Scottish Art News Issue 25

SCOTTISH A RT N EWS

Alexander Carse c.1770–1843 detail from Scotch Country Fair c.1818 ISS UE 2 5

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ISSUE 25 / SPRING/SUMMER 2016 EDITOR’S NOTE ‘The Scottish Endarkenment’, now on at Dovecot Studios, will be one of those landmark shows that enhances our knowledge and understanding of Scottish art for years to come. Scottish art has an undeniably dark strain, a compelling fascination with the unknown and a curiosity to delve and explore the peripheries of the imagination, yet no exhibition has aimed to investigate it as thoroughly as this one. In this issue, Professor Bill Hare, co-curator of the exhibition, explains what prompted ‘the provocative and intriguing neologism’ of the Endarkenment, comparing it with its supposed antithesis, the Scottish Enlightenment.

Unsurprisingly, Pat Douthwaite’s disconcerting, often grotesque work is included in ‘The Scottish Endarkenment’ exhibition. Guy Peploe, the late artist’s agent has written about the challenge of working with Douthwaite, and the artist’s determination and commitment to her practice on pages 24–27 . A retrospective of her work will be shown in June at The Scottish Gallery. This is one of many exhibitions this summer that has inspired features in this issue. I am particularly excited about the upcoming Edinburgh Art Festival programme, especially as so many brilliant Scottish artists have major exhibitions across the city. John Maxwell and William Gillies’ work, for example, will be hung side-by-side in the City Art Centre’s summer show, offering an interesting comparison between the two contemporaries. Dr Helen Scott has written about curating the show on pages 32–35. Barbara Rae will also have a major solo show at the Open Eye Gallery for the Festival, and Laura Campbell interviews the artist on pages 28–31 .

I am particularly looking forward to ‘Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA). It was through researching Scottish art and Surrealism that I discovered Edwin G Lucas, a fascinating Scottish artist who ‘flirted’ with Surrealism (though perhaps contributed more to the movement than any other Scottish artist). On pages 18–23, you can find out more about his work. Lucas is still a relative outsider to Scottish art; he was discouraged from becoming an artist and instead worked in the civil service, only pursuing his art part-time. His work was not widely collected and, therefore, is not included in the Surrealism show, but if you do visit SNGMA you can see one his most fascinating pieces, The Shape of the Night, in the permanent collection. I highly recommend it.

Rachael Cloughton The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation pursues a programme of cultural diplomacy furthering an understanding and appreciation of Scottish art and creativity outside Scotland through exhibitions, events, publishing and education. The Foundation also owns the finest collection of Scottish art outside institutions comprising over 600 works from eighteenth century masters to contemporaries. The collection dates back to the

SCOTTISH ART NEWS Scottish Art News Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, 15 Suffolk Street, London SW1Y 4HG United Kingdom T: (0)207 042 5730 E: scottishartnews@flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News is published biannually by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London. Publication dates: June and November.

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1960s when Flemings investment bank, in recognition of its Scottish origins, began to acquire Scottish art to hang in its offices worldwide. Following the sale of the bank in 2000, the collection was vested in the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation. The Foundation has established a ‘museum without walls’ strategy using its collection to initiate exhibitions of Scottish art outside Scotland. The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation is a registered charity in England and Wales (No.1080197).

For more information contact gallery@flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News | CONTENTS | 1

NEWS 5

REVIEWS AND PREVIEWS News

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William Hunter to Damien Hirst: The Dead Teach the Living Susan Mansfield

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Glasgow International

FEATURES 11

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Scottish Endarkenment Bill Hare Edwin Lucas Patrick Elliott

Laura Campbell

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Will Maclean: Veering Westerly

Rose Skelton

Pat Douthwaite Guy Peploe

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Celts

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Barbara Rae

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Pehchaan: Art from Another India Dave Pollock

Edinburgh Art Festival Preview

Laura Campbell

Laura Campbell

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John Maxwell and William Gillies Helen Scott

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Art Market Tim Cornwell

52 Purvai

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WILL MACLEAN

Rosie Lesso

Scottish Art Auction 22 November 2016 Now accepting consignments

Tim Cornwell

THE DIARY 54

Veering Westerly / Fiaradh Gun Iar Touring: An Lanntair, Stornoway Iona Gallery, Kingussie St Fergus Gallery, Wick Inverness Museum and Art Gallery An Tobar, Mull

FRANCIS CAMPBELL BOILEAU CADELL The Red Chair Estimate £250,000–350,000

Scottish Art News Diary Perrine Davari

Charting a Decade II, 2006 – 2016 (with Simon Lewty) Art First, London 12 April – 11 June 2016

Accompanying publications with new essays are available on the Art First website

21 Eastcastle Street, London, W1W 8DD www.artfirst.co.uk Shaman Board/Herring Caller 2010, found objects and mixed media, 143 x 63 x 7 cm

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Cover Image ©Jock McFadyen, Calton Hill, c. 2014.

Image courtesy the Artist and Dovecot Gallery

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Elizabeth Blackadder, False Palm (Shadow) and Kimono, oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cms, Courtesy of The Scottish Gallery.

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George Ridgway awarded the FlemingWyfold Bursary At the opening ceremony of the Royal Scottish Academy’s (RSA) New Contemporaries exhibition in March 2016, the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation awarded Glasgow School of Art graduate George Ridgway with the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary, a significant award of £10,000, with an additional £4000 also available to support production costs for the next year.

The Fleming-Wyfold Bursary selection panel included: James Knox (director of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation), Susanna Beaumont (independent curator), Vincent Honoré (director of David Roberts Art Foundation), Bill Smith (former director of the Fleming Collection) and Kevin Harman (an Edinburgh-based artist).

In addition to generous funding, the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary will support Ridgway through a year-long mentoring scheme with established curator Susanna Beaumont. Beaumont has recently completed working with last year’s winner Edward Humphrey and also worked with winners of the inaugural award in 2014, The Brownlee Brothers.

‘The sheer range of works on display at RSA New Contemporaries is testimony to the strength of Scotland’s art schools. Selecting a winner was challenging but the panel unanimously decided to award the bursary to George Ridgway as one of the most innovative artists who is engaging with performance, musical composition, sculpture and drawing. This is where the most exciting

contemporary practice is happening and it is great to support a Scotland-based artist working in these disciplines at this key stage in their career,’ said James Knox, director of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

Ridgway’s work was also exhibited in the New Scottish Artists exhibition at the David Robert’s Art Foundation (DRAF) in London in April 2016 (read more pp6).

Key to the numbered illustrations is at the end of the news section Scottish Art News | NEWS | 5

Tribute: Allan Murray 1943-2016

By Sir John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland The world of Scottish art has lost one of its most colourful and engaging characters with the passing of Allan Murray, who died in Hong Kong on 4 February, aged 72. Allan was a highly successful financier who spent most of his career overseas, first in the Middle East and then, from the early 1970s, in Hong Kong, where he developed a reputation for his easy rapport with wealthy Chinese families and the local business community.

From 1974 onwards, he worked for Jardine Fleming (later part of JPMorgan Chase) and, at the time of his death, he had been employed by this company for some 42 years.

We remember him here, however, as an avid collector who, with his wife Carol, assembled what has been described as the greatest private collection of Scottish art formed in recent years.

Allan’s enthusiasm for Scottish art was kindled by the Fleming Collection in London. As his friend and collaborator Patrick Bourne recalls: ‘In 1978, Allan and Carol viewed the collection of Scottish paintings created by the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. Allan was so inspired that he told Carol he wanted them to create their own collection, with Fleming’s as the benchmark. The compliment was returned some years later by his becoming a Trustee of Fleming’s.’ Allan’s collecting was marked not just by his shrewd eye and sharp intellect but by a characteristic gusto: the purchases came thick and fast. Over the following 35 years, the Murrays acquired more than 200 pictures, ranging from portraits by Clouet and Adam de Colone (1572–1651) to contemporary works by Victoria Crowe (b.1945) and John Byrne (b.1940).

When space became an issue, Allan transformed the Hong Kong Club into an embassy for Scottish art, housing a representative selection of some 120 works.

Important loans were also made to museums in Scotland and to Tate in London. Major works at the Scottish National Gallery include the impressive Hunter Blair family portrait of 1785 by David Allan (1744–96) 6 | ART

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and the portrait of George Abercromby of Tullibody (c.1705–1800) by Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823). The soon-to-berenovated spaces on the lower floor of of the Scottish National Gallery are currently graced by two breathtaking panoramic views from Ben Lomond by John Knox (1778–1845) and a dramatic view of Dunnottar Castle by Waller Hugh Paton (1828–95). The significance of the site of Dunnottar Castle, hiding place of the Honours of Scotland during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and later an important site during the Jacobite Risings, would not have escaped Allan who knew his Scottish history.

Allan and Carol Murray have been loyal supporters and funders of many organisations in Scotland and Hong Kong.

Their outstanding generosity has been marked by dedicated rooms in both the Royal Scottish Academy building (as part of the Playfair Project) and, more recently, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where his portrait by John Byrne, commissioned in 2013, now hangs. Byrne succeeded in capturing the Allan Murray that so many people knew and loved; with his shock of white hair and his open, friendly face, this flamboyant, larger-than-life character was always the very best of company. Alongside his successful business career, Allan will be remembered for many things ranging from his animated impersonations of Elvis Presley to his sartorial flair. Here in Scotland, however, he will be cherished above all for his inspiring passion for this nation’s art and for sharing that enthusiasm so widely.

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‘Byrne succeeded in capturing the Allan Murray that so many people knew and loved; with his shock of white hair and his open, friendly face, this flamboyant, larger-than-life character was always the very best of company’

New Scottish Artists at Camden’s David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF) As part of the partnership with the RSA, the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation (FWAF) staged the third annual exhibition of ‘New Scottish Artists’: a Royal Scottish Academy exhibition supported by FWAF with the world-renowned DRAF (the David Roberts Art Foundation), which hosted the exhibition in Camden, London from 21 April to 7 May 2016.

This exciting group show brought together selected works from the annual Edinburgh-based ‘RSA New Contemporaries’ to London for the first time, providing a significant platform for

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14-18 NOW To mark the centenary of the naval engagement at the Battle of Jutland during World War I, Turner Prize-nominee Ciara Phillips (b.1976), artist and longterm resident of Scotland, will ‘dazzle’ the iconic service vessel MV Fingal, berthed in the historic port of Leith, Edinburgh.

‘Dazzling’ is a form of camouflage, that does not conceal but makes it difficult to estimate a target’s range, speed, and heading.

Phillips will put her own spin on the astonishing patterns that adorned battle-ready ships in Leith 100 years ago.

The recent brilliantly coloured ‘Dazzle Ships’ in Liverpool and London have been the most striking symbols of the World War I centenary commemorations to date.

The ship at Leith, unveiled in May, will form a central element of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2016.

The event is supported by the Scottish Government and the Royal Yacht Britannia, and the work is commissioned by 14–18 NOW, the UK’s official arts programme for the World War I centenary.

Ten new galleries open at National Museum of Scotland this summer The next phase of the ambitious £80-million master plan to transform the National Museum of Scotland will be completed on 8 July 2016. The extension, comprising ten new galleries, will increase display space by over 40 per cent at the museum, with three-quarters of the objects exhibited not having been seen for at least a generation. The new displays will champion excellence and innovation, offering an inspirational experience for the scientists, engineers, artists and designers of tomorrow.

Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland, said, ‘from Dunlop’s first pneumatic tyre to cuttingedge scientific discoveries from CERN, the fashion of Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, Dolly the Sheep and Picasso ceramics – we have something to appeal to everyone.’

This £14-million project is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Government, with £7 million of the costs being raised from trusts, foundations and individual donors.

these emerging artists. ‘New Scottish Artists’ also featured the work of the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary winner George Ridgway.

“I am delighted that the FlemingWyfold Bursary is going from strength to strength, reinforcing our role of cultural diplomacy on behalf of the RSA and emerging Scottish artists outside Scotland,” said Rory Fleming, chairman of the FWAF.

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‘The extension, comprising ten new galleries, will increase display space by over 40 per cent at the museum, with threequarters of the objects exhibited not having been seen for at least a generation’

Scottish Art News | NEWS | 7

New Artist Centre for Cove Park Cove Park offers year-round residencies in all the art forms for national and international artists, collaborative groups and organisations. It is located on 50 acres of unspoilt hillside overlooking Loch Long on Scotland’s west coast.

Due for completion in early summer 2016 and designed by Cameron Webster Architects, the new Artist Centre will include two accommodation units and two studios, increasing Cove Park’s capacity to 12 residents and allowing a greater diversity of residencies for individuals and groups on site.

‘Creative Scotland and the Monument and Robertson trusts, among many organisations and individuals, have made significant contributions to the new building, which allows us for the first time to operate all year round, to accommodate more artists than ever before and to run a parallel community engagement programme to that of the residencies,’ explained Julian Forrester, director of Cove Park. covepark.org

‘Cove Park offers year-round residencies in all the art forms for natioanal and international artists, collaborative groups and organisations’

1 George Ridgway, Members We Are (Aren’t We).

Image courtesy of the Royal Scottish Academy 2 Sir Henry Raeburn, George Abercromby of Tullibody, 1705-1800, © Scottish National Portrait Gallery 3 John Byrne, Allan Murray, © Scottish National Portrait Gallery 4 David Allan, The Hunter Blair Family, © Scottish National Portrait Gallery 5 DRAF opening, image courtesy of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation 6 National Museum of Scotland © Neil Hanna 7/8 Cove Park Sketches.

Images courtesy of Cove Park and Cameron West Architects 9 Kirsty Whiten, Fate, 2015.

Image courtesy of Cupar Arts Festival 10 Rachel Maclean, photo by Craig Gibson

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Fife town hosts major arts festival The week-long Cupar Arts Festival takes place over the summer solstice this year, and artists have been asked to work around the theme of liminality: the precise point at which one phase ends and another begins.

The festival line-up is very strong, with 20 acclaimed British and international artists showing in this small Fife town. Highlights include a large ‘sea monster’ sculpture and a series of six gouache paintings by Charles Avery; Rachel Maclean’s celebrated film Feed Me,

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commissioned for the exhibition ‘British Art Show 8’; and a new site-specific work

by Anthony Schrag.

Work will be shown in a series of unconventional spaces around the town, including the hoardings on industrial sites, medieval closes, churches, the town’s historic county buildings and Burgh Chambers.

Cupar Arts Festival 18–25 June 2016 cupararts.org.uk

Rachel Maclean selected to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale 2017.

The film, video and performance artist Rachel Maclean (b.1987) has been chosen as Scotland’s representative at the 57th International Art Exhibition, the Venice Biennale, in 2017. Her unannounced-as-yet project has been newly commissioned and will be curated by the Hawick-based Alchemy Film & Arts – which runs the experimental Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival – alongside the Talbot Rice Gallery and the University of Edinburgh.

Born in Edinburgh, educated at Edinburgh College of Art (she graduated with a BA in Drawing and Painting in 2009) and currently based in Glasgow, Maclean has attracted considerable attention and acclaim for her ambitious

film works. These fuse performance (Maclean plays all of the characters, sometimes a number in one shot) with detailed computer-generated imagery, a wealth of pop cultural references and a sometimes black sense of humour in their consideration of representation and childhood.

Pieces like Lolcats (2012), I HEART SCOTLAND and Over the Rainbow (both 2013), and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art-acquired Feed Me (2015) are self-described by their creator as ‘hyper-glowing, artificially saturated visions that are both nauseatingly positive and cheerfully grotesque.’ The artist was nominated in 2013 for the Film London Jarman Award and in the same year won the Margaret Tait Award at Glasgow Film Festival, while

more recently Feed Me was exhibited and heavily showcased as part of ‘British Art Show 8’.

‘It is hugely exciting to be representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale,’ said Maclean of her selection.

‘I am honoured to be participating in such a significant international event and can’t wait to get started on the new commission.’ Past Scottish exhibitors in Venice include Graham Fagen, Karla Black and Martin Boyce.

The Venice Biennale 2017 runs from 13 May–26 November 2017

Scottish Art News | NEWS | 9

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SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS, P.R.A. (1829–1896) John Ruskin, standing by the stream at Glenfnlas oil on canvas 31 x 26 ¾ in. (78.7 x 68 cm.)

Negotiated by Christie’s and accepted in lieu of inheritance tax; allocated to the Ashmolean Museum.

THROWING LIGHT ON THE SCOTTISH ENDARKENMENT Bill Hare

JOHN RUSKIN © ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Bill Hare, co-curator of The Scottish Endarkenment exhibition at Dovecot, believes there has been a marked change in the nature and attitude of progressive Scottish art after World War II. A new serious sense of purpose and awareness began, he argues – and still continues – to fire ambitious post-war Scottish artists.

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When Andrew Patrizio, my co-curator and long-time colleague at the University of Edinburgh, and I came up with the title ‘The Scottish Endarkenment’ for our Dovecot Gallery exhibition at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, we imagined that we had created a provocative and intriguing neologism for our own specific purpose. It transpires, however, that the term – to endarken – goes way back to an archaic semantic source. With such ancient origins, then, it is not so surprising that we have had such a widespread enthusiastic response to our plans for the exhibition. As soon as we mention the proposed title, everyone seems to ‘get it’. It is as though we have unconsciously tapped into those shared, yet still vague and amorphous desires and fears at the core of the Scottish psyche. Even now, after putting together the exhibition, the Scottish Endarkenment remains very much open to tentative and speculative suggestions and interpretations as to what it might mean. It may help, however, if we begin by examining and making some critical comparisons with its assumed antithesis, the firmly established and universally acknowledged Scottish Enlightenment.

Most have heard of the Scottish Enlightenment and have some idea of what it is. Historically, it is usually placed at some point after the Acts of Union of 1707 when Scotland became an

integral part of the newly established British state. This was a period of radical and irreversible change, when Scotland rapidly moved from a predominantly rural and religious community to a modern secular society. This was most clearly demonstrated in the way education moved away from church control to that of the universities, where humanist philosophic debate and empirical scientific experimentation began to challenge theological authority and ecclesiastical tradition. In philosophical terms, this revolution was inspired and guided by the writings of David Hume (1711–76), yet it was the economic theories of Adam Smith (1723–90) in his An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) that had a much greater impact on the everyday lives of most Scots. Smith’s ideas, when turned into practical reality, soon led to the seismic impact of the Industrial Revolution and an expanding and mobile Scottish society of fast-growing, large cities and towns where wealth was generated by a vast interconnected system of mechanised production. As a result, the Scottish nation found itself at the forefront of the impact of innovative technology and commercial practice, rapidly becoming a major contributor to the industrial and economic triumph of Great Britain and the imperial power of its vast global empire.

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‘A new serious sense of purpose and awareness began – and still continues – to fire the ambitious post-war Scottish artists. They have broadened their geographical and artistic horizons immensely and have become notable on the international art scene’

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While the intellectual ideas, scientific rigour and technological achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment have always been held in high esteem, there are those who take a more sceptical, even hostile, view of its rationalistic ideology and materialistic achievements. Since the 18th century, there has been a growing feeling among a number of important and influential Scots that many of our inherited moral and social values – and even our common humanity – have been irredeemably damaged and possibly lost in the pursuit of the Enlightenment’s more mundane aims of material progress and monetary profit. These warning voices, which have echoed right down to the present, are found in both the sciences and the arts.

In the area of sociology, for instance, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), from his early polemical essay Signs of the Times (1829), was deeply concerned with the deteriorating effects that mass mechanisation and the ruthless pursuit of profit were having on the ethical and spiritual character of his fellow countrymen and their new industrialised and urbanised society. Carlyle likened his view of this emerging bourgeois capitalist world, where vast wealth for the few came at the expense of vast misery for the many, to ‘spreading a nightmare’. At the same time, James Hogg (1770–1883), in his sinister novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), conjured up another, more psychological ‘nightmare’ in religious terms. He revealed 12 | ART

and examined a festering layer of the perverted Calvinist psyche, which had not been touched, let alone altered, by Enlightenment rationality. Rather, it was still ominously lying in wait ready to burst out with all its fanatically destructive vengeance. This dark romantic gothic tale had a profound effect on John Bellany (1942–2013), as seen in his highly disturbing, imaginative portrait of Hogg as The Ettrick Shepherd (1967), lent by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, which vividly evokes the unsettling nature of psychological duality between the good and bad shepherd.

Towards the end of the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), in his universally acclaimed The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), picked up on both Carlyle and Hogg. His Manichean horror fable satirises enlightened Victorian society’s cringing submission to the omnipotent authority of reason and science, and its blindness to the inner dangers that stalked and threatened its misplaced sense of security. Furthermore, the pioneering anthropologist James Frazer (1854–1941), in his immensely influential The Golden Bough (1890), further revealed that primordial non-rational forces of primitive superstition and magic were still lurking behind the fragile mask of civilisation in Western society. This is most succinctly visualised in the photographic double self-portrait Monster (1995–96) by Douglas Gordon (b.1966), in which his appearance changes from the seemingly normal to the abjectly

grotesque with the use of only a few pieces of sticky tape.

Yet, appearances aside, one is still obliged to ask, which is the actual monster? Another Scot, the radical psychiatrist RD Laing (1927–89), in his celebrated cult classic study of schizophrenia in modern society The Divided Self (1960), gives a factually researched endorsement to RL Stevenson’s fictionalised account of the disastrous effects that the suppressive tyranny of Enlightenment scientific dogma can have on the individual human mind, in particular, and wider society in general. The highly visceral work of Lys Hansen (b.1936) in her triptych The Divided Self (1985) powerfully expresses in a most violent manner the impact that psychological schism and social suppression can have.

Many Scottish scientists and writers have used their knowledge and imagination to question and rally against what they see as the dangerous ideals and aims of much of the Enlightenment, which, for them, has pushed the world towards one near apocalyptic disaster after another. On the other hand, however, Scottish visual artists have until recently mainly avoided such a questioning and critical position in their work. The reasons for this are complex, but if we return to the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume might be able to assist our understanding. Hume famously declared in his Treatise of Human Nature (1740) that, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of

the passions.’ Yet, instead of a hierarchical relationship between reason and passion as Hume suggests, most Scots have contrived to keep them well apart, if not totally separate. Thus, reason has been designated to deal with the important practical affairs of life, such as scientific technology and commercial enterprise, while passionate feelings have either been totally suppressed or only allowed to manifest themselves through the less necessary agency of the arts, usually in a safe and sentimental way. Hence, Scottish visual art has been regarded primarily by its patrons and its public as a convenient vehicle for escape from the harsh realities of modern industrial and urban life. This expressed itself in the 19th century through the ubiquitous nostalgic Highland landscape with not a trace of modern Scotland in sight; or, in the 20th century, through the studio-bound claustrophobic still life in the regulation modernistic belle peinture style. That, at least, was mostly the case up until World War II, but, as we have set out to show in our exhibition of the Scottish Endarkenment, since 1945 there has been a marked change in the nature and attitude of progressive Scottish art. A new serious sense of purpose and awareness began – and still continues – to fire the ambitious post-war Scottish artists. They have broadened their geographical and artistic horizons immensely and have become notable on the international art scene.

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Many of the earliest artists in our exhibition were involved in the war effort and saw at first hand the devastating after-effects of the conflict. The brutalist sculptures of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) and William Turnbull (1922–2012) during the 1940s and 1950s bear witness to the traumatic memories of the war years, as does Majdanek (2002–03) by Joyce Cairns (b.1947), a reminder of the unspeakable crimes against humanity that took place during the Holocaust. Furthermore, the nuclear threat of total annihilation that emerged with the Cold War, and still continues into our precarious present, is addressed by a number of artists’ works. These include Paolozzi’s Mr Cruikshank (1950), named after a robotic dummy created in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to test the human capacity to withstand radiation; the memorial relief sculpture

by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), ominously entitled Et in Arcadia Ego (1976) and often translated as ‘I, Death am also in Arcadia’; and the table-top atomic mushroom, ironically called I Love Rapid Change (2005), by Kenny Hunter (b.1962), a satirical reminder that although nuclear weaponry may seem more controlled, the risk of Armageddon has not gone away in spite of our convenient amnesia. Of course, what concentrates the mind in our present troubled times are the spectacular, violent terrorist attacks on cities and their citizens, and John Kirkwood’s awesomely prescient series of photomontages, Capital of Capital (1987–90), are much too close to current events for complacent comfort.

Other selected artists in their own distinctive ways take up Carlyle’s dire warnings concerning the consequences of the overtly materialistic nature of our career-obsessed and consumer-driven contemporary society. Matthew Inglis’ (b.1958) ladder of Success (1985) turns the pursuit of that tantalising and elusive glittering prize into a fetishistic object of desire for which we might be prepared to perform any humiliating stunt to gain its approval and reward. Similarly, Beagles & Ramsay in a specially commissioned work, Parallel Incremental Sophistication (Head Living Dead) (2016), created a man-made tyrannical god satirising our world of endemic consumerism and the ubiquitous supermarket that has become our designated place of devotion and worship.

The complex relationship between the material and the spiritual, the rational and the irrational at the heart of the anthropological study The Golden Bough by James Frazer acknowledges the continuing power of superstition and magic that are still forces we rashly ignore or intellectually dismiss at our peril. Alan Davie (1920–2014) releases these primordial forces from our collective psyche in his explosive Woman Bewitched by the Moon No. 2 (1956). Unlike the Apollonian Enlightenment, the Scottish Endarkenment is illuminated by a lunar, rather than a solar, light. This form of illumination is popularly associated with madness, lupine transformation and female hysteria induced by Selene, the Greek moon goddess, as witnessed not only by Davie 16 | ART

but also, in a different manner, by women artists such as Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) in her moonstruck Dancing Nude (1973) and Georgia Horgan (b.1991) in her embroidered textile work Witch-Hunting Accusations (2015).

A gigantic moon hovers over the goddess of wisdom’s northern Athenian citadel in Calton Hill (2014) by Jock McFadyen (b.1950). In this painting, the minuscule architecture below – the observatory, the classical temples and the monuments to the great men of the Scottish Enlightenment – are bathed in a ghostly lunar aura. In contrast, a very different nocturnal view of Calton Hill is presented in Little Foxes (2009) by Peter Thomson (b.1962). Hidden in the shadows cast by those worthy emblems of intellectual authority and establishment respectability, all kinds of nefarious and frightening activities are ruthlessly pursued by the suppressed forces of sexual attraction and repulsion within the Scottish divided self and its society. Thus it would seem that the visionary utopian society of mutual understanding and integration as envisaged by the idealists of the Scottish Enlightenment remains sadly a pipe dream.

For most, the Scottish Enlightenment embodies such qualities as reason, clarity, mathematical order, moderation, certainty and a belief in the human capacity to understand and direct the historical process. The Scottish Endarkenment, on the other hand, is deeply involved with passion, mystery, organic growth, excess, necessary doubt and a faith in the power of myth to connect us with our authentic selves. Yet these two contrasting aspects of human thought and feeling need not be seen as being opposed to each other. In nature, as in art, they are there to combine and create the chiaroscuro by which we make visual sense of the world and our relationship to it. The Scottish Endarkenment, therefore, is as vitally necessary as its enlightened counterpart to define and enrich our individual wellbeing and to give us a fuller understanding of ourselves and the world we have created.

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Bill Hare is a Visiting Lecturer and Honorary Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh

1 John Bellany, The Ettrick Shepherd, 1967, ©The Estate of John Bellany, photo credit Stuart Armitt, courtesy Dovecot Gallery and Fleming Wyfold Foundation

The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation has lent to the exhibition The Ettrick Shepherd (1967) by John Bellany and The Entombment (1972) by William Johnstone

2 Joyce Cairns, Shoes from Majdanek, 2003, photo credit Stuart Johnstone, courtesy the Artist 3 Pat Douthwaite, Dancing Nude, 1973, © The Estate of Pat Douthwaite, photo courtesy The Scottish Gallery

The Scottish Endarkenment: Art and Unreason, 1945 to the Present Until 29 August Dovecot Gallery 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT T: (0)131 550 3660 | dovecotstudios.com Open: Monday to Saturday 10.30am–5.30pm

4 The Scottish Endarkenment, 2016, Dovecot Gallery, photo credit Stuart Armitt

5 Alan Davie, Woman Bewitched by the Moon No2, 1956, © The Estate of Alan Davie, photo credit Stuart Armitt, courtesy Dovecot Gallery 6 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1976 © The Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay, photo courtesy National Galleries of Scotland 7 Peter Thomson, Pastoral, 1990 © Peter Thomson, photo credit Stuart Armitt, courtesy Dovecot Gallery 8 Lys Hansen, THE DIVIDED SELF, 1985, Grip, © Lys Hansen, Triptych Centre Panel, photo courtesy the Artist

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THE SURREAL CASE OF EDWIN LUCAS

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Patrick Elliott

Ahead of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s international touring show ‘Surreal Encounters’, Patrick Elliott, curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, writes about a Scottish artist whose contribution to the Surrealist movement is little known.

I remember an American museum director telling me, years ago, that a visitor had called from the front desk of his museum, asking to show him a picture. The director thought twice about it, but decided to go and see. It turned out to be a 17th-century painting, and the man had a Rubens at home. The museum was given both.

So when someone writes or calls saying they have a picture, I do my best to see it. It is part of the job, but I have that Rubens in mind.

In 2011, someone wrote in, stating that they had seen ‘Another World’, a big exhibition on Surrealism that I had organised at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He explained that his father, Edwin Lucas (1911–90), was a Scottish Surrealist artist and asked whether I would be interested in seeing his pictures. I had not heard of Lucas, but I checked on the incomparable BBC ‘Your Art’ website and found a really odd, arresting painting in the City Art Centre; it reminded me of the old Ready Brek television advert in which a boy walks to school, imprisoned by a sort of nuclear glow. I do like odd artists, who do not fit into categories, so I said, yes, I would have a look.

I cycled out to a modern bungalow on the fringes of Edinburgh and have to confess that I did not have high hopes.

Ceramic ducks flying in formation or a reproduction of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl seemed more likely finds. A friendly 18 | ART

couple greeted me and offered me coffee. Inside, the walls were filled with some of the weirdest paintings I had ever seen, dating mainly from the 1940s, crazy pictures in all sorts of styles. They made me think of Francis Picabia (1879–1953), doyen of Dadaism and Surrealism, and one of the most left-field artists of the 20th century; George Condo (b.1957), an American artist who is all the rage and sells for big money; and some of the so-called ‘Bad Painters’ of recent years – Stella Vine (b.1969) and Martin Maloney (b.1961), artists Saatchi bought. Only these pictures by Lucas were, in my mind, more compelling and unfathomable, partly because there was (or seemed to be) no irony or intention to shock.

My mouth still agape, and holding on to my coffee, I listened to my host, Lucas’s son. His father, Edwin George Lucas was born in Leith, the port of Edinburgh, in 1911. He showed a talent for drawing and painting at an early age, but his family discouraged him from considering art as a career. It transpired that Lucas’s uncle, EG Handel Lucas, had been a good Victorian painter but had struggled to make ends meet and so the family was quick to snuff out interest in art among the younger generation. Lucas attended evening life-drawing classes at Edinburgh College of Art for a number of years, but was otherwise entirely self-taught. He worked for the civil service in Edinburgh and took a law degree at the University of Edinburgh.

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‘If you have a fair grounding in the history of art, you can usually figure out where an artist got this or that motif or style from, but with Lucas I have no idea why he painted these works, or what they mean, or how on earth he adopted that style when nobody else was painting in that way at that time.

Which is why it is always a joy to look at them’

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Throughout the 1930s, Lucas worked mainly in watercolours but towards the end of the decade he turned seriously to oil paint, and at the same time ‘flirted’ (the term he used) with Surrealism. A big show of Surrealist art held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936 sparked interest in Surrealism around the UK (famously, Salvador Dalí attended the opening, and nearly suffocated in a full diving suit). A few Surrealist paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Dalí (1904–89) and Max Ernst (1891–1976) were shown in the annual exhibition of the Society of Scottish Artists held in Edinburgh in December 1937, the year that Lucas also exhibited, although his must have been a more traditional work. Other Surrealist paintings, including a work by Yves Tanguy (1900–55), were shown at the University of Edinburgh in May 1939. In June 1939, the New Era Group, which included William Gear (1915–97) among its number, held a Surrealist exhibition at Gladstone’s Land Galleries in Edinburgh. Gear was a close friend of artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004), who sublet her studio to Lucas, and it seems likely that Lucas attended this exhibition.

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So, there were opportunities for Lucas to see Surrealist paintings first-hand. He produced a small body of Surrealist works between 1939 and 1941 and surreal elements were an important part of his work thereafter, even though he stopped regarding himself as a Surrealist painter. In terms of Scottish art, his interest in Surrealism marked him out as unusual. A small number of others experimented with the surreal, but only briefly: Edward Baird (1904–49), James Cowie (1886–1956), Charles Pulsford (1912–89), William Johnstone (1897–1981), and a couple of others. That so few Scottish artists became interested in Surrealism was partly due to the nature of the Scottish art market, which was conservative, and there were hardly any buyers for that type of work. In this respect, Lucas was in an advantageous position: he had an income and did not need to sell.

Lucas’s son and I looked at one painting, which was on a loose piece of canvas and called The Shape of the Night.

Dating from 1939, it showed a bird of prey, a spoon and some triangular motifs hovering in the air; these turned out to be icecream cones. The title is pure René Magritte, but the painting

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had something very individual about it. Also individual were the crystals growing on the surface – it had evidently been kept in a damp environment. We later went to a lock-up on the way out to Edinburgh airport and looked at a further 50 or so works. About a year later, the National Galleries of Scotland purchased, at very modest prices, four paintings from the 1940s, and The Shape of the Night came as a gift from the family, in memory of their father.

It cleaned up a treat and now hangs between Dalí and Magritte paintings worth millions.

Lucas submitted some of his Surrealist pictures to exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy in the 1940s, but they were usually rejected; his more traditional landscapes were hung instead. He held two one-man shows at the New Gallery in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh, in 1950 and 1951, and included all his Surrealist work, but the shows received little attention from the art establishment. Following his marriage in 1952, he stopped painting and only picked up his brushes again in the early 1980s.

He died of leukaemia in 1990, his work virtually unknown.

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I am still bowled over by the pictures. If you have a fair grounding in the history of art, you can usually figure out where an artist got this or that motif or style from, but with Lucas I have no idea why he painted these works, or what they mean, or how on earth he adopted that style when nobody else was painting in that way at that time. Which is why it is always a joy to look at them.

Patrick Elliott is curator at the National Galleries of Scotland Surreal Encounters | Collecting the Marvellous 4 June–11 September 2016 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: Daily 10am–5pm

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1 Edwin G Lucas, Tailors Object, c.1939 2 Edwin G Lucas, The Mask, c. 1939 3 Edwin G Lucas, The Shape of the Night, c.1939 4 Edwin G Lucas, To See Ourselves As Others See Us, c.1946 5 Edwin G Lucas, The Intellectual Dance, c.1941 6 Edwin G Lucas, Dance Hall, c.1946

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PAT DOUTHWAITE: THE OUTSIDER Guy Peploe

Guy Peploe recalls working with Pat Douthwaite and explains why this extraordinary artist, who operated on the peripheries of the imagination, should no longer be an outsider to the Scottish art world.

It is now 14 years since Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) died alone of heart failure in bed-and-breakfast accommodation in Broughty Ferry, Dundee. She was two days short of her 68th birthday. Her legacy is her extraordinary work, utterly original and arresting: paintings and drawings that provoke a huge variety of responses, persist in the memory and, like all great artworks, transcend the time they were made, defying any impulse to box them into an art-historical cul-de-sac.

Since her death, there have been several exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery, helping many see the span and variety of her extraordinary career. ‘An Uncompromising Vision’ at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester (2012–13), West Sussex, further widened the recognition of one of Scotland’s most original and difficult painters. The show ‘Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors, 1885–1965’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art includes Douthwaite’s work and seeks to place it as one of the triumphs of feminist art.

However, her work is not easily defined, being at once naive and intellectually loaded, personal yet resonating with cultural references. It was not made for others but came from that deep-seated need of the creative to make, to express. This said, she was interested in what people thought, often drawing an audience into a dangerous dialogue; she was impossible to please and made enemies of her supporters with an extraordinary 24 | ART

impunity. Now we no longer have Douthwaite to mediate or twist our experience of the work, we can perhaps begin a more serious appraisal. But in front of her best work, the artist seems still palpably present because she is the real subject of everything she made, in pain, anger or ecstasy. Even now, the many cultural impresarios from both public and private areas of the art establishment – who were attracted to her to begin with but found her impossible to deal with – are wary of her aftermath, as if the work carries toxicity.

For the last 15 years or so of her life, I was her chief agent and advisor, not always a rewarding or easy assignment.

I visited her in Berwick in the early 1990s, wearing a perfectly ordinary St Michael pinstripe suit (it was that time after all), and was subsequently abused for coming sewn in what she perceived to be an Armani suit and undermining what she was doing. The relationship survived many bumps; an agent was, in Pat’s bitter understanding, a craven, egregious role, often less preferable to a DIY approach, such as putting a small ad in a local paper or writing to everyone she knew to implore them to make a purchase. In these years, she was increasingly constrained, by health and studio space, unable to paint on a grand scale, but she always drew and continued to mine the strange, utterly original iconography that makes her work so distinct.

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After her death, I worked with her son Toby to disentangle her complicated estate and we were able to mount a handsome memorial show in 2003. Since then, The Scottish Gallery has promoted her interest, making significant sales to both private and museum collections. In writing her monograph, I delved into her fascinating history, spoke to many who knew her and used archives of letters both private and public (where some material is perhaps permanently embargoed). What emerged was a clear picture of a woman who was often deeply troubled but who possessed tremendous spirit, energy and a sense of mischief.

When it came to the promotion and understanding of her work, she was uncompromising; her self-belief and the belief that making art was important, more than anything else made her a fierce self-advocate.

Her early training with Margaret Morris (1891–1980) and JD Fergusson (1874–1961), her life among the roués of Soho and Suffolk, her years in Majorca in the swinging sixties and the tragicomic, peripatetic life she led in her final years hopefully make for a good read. As an artist, she tackled monumental themes of sex and violence, life and death, often from an original distaff perspective. Throughout her life she drew, prolifically and honestly, and her febrile, nervous line exemplified in her distinctive signature is instantly recognisable. A great traveller, she absorbed imagery and devoured cultures as far afield as Poland, Peru, Mexico and India. Her wanderlust is a tribute to her intellectual curiosity, but was at the same time symptomatic of her restlessness: in the last ten years of her life, she seemed to be constantly on the move, her world by then restricted to the Borders, her homes always temporary and her life lived in anxiety.

Yet still she worked, finding a love of watercolour that produced some of her most touching imagery, very often of animals – her familiars and the receptacles of love she could not give to others.

There is often no happy ending in the life of the creative, but Pat Douthwaite is present in her work, and meeting her there is as rewarding and challenging as ever it was in her life.

‘As an artist, she tackled monumental themes of sex and violence, life and death, often from an original distaff perspective.

Throughout her life she drew, prolifically and honestly, and her febrile, nervous line exemplified in her distinctive signature is instantly recognisable ’ 2

1 Pat Douthwaite, Woman with Red Hair, c.1966.

2 Pat Douthwaite in the studio, c.1958.

3 Pat Douthwaite, Hogey Bear, c.1960.

4 Pat Douthwaite, Listen to Me, c.2001.

5 Pat Douthwaite, The Family, c.1963.

All images courtesy of The Scottish Gallery

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Today, greatness is still a difficult claim to make for Douthwaite, but then it is also an attribute hard to allow for the vast array of artists trying to make their way into permanence.

Her work is without doubt original and heartfelt; she is the expressionist par excellence in a post-Freudian world. But she also has plenty to say. Her observations are razor-sharp, her cast of characters always interesting, managing at once to be universal and historical re-creations (or contemporary understandings).

Her images are always haunting and also stand up to the test of isolation from their context. Her work is closer to Tracey Emin in its raw honesty than to any other living painter, but there is no art-world agenda or cool irony, so pervasive in BritArt and the Turner Prize shortlists. Douthwaite is fearless as she pursues her subject, which is often grotesque or shocking, but never gratuitously so and always moderated by the discipline of good composition and the painter’s craftsmanship. The work has both romantic and expressionist characteristics and as such allies her with a tradition in European art that goes back to William Blake and includes Chaïm Soutine, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

Perhaps more time is needed for her to be fully appreciated and included in this illustrious company, but it is hoped that this short appraisal will introduce a wider audience to a remarkable artist.

Guy Peploe is the Director of The Scottish Gallery The Outsider is published by Sansom & Co. Copies are available at The Scottish Gallery

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Pat Douthwaite: The Outsider 1–25 June 2016 The Scottish Gallery 16 Dundas St, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ T: (0)131 558 1200 | scottish-gallery.co.uk Open: Monday to Friday 10am–6pm, Saturday 10am–4pm Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 27

FROM A-Z WITH BARBARA RAE Laura Campbell 2

Barbara Rae talks to Laura Campbell about artists’ integrity and her upcoming show with Open Eye Gallery as part of Edinburgh Art Festival.

Like so many artists whose practices have reached maturity, Barbara Rae (b.1943) commands respect. She has the authoritative air of a firm but fair teacher, of someone who really knows their stuff as a result of accumulating a wealth of experience both in the art world and beyond. She is 73 this year, so all this is to be expected, but what might surprise some is her self-deprecating sense of humour and refreshing openness that belies her seniority as a highly regarded artist.

Rae’s studio is a bit like her work: meticulously set up to provide optimum conditions for spontaneity. It is tempting to relate its every nook and cranny: the glass roof letting in pure natural light, the collection of pot plants, the neat stash of CDs that she listens to as she works, the little side room storing her library of moleskin sketchbooks, but I digress. If this evokes an image of a woman precious about her work then prepare to be wrong. Strewn haphazardly across this vision of perfect orderliness are bits of collage, prints, sketches and paintings at various stages of completion.

She invites me to delve into her sketchbooks and visibly lights up while recounting sketches’ backstories and her process for making the finished works. Pointing out a drawing made in County Mayo, Ireland, Rae describes her fascination with standing stones as a student. Another sketch prompts her to tell me about her time spent in Utah. ‘I’m dying to go back to Arizona,’ she says, ‘There comes a point when you lose a connection with a place. That’s why I really need to go back.’

Rae’s strong desire to return to a site of inspiration before making a planned series of prints gives an insight into her 28 | ART

process. It is easy to imagine the artist charging herself up with the essence of a place, be it Scotland, Arizona or South Africa, then returning home to her studio to let loose. She laughs: ‘It drives me nuts when people describe me as a landscape painter.

Do these look like landscapes to you?’ The answer is emphatically no. While Rae’s paintings have some figurative elements that allude to place, they are a far cry from the safe easel paintings conjured up by the word ‘landscape’.

The enormous canvases are acted upon in intense sessions. ‘You have to work fast,’ she explains, ‘The idea takes a long time; the painting doesn’t take a long time.’ Sometimes Rae makes a series of prints before working on a painting with the same subject in mind, but often it is the other way around. Both mediums are equally important to her, and she has the same approach to both. ‘Printmaking has taught me a lot over the years about the painting process and the layers within them.’

Rae’s forthcoming exhibition for Edinburgh Art Festival, aptly titled ‘Return Journey’, offers a unique opportunity to reflect on the artist’s evolving relationship with painting and printmaking. Some works, such as those made in the 1970s, have seldom been shown, and, though different in terms of execution and palette, it is striking how persistent Rae’s vision has been over the decades. It was an important moment for Rae when she realised that she could make more than one work from a single idea: ‘No one told me [at art school] you don’t have to think of a fresh idea for each and every painting!’ Armed with this knowledge, she went on to develop a distinctive style that continues to inspire a new generation of artists.

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With the conversation turning to Rae’s own influences over the years, it proves facile to try to pin down her work with references to art history or other artists with a similar flare for colour. In response to the suggestion that British abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) was an inspiration, she laughs, surprised. ‘John? No! I’m too dumb to be inspired by John. I don’t make completely abstract paintings. If I did they’d be crap.’

‘I don’t care about what other people are doing; I’ve got enough problems of my own. I can only do what I can do. I can only paint what I know. If I see something in a gallery I like then I’m glad to have seen it. But it doesn’t worry me, I don’t think “is my art going to look as good as that?”’ She adds facetiously, ‘More often, I’ll see a painting and think, “That’s awful! I hope my work doesn’t look as bad as that!”’

But what of her known approval of the work of American abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–93)? ‘I wouldn’t say I was inspired by Diebenkorn, I’d say I liked his work. I used to tell my students to look at him because it’s easy to see his progression as an artist: you can see how he went from A through to Z. You can’t get to Z without going through the processes, something today’s students don’t often realise.’

‘You have to absorb your influences,’ she continues. ‘You can’t make them the main point of your work.’ There is a shred of irritation in her voice that could be attributed to the fact that she has had her fair share of imitators. Rae cares deeply about artists’ integrity and it is telling that she admires those whose careers have been prolific, brave and single-minded. Among them are the insatiable painters Pablo Picasso, Antoni Tàpies and Francisco

Goya – Spanish painters whose urgent brushwork often radiates raw emotion.

As a student at Edinburgh College of Art in the mid1960s, Rae claims that she and her peers never had the added pressure of referring to themselves as artists, something she believes helped her practice to develop naturally. ‘You were students back then, plain and simple,’ she says. The cultural climate from which Rae emerged is utterly different (some might say more straightforward) from the one that students must navigate today. It is arguably unhelpful that students are now encouraged to proclaim themselves bona-fide artists immediately after graduating, some without the benefit of life experience. Rae’s advice to them is to develop their own voice regardless of what others are doing, to paint what they know, and to work damn hard; there are no shortcuts to ‘Z’.

Laura Campbell is an arts writer based in Glasgow Barbara Rae: Return Journey 1–31 August 2016 Open Eye Gallery 34 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh, EH3 6QE T: (0)131 558 9872 | openeyegallery.co.uk Open: Monday to Friday 10am–6pm, Saturday 10am–4pm

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1 Barbara Rae, Cortijo Ladero (Spain), c.2015 2 Barbara Rae, Standing Stones and White Sea (West Coast Scotland), c.1984 3 Barbara Rae, Spring Tide – Lacken (Ireland), c.2015 4 Barbara Rae, Hamilton-Russell Vineyard (South Africa), c.1997 All images courtesy of The Open Eye Gallery

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WILLIAM GILLIES AND JOHN MAXWELL Helen Scott

Ahead of ‘William Gillies & John Maxwell’ opening at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, Helen Scott, curator of Fine Art, reflects on the background to the show and the lives of these two distinctive Scottish artists.

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When I joined the City Art Centre in summer 2013 as curator of Fine Art, one of my first priorities was to familiarise myself with the collection. The centre holds over 4800 artworks in a variety of media, which trace the development of Scottish art from the 17th century to the present day. Looking through the oils, watercolours, prints, sculptures and installation pieces in storage, I was struck by the number of works by William Gillies (1898–1973) and John Maxwell (1905–62), two members of the loose group known as the Edinburgh School. I subsequently learned that many of these paintings and drawings were part of the Fletcher Collection, a set of 43 works by Gillies and Maxwell that had been on long-term loan to the City Art Centre since 1995.

The Fletcher Collection was amassed by botanist Dr Harold R Fletcher and his wife Mrs Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Fletcher, who began collecting in the 1940s. Although they bought work by a number of Scottish artists, including Anne Redpath (1895–1965), Robin Philipson (1916–92) and William Littlejohn (1929–2006), Gillies and Maxwell were personal friends and particular favourites.

Dr Fletcher passed away in 1978, and, in the early 1990s, his family approached the City Art Centre with a view to lending the majority of the collection, 18 works by Gillies and 25 by Maxwell, on a longterm basis. The Fletcher Collection arrived in 1995 and went on display later that year. Following that time, individual pieces and subsets of the collection were featured in the temporary exhibition programmes and touring shows. Yet, the works were never again displayed en masse – a situation that I was keen to rectify.

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So this summer the City Art Centre stages ‘William Gillies & John Maxwell’, the first exhibition in over 20 years to showcase the Fletcher Collection in its entirety. The show follows the parallel development of the two artists as their careers and personal lives interwove throughout the middle decades of the 20th century. Over 70 artworks are included, with the Fletcher Collection augmented by a selection of works from the City Art Centre’s own permanent collection, and additional pieces on loan from the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture and the University of Edinburgh Art Collection. Displaying Gillies and Maxwell side by side, the exhibition gives audiences the opportunity to explore not only the output of these two significant artists, but also the legacy of their enduring friendship.

It is thought that Gillies and Maxwell first met in the early 1920s, when Gillies was completing his training at Edinburgh College of Art and the younger Maxwell had just embarked on his studies there. Both artists pursued comparable paths at the outset of their careers. Having gained his postgraduate diploma in 1923, Gillies used a travelling scholarship to spend time in Paris working under Cubist painter André Lhote (1885–1962). After five months, he moved on to Italy where he visited museums and churches, and sketched the local sights. Three years later, Maxwell followed a similar route, studying at the Académie Moderne in Paris under Fernand Léger (1881–1955) and Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966), before progressing on to Spain and Italy. By 1929, both men had returned to Edinburgh College of Art to join the teaching staff.

‘The two artists had contrasting personalities and different approaches to their work. Gillies’ manner was quiet and retiring, but his seemingly boundless energy made him a prolific painter. Maxwell was the more gregarious of the pair, although he was notoriously self-critical and laboured extensively over many of his compositions. In spite of these differences, or perhaps because of them, a close friendship developed over the years’

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The two artists had contrasting personalities and different approaches to their work. Gillies’ manner was quiet and retiring, but his seemingly boundless energy made him a prolific painter. Maxwell was the more gregarious of the pair, although he was notoriously self-critical and laboured extensively over many of his compositions. In spite of these differences, or perhaps because of them, a close friendship developed over the years.

From the late 1920s onwards, Gillies and Maxwell undertook regular painting holidays together, leaving the responsibilities of college life in Edinburgh to explore the landscapes of rural locations like Dumfriesshire, the North West Highlands and the East Neuk of Fife. They usually camped on these excursions, sometimes in the company of others, such as Gillies’ younger sister, Emma, a talented ceramicist. The pair also made trips abroad; for example, in 1937 they visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris. During term-time they socialised together, attending supper parties and college functions. Eventually, they both moved away from Edinburgh, with Gillies relocating to the Midlothian village of Temple in 1939 and Maxwell returning to his native Dalbeattie in 1946, but they still continued to visit each other often.

Maxwell’s teaching career at Edinburgh College of Art was more intermittent than Gillies’ tenure. The younger artist took a two-year break in 1933 and resigned completely in the mid-1940s, before being persuaded to rejoin the staff body in 1955. Gillies remained at the college for over 40 years, ultimately advancing to the position of principal. Throughout this period, they exhibited together, showing work at the Society of Scottish Artists and the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1950, both men were invited to participate in the Festival of Britain exhibition ‘Sixty Paintings for ’51’, a high-profile event intended to showcase the best of British contemporary art. Through teaching and public displays of their work, they exerted a considerable influence on the next generation of Scottish painters.

In 1962, Maxwell’s premature death had a profound effect on Gillies. As he later wrote: ‘I knew him intimately, I valued his friendship, his unaffected manner, his essential simplicity, his whimsical humour; above all his amazing gifts as an artist.

His death has left a void which can never wholly be removed.’

Although Gillies was a popular teacher and successful painter, he was a very private man who led a largely compartmentalised life.

He embraced few friends as closely as his immediate family, but Maxwell was counted among those exceptional few.

As artists, Gillies and Maxwell matured in different creative directions. Gillies is best known for his tonal landscapes of the rolling Borders countryside, his spontaneous Highland watercolours and his carefully constructed still-life compositions.

Meanwhile, Maxwell is remembered for his expressive, often dream-like depictions of creatures, flowers and timeless nudes; the heavily worked oils and joyous watercolours that flowed from his imagination. Yet, there were points of creative crossover in their work and they sometimes drew from the same influences, such as their early encounters with the paintings of Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Paul Klee (1879–1940). Presenting the two artists in tandem helps us better understand these commonalities and differences.

This exhibition, with the Fletcher Collection at its heart, brings together many of the artists’ finest drawings and paintings, alongside photographs and other archival objects.

Timed to coincide with the Edinburgh Art Festival, ‘William Gillies & John Maxwell’ is a chance to re-examine and celebrate the achievements of this unique pairing.

Dr Helen Scott is curator of Fine Art at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre William Gillies & John Maxwell 30 July–23 October City Art Centre, 2 Market St, Edinburgh EH1 1DE T: (0)131 529 3993 | edinburghmuseums.org.uk/venues/ city-art-centre Open: Monday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday noon–5pm

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1 William Gillies, Highland Landscape, c.1930s. The Fletcher Collection. © The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture 2 John Maxwell, Yellow Flower Piece, 1953.

The Fletcher Collection. Courtesy of the Maxwell Family

3 John Maxwell, Garden at Night (Moth), 1960. The Fletcher Collection. Courtesy of the Maxwell Family 4 William Gillies, Shadowed Interior, 1961. City Art Centre, City of Edinburgh Council. © The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

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Tim Cornwell

ART MARKET

Tim Cornwell on the Glasgow International artists making an impact, the highlights of Sotheby’s Scottish Sale and the London Art Fair plus the changes that lie ahead for the Scottish Art Market.

Scottish galleries, and London dealers in Scottish art, struck a particularly strong presence at the London Art Fair this year. The Scottish Gallery returned to Islington in January after a break of about five years. Also in the mix were the Glasgow Print Studio, Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Cyril Gerber Fine Art and the Compass Gallery from Glasgow, and London’s Duncan R. Miller Fine Arts and the Portland Gallery.

The Scottish Gallery, which dates its original founding to 1842, was back in part due to the guarantee of a place on the main mezzanine floor. ‘We needed to be mixing it on the mezzanine, so eventually they accommodated us down there and we were back,’ said director Guy Peploe. Offerings ranged from the Colourists to Victoria Crowe, Barbara Rae and Geoff Uglow.

Also doing well at the fair was the Arusha Gallery, a relative newcomer to the Scottish scene, with just two years in business across the road from The Scottish Gallery on Dundas Street. Arusha attends about ten art fairs a year and, in the last year, has set up stalls in Manchester, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and the two Affordable Art Fairs in Battersea and Hampstead.

‘At London, we did incredibly well,’ said Arusha’s creative director, Agnieszka Prendota.

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Among Arusha’s artists in London was Glasgow-born, Gray’s School of Art alumnus Mark L’Anson, with the drawings he makes based around faces he finds in vintage photographs. L’Anson’s work in the fair sold out, and he did almost as well in his recent Edinburgh show. ‘We had collectors from Germany come in, and one guy bought four pieces, for a total value of over £40,000,’ said Prendota. ‘There are other big buyers coming in from Europe as well.’

The Dundas Street scene gets a new addition this year. For nearly half a century, the Carson Clark Gallery – selling fine prints and antique maps and founded by The University of Edinburgh cartographer Carson Clark and continued by his son Paul – was a fixture on the Royal Mile. After a five-year hunt for a New Town location, the gallery has found a sizeable place at the corner of Dundas and Northumberland streets with room not just to display the best of some 10,000 prints and maps in its stores but also with a space for small themed exhibitions. Paul Clark’s high-end offerings are set to include a Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, a first edition of the first known atlas of Scotland, uncoloured, and pushing into five-figure territory.

The decision by the renowned Ingleby Gallery, one the foremost contemporary galleries in

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Scotland, to sell its Calton Road premises, is a sad development for the Scottish art scene. The gallery represents Charles Avery, Callum Innes, Katie Paterson and Alison Watt and has an influential and international client list. Its last show in the city centre premises was the mesmerising ‘No Man’s Land’ series by artist-to-watch, Kevin Harman, who injects paint into double-glazed units to create what seem like abstract land or seascapes seething with motion.

Owner Richard Ingleby insists that the gallery’s sale will free capital for a future ‘every bit as beautiful’, although its presence in the three-storey building next to Waverley rail station was a standard bearer for contemporary art in Edinburgh, particularly at festival time. This year’s festival show will take place at 6 Carlton Terrace (see page 51) and the gallery will be moving to a new venue, yet to be announced, later in the year.

The Glasgow International (GI), however, with 220 artists from 33 countries in 78 different shows, was received as another ringing endorsement of that city’s contemporary scene. Glasgow’s Mary Mary won strong reviews for one of the stand-out exhibitions by Australian painter Helen Johnson at Kelvin Hall. It has also done well with sales of Glasgow-based Sara Barker following her Fruitmarket show, and with New Yorker Emily Mae Smith’s work, also during GI.

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On the auction front, Sotheby’s, as promised, returned in November 2015 with its first dedicated sale of Scottish art in years. Top results included £485,000 for Samuel John Peploe’s Pink Roses, slightly above estimate, and £269,000 for FCB Cadell’s The Cheval Glass sold by George Watson’s College 60 years after it was donated to the school. Sotheby’s said the sale ‘saw strong results and re-established Sotheby’s at the forefront of the Scottish market’, with the 22nd November set for the next Scottish sale in London.

A test of the Colourist market is set for the Lyon & Turnbull Scottish sale on 9th June 2016 when two important collections appear on the market for the first time. The Wood collection valued at £1 million, was formed between the 1920s and the 1940s by the Edinburgh collector Walter Quarry Wood, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, with the advice of Duncan Macdonald of the renowned dealers Alex Reid and Lefevre and hung for many years in his family’s residence in the city’s New Town.

The collection is particularly strong on Peploe’s and Cadell’s. The Ian and Anne Robertson collection focuses on the work of JD Fergusson, who was a friend of the family.

A note of caution on market sentiment is sounded by The Scottish Gallery veteran Guy Peploe, Samuel John Peploe’s grandson, who is taking a step back to pursue a project centered on the Scottish Colourists. He remains a gallery director, but his wife Christina Jansen assumes the managing director’s slot, while the redoubtable Tommy Zyw moves up to director.

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1 John Duncan Fergusson RBA, At a café table. Image courtesy of Lyon and Turnbull

6 Samuel John Peploe, Pink Roses.

Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Lot Sold for £485,000

2 John Duncan Fergusson RBA, Greenhouse, Botanic Gardens.

Image courtesy of Lyon and Turnbull

7 John Duncan RSA, St Christopher, 1887. Image courtesy of The Fine Art Society

3 John Duncan Fergusson RBA, The Picnic. Image courtesy of Lyon and Turnbull

8 Edward Arthur Walton RSA The Uplands of Ceres. Image courtesy of The Fine Art Society

4 Kevin Harman, Symptoms of Joy All Over, 2016. Image courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

9 John Duncan Fergusson RBA, Philosophy. Image courtesy of Lyon and Turnbull

5 Kevin Harman, No Man’s Land, 2016.

Image courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

10 Mark L’Anson. Image courtesy of Arusha Gallery

While The Scottish Gallery has put a £50,000 overhaul in place, Peploe concurs with those who see a chilling effect on the market due to political uncertainty, with the same dampening effect as on the upper end of the property market. ‘We could do without this endless countdown to the next referendum,’ he said.

However, a reminder of the resilience of the market for great art is highlighted by the 140th anniversary celebrations of the Fine Art Society, which offers a feast of Scottish painting and design at its Dundas Street Gallery throughout the summer from ‘Signatures of Scottish Art’ in June to Glasgow designers, Timorous Beasties, to Scottish post-war painting from mid-July to the end of August. Its annual summer show in the art town of Kirkcudbright is taking place at the Harbour Cottage Gallery showing Galloway paintings and 20th-century art in August (check website for details).

Tim Cornwell is an arts journalist based in Edinburgh and Istanbul

‘A test of the colourist market is set for the Lyon & Turnbull Scottish sale on 9th June 2016 when two important collections appear on the market for the first time’

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REVIEWS

William Hunter to Damien Hirst: The Dead Teach the Living

Glasgow International 2016 Laura Campbell

Susan Mansfield

1 Scott Rogers, Between Nonesuch Place, 2011. Custom scientific glassware, shelf, steel stand, computer-animated video 2 Scott Rogers, Between Nonesuch Place, 2011. Custom scientific glassware, shelf, steel stand, computer-animated video Photographs courtesy the artist

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Various venues across Glasgow Held 8–25 April

The Hunterian, Glasgow Until 5 March 2017 Science has often proved a fruitful place for contemporary artists to draw inspiration, but this show, created for Glasgow International by students on the MLitt in Curatorial Practice run between Glasgow University and Glasgow School of Art, attempts something altogether more ambitious. It places contemporary art next to works created by and for the scientists of the past to see what they have to say to one another.

Drawings by 16th-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) and 19th-century Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) and, most strikingly, a cast of a pregnant uterus made by an unknown sculptor for Glasgow pioneer physician William Hunter, form a kind of backbone for the show. In their way, these men were clearly artists: the quality of their work shows they cared about aesthetics. Cajal’s mapping of neural pathways, in particular, looks like 20th-century abstraction, and was studied by a number of Surrealists.

But, their purpose is very different: these are diagrams, teaching tools, created to 40 | ART

pass on information. Hunter did not want to stimulate ideas, he wanted to teach midwifery.

By contrast, contemporary art operates in a miasma of images and ideas.

Necromancer (2004), the star attraction of this show, by Damien Hirst (b.1965) and on loan from Anthony d’Offay, is a supreme example. The mirrored cabinet, with its precise rows of obstetric instruments, looks almost utilitarian, while in fact it is a curiosity cabinet, perhaps even a still life.

Like Hirst’s best work, it has clarity while evoking a range of ideas and questions, key among them: why do instruments designed to save lives create in the viewer such a shudder of mortality?

Scott Rogers (b.1981) employs research in his project A Call to the Old Ones, which centres on writing, film and found objects (specimens from the Hunterian Museum). He investigates lark mirrors, spinning devices used historically in hunting to confuse and trap birds, and later in hypnosis on humans. How do they work, he asks? How does the avian brain compare to the human one? But there are

few answers. Catherine Street’s (b.1977) film and paintings coloured with blood aim for a more visceral response, her discomfiting soundtrack of taps and clicks providing the perfect backdrop to Hirst’s cabinet.

While there are aesthetic and thematic echoes between the two groups of works – Street’s geometrical paintings and Cajal’s diagrams, Hirst’s instruments and Hunter’s model – the approaches are radically different. The scientists aim to name, teach, make precise; the artists want to stimulate thought and response, and are much more comfortable with leaving questions unanswered.

Susan Mansfield is an arts journalist based in Scotland Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ T: (0)141 330 4221 gla.ac.uk/hunterian/ Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday 11am–4pm

‘Getting into GI’ is a rite of passage for young artists in Glasgow, particularly those studying at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art, for whom it is a motivator and crucial source of inspiration. For some who are unsuccessful, however – and there are many – GI is seen as an elitist organisation that has lost its way: sour grapes, perhaps.

Regardless, this year’s festival had a pointedly inclusive feel with no shortage of artists who are yet to hit the big time: ripe pickings for art lovers looking to spot the next generation of Jim Lambies and Claire Barclays. Many were quick to note the predominance of female artists (unnecessarily, maybe), and the inclusion of artists who have nurtured their talent with the guidance of organisations such as Project Ability.

One such artist is Cameron Morgan, whose exhibition ‘TV Classics Part 1’ was a welcome injection of vitality and humour. With increasing attention paid to ‘outsider art’, the visibility of selftaught artists is firmly on the agenda in the art world. Although more mature than some of his peers currently making waves,

Morgan is a Scottish artist to watch as he gains momentum in the mainstream contemporary art scene.

Heading up the ranks of Glasgow School of Art’s alumnae this year is 31-year-old visual artist Tessa Lynch.

With a major project as part of 2014’s GENERATION under her belt and now a slot in GI’s Director’s Programme, Lynch has surely sealed her position as a serious contemporary artist. Her show ‘Painter’s Table’ at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) saw the artist fill the institution’s thirdfloor gallery with her whimsical brand of minimalism. Intricate steel sculptures that uncannily evoked everyday ephemera were accompanied by a bench-like structure that acted to interrupt the flow of visitors entering the space.

Fresher-faced still were the hot young artists fresh out of art school and keen to make a name for themselves.

Glasgow-based artists Georgia Horgan (b.1991), Rosie O’Grady (b.1990) and Josée Aubin Ouellette (b.1986) each used their local knowledge to their advantage, with Horgan focusing on the Calton Burial

Ground and Ouellette the Govanhill Baths.

O’Grady exhibited as part of the collective VERBureau at the New Glasgow Society with an experimental group project that centred on the history of the city, using its ice-cream trade as an eccentric route in.

More conventional was the group show ‘–scape’ by recent graduates of GSA’s Master of Letters programme at 1 Royal Terrace, a gallery run from the front room of one of the participating artists. For GI, Ruth Switalski (b.1991) took a break from curating the work of others in her Georgian tenement flat to exhibit her own slick sculptures, including an enormous pair of shiny black legs titled Akimbo.

Collaboration has always been a strong point of Glasgow’s art scene, with group shows being the bread and butter for artists seeking opportunities to road-test new work. So long as GI keeps giving them this platform to experiment, we shall see more Tessa Lynchs in years to come.

Laura Campbell is an arts writer based in Glasgow Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 41

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1 Tessa Lynch, Painter’s Table, 2016 2 Georgia Horgan, Saturday, 2016 3/4/5/6 Cameron Morgan, TV Classics Part 1, 2016 Images courtesy of Projectability

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Will Maclean: Veering Westerly Rose Skelton

‘ Perhaps most intriguing of all is the sheer amount of words that appear in the pieces, their meaning, like many of the objects, never entirely understood’

1/2 Will Maclean, Installation shots, Comar and An Lanntair Images courtesy of Comar

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Comar, Tobermory Held until 28 May Inverness-born artist Will Maclean has often created work concerned with the ocean-going culture of the Highlands and Islands, influenced perhaps by his parents’ west-coast roots and the stories they recounted of the people living and working so closely with the sea. Well-known for such exhibitions as the documentary ‘Ring-Net Project’, which showed at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1978 and consisted of more than 400 drawings based on his studies of ring-net fisherman, Maclean is equally renowned for the three memorial cairns he designed for the Isle of Lewis to commemorate crucial moments from the island’s past.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that his latest exhibition, ‘Veering Westerly’, was shown at the seaside arts centre Comar, in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull. The single-room space, housed in a converted Victorian school, seems the natural stage for Maclean’s collection of drawings, freestanding sculptures, boxed assemblages and intriguing constructions, often made from found objects and all seeming to 44 | ART

mirror the wild ocean landscape in which the exhibition space so comfortably sits.

The artist’s pieces sometimes offer ghostly reflections on what it means to live and work so closely with the sea.

The Archaeology of Childhood is a boxed construction with compartments made out of wood or bone – nothing is ever quite clear in these works – holding dolllike forms, miniature bottles containing fragments of unknown origin, a wooden cross, an eagle soaring above it all. Like many of the pieces, it is whitewashed to give a ghostly hue, so that the eye wanders, dreamlike, settling only briefly on the individual components, never quite landing on any one object for long.

Also wall-mounted, Diviner’s Wall is equally mysterious: a black rectangle inset with white, the latter inlaid with delicate tools, fragments of something bone-like, perhaps terracotta or shell, and globules of something animal-like inlaid in a compartment across the top. The piece is both vast in its singularity of colour, and minute in its inlaid detail; it is both precise and vague,

offering the viewer a delightful paradox of not knowing and somehow instinctively knowing what it is that she or he is looking at. The hazy wash again gives the work a ghostly quality.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is the sheer amount of words that appear in the pieces, their meaning, like many of the objects, never entirely understood.

Atlantic Messengers consists of three free-standing wooden plinths, perhaps once parts of a boat, which hold globules of resin inside which are feathers, fish hooks, a fish head (again, it is not quite clear) and words, whose meanings morph as the plinths are circumnavigated. The messages contained within objects that are contained and contained again, bring to mind the land sculptures of Harrisbased Steve Dilworth, whose work also asks the viewer to pay attention to minute detail encased in multiple layers of meaning.

The Comar exhibition includes drawings of the Lewis cairns, along with the histories they commemorate, both in English and Gaelic. This is a small

collection of potent pieces, carefully curated to reflect both the inner world of the artist and the outer world of the seafilled Hebridean landscape that Maclean has spent a working life deeply connected to.

Rose Skelton is a writer and journalist Comar Argyll Terrace, Tobermory, PA75 6PB T: 01688 302211| comar.co.uk Open: Monday to Saturday 11am–5pm Will Maclean, Veering Westerly is a travelling exhibition and has also been shown at An Lanntair, Stornoway between 8 August–26 September 2015; Iona Gallery, Kingussie between 3 October–1 November 2015; St Fergus Gallery, Wick between 28 November 2015–16 January 2016 and Inverness Museum and Art Gallery between 20 February–26 March 2016.

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Celts Laura Campbell

1 Gunderstrup Cauldron © The National Museum of Denmark 2 Snettisham Great Torc. Courtesy of The British Museum 3 Iron Age Torcs found at Blair Drummond.

Image courtesy of National Museums Scotland

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National Museum of Scotland Until 25 September ‘The Celts, they seem to be everywhere and at the same time they are nowhere,’ we are told by Dr Flemming Kaul in a video titled Celts? Such is the complexity of this slippery word that most of us are familiar with yet struggle to define.

This groundbreaking exhibition is not an easy affirmation of how a single Celtic race evolved and prospered over the ages, but an ardent rebuttal of our chocolate-box preconceptions about our ‘barbarian’ ancestors. The show is a reconfiguration of one recently finished at the British Museum, with a few extras thrown in for good measure, including two exquisitely engraved bronze Iron Age mirrors that were crafted in the British Isles.

This is just one example from a staggering 300 precious objects that have been brought together from institutions across the UK and beyond.

What makes ‘Celts’ so special, aside from the fact that it is the first exhibition of its kind to explore the full history of Celtic art and identity, is its willingness to be led by the artefacts on display. This is not your usual trip to the 46 | ART

museum during which a tidy series of events are relayed with objects to prove it. No, ‘Celts’ is an invitation to join the archaeologists in musing about what it all means: were these objects gifts for the gods; what is the significance of this birdlike shape here; what was so much Roman silver doing in Scotland?

The Celts left no written account of their lives, leaving the door wide open for their Greek and Roman neighbours to determine our understanding of them through their reports. The title was used as a derogatory term to speak of wild savages to the north of their borders, which goes some way to explaining the popular image of a Celt as a ferocious warrior with tribal tattoos adorning a naked body. There might be a grain of truth to this, but the art they left behind tells an entirely different story.

The original Celtic art of the Iron Age is not the interlaced design of which most of us think (that was introduced by the Anglo-Saxons in 7AD) but abstract, swirling shapes that allude to natural forms and wild beasts. If the naturalism

aspired to by the Greeks and Romans signified civility and culture, then the Celts’ transcendental abstract forms were primitive and uncivilised. Some 2500 years later, this dichotomy is still relevant in contemporary art, with the distinction between abstraction and figuration a huge source of inspiration for artists.

The breathtaking beauty of the craftsmanship that went into Celtic art debunks the barbarian myth. Hoards discovered across the UK and Europe (the Celts were not one people but several) demonstrate an advanced knowledge of maths and the materials needed to create their intricate objects.

Perhaps most spectacular of these hoards on show is the one found in Stirling by a novice metal detectorist in 2009. A torc – a type of neckpiece popular across Europe during the Iron Age – is made from eight delicately twisted, waif-like golden wires with intricately decorated terminals.

Such is the beauty of this unearthly creation one has to wonder what else the Celts were capable of that will remain secret.

Laura Campbell is an arts writer based in Glasgow National Museum of Scotland Chambers Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1JF T: (0)300 123 6789 | nms.ac.uk Open: Daily 10am–5pm

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‘ What makes “Celts” so special, aside from the fact that it is the first exhibition of its kind to explore the full history of Celtic art and identity, is its willingness to be led by the artefacts on display’ Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 47

Pehchaan: Art from Another India PREVIEWS

David Pollock

1 Jarnail Singh, Peacock and Lotus Flower, 2013 2 Shri Ratual Chandra Gogoi, The Reflection, 2008 3 Jarnail Singh, 2013 4 Ramu and Subho Karmakar, Rani of Jhansi, 2013 Images courtesy of Glasgow Life

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Tramway 18 June–30 July Pehchaan means ‘identity’ in Hindi and Urdu, and it has been decided that the term best sums up the breadth of work being displayed as part of an introduction to a new range of pieces acquired by Glasgow Museums. Made possible as the result of a £100,000 grant from the Art Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s Renew Project in 2011, the purpose of which was to allow six museums to enhance their existing collections, over a hundred new items have been added to the Indian and South Asian collection.

Patricia Allan, Curator of World Cultures for Glasgow Museums, elaborates: ‘Most of what we already had was from the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition. It was an event designed to celebrate the power of the British Empire, so there were many lovely pieces that are somewhat anachronistic these days. We’ve all come a long way since then, so I wanted to showcase what’s being made right now in India; I didn’t want to collect more of the same. We’ve done a lot of work with communities, and it’s been so difficult 48 | ART

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to connect people with the work we had – it contains a lot of Hindi deities and almost everyone from the diaspora here is Muslim, for a start.’

Allan explains that this collection of work from India is the largest collection held by Glasgow Museums, and, even though more of the city’s population whose roots go back to the subcontinent hail from what is now Pakistan, there is a wide appetite in Glasgow to see work from across South Asia.

The newly acquired works focus on folk art and tribal art, with some contemporary pieces in there, too. They come from three distinct geographical areas in the north of India: Punjab, West Bengal and the remote Assam area, which has strong Scottish links in terms of the number of Scots who went to work on tea plantations there. It is an area with a degree of political unrest and climate issues, meaning that its people are more subject to displacement and strife than those in the rest of India. ‘They have a lot of very westernised 2D art,’ says Allan.

‘I didn’t want that, I wanted something

that felt very definitely like it wasn’t from here, so we went with sculpture. And it’s extraordinary, the artist we got had spent a year in Glasgow: his name is Ganesh Gohain – the giant foot sculpture in Bellahouston Park, that’s his.’

From West Bengal come lost waxcast Dhokra sculptures made by the tribal Damar people, while from Punjab, the fascinating area of truck art is explored, a form of street art that sees the back of delivery trucks customised by untrained artists in a detailed manner, akin to New York graffiti art of the 1980s. Three truck backs have been re-created, complete with tailgates, and shipped over.

‘It’s an experiential thing: we want people to have a taste of modern India,’ enthuses Allan, referring to the display medium of four shrine-like alcoves created by local artist Gabriella Marcella, as well as the films of India that will be playing in the background. ‘Just for a few minutes, we want people to feel as though they actually are walking through the streets of India.’

David Pollock is an arts writer based in Edinburgh Pehchaan: Art from Another India Tramway 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE T: 0845 330 3501 | tramway.org Open: Tuesday to Friday noon–5pm, Saturday to Sunday noon–6pm

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10 must-see shows at this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival Rosie Lesso

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Edinburgh Art Festival 28 July–28 August

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Ciara Phillips, ‘Dazzle Ship’, Port of Leith, from 29 May The first female artist to be commissioned to design a ‘Dazzle Ship’, Ciara Phillips is dressing the iconic vessel MV Fingal in the port of Leith with a unique abstract design. Her work plays a part in commemorating the centenary of World War I and celebrates the role women played in the war effort.

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‘I Still Believe in Miracles’, Inverleith House, 23 July–23 October Inverleith House will reveal work by 30 leading Scottish and international artists who have held solo exhibitions there over the last 30 years. With its title taken from a permanent installation by Douglas Gordon on site, the show will include work by Louise Bourgeois, John McCracken, Joan Mitchell and Robert Ryman. Five new sculptures will also be situated in the surrounding gardens.

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‘ARTIST ROOMS: Joseph Beuys Drawings’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 30 July–30 October Over 110 drawings from the ‘ARTIST ROOMS’ collection by post-war artist Joseph Beuys will be shown together for the first time at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The drawings trace the development of his career from 1945 to the end of his life, revealing his ongoing interests in nature, philosophy, mythology, politics and religion.

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Damián Ortega, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 9 July–23 October Mexican artist Damián Ortega will create a series of fragmented and dynamic clay sculptures throughout The Fruitmarket Gallery. His splintered installations will pull apart and rearrange a series of familiar and ordinarylooking objects from the ‘primitive’ to the ‘sophisticated’, drawing attention to the hidden poetry in the everyday.

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‘Facing the World: Self-Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei’, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 16 July–16 October This rich survey of self-portraiture will cover an impressive six centuries of art.

Over 140 works including drawings, prints, paintings, photographs, video and social media will be featured. Highlights include iconic paintings by Rembrandt and Courbet and contemporary works by Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei. Visitors can also make digital portraits of themselves in interactive installations.

‘William Gillies & John Maxwell’, City Art Centre, 30 July–23 October City Art Centre celebrates the careers of John Maxwell and William Gillies, two of Scotland’s most significant and distinctive artists. Gillies is known for his landscapes and still lifes, while Maxwell created dreamlike creatures, flowers and nudes.

The exhibition traces their interwoven lives and enduring friendship and highlights their important contribution to 20thcentury Scottish art.

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Jonathan Owen, Ingleby Gallery and Regent Road, 28 July–28 August Scottish artist Jonathan Owen will hold a solo exhibition of his delicate, monochrome ‘eraser’ drawings at Ingleby Gallery. He will also re-carve a 19th-century statue of a nymph to be installed in the interior of the Burns Monument on Regent Road, providing rare access to this iconic Edinburgh building.

‘Barbara Rae: Return Journey’, Open Eye Gallery, 1–31 August International painter and printmaker Barbara Rae is well known for her rugged and expressive landscapes. She presents a major new solo exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery, which includes a mix of retrospective and contemporary works, some of which have been inspired by her adventures in remote and wild locations.

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Animitas by Christian Boltanski, Jupiter Artland, 4 August–25 September French artist Christian Boltanski will create Animitas, his first permanent installation in the UK. Situated on the island within the duck pond at Jupiter Artland, hundreds of small Japanese bells will be attached to long stems planted in the ground and will chime in the wind, creating ‘music of the souls’.

1 Barbara Rae, Lammermuir Farm (Scotland), 1999. Image courtesy of Open Eye Gallery 2 William Gillies, Back Gardens, Temple, c.1967. City Art Centre, City of Edinburgh Council. © The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture 3 John Maxwell, The Trellis, 1951. The Fletcher Collection. Courtesy of the Maxwell Family

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Jo Spence, Stills Gallery, 29 July–16 October Stills Gallery celebrates work by influential and renowned British photographer Jo Spence in this solo exhibition. A group of Spence’s documentary images from the 1970s, illustrating educational workshops, will be seen alongside her ‘photo therapy’ self-portraits from the 1980s in which the artist explores sexuality, family and class.

Rosie Lesso is an artist and writer based in Scotland Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 51

Purvai – A Warm Wind from the East Tim Cornwell

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An Lanntair, Stornoway Exhibition scheduled for 2017 Plans are underway for a major exhibition celebrating the life and work of Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821), the Stornoway engineer who mapped India.

The legacy of a former customs officer from the Isle of Lewis, who became the first European to visit and document temples and historic sites across southern India, will be honoured in an exhibition at Stornoway’s arts centre, An Lanntair, next year.

Colonel Colin Mackenzie, known as ‘the man who mapped India’, was the country’s first Surveyor General. He went far beyond his official work of charting geographical boundaries to build a vast collection of sculptures, manuscripts and drawings from the early years of British rule. He was not a scholar or writer, however, and never properly catalogued or chronicled his own work.

Nearly 200 years after his death in Calcutta in 1821, An Lanntair aims to give him the recognition he deserves, celebrating historic ties between Scotland and India in the process. The exhibition is slated for the refurbished Lews Castle 52 | ART

Museum in 2017, and negotiations are underway for loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which holds about 20 bronze and stone sculptures collected

by Mackenzie, and such other institutions as the British Library, which has about 1700 of his drawings and paintings.

Catherine Maclean, special projects director at the An Lanntair arts centre, spent six weeks earlier this year researching Mackenzie’s work in India.

She struggled to get access to some 50,000 palm-leaf manuscripts held at the Oriental Manuscripts Library at Madras University, which he also helped gather together. The Heritage Lottery Fund has supported An Lanntair’s ‘Purvai’ project – meaning warm wind from the East – for joint Indian and Hebridean art projects, including a planned children’s book inspired by Mackenzie.

Colin Mackenzie was born in Stornoway in 1754, the son of the town’s first postmaster. He was a customs officer on the Isle of Lewis before joining the East India Company as an army engineer, arriving in India in 1784 and remaining there until his death. In 1799, after the

famous defeat of Tipu Sultan, Maharaja of Mysore, Mackenzie was named to lead a survey of Mysore, then part of the East India Company’s expanding Indian possessions. At sites like Amaravati, famous for its marble sculptures, he began drawing, and later commissioning drawings from an expanding Indian team, of everything from monuments to botanical specimens, as well as mapmaking and collecting such artefacts as manuscripts, coins and sculpture. He trained Indian assistants and was keen for them to carry on his work. ‘It would be my ambition to carry home with me a body of material that I conceive may be very interesting to the public if properly brought forward,’ he wrote in 1809.

After his death, the East India Company paid 100,000 rupees for his collection, a vast sum at the time, and it ended up in museums in the UK and India. Anna Jackson, keeper of the Asian department at the V&A, calls him ‘one of the first Europeans to take a serious and scholarly interest in India’s culture and history’.

Scholar Jennifer Howes, author of Illustrating India: The Early Colonial Investigations of Colin Mackenzie, was one of several academics invited to a conference on his work in Stornoway.

She says: ‘He collected vast amounts of information that he organised more or less. I don’t think he ever intended to collate everything he gathered into a grand book, he expected other people to do that for him and it didn’t quite happen. It’s happening now. There’s something very non-judgmental about what he did, from a very objective standpoint. In around 1800, you find people saying rather critical things about Indian culture and Mackenzie never did that, he just recorded it as it was and relied very heavily on Indians to help him gather his information.’

Tim Cornwell is an arts journalist based in Edinburgh and Istanbul

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1 Shelves of the Oriental Manuscripts Library Chennai, image courtesy of An Lanntair 2 Decorated Palm Leaf Manuscripts, image courtesy of An Lanntair 3 Thomas Hickey, Colin Mackenzie, 1816. Image courtesy of An Lanntair

Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 53

SCOTTISH ART NEWS DIARY Perrine Davari

Glasgow

Edinburgh

William Hunter to Damien Hirst: The Dead Teach the Living Hunterian Art Gallery Until Sun 5 March 2017 W: gla.ac.uk/hunterian/ At the new exhibition at the Hunterian, Damien Hirst’s Necromancer (2007) is premiered alongside art and objects that explore the historical and contemporary connection between art and science.

The Scottish Endarkenment: Art and Unreason 1945 to the Present Dovecot Gallery Until Mon 29 August W: dovecotstudios.com The psyche of Scottish artists is exposed in this multilayered exhibition at the Dovecot. Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, the concerns of prominent Scottish artists, including Joan Eardley and Eduardo Paolozzi, are bared for all to see.

Pehchaan: Art from Another India Tramway Sat 18 June–Sat 30 July W: tramway.org The English translation of Pehchaan from Hindi and Urdu is ‘identity’, and this theme is explored in the new collection of North Indian art on display alongside material from Glasgow Museums’ original collection.

William Gillies & John Maxwell City Art Centre Sat 30 July–Sun 23 October W: edinburghmuseums.org.uk/ Venues/City-Art-Centre/ Gillies and Maxwell met during their education at Edinburgh College of Art, and the friendship that they cemented during their youth lasted throughout their careers and is chronicled in this exhibition.

The India Street Bazaar Tramway Fri 10 June–Sun 24 July W: tramway.org An Indian-Scottish fusion awaits you at The India Street Bazaar at Tramway this summer.

Seven designers from India and Scotland have responded aesthetically to the Turkey Red archives in relation to the Scottish textile industry to create their own unique products.

Celts National Museum of Scotland Until Sun 25 September W: nms.ac.uk Organised in partnership with the British Museum, this major exhibition explores more than 2500 years of Celtic history through the extraordinary art objects that the Celts made and used.

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Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Mon 4 June–Sun 11 September W: nationalgalleries.org From the legendary private collections of Edward James, Roland Penrose, Gabrielle Keiller and Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, ‘Surreal Encounters’ brings together rarely seen pieces to showcase Surrealist art.

Pat Douthwaite The Scottish Gallery Wed 1–Sat 25 June W: scottish-gallery.co.uk Pat Douthwaite is the subject of a major retrospective at The Scottish Gallery this summer, to accompany Guy Peploe’s new book on the artist, whose work evokes the torment of humanity and particularly that of female nature.

Étranges convergences Institut Français Écosse Fri 10 June–Sat 23 July W: ifecosse.org.uk French and Scottish photography come together in the poetic work of Douglas McBride and Cégolène Frisque at the French Institute of Scotland. They each explore the marks of time on forms and textures, yet using two different ways of working.

Elsewhere in Scotland

Barbara Rae: Return Journey Open Eye Gallery Mon 1–Wed 31 August W: openeyegallery.co.uk Barbara Rae’s forthcoming exhibition for Edinburgh Art Festival documents the artist’s evolving relationship with painting and printmaking, showing that more than one artwork can be made from just one idea and the artist’s own determination.

Cupar Arts Festival Various Venues, Fife Sat 18–Sat 25 June W: cupararts.org.uk This biannual festival of visual art uses all the nooks and crannies of Fife to present a body of work from international and local artists, exploring the process of transition and coinciding with the summer solstice.

Perpetual Discovery Tatha Gallery, Fife Until Sat 18 June W: tathagallery.com ‘Perpetual Discovery’ brings the work of Janet Melrose, Jenny Matthews, Cathy Campbell, Jennifer Watt and Frances Walker under one roof, each exploring the personal human experience of time passing and its cyclical nature.

Purvai: Fòcas India and Lensational Photography Exhibition An Lanntair, Stornoway Mon 22 August–Sat 1 October W: lanntair.com Supported by Lensational, a non-profit social enterprise that aims to empower marginalised women in developing countries through equipping them with cameras and photography training, eight adolescent girls in Chennai, India, venture outside by themselves for the first time, equipped with a camera to document their journey.

Am Beairt/The Loom: Sharmanka An Lanntair, Stornoway Sat 1 October–Sun 13 November W: lanntair.com This exhibition explores the resurgence in popularity of Harris Tweed in recent years.

Am Beairt has commissioned Russian company Sharmanka to reinvent a genuine Harris Tweed Hattersley loom, reconstructing it as a new machine to tell the story of the industry.

Ian Hamilton Finlay Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Sat 20 August–Sat 24 September W: dumgal.gov.uk Selected from the Wild Hawthorn Press Archive of Jessie Sheeler, a personal collection of prints, postcards, tiles and paper sculpture works by Ian Hamilton Finlay is revealed. This special exhibition also features some of Gracefield’s art collection.

Reflections on Celts Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness Tue 24 May–Sat 27 August W: highlifehighland.com/ inverness-museum-and-artgallery In conjunction with the major show ‘Celts’ at the National Museum of Scotland, a display of two Iron Age mirrors tours regional museums across the UK. These mirrors, dated to around 100BC, were polished until reflective on one side, while swirling Celtic art adorns the other side.

Hamish Young Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness Sat 21 May–Sat 18 June W: .highlifehighland.com/ inverness-museum-and-artgallery A recent graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, Hamish Young presents his work in collaboration with Timespan in Helmsdale, as part of its Graduate Residency programme.

Working in multiple mediums, Young creates environments that reimagine how objects move in and out of the human sphere.

Scotland Abroad Barbara Rae CBE RA 2016 Portland Gallery, London Thu 2–Fri 17 June W: portlandgallery.com The acclaimed Royal Academician and Royal Scottish Academician Barbara Rae heads down south to London this summer. Her extensive travelling inspires her works of intense colour bursts, subtly evoking dramatic landscapes in their abstraction.

Fiona Strickland: The Vital Moment Jonathan Cooper, London Thu 20 October–Sat 12 November W: jonathancooper.co.uk Jonathan Cooper presents leading botanical artist Fiona Strickland’s first solo show this autumn. Botanical art as it has never before been seen, Strickland’s work displays flowers in the stages that the human eye misses, moving beyond scientific representation to capture the spirit of nature.

Scottish Artists 1750–1900: From Caledonia to the Continent The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London Until Sun 9 October W: royalcollection.org.uk/ exhibitions The first exhibition from the Royal Collection solely dedicated to Scottish Art comes to London’s Buckingham Palace.

It highlights the sphere of influence of artists whose work was shaped by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Discover Scotland’s New Talent Art, Design & Architecture Degree Shows 2016 Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee Sat 21–Sun May 29 Degree Show 2016 Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh Sat 28 May–Sun 5 June Degree Show 2016 The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow Sat 18–Sat 25 June Degree Show 2016 Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen Sat 18–Sat 25 June

A Window on Glasgow Consul’ Art 2016, Marseille, France Fri 10 June–Sat 23 July W: maisondelartisanat.org Celebrating ten years of partnership between Marseille and Glasgow, Consul’ Art this year welcomes ‘A Window on Glasgow’, a photography exhibition showcasing aspects of the city in 26 photographs, from the 1970s to the resurgence of Glasgow as a city of modern culture.

Scottish Art News | THE DIARY | 55

1 1 William Johnstone (1897–1981), Entombment (1972).

Oil on canvas lent by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation to the Scottish Endarkenment exhibition The Scottish Endarkenment: Art and Unreason, 1945 to the Present Until 29 August Dovecot Gallery 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT T: (0)131 550 3660 | dovecotstudios.com Open: Monday to Saturday 10.30am–5.30pm

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DUMFRIES HOUSE A Scottish Treasure

Gerald M. Burns – Tightrope – 48" x 48"

Sir Robin Philipson – Actor – 30'' x 30''

Chippendale Best Bed (c.1759), © Dumfries House

HOUSE TOURS | GRAND TOURS | ART TOURS John Boyd – Reclining Figure and Boat – 40'' x 48''

James Kay – The Coast of Normandy – 20'' x 24''

Annual Exhibition Aldeburgh June 11th – August 7 th 2016 – Illustrated Catalogue available on request –

Take a tour of Ayrshire’s Dumfries House, designed by Robert and John Adam, and discover one of the most complete collections of furniture from Thomas Chippendale’s early Director period and the finest collection of Scottish rococo furniture in existence.

Dumfries House, which is run by the Great Steward of Scotland’s Dumfries House Trust, is also proud to display a group of paintings by Scottish masters on loan from the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

Thompson's Galleries deal in both Contemporary and Modern British Art The London Gallery has an Annual Scottish Show 175 High Street 15 New Cavendish Street www.thompsonsgallery.com Aldeburgh London Suffolk, IP15 5AN W1G 9UB Tel: 01728 453 743 Tel: +44 (0) 207 935 3595 email: john@thompsonsgallery.co.uk email: enquiries@thompsonsgallery.co.uk

Dumfries House, Cumnock, Ayrshire KA18 2NJ www.dumfries-house.org.uk Tel. 01290 425 959