall, Edinburgh 1 August–26 September

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, DOES IT FIT, 2013, installation view: Stephenson Works CIRCA Projects 2013, photo: Adam Phillips, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan Are you LOCATIONALIZED Various locations on Skye and Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, North Uist 1 August–30 September As part of the national art jamboree of GENERATION, Atlas Arts – a venue-less arts organisation based on the Isle of Skye – are working with Glasgow-based artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan on Are you LOCATIONALIZED. At Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, North Uist, they have created a structure that abuts the gable end of a former milking shed and, within, are photographs of public sculpture at Loughborough University and on the Uists. Over in Portree on Skye, another temporary structure has been erected near the Apothecary’s Tower, a folly, or perhaps a beacon, that affords views over the town and harbour.

It all sounds rather enigmatic, what with the confluence of follies, public sculpture and multiple island locations. And, that jarring neologism of the project title relates well to the artists’ sense of conspicuous theatrical and playful indulgence. In past work, overblown childlike structures incorporate elements that relate to art and cultural history, as well as to the more commonplace.

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Tatham and O’Sullivan met at The Glasgow School of Art and have been working together since 1995. Their complex installations implicate the ways in which meaning is accrued and shifts with changes in context and intention.

The experience of looking at their work makes the viewer conscious that there is not an ideal single perspective or view point; Are you LOCATIONALIZED with its multiple, dispersed locations is set to heighten this.

The opening of Tatham and O’Sullivan’s Hebridean project will coincide with the Isle of Skye Highland Games in Portree. Watching such a cacophonous spectacle from a hilltop folly seems an entirely appropriate way to engage with their work.

Gavin Morrison is a curator, writer and publisher based in Marseilles and Scotland.

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan Are you LOCATIONALIZED Various locations in Portree, Skye and Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, Lochmaddy, North Uist T: (0)1870 603 970 taigh-chearsabhagh.org | atlasarts.org.uk

It is almost 40 years since the late Scottish Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn declared those behind COUM Transmissions’s Prostitution show at the ICA in London in 1976 to be ‘wreckers of civilisation’. The artist, then known as Genesis P-Orridge (b.1950), who was the driving force behind the artistic collective, which morphed into Throbbing Gristle, still has the power to provoke, however, as the centrepiece of Summerhall’s current exhibition programme makes clear.

Life as a Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and a Search for a Unified Identity) charts the love affair between P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer (1969–2007), who met in 1993 and married two years later on Friday the 13th. Over the next 12 years, before Lady Jaye tragically ‘dropped her body’ in 2007, the couple became a living artwork as they attempted to merge their identities and bodies into a third unified being by way of cosmetic surgery and body modification. This included having matching breast implants on Valentine’s Day 2003, requesting that they be referred to as s/he and wearing matching clothes, hair and make-up.

This first UK solo exhibition since 2003 features a series of collages and paintings by Breyer P-Orridge that shows explicit images of the couple’s ever-converging bodies, as well as religious iconography, mirrored patterns and the Royal family, who represent the establishment-based antithesis of Breyer P-Orridge’s fearlessly taboo-busting and touchingly frank display. If Breyer P-Orridge’s previous work, from early mail art through to COUM, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and beyond, has sought to point up and counter the ugliness and hypocrisy at the heart of society, the images receiving their first European viewing in Life as a Cheap Suitcase suggest the most intimate form of revolution.

Breyer P-Orridge’s show is one of 19 exhibitions occupying Summerhall, the former Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies turned international avant-garde arts centre. These include new soundworks by Londonbased Susan Hiller (b.1940), paintings by the late Caroline McNairn (1955–2010) drawn from work made during a year in Russia in the mid-1990s as part of a cultural exchange and Bosnian war paintings by Peter Howson (b.1958) in a programme that puts the body politic centre stage.

Neil Cooper is a writer and critic on theatre, music and art.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Snowflakes DNA (Clouds), 2008

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Immortality, courtesy the artist and Invisible-Exports

Susan Hiller, Resounding, courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Galleries

Life as a Cheap Suitcase (Part of Edinburgh Art Festival) Summerhall 1 Summerhall, The Meadows, Edinburgh EH9 1PL T: (0)131 560 1580 | summerhall.co.uk Open daily, 11am–9pm Scottish Art News | EXHIBITIONS | 58

Mackintosh Architecture Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow 18 July 2014–4 January 2015 It is a testament to the multiple achievements of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868– 1928) that the recent fire at T he Glasgow School of Art caused such worldwide coverage and dismay. But, perhaps because our experiences in the main are of his formal design and detailing, we have less of an understanding of his architectural career – the core of his activity. In order to redress this under-researched aspect of his work, this exhibition and new online e-resource mark the completion of a major four-year research project led by The Hunterian: Mackintosh Architecture, Context, Making and Meaning.

The project has sought to place Mackintosh within the wider context of the architectural practice Honeyman & Keppie, looking at both high- and low-status buildings, particularly his domestic designs. Mackintosh had clearly identifiable design input into such projects as Martyrs’ Public School and the Glasgow Herald building and was the only employee known to have prepared perspective drawings at this time. His dramatic, accomplished drawings were published and exhibited, promoting both the firm and what the professional press came to identify as a distinctive Glasgow style.

From 1901, when Mackintosh became partner and the firm’s name changed to Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh, he had sole responsibility for projects including the Daily Record building and Scotland Street Public School, and was publicly acknowledged as their designer.

Mackintosh’s six-storey building for the Daily Record newspaper differed greatly from the earlier Glasgow Herald building and other city-centre commercial structures, partly through its use of yellow sandstone, white and coloured glazed brick and architectural details such as the enormous keystone arch over the entrance. Mackintosh designed two of the six schools the practice worked on. The second of his school designs for Scotland Street Public School is remarkable for its novel reinterpretation of tradition, especially in the glazed towers that contain the stairs.

The exhibition features over 80 architectural drawings from The Hunterian (home to the largest single holding of the work of Mackintosh) and collections across the UK and is complemented by three special displays that showcase Mackintosh’s skills as a draughtsman and designer. These include Mackintosh Travel Sketches, which present a selection of drawings and sketchbooks, that feature studies from the north of Scotland and drawings of the castle at Holy Island, Northumberland.

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LEFT Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Daily Record building, Glasgow: perspective from the south-east, 1901 © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014 ABOVE Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scotland Street School, Glasgow: perspective drawing, 1904, © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014

Across the city, Glasgow-based artist Graham Fagen, who will represent Scotland at next year’s Venice Biennale, has created new work for a specially commissioned exhibition for The Glasgow School of Art (GSA). Alongside three of Mackintosh’s watercolours from the GSA archive, which survived the recent fire unscathed, are new watercolours, sculptures and photographs made by Fagen in response to a handwritten description accompanying Mackintosh’s student work Cabbages in an Orchard, from The Magazine, a publication held in the GSA Archives and Collections. (Cabbages in an Orchard; The formers and forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen, Reid Gallery, GSA, until 29 August.) (BA)

Mackintosh Architecture The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery University of Glasgow, 82 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QQ T: (0)141 330 4221 gla.ac.uk/hunterian mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–5pm and Sunday 11am–4pm Admission £5.00/£3.00 A range of exhibitions, events and talks will take place throughout 2014 at other Mackintosh venues across Glasgow, culminating in the Creative Mackintosh Festival in October 2014. For more details visit glasgowmackintosh.com Scottish Art News | EXHIBITIONS | 60

Familiarities and certainties once conveyed by the original material are thrown into doubt. As an intervention is made, the meaning and messages of the pre-existing surface are interrupted and disturbed. Information is alternately concealed and exposed, erased and revealed. In these meticulous, careful and varied subversions that have characterised her career, Hopkins has intervened in the often overwhelming flow of printed information that faces us daily, opening up a space for questions and contemplation.

(KB) Louise Hopkins, Relief (739) (diptych), 2005, oil on patterned furnishing fabric, 153 x 145 cm City of Edinburgh Council

Louise Hopkins: Black Sea, White Sea Linlithgow Burgh Halls, West Lothian 15 August–2 November As part of GENERATION’s nationwide exhibition programme, an exhibition of work by Louise Hopkins (b.1965) at Linlithgow Burgh Halls brings together works held in private and public collections in Scotland and elsewhere, giving audiences the opportunity to view important examples of paintings and drawings by the Glasgow-based artist.

Born in Hertfordshire, Hopkins studied at The Glasgow School of Art, where she now teaches. Chosen to represent Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, she first came to prominence with an exhibition at Tramway Project Room in 1996. Hopkins is known for working on pre-printed surfaces drawn from the everyday world, from furnishing fabrics and comic-book pages to sheet music and maps. She reworks them with her own physical gestures and mark making, using pencil, ink or paint, transforming them into new compositions. This show offers a chance to view some of the works that have made her one of the most significant contemporary artists to have emerged from Scotland.

Some of Hopkins’s earliest paintings and drawings were made on furnishing fabric, a material she has revisited many times in her career. Stretched over a wooden frame like a canvas, the fabric is reversed to present a shadow of the print, over which she partially paints with painstaking care.

On viewing, it is not immediately apparent what has been painted and what was there before. Maps, too, have featured prominently in her work, becoming almost subsumed by a dark, inky mass of brushstrokes, with islands created from the names of oceans and countries. The words hover on the surface of the painting, unmoored from their respective seas and land masses and unsettling our understanding of the geography as we know it.

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Louise Hopkins: Black Sea, White Sea The Gallery at Linlithgow Burgh Halls The Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian EH49 7AH T: (0)1506 282 720 linlithgowburghhalls.co.uk Open: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9am–5pm; Tuesday and Thursday, 9am–9pm; Sunday, 11am–5pm

FROM TOP Hogan’s Alley, 2014, lightjet print, collection of the artist 2013_9009, 2013, colour inkjet mounted on Dibond aluminium Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Stan Douglas Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 7 November 2014–15 February 2015 When Canadian visual artist Stan Douglas (b.1960) decided to explore what happens in rough neighbourhoods after a war, the play Helen Lawrence, which forms part of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival’s theatre programme, was the result. This noir writ large is an epic piece of ‘cinematic theatre’ in which the actors are filmed live as they perform against digitally realised backdrops of Hogan’s Alley district, Vancouver, and the city’s now demolished Hotel Vancouver, where homeless war veterans squatted in squalor.

It is somehow fitting that the shadows and light of Hogan’s Alley are tucked away at one end of Haus der Kunst in Munich, in Douglas’s current exhibition of elaborately constructed fictions (until 12 October), Mise en scène. The 3D styling of Hogan’s Alley (2014) and Hotel Vancouver (2014) – computer-generated renderings that look just like detailed historical photographs – form the ‘set’ of Helen Lawrence and make up part of the artist’s film- and photography-based Fruitmarket Gallery show.

Another piece by Douglas at the Fruitmarket will be Video, an 18-minute remake of Orson Welles’s 1962 bigscreen version of The Trial by Franz Kafka. In it, Douglas also looks to Samuel Beckett’s 1965 work, Film, and shot his piece in the same Paris tower block where the 1967 feature Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two Or Three Things I Know about Her) by Jean-Luc Godard was partly set. The

digital form is reduced to its purest state in the selections from Corrupt Files (2013), which turns data into rainbowcoloured barcodes.

The centrepiece of the show, however, will be Der Sandmann, the piece that brought Douglas to prominence in 1995 and that took its name from an E.T.A. Hoffmann short story referenced by Sigmund Freud. Filmed in Potsdam, it looks at post-Cold War urban planning via a split-screen juxtaposition of footage of a garden when it was a place where the poor could grow food, and 20 years later when it had become a construction site.

First seen widely at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, Der Sandmann encapsulates Douglas’s quietly political concerns, which map out or reimagine social histories of marginalised communities. This is the case, too, with Helen Lawrence, in which the digital reconstruction of Hogan’s Alley and Hotel Vancouver honours their history while creating a brand new mythology where nothing is hidden. (NC) Stan Douglas Fruitmarket Gallery 45 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DF T: (0)131 225 2383 | fruitmarket.co.uk Open daily: Monday to Saturday, 11am–6pm; Sunday 12–5pm Helen Lawrence shows at Edinburgh International Festival, 24–26 August 2014.

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Robert MacBryde, Still Life, 1948, oil on canvas, 38.6 x 53.8 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

The Two Roberts Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 22 November 2014–24 May 2015 When all the razzmatazz and ballyhoo of the GENERATION extravaganza has died down and dissipated, this exhibition of quality modernist painting by ‘The Two Roberts’ – MacBryde (1913–66) and Colquhoun (1914–62) – will surely be an alternative attraction. With its distinctively robust approach to Cubism and Expressionism, their art was considered as radically innovative as the current work of contemporary Scottish artists. For progressive critics like Wyndham Lewis and David Sylvester, they were ‘the most promising and the best of the young artists’ of the London art scene of the 1940s and 1950s.

Like many of the current GENERATION artists, they trained at the Glasgow School of Art, where they formed a deep personal relationship and a strong artistic partnership. They soon moved to the bohemian world of London’s Soho, from where, along with fellow rebellious painters like Francis Bacon (1909–92) and Lucian Freud (1922–2011), they took the British art world by storm through their uncompromising approach to modern painting. This drew the support of an influential network of wealthy gay collectors, adventurous dealers and enthusiastic critics.

However, unlike the more gentile Modernist St Ives School, for example, there was unfortunately little institutional recognition for these troublesome Scottish renegades. And so, after a brief moment in the spotlight of celebrity as ‘The Golden Boys of Bond Street’, The Two Roberts soon plummeted out of fashion and into alcoholic neglect when abstraction, and then Pop Art, caught the fickle taste of the London art world.

Over the last few years, there have been notable efforts to re-examine their contribution to British modern art and restore their reputation on a sound and secure critical and commercial basis. This process of revision and revaluation has been led by Roger Bristow’s scrupulously 63 | ART

researched critical biography The Last Bohemians: The Two Roberts – Colquhoun and MacBryde (2009), which was followed by an extensive showing of their paintings, prints and drawings at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh.

Curated by Patrick Elliott, Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, The Two Roberts: Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun is the first major retrospective exhibition of their work. It will not only allow us to examine and appreciate the internal development of their art, but it will also encourage us to place their achievement within the wider context of post-war European and British Modernism. In contrast to artists who receive instant recognition and immediate success, The Two Roberts have had to wait a few generations to find their place within the canon of Scottish art. (BH) The Two Roberts: Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR T: (0)131 624 6200 nationalgalleries.org Open daily, 10am–5pm Admission £8/£6

Robert Colquhoun, Figures in a Farmyard, 1953 Oil on canvas, 185.4 x 143.5 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Bill Drummond, Scale Models (A0), The 25 Paintings, photo: Stuart Whipps, courtesy Eastside Projects

Bill Drummond: World Tour 2014–25 When Bill Drummond (b.1953) announced that he would be embarking on a 12-year world tour with his exhibition The 25 Paintings, shown earlier this year in Birmingham, it was no belated rock-and-roll gesture based on the idea of life on the road so beloved of ageing icons stuck in a last-gasp music industry groove. Rather, the show, which opened at Eastside Projects in Birmingham between March and June this year, is the latest chapter in Drummond’s very personal pilgrimage that has provoked and confused him as much as it has the music and art establishments he has subverted over almost 40 years.

From designing the set of Theatre Director Ken Campbell’s legendary 12-hour staging of the sciencefiction conspiracy epic Illuminatus (1976) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson through to spending his 60th birthday standing on a manhole cover in Liverpool (2013), Drummond’s restless wanderings have been very personal Boy’s Own-style adventures that explore ways of being as much as of seeing. This has been the case whether subverting the music business with The KLF, burning a million pounds with the K Foundation, or founding National No Music Day and his mythical choir The17.

The 25 Paintings is a series of word-based canvases that make up an epic, ever-changing sculpture that Drummond has painted over several times since he began the work in 2001. As he points out in the limitededition hardback catalogue of essays and images from the

Birmingham show, ‘the actual paintings aren’t the important bit. The important bit is what I will be doing in and around Birmingham...for those three months.’

Since he wrote those words, Drummond has graffitied a bridge under Spaghetti Junction, where he laid down 400 bunches of daffodils. He also defaced a UKIP election poster with his own brand of Drummond’s International Grey paint, an action for which he was investigated by the police.

The tour will visit a further 12 cities in 12 different countries around the world between 2014 and 2025. Berlin is the next stop-off point in his nomadic journey that will later take in residencies in Guangzhou (China), Memphis (Tennessee) and Damascus (Syria), all of which he will sail into on a wooden raft of his own construction. In 2025, when he is 72, Drummond will end his tour by returning to Birmingham, where he will once again lay 400 bunches of daffodils beneath Spaghetti Junction. (NC) Bill Drummond’s world tour continues in Berlin in 2015.

Further details will be published on the artist’s website: penkilnburn.com Bill Drummond – The 25 Paintings catalogue (Penkiln Burn Publishing, £20.00) is available to buy from Eastside Projects, Birmingham. Bill Drummond will be performing his ‘Head Paintings’ at this years Infr’Action Festival International d’art Performance, in Sète, France, from 10–14 September.

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FLEMING COLLECTION FRIENDS

BECOME A MEMBER Fleming Collection membership enables you to enjoy the gallery and our exhibitions to the full, while supporting emerging Scottish artists and The Fleming-Wyfold Foundation’s charitable endeavours.

Benefits include: Discounted ticket prices for all Fleming Collection events 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 newsletter Invitation to exhibition openings throughout the year Individual membership is priced at £40 per year, with Joint membership £60 per year and Student membership £10 per year Membership also makes a wonderful gift for anyone interested in Scottish art

UPCOMING EVENTS We run a varied programme of events 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.

Autumn 2014 events include: Women’s Poetry of the First World War Wednesday 17 September, doors 6.30pm for a 7pm talk When we think of poetry of the First World War, it is primarily soldier poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon who come to mind. Judith Palmer, Director of the Poetry Society, will introduce and read some of the women’s poetry that emerged from the conflict: telling the story of poets who worked as nurses or ambulance drivers, and those who waited and mourned for brothers, lovers and sons. £5 Members/Students | £7.50 non-Members

Fergusson’s First World War Work for the Admiralty Wednesday 1 October, doors 6.30pm for a 7pm talk Fergusson was not an Official War Artist and described patriotism as ‘the most overrated of vices’. However in 1918 he was given permission by the Admiralty to sketch in Portsmouth Docks. The resultant works are unusual for the artist in their subject matter and approach. This talk by Alice Strang, Senior Curator, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, will examine this little known aspect of Fergusson’s oeuvre.

Mayfair (91x91cm oil on canvas) Peter Graham ROI

Support Scottish art with Fleming Collection Membership

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FIND OUT MORE To find out more about becoming a Member, or for further details on our upcoming events, please contact Katie Baker by phone on 020 7042 5784 or by email to: katie.baker@flemingcollection.com

‘The events are always well organised, with a warm welcome’

New Scottish Artists 2014. Photo: Colin White

Peter Graham ROI 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

Modern Colourist

An exhibition at Llewellyn Alexander (Fine Paintings) Ltd

25 September – 18 October 2014 Gallery open: 10am–7.30pm Tuesday–Saturday www.lafp.co.uk

124-126 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 8LN (opposite The Old Vic theatre) 020 7620 1322 | gallery@Llewellynalexander.com

Mariner’s Museum/Taxonomy of Tides, 2014, mixed media construction, 123 x 108 x 9.5 cms Photo: Coline Russelle

Gleanedand Gathered

WILL MACLEAN

An online catalogue with a new essay by Andrew Patrizio accompanies this exhibition

8th October –8th November 2014

Art First | 21 Eastcastle Street, London W1W WDD | Telephone +44 (0)20 7734 0386 | www.artfirst.co.uk