Sir Robin Philipson (1916-1992) 7 - 30 May 2012
The Scottish Gallery 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
Front cover: Cockfight oil and vinyl toluene on canvas 122 x 122 cms Left: Abstract Pink and Blue watercolour 73.5 x 50.5 cms
Self Portrait in a Straw Hat 1983 oil on canvas 92 x 61 cms
Foreword Twenty years have passed since the death of Robin Philipson and he remains one of Scotland’s most enigmatic artists, his reputation secure but his place in post-War Scottish art somehow unfixed. He was of enormous importance to The Scottish Gallery where we held nine exhibitions in his lifetime and was the most high-profile Scottish artist of his generation earning countless honours including a knighthood in 1976. He was a man of enormous energy and capacity, devoted to his senior role at Edinburgh College of Art and stewardship of The Royal Scottish Academy, where his Presidency can be seen as a golden age. As a painter his energy was matched by his ambition; his desire to engage with great human themes: sex, war, redemption and sacrifice often corralled into an existential narrative on a truly monumental scale. His artistic personality was formed at The College where there were many examples of painters’ love of the plastic possibility of their medium and of strong colour, although after War Service when he returned to Edinburgh it was the work of Oscar Kokoschka which held him in direct thrall. At this point he might have gone in the same direction as his friend and contemporary Alan Davie, towards the abstract which became the dominant characteristic of International painting in the fifties. Instead his journey is more akin to that of Joan Eardley: all three painters owe something to Nicolas de Stael and the School of Paris but Philipson, like Eardley, cannot abandon his motif and his work retains its thematic badge over the next forty years. Tom Elder Dickson wrote a piece for the Scottish Art Review in 1961 which shows great insight into the forty-four year old painter by then ‘…original without being pretentious, forceful without being crass, advanced without being outré… At his best he is a supreme painter possessed by a mood of peculiar sensitiveness. I can think of no artist today whose understanding and feeling for the qualities of paint are so perfectly matched to his lyrical purpose; he takes the paint into his very imagination and makes it speak with (an) eloquence and fervour.’ By then some of the themes: the cockfight and rose windows were well developed and for his Edinburgh Festival Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery four years later themes of Golgotha, execution and The Great War had been added. Douglas Hall writing the introduction sums up. ’Philipson is far from the detachment of the matière painter. He seems compelled to live in as well as with his paintings and it is this which distinguishes him from some Scottish contemporaries who stand well back, figuratively speaking, from their creations and whose object seems sometimes to minimise the effort and pain of giving them birth. In rejecting this analgesic attitude, Philipson is being true to the expressionist tradition to which many Scottish painters should naturally belong, but to which he almost alone has given his allegiance.’
Like a good modernist Philipson was never tempted to provide his own analysis of the iconography of his painting; he preferred it to remain enigmatic or to allow the viewer to respond without didacticism. At the same time he is fearless in encountering the dark side in the human psyche and its endless manifestations of violence and cruelty, as well as beauty without taking a moral stance; he depends, as Hall wrote ‘… on a precarious balance between imagery that is readable to the spectator and the private forms that provide the painters’ own guidelines to success in any work.’ In 1960 his first wife Brenda Mark died of a brain tumour. This was a traumatic loss, but not the first. Philipson had been on the edge of a breakdown at the end of the War, isolated from his family in Burma, frequently ill and his younger brother having died in 1943; pain and loss were powerful creative drivers. He launched himself into work; in 1960 he had the first of nine one-person exhibitions with Roland Browse and Delbanco in London, the next year became Head of Painting at The College and within another year was elected a RSA and had remarried, to the painter Thora Clyne.
Painting for a Venetian Frame II oil on board 8 x 6 cms Opposite: Sir Robin Philipson
Together they worked in Boulder, Colorado for ten weeks in the summer of 1963 and the paintings inspired by the primitive churches he saw in the border county renewed a favourite theme. By the end of the decade he tackled the Crucifixion again, inspired by a visit to Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece but was also in the midst of new subjects he titled Humankind and Threnody. In 1972, on his way to Greece, on a sabbatical from The College, he became ill and was operated on for cancer in Boulogne. Though he was to live for another twenty years he was in remission rather than free from illness. New themes appear such as Women Observed and animalist subjects inspired by the zebras, baboons and lions he saw on a trip to South Africa in 1975. In the eighties he divested himself of official duties and his family arrived: he married Diana Pollock in 1976 and they adopted two children before the arrival of their son Anthony in 1987. Themes of the sea, still life, studio interior and sumptuous poppy pictures dominate this last phase and are painted with the same energy and technical mastery as the work of the seventies but violence has often been replaced with a sense of celebration. In 1989 he worked with Colin Thomson, previously Director at the National Galleries of Scotland on a huge retrospective which was mounted in the summer at the College of Art. Then in 1999 Philip Long curated a Philipson show for the Gallery of Modern Art, the final of six reviews of the principal figures of the Edinburgh School. These exhibitions and the two we have mounted since demonstrate clearly that Philipson is an artist of international stature.
Mesdemoiselles I 1965 oil on hardboard 19 x 19 cms
Mesdemoiselles II 1965 oil on hardboard 19 x 19 cms
Sleeping oil on leather 16.5 x 16.5 cms
Morning oil on canvas board 16 x 14.5 cms
“The Cockfight theme has been with him for more than twenty years. In 1960, which was the beginning of a period of great personal stress for him, the theme was taken up (with other then subsidiary themes) with an almost unabated fury. Keyed in reds, oranges, greens, violets, purples, cock fights, crow, tear, tremble, skirmish in terrible yet splendid mortal turmoil. A second outburst of paintings on this subject occurred in 1967. “Robin Philipson, a compassionate man, has found in the cruel beauty of the cockfight an almost perfect vehicle for the expression and the releasing of a deep tension.” William Buchanan, 1970
Cockfight oil and vinyl toluene on canvas 122 x 122 cms
Above: Men Observed watercolour 22 x 38 cms Left: Women Talking pastel 27 x 22 cms
“They appear to be women who are far from being in a state of grace; they are more likely fallen women, or perhaps they are the three aspects of Eve who contain the seeds of damnation, not only herself but of the whole human race. “We have a forceful analogy with Degas in his brothel or bathroom scenes with his expressed desire to look at women ‘as if through the keyhole’, catching them unawares.” Mary Rose Beaumont, 1983
Women Observed oil on canvas 66 x 66 cms
Nude in the Mirror gouache 24 x 24 cms
Women Observed V oil on canvas 64 x 64 cms
Nevermind II oil on canvas 91.5 x 123 cms
“From time to time I find that I am compelled to concentrate upon a series of images that centre around man’s predicament and place in the world – the war pictures; the cathedral interiors; the women who are observed and more recently women who are companions and simply enjoying this state.” Robin Philipson, 1985
Gethsemane oil on vinyl 215 x 425 cms
“What excited me the most about them was their space, something you can’t really convey in representational painting… That vast space is so beautifully lit, roundels, lancets and slits and sudden shafts of daylight, and seemingly endless shadows. I had this great desire to recreate all the visual aspects of these interiors simultaneously, blending the inspired and intricate rhythms of all these shapes and the richly saturated colour.” Robin Philipson
Byzantine Interior oil on canvas 71 x 71 cms
Blue Window oil on board 25 x 45 cms
“Philipson’s circle windows are often painted floating in space, complete and tranquil. Add to this the ideas of sanctuary and peace which are associated with cathedrals, and the beginnings of a case emerge to suggest that the Rose Window may be, partly at least, an image of serenity. The circle windows are open to many interpretations. Their brilliant gem colours and myriad lines suggest, especially when the circle void is read as a solid, that they might be strange and distant planets.� William Buchanan, 1970
Rainbow and Rose Window oil on canvas 41 x 41 cms
Rose Window and Crucifixion oil on canvas 55 x 55 cms
Palette watercolour and ink 90 x 90 cms
“He is a magician of the brush; in his hands oil paint is a thing of delight, colour appeals directly to the senses, and before his work is an almost tangible sense of physical well being.� Terence Mullaly, quoted in Philipson by W Gordon Smith, Atelier Books, 1995
Above: King and Queen oil on board 27 x 17 cms Top left clockwise: Christmas Card X colour print 26.5 x 22 cms Christmas Card IX colour print 27 x 21.5 cms Christmas Card V colour print 26.5 x 17.5 cms Christmas Card VII colour print 27 x 22 cms
Basket of Pears III 1986 oil on board with Japanese paper 61 x 51 cms
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with their exhibition Robin Philipson 7 – 30 May 2012 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/robinphilipson ISBN 978-1-905146-65-9 Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk Web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk