14 minute read
Eardley 100
Joanna Meacock, curator of British Art at Glasgow Museums, gave an inspiring presentation about plans to present a digital ‘festival’ around the 24 Eardley artworks in its collection. The Hunterian’s planned exhibition for summer 2021, we discovered, would be focusing on 20 or so works, including the stand-out ‘Salmon Nets and Sea’ (1960) and ‘Sweetshop, Rottenrow’ (1957–61), gifted by the poet Edwin Morgan after his death in 2010. In the summer of 2020, the official Joan Eardley website, created by artist and curator, Lynne Mackenzie, went live. The biography and timeline which I had written was swiftly joined by news of events and exhibitions from Aberdeen to Dumfries from SWARN members, all under the banner of #Eardley100. To date, we have witnessed several online seminars celebrating Eardley’s life and legacy, which can be viewed on the website.
A highlight was a celebration on 18 May, Eardley’s birthday, organised by the Hunterian. Over 500 people joined the webinar from across the world for what proved to be a sparkling event chaired with elan by BBC Scotland’s arts correspondent, Pauline McLean.
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Leila Riszko, a curatorial assistant with the National Galleries of Scotland, who has worked on its latest Joan Eardley display, Eardley and Catterline, talked to art historian Matilda Hall about the gargantuan task of cataloguing 650 drawings in the early 1980s on behalf of the family. Matilda, who went on to marry Douglas Hall, first Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – and a true champion of Eardley – told the audience about taking the drawings out from a box under Joan’s sister Pat’s sofa and working her way through them. ‘Every piece of paper became a jewel in my hand,’ Matilda said. Most of the drawings were distributed to galleries. Over 200 went to the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection while other institutions such as the GSA, the family’s local gallery, the Lillie in Milngavie, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Glasgow Museums and the Hunterian all received gifts.
Matilda revealed she even wrote to the National Art Gallery of New Zealand to offer them a drawing as it had a Catterline seascape in its collection, but they said ‘no’. A handful of drawings were kept back by the family and marked for sale. Over the years, trusted dealers, such as the late Cyril Gerber from Glasgow’s Compass Gallery and the Scottish Gallery, would come and have a look and take some away for sale.
Some of these works, such as ‘Mrs Red Wallpaper’, which Joan made in either Italy or Arran, remain in private collections. Take a look at the event, which is on the Eardley website – maybe someone out there reading this has one of these drawings. The genius of Joan Eardley touches people at their core. Monitoring the Joan Eardley social media, I can see that interest in her work is at an all-time high and I couldn’t be more delighted. Here’s to Joan Eardley at 100, 150 and 200. She is now, as Edwin Morgan put it so perfectly in his poem inspired by her ‘Flood Tide’ painting, ‘beyond the sun’.
Jan Patience is an arts journalist and co-organiser of the Joan Eardley centenary
For more information on events marking the centenary of Eardley’s birth, check out joaneardley.com and swarnetwork.
wixsite.com/swarn
1 Joan Eardley, Flood Tide, 1962. Photograph courtesy of the Lillie Art Gallery © Joan Eardley Estate
2 Joan Eardley, Sweet Shop, Rottenrow, 1960 - 1961 © Joan Eardley Estate
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Joan Eardley, Two Children, 1963. Glasgow Museums © Joan Eardley Estate
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Greg Thomas Margot Sandeman’s biography is entwined with those of two of Scotland’s most famous late 20thcentury artists: Joan Eardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay. But she often appears as a buoying or grounding presence, not always recognised for her own precocious artistic talent
Unveiled in April 2021, the Arran Arts Heritage Trail includes 20 waymarkers scattered across the island. The seventh stone, in the small village of Corrie, bears two names – ‘Eardley : Sandeman’ – which tell the story of a deep and loving friendship. Margot Sandeman was born in 1922 to a family of artistic and cultural distinction. Her mother Muriel Boyd was a renowned needlework artist while her father Archibald Sandeman was a chemist and self-taught watercolourist. Margot grew up in a house in the Arts and Crafts style in the leafy Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, while Arran was a regular holiday destination. At the end of the 1930s, the aspiring painter followed in her mother’s footsteps to Glasgow School of Art, where in 1940 she crossed paths with a new student, another resident of Bearsden, later remembered by her friends as prone to depression yet deeply compassionate. In a 2007 interview, Sandeman recalled that she and Joan Eardley ‘were very shy of each other for about a year’, but eventually became ‘tremendously great friends’. A few years later, Sandeman would meet a similarly brooding classmate, Ian Hamilton Finlay, recalled by literary critic Derek Stanford, who met him in 1946, as ‘fair-haired’, ‘faunlike’, and ‘a little pitiful’. He had a steely edge though, and was expelled from GSA for organising a student strike, returning for a period to work as a janitor. Sandeman’s artistic fortunes would become closely interwoven with those of her two more tempestuous peers. The first step on this road was an invitation extended by her parents for Eardley to join the Sandemans on their annual trip to Arran, where Joan and Margot’s friendship deepened. The two made many more pilgrimages to the island across the remainder of the 1940s and the 1950s, sometimes renting a tiny bothy known as the Tabernacle in Corrie village (below the spot on High Corrie where Muriel’s friends Jessie M King and EA Taylor had run a summer school during the 1920s and 30s).
In Heroica Theatre’s 2017 production Joan Eardley: A Private View, Sandeman is presented as the sunny backdrop to Joan’s self-doubt and angst. It is easy to read such distinctions into the styles the two were developing at this time. According to GSA exhibitions director Jenny Brownrigg, while Eardley’s 'Woman in High Backed Wicker Chair' (1949), a portrait study made in the Tabernacle, depicts the figurative detail of the bothy interior, Sandeman’s works on the same subject make bolder play with colour and backdrop. Eardley’s paintings would come to be celebrated for their extraordinarily raw emotional energy and social conscience, seen as great works of modern art. Sandeman’s, with their bright cloisonniste colour-blocks and clarity of outline, their easier affinity with a representative approach, are often described as poetic, lyrical. It is tempting to see them as the products of a more contented soul. In any case, it is clear that Sandeman was a source of emotional succour and creative inspiration to Eardley. In that 2007 interview, Margot even recalled that it was a drawing of hers from the 1940s, of two children playing marbles on the pavement, that ‘set off Joan on that theme’ – Eardley’s tender portraits of Glasgow street children are now among her best-loved works. But their friendship, ‘the most important of Eardley’s life’ according to curator Fiona Pearson, was cut short by Eardley’s early death from breast cancer in 1963. Sandeman was, at this time, on the cusp of the second great artistic partnership of her life. By the following year, Ian Hamilton Finlay had invited her to lay out and illustrate the 15th issue of his poetry magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. Finlay seems to have valued Sandeman particularly as a sketcher; her fluid, dextrous pencil illustrations for the issue, published in 1965, are exemplified by her front cover, a jazzy cross-hatched seascape featuring the casJust as Sandeman is seen as having provided emotional ballast to Eardley, her creativity is often encountered as auxiliary to Finlay’s mercurial vision. As several recent solo shows have indicated, however, Sandeman was herself an artist of singular gifts, whose landscapes combine a Matisselike effervescence and colour palette with something of the visionary quality of Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham period (yet tied to a very different natural scene). The benign magic of her paintings continued to be conjured frequently on Arran – where she acquired a family home – and her estate remains a source of riches and intrigue, as new sketches and paintings are released by her children. At some point in the near future, Sandeman’s legacy might be rewarded with a show on a scale to match those offered to her friends, drawing her out from the shadow of Joan Eardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
cading words ‘boats / shores / tides / fish’. Across the following page, her collages of marine scenes offset poems by George Mackay Brown, Edwin Morgan and others. Sandeman’s illustrations would become a vital component of several of Finlay’s most ambitious publishing projects across the next few years, including the concertina booklets Fishing News, News and Rhymes for Lemons (both 1970), the folding card Arcadian Sundials (1970), and the postcard poem 3 Names of Barges (1969). Finlay’s long-time critic and friend Stephen Bann suggests that ‘around this important period, Sandeman was among the very few artists who must have spurred Ian on to new ways of envisaging the medium of the card’. Later, artist and poet worked together on a full booklet of poems and artworks, Peterhead Fragments (1979), and on the collaborative exhibition Sheaf (1986).
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Greg Thomas is a critic and editor based in Glasgow
Margot Sandeman SSA (1922-2009): Poetry & Harmony, Works on Paper and Oils
5 August–1 September Cyril Gerber Fine Art 178 West Regent Street, Glasgow, G2 4RL T: (0)141 221 3095 | gerberfineart.co.uk Open: Wednesday to Friday 10am–4pm (Saturday by appointment)
1 Margot Sandeman, Two Figures in a Landscape, 1956. Courtesy of Cyril Gerber Fine Art © The Sandeman Estate
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Two Painters in a Landscape (Margot & Joan), 1960. Courtesy of Cyril Gerber Fine Art ©The Sandeman Estate
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Margot Sandeman and Joan Eardley Marker, part of The Arran Arts Heritage Trail. Courtesy of The Arran Arts Heritage Trail
EARDLEY AT THE GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART
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As part of the Eardley 100 celebrations, a new exhibition will shine a light on the artist’s early work from her time as a student at The Glasgow School of Art
In autumn 2021, 100 years after Joan Eardley’s birth and 81 years since she first enrolled as a student in January 1940, Glasgow School of Art – a place so central to the artist’s artistic development, identity and reputation – will once again honour one of its most famous graduates as part of the Eardley 100 centenary celebrations. Curated by a team of academics, curators and archivists at the school, Early Eardley: Joan Eardley in the 1940s will focus on Eardley’s little-known early works, including a number of drawings and ephemera not previously exhibited.
The works planned for the exhibition are drawn from the school’s archives and special collections and are primarily drawings made while Eardley was a student in the 1940s. The exhibition will be far from the first time the artist’s alma mater has displayed her drawings and paintings – Eardley’s first solo exhibition was held in the GSA’s famous Mackintosh Building on her return from Italy and France in 1949. That exhibition, featuring drawings made while undertaking a Royal Scottish Academy and Glasgow School of Art Travelling Scholarship between 1948 and 1949, helped to cement the artist’s reputation as a young graduate to watch. In a review in The Glasgow Herald, a critic observed that her work was ‘notable among the immediate post-graduate generation . . . for the strength and selective quality in her drawings.’ Some of these drawings – of peasants, landscape, architecture – will be shown again in this year’s exhibition, along with the scholarship report she was required to submit to the GSA’s director, artist Douglas Percy Bliss. Since her death in 1963, Eardley’s work has been included in a number of exhibitions at GSA, including the 1995 show The Continuing Tradition: 75 Years of Painting at GSA and the 2001 exhibition Art Booms with the Guns, which focused on the ‘war years’ generation of staff and students and included a number of very early drawings by the artist, such as the 1938 pencil and watercolour ‘Fair at Blackheath’, one of her earliest known works. Works by Eardley’s close-knit circle of friends and peers were also exhibited including paintings by Margot Sandeman, Cordelia Oliver and Bet Low. In 2012, three works were loaned to Glasgow School of Art for inclusion in another historical survey show, Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow since World War II, which sought to highlight the work of mid-late 20th century women alumni. The new GSA exhibition will not focus on Eardley’s most famous works, perhaps too often limited to the ‘street kids and seascapes’ dichotomy in terms of dominant narratives of the artist’s development. In contrast it will introduce audiences to the artist as a young woman, still learning, experimenting and developing as a painter. The drawings demonstrate Eardley’s emerging talent and the range and breadth of her interests. The works will reveal a far wider range of themes, places and subjects than those commonly associated with the artist’s oeuvre and will highlight the role of education and training in her artistic development. In her firm commitment to the practice of drawing, for example, the influence of her much-admired tutor, Hugh Adam Crawford, can be seen. Other influences, such as her friendship with the Polish émigré Josef Hermann, can be seen in the artist’s growing interest in urban realism. The Glasgow School of Art easel that Eardley, as a student, took to Hermann’s studio (returned 50 years later by his widow) will also be on show. The Eardley works in Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections give a particular insight into her approach to drawing and sketching. Materials used include pen, ink, chalks, watercolour and blue biro. The latter was often used for quicker sketches which appear to work out composition, light and shade. Categories of work in the archive include life drawings made while she was a student, some early scenes from Glasgow’s famous Barras Market, studies from the Glasgow School of Art, Royal Scottish Academy and Carnegie Travelling Scholarship in Italy and France (1948–49), and a small group of sketches from Lincolnshire, made during a period spent in the county to undertake a mural commission at a school in 1946. There is strong evidence of Eardley’s interest in the rural as well as the city in these early works – perhaps unsurprising, given that she was born at Bayling Hill Farm in Warnham, Sussex. A small series of drawings of farm wagons are in the collection, ranging from Lincolnshire to Italy. Whether at rest or on the move, in works such as ‘Mule with Cart’ (1948–49), Eardley shows an interest in and ability to capture aspects of rural labour and its mechanics. ‘Italian Farmhouse’ (1948–49) is beautifully constructed, with a plough in the foreground, leading the eye through trees to the white farmhouse, its front door ajar, a detail set at the golden ratio point in the composition. Eardley subtly works up swathes of colour from the brown paper ground, to add black line details of roof tiles, vine leaves and the patterns of the distant groups of trees on the surrounding hillside. The Glasgow School of Art collection also shows a number of studies of interiors and exteriors of Italian churches made during her travelling scholarship. There are two drawings of the same study, ‘Church interior, Basilica di San Marco, Venice’ (1948–49), showing three figures at worship. The early, quicker sketch, begins to plot the differences between the angles of the heads of the three figures. The front worshipper, with his head raised, appears to be in communion with above, the man in the middle seat stares at his hands and the figure at the back stares stoically ahead. This is further developed in the second work, a chalk and pastel study on brown paper (gsaarchives. net/collections/index.php/nmc-0080). Eardley works up the church interior surrounding the figures, choosing to link them to their surroundings by three bold columns that echo their number. A number of the sketches are working drawings. As part of the schema of ‘An Italian Hilltown’ (1948–49), Eardley writes colour notes on this black chalk sketch as an aide-memoire. A far spire is ‘pink’, shutters are ‘dark green’ against a ‘brown’ building. Drawings are often immediate and look to be on paper that was to hand, such as ‘Bridge in Venice’ (1948–49), drawn on lined paper suggestive of a letter pad. Of her Glasgow works in the collection, there are two studies of the Barras stalls entitled ‘Covered Market’, both dated c.1945–49. The first is black ink on paper showing distinctive bold lines and markmaking that are recognisably Eardley’s dynamic style, capturing a line of stalls with few customers at the start or end of a market
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