ALEXANDER GOUDIE An Artist’s Life act i
ALEXANDER GOUDIE (1933–2004) An Artist’s Life act i 1–24 July 2021 foreword
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introduction
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portrait of the artist as a young man
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BY GUY PEPLOE
BY JAMES KNOX
BY ROGER BILLCLIFFE
en famille
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goudie’s glasgow
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la mer et la terre
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BY LACHLAN GOUDIE BY PROFESSOR JOHN MORRISON BY LACHLAN GOUDIE
biography
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* picture for sale but will not appear in exhibition hang
Foreword We are delighted to present An Artist’s Life, act i, an exhibition and publication covering Alexander Goudie’s early beginnings and development: Glasgow, family and his love affair with Brittany. A further exhibition, act ii, will be unveiled in 2024 which looks at the later career of the artist and bigger theatrical projects. We thank Lachlan Goudie for writing new text and providing archive material to bring this project to life and also his sister Gwen for her personal contributions. We have further insights from James Knox, Director of The Fleming Collection, Roger Billcliffe and Professor John Morrison. I have strong memories of visiting the home and studio of Sandy Goudie in Arnewood House, Glasgow surrounded by the extraordinary profusion of his creativity, lines, couplets, stanzas and epic poems of imagery making up a grand, operatic production. At his beautiful Victorian home and studio in Glasgow there was a great atrium which held a large, suspended white bird cage with doves; all around were vitrines of modelled clay, paintings, frames, monumental props arrayed around and above on the gallery level more canvasses; stretched, primed, started, paused. No project was too grand: a commission for all the artwork and designs for the interiors of a giant ship from Brittany Ferries; Strauss’s Salome or Burns’ Tam o’Shanter. The artist thought big but honed his aesthetic to the last flourish, for a highlight on a ceramic jug or vital pentimento in a life drawing; attention to detail was obsessive and his art was an extension of his personality. From the declaration explicit in his early portraits that says: ‘I have arrived,’ to the touching depiction of the children, to his love letter in paint to his Bretonne wife Maïnée, to accomplished easel paintings and designs and sketches fizzing with creative energy, the personality of the painter is not hard to find and forms a vital, recently overlooked contribution to post-war Scottish art. guy peploe the scottish gallery
Alexander Goudie, c.1955
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Introduction I first met Sandy Goudie in February 1975 when my father was having his portrait painted by him. At the time, my life was becalmed after nine months of fruitless job hunting, which my art history degree from Cambridge did little to facilitate. To make myself look useful, I volunteered to chauffeur my father to his sittings in Sandy’s High Victorian palazzo-cumstudio in Glasgow’s West End. The portrait had been commissioned by employees of W&K Knox Ltd, the family textile mill in north Ayrshire founded in the 18th century, which thanks to my father had been saved from closure by a predatory asset stripper and still survives today (although not in family hands). My father, who had been an irrepressible dandy at Cambridge in the 1930s, chose to be painted in his glorious scarlet hunting coat with blue collar, shining Eglinton Hunt brass buttons, yellow waistcoat, fine knitted gloves, white breeches and with a horn-handled leather hunting crop in hand. No wonder when my parents asked the legendary Glasgow dealer, Ian MacNicol, for advice on choosing a suitable painter, he replied: ‘There’s only one candidate and he’s Sandy Goudie’. MacNicol rated Goudie, who was then aged 42, as the best of the up-and-coming painters working in the Glasgow tradition. His opinion counted as he was the last in the line of great Glaswegian dealers stretching back 100 years to Alexander Reid, the promoter of radical French and Scottish painting. I have never forgotten standing on the doorstep of 4 Cleveden Road on my first visit to the studio. Sandy led us up the magnificent staircase into the galleried hall, alive to the cooing of caged doves, with glimpses off into a black dining room and vivid green drawing room. Maïnée with her exotic
Scotto-French accent hovered in the wings with cups of fresh ground coffee (almost unheard of in the 1970s) and delicious bowls of moules which in the Knox family only ever featured on foreign menus. And then there was the artist himself prepared for action in a simple smock with thin black cravat. Entering Sandy’s carefully curated world, which some might liken (to put it mildly) to a stage set, was for me the discovery of a new reality, which I still inhabit. It is the world of the creative sensibility formed by taste, sensuality, visual intelligence and talent. Until then, I had been acutely aware of the power of art, but had never actually met a living artist of note. Since then I have spent much of my career, whether with a view to commissioning, buying, curating or writing about art, visiting artists’ studios. These have ranged from warehouses and dripping railway arches to church crypts worthy of Piranesi, to humble sheds and front rooms. But none have ever rivalled my first visit to Sandy’s magical space. Utterly seduced, I soon bought a work off his studio wall. It is a Breton study of two men and a bicycle. The small work of luminous tone and witty design is totally satisfying even though one of the men lacks a head. ‘Why’ I asked tentatively, ‘was he decapitated?’ ‘Och I just turned my back for a moment’ Sandy explained airily in his refined Paisley accent ‘only to find the man was gone – so I just left it’. Although this was not my first acquisition by a living artist (John Piper had been the first), it whetted my appetite for collecting contemporary art. Recently, his son, Lachlan, discovered stuck at the back of a chest of drawers which came from his father’s studio, a letter from my father complaining that some his friends thought he looked ‘old and
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ill’. What my father, aged 59, had blotted from his mind was that during the time of the sittings he did look strained and careworn due to the pressure of saving the Knox mill. Sandy politely staged another sitting, but let the essential truth of his portrait stand concentrating only on finessing my father’s hunting gloves with all the swagger and perfectionism of his hero, John Singer Sargent. My father, unaware of Sandy’s sleight of hand, was delighted with the result. My friendship with Sandy proved to be one of the most pivotal in my life strengthening my
resolve to pursue a path largely driven by art. A few weeks after the portrait was finished, I was offered a job out of the blue as feature writer on the Antique Collector magazine. Our friendship continued over the years often in London in the bravura setting of Sargent’s studio in Tite Street, where he held court for a month or so in the summer while working on portraits of southern clients. For Sandy, life itself was a work of art. james knox director, the fleming collection
* 1. Self Portrait in Gilet, c.1965 oil on canvas, 102 x 76 cm
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Alexander Goudie Self Portrait, c.1961 Private collection
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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
Alexander Goudie, c.1965
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I went to Paisley Grammar School. The teachers quickly realised that I was not academic, because the only thing I was interested in was art. The school accepted that and didn’t push me to study. They always encouraged my art. I never took my school leaving exams. All I wanted to do was to start work as an artist as soon as I possibly could. The board of the Glasgow School of Art decided to admit me even though I was too young according to the rules. The Glasgow School of Art was an extraordinary place to be a student. I was privileged. Even the building itself is a masterpiece, and I realised as soon as I entered it that it was a kind of cathedral to art. It was a happy and interesting time. I learned about art, and also about life. I picked up a lot from watching artists work, probably more than I did from the teachers, though some of them were very inspiring. alexander goudie
* 2. Life Study Female Nude, 1954 pencil on paper, 43 x 31 cm
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Alexander Goudie was born in 1933 in the town of Paisley, an engineering and textile town to the West of Glasgow. The Goudies were not an overtly artistic family, but as a boy Alexander was not discouraged in his persistent habit of drawing with a pencil almost everything that he saw. Goudie’s father was a master-plumber, a tradesman who was happy to work at a skilled craft with his hands and who recognized a similar manual dexterity in his son. Goudie’s distinctive talent categorised him as a special case when he applied to enter The Glasgow School of Art and he was admitted at an unusually early age. The traditions of an earlier era were still strong while Goudie was a student. An understanding of values of colour and of tone were the hallmarks of teaching in the School. This emphasis on the craft of painting was enthusiastically received by a young man who was already developing a natural ability for handling paint. In 1955 his unrivalled facility as a draughtsman and colourist was acknowledged by the School in the award of the Newbery Medal. Goudie would be the first to acknowledge the influence of the teaching of David Donaldson, not only in his work but in his early decision to become a portrait painter. Portrait painting has a strong tradition in Scotland but the Glasgow Boys, particularly John Lavery, James Guthrie and George Henry, were to apply to it modern ideas. Their work extended beyond the formal commissioned portrait to encompass Social Realism as inspired by J.F. Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. These Glasgow artists who had reacted so strongly to French painting of the 1870s and 1880s, directed Goudie’s attention to Manet, the French Impressionists and PostImpressionists.
* 3. Ironing, c.1950 watercolour on paper, 42 x 33 cm
Throughout the 1950s, Paris had become the Mecca for almost all of the painters emerging from the four art Schools in Scotland. One of those was Alexander Goudie. In 1953 Goudie spent six weeks in Paris on a scholarship won while he was still a student. The visit had an enormous impact on him. Although he had already produced a number of allegorical compositions Goudie believed that painting should be firmly based on reality. The Glasgow Boys had revitalised a Scottish tradition of painting real life subjects initiated by David Wilkie. Their approach to such subject matter was directed by their knowledge of Millet and Bastien-Lepage but Goudie realised that its ultimate source was Courbet. To encounter A Burial at Ornans in all its vastness in the Louvre reinforced his admiration for Courbet’s achievement and confirmed for him the importance of clear design in his own compositions.
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When my father enrolled at Glasgow School of Art, he was only a boy of 16. During the five years he spent studying there his work evolved hugely, from tentative watercolours and domestic scenes, to complex and stylised mythological compositions that reveal the influence of the artists he most admired; Puvis de Chavannes and Picasso. lachlan goudie
At The Glasgow School of Art, Benno Schotz, the head of sculpture, had recognised a dual talent in the young man. He encouraged him to look at Rodin and Gaudier-Brzeska, sculptors who shared with Goudie a similar talent and fluency in drawing. Goudie was persuaded by Schotz to experiment with modelling and displayed an immediate rapport with the medium. Visiting Paris and the Musée Rodin, therefore, had a particular appeal. Rodin’s vast oeuvre, his enormous personality and his gift for making direct statements with an unaffected vitality impressed Goudie: Rodin has always been, for me, larger than life. I’m more interested in a kind of vulgar strength than in a petite exquisiteness. Goudie had also discovered that the work of the old masters meant a great deal to him. Three painters made a particular impact – Tintoretto, Rubens and Matisse. Whatever else these painters had in common, they shared a love of colour, gesture, and – very important for a young man just emerging into the austerity of post-war Britain – they all exuded a love of life, a joie de vivre which * 4. Idyll, 1958 watercolour and pen on paper, 32 x 38 cm
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struck a chord with the young Goudie. He was totally absorbed in what he calls the ‘exoticism’ of these painters, their love of the sensual image of the human figure which would stay with him… My pictures were full of diverse influences. Augustus John, Rembrandt, Matisse all figured strongly in these early works after I left the Art School. Things began to come together. I went abroad to France and Spain. I saw pictures here I hadn’t seen in Scotland and a way of life that I found immediately attractive, which pointed out a direction that it seemed perfectly natural for me to take. In 1957 Goudie joined his friends, John and Michelle Cunningham in Spain, where he spent several months in Toledo. This was Goudie’s first prolonged encounter with El Greco and Velázquez, who were to be of considerable importance to him in his future career. The following year Goudie was back in France, touring through Royan, Biarritz, and the Pyrenees before arriving at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port where he began to paint the landscape around him. One of these paintings was later purchased by Glasgow Art
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Gallery (Evening Light, Saint Lizier). He had so far painted few landscape pictures but he was immediately aware of its possibilities and the pleasures it gave him. It confirmed his deeply held belief that a painter should be capable of responding to what is put before him, and finding art in the least complicated and least favourable aspects of his life. When back in Glasgow, Michelle Cunningham introduced him to a young French girl she had met. Marie-Renée Dorval was from Brittany, not an area Goudie knew well at all but he was aware of its importance to artists. Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling
with the Angel) in the National Gallery of Scotland, was one of the Pont-Aven paintings which was to have a crucial effect on him. Goudie still painted in a very tonal manner and Gauguin’s use of stark contrasts made the young man aware of the importance of tone linked to a sense of pattern and balance in pictorial design. roger billcliffe Adapted from Goudie’s Brittany, an essay by Roger Billcliffe published in the monograph of the same title.
* 5. Self Portrait in Red, c.1965 oil on canvas, 51 x 51 cm
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Alexander Goudie at Paisley Grammar School, 1950
Goudie and his brother John, 1942
From left: Stephen Orr, Marie-Renée Goudie, Mrs Orr, Alexander Goudie, c.1967
Painting in Spain, 1957
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6. Still Life with Coffee Pot and Frying Pan, c.1970 oil on canvas, 35 x 45 cm
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7. Academy Nude, c.1955 oil on canvas, 45 x 33 cm
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This study of Queen Mariana by Velázquez represents, for me, the most personal and intimate recollection of my father as an artist. It brings me back to walking through the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland, where he gave me his own private masterclasses on the actual art of painting and his vision of what it meant to be an artist. He often spoke of Zurbarán, El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Goya. Our final ‘grand tour’ was when we both went to see the retrospective of Velázquez at the Prado in the 80s. gwen goudie
* 8. Study of Queen Mariana of Austria, after Velázquez, c.1998 oil on canvas, 96.5 x 106.5 cm
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* 9. Study of King Charles I, after Van Dyck, c.1995 oil and charcoal on board, 112 x 133 cm
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10. Crowning the May Queen, 1958 gouache on paper, 43 x 55 cm
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11. The Bathers, 1963 charcoal and chalk on canvas, 108 x 133 cm
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12. In the Garden of Love, c.1970 oil and charcoal on canvas, 142 x 284 cm
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There is a portrait of the young Alexander Goudie standing causally but elegantly dressed, his right thumb tucked into his trouser pocket. He looks out quizzically, guarding his opinion closely, he could be a renaissance prince, Hamlet even. His hair and clothes suggest that. Yet we know that this is a self portrait of a 20th century artist who must have looked into a mirror to observe himself and that serious, concentrated expression is the artist scrutinising himself while he paints. As he assesses himself we assess his art. And what art and artistry there is to admire: such freshness of paint, such facility of brush work, such a liveliness of surface and such enjoyment of colour. Here is an artist at the top of his form. Confidence and exuberance are the hallmarks of Alexander Goudie’s art as the works in this exhibition demonstrate. They reveal his enjoyment of life, his appreciation of beautiful women, his relish of strong character and his pleasure in social interaction. His ability to convey these things through paint is what made him such a fine artist. james holloway, former director, scottish national portrait gallery Joie de Vivre! The Art of Alexander Goudie, Memorial Exhibition, Paisley Art Gallery & Museum, 2008
13. Self Portrait in Breton Gilet, Red Background, c.1969 oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cm
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EN FAMILLE
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A Life in Line and Colour
As a student at The Glasgow School of Art in the early 1950s, Sandy Goudie was boisterous, opinionated and cheerfully confrontational. But he was not a rebel. Even from this early stage he had evolved an idea of what it meant to be an artist that was grounded upon tradition. He relished the lessons which were given to him by tutors, including David Donaldson, and his artistic heroes were figures like Manet, Velázquez and Van Dyck. The rest of his life would be a performance, channelling the spirit of these great masters, pushing himself creatively and technically, aspiring to reach the heights of their genius. Even at this early stage, art for young Goudie was a celebration, an opportunity to create a vision of the world that was rich in sensuousness and painterly beauty. It was the approach he brought to painting portraits, a genre he specialised in after graduating from art school. Working in a small studio in Paisley and then Johnstone, dad would transform his subjects. When confronted with a sober suited professor or provost, he would flamboyantly describe their ceremonial robes, enhancing their appearance with carefully placed highlights, endowing them with the aura of a royal courtier. He loved the dramatic possibilities of paint. In 1962, my father’s life was transformed when he met and married a young French girl from Brittany, Marie-Renée Dorval. From this point onwards he would spend part of each year in France, using the home of his in-laws as
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both a studio and as a kind of living theatre of inspiration. Brittany, in 1962, was a country preserved in aspic – a deeply religious culture, where traditional costume and head-dresses were still worn every day. It was a landscape and an agricultural economy that had hardly changed since the years when artists like Paul Gauguin first visited. This was just the kind of time-machine my father needed; a rural subject in which he could embed himself, just as the 19th century Glasgow Boys had done in Cockburnspath, on the east coast of Scotland. Each summer, dad sketched the ploughmen, the potato pickers, the fish gutters and trawlermen. And just as he elevated the dour dignitaries that came to sit for their portraits in Scotland, so he now ennobled the fieldworkers of Brittany – etching their dignified profiles into his sketchbooks, onto canvas and eventually modelling them in clay. For artists like Gauguin and Paul Sérusier, the strong light, strong shadows and strong colours of Brittany had been transformative. They were inspired to experiment with compositions incorporating areas of bold, flat pigment – to create images that seemed ever so slightly unhitched from reality. And in the 70s and 80s, as my father grew more familiar with his new Breton subject and with the work of the artists who had preceded him, so he began to indulge the colourist lurking inside of him. Increasingly his impressions of the land and the sea became vivid, joyous; a graphic patchwork of form and colour. Brittany was my father’s second
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Drummer Boy, c.1985 Private collection
Lachlan Leaning on Chair, c.1985 Private collection
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art school. It had a deep impact on the style of painting he pursued on returning to his studio in Glasgow every autumn. By the mid-1970s my parents had swapped a cottage in Johnstone for a building more suited to dad’s flamboyant artistic ambitions, and indeed his ego. The Victorian Palazzo where I grew up and where my father had his studio was a huge and fabulously ornamented stage set. Beneath the vaulted glass ceiling, gilded cornicing and cantilevered galleries, dad played the starring role. He was a tartan-suited virtuoso, painting Dukes and Duchesses one day and sumptuous still lifes the next. In the hallway, a stereo poured out a constant soundtrack of classical music and in the kitchen my mother laboured to prepare platters of lobsters, pheasants and porcine cuts and carcasses. These were ferried into the studio where my dad would ignore the mouldering stench of decay that inevitably set in after a few days, and create painted representations of baroque abundance. Alexander Goudie, along with his peers and contemporaries, David Donaldson, Jimmy Robertson, John Cunningham, Duncan Shanks and John Byrne were trained at art school to understand the alchemy of paint. They studied the properties of pigments and mediums, the tension between line and colour, the methods of modelling form and transferring your lived experience onto canvas. In the second half of the 20th century, however, with the emergence of conceptual art, these principles of painterliness, craftsmanship and technique came to be viewed with suspicion. The simple act of painting landscapes, portraits or still lifes was condemned by some critics as outmoded. My father was unrepentant – and in any case he didn’t know any other way to be an artist. Living at Arnewood House was rather like being part of my father’s circus troupe. We were all
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The Goudie family at home, c.1981
expected to perform in some way, to take our place on the podium in the studio and sit for hours as he painted our portraits. The paintings themselves were the result of sustained scrutiny. Dad was always observing us as we went, unsuspectingly, about our daily lives. Every so often he would catch us in a pose that sparked an idea for a portrait; Budoc playing the banjo, Gwen carrying a bunch of flowers, me blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. And that was that; Saturday mornings for the foreseeable future would be spent recreating that instant. My tenth birthday was strung out over weeks. For every portrait session I’d put on my paper hat and we’d light the candles on a slowly solidifying cake. Of course, I hated it then, but the paintings which we now have hanging in our homes are so full of his attention and care, it’s like he put a frame around his love for each of us and we get to share in that relationship every day. My mother, of course, was the favourite muse. When I came home from school at lunch, she would often be cooking in her dressing gown and when I left for the afternoon, I knew she would return to being my father’s nude model. There, draped across a sofa or standing in the bay
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En Famille, c.1975 Private collection
window, looking down from the third floor on an unsuspecting Cleveden Road, she would wait patiently as dad painted. A passerby glancing up might have got a voyeuristic shock. More often than not, however, it would be my father that they would catch a glimpse of. All day he would pace from window to window gathering the brushes and paints that were scattered across tables in the sun. And by force of habit, he would look up and study the Glasgow light as it shifted across the sandstone buildings opposite or filtered through the poplar trees. Glasgow’s skyline fascinated my father. But when he eventually painted the portrait of his adoptive city, he refused to depict a vision of urban decay and squalor. In his eyes Glasgow
was a Vienna of the North, a place of culture and architectural elegance. The Victorian splendour of Park Circus was no less ‘real’ than the sooty canyons and gutters of the Gorbals. It was the intellectual and aesthetic ambition of Glasgow that he chose to celebrate; a dear green place, Kelvingrove’s palace of art and the dreaming spires of the city’s medieval university. Alexander Goudie died in 2004. To his last breath he was an unreconstructed romantic, an egomaniac, an artist immersed in the tradition of painting. His was a life dedicated to colour and painterly flamboyance, an eye and a hand that documented his most valued experiences with unrivalled skill. I will always be his apprentice. lachlan goudie
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14. Nude by Lamplight, c.1975 chalk on paper, 49 x 62 cm
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15. Seated Nude in Armchair, c.1975 bronze finished plaster, 28 h x 34 w x 34 d cm
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16. Nude Seated on Couch, c.1975 bronze finished plaster, 39 h x 51 w x 33 d cm
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Míle Fáilte Lachlan, c.1976 Private collection
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Party Piece is a family portrait painted when my mother was, unbeknown to us, expecting our younger brother Lachlan – and our life as a family of four was about to be totally transformed. Many weekends were taken up sitting for my father and not being able to go out and play with friends. I do remember the discomfort of wearing my ballet costume for hours on end and not being allowed to move. My mother was supreme in her patience and dedication, and Budoc was always the gentle sitter. We learnt very quickly the price of having to give up certain pleasures or weekend activities. And with my father there was no discussion. In one other family portrait, I remember having to bake a cake three times until my father was happy with the colour of the icing. gwen goudie
17. Party Piece, c.1975 oil and charcoal on canvas, 124 x 208 cm
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18. Morning Toilette, c.2002 oil on board, 75 x 61 cm
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Goudie at 50 In 1983 my father celebrated his 50th birthday with an exhibition at the Fine Arts Society in Glasgow, Goudie at 50. He was at the height of his powers, an artist who had reached full maturity, and hanging on the walls were richly coloured still lifes, family portraits and nudes. The exhibition marked, in many ways, the close of the first act in my father’s career but it was also the first private view I had ever attended. I remember a huge crowd of friends including David Donaldson and John Cunningham as well as clients who had come from across the UK. lachlan goudie
* 19. Maïnée in Fur Coat; À la Mode, c.1980 oil on canvas, 196 x 96 cm
Pensées Heureuses My first encounter with the bohemian life of an Artist was in Glasgow in 1959. Recently arrived from France I could not have imagined what effect my new friends, Michelle and John Cunningham, were going to have on my life. They introduced me to Sandy who became my raison d’être, in every sense of the word. To be the wife, companion and muse of an artist is a privilege. You become part of a world of creativity; the silent observer of magical instances when, with a dash of paint or the contour of a line, something ordinary is transformed. An artist can elevate your mind and allow you to share in moments of wonder or make-believe but to achieve this they must have great talent, love and enthusiasm for their art. Sandy was not short of these qualities. Life with him was a daily rollercoaster of emotions. There were times of huge frustration. There were also times of great delight when he managed to capture on canvas what was in his imagination. Sandy was an artist who lived life to the full and being a part of that meant sharing in his reverie along with his melancholy. Artists can be very private when it comes to their feelings and their inner thoughts. The precarious balance of their emotions can demand a great deal of understanding and respect. Sharing the years with Sandy was always stimulating – I can assure you that there was never a dull moment. But it soon became clear that choosing to live with an artist of such joie de vivre and strength of character meant having to be generous and forgoing some of my own ambitions. Life together was, in return, hugely rewarding and enriching. The wonderful works of art which Sandy left us are a testament to that life and, for me, ensure that his soul and spirit remain amongst us. I dedicate these ‘Pensées Heureuses’, with all my love, to the memory of Sandy. maïnée goudie Joie de Vivre! The Art of Alexander Goudie, Memorial Exhibition, Paisley Art Gallery & Museum, 2008
20. Cancan, c.1975 oil on canvas, 196 x 96 cm
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Throughout his life my father regularly painted self-portraits. ‘Why?’ I remember people asking when they visited our home, where every wall seemed to reflect a new incarnation of my dad. In part it’s because he was a very reliable model, a subject that allowed the artist to hone his own skills in portraiture. But perhaps more importantly, it was because this is what my dad’s heroes did. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, they all took control of their own image, simultaneously scrutinizing their identities in the mirror whilst projecting a painted performance. And for dad, the life of an artist was all about performance. In this exhibition alone we find him channelling Courbet, Guthrie and even, draping himself in a red scarf and assuming the role of Aristide Bruant, the French nightclub star immortalised by Toulouse-Lautrec. lachlan goudie
21. Self Portrait with Red Scarf, c.1985 oil on canvas, 106 x 101 cm
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GOUDIE’S GLASGOW 45
Goudie and Glasgow
In 1960, five years out of Glasgow School of Art and with a studio in a tenement above a pub in Paisley, Alexander Goudie knew who and what he was and what he thought about that identity. ‘I like artists to look like artists; bankers like bankers; journalists like journalists’ he told a reporter from Glasgow Herald. We can see in this exhibition how the painter thought artists should look. There are seven self-portraits in the show and three other works in which the painter is present. Alexander Goudie certainly looks like an artist but an artist of a particular kind. These are self-portraits in the vein of the 34-year-old Rembrandt. That is they are depictions of the artist as a success. A man who knows he is good at what he does and knows he is valued for it. It is only viable if you are very good at what you do and Goudie was. Whether he’s posing with a cast of the Venus de Milo in Self Portrait at The Glasgow School of Art (cat. 27), hand on hip, weight on one leg evoking the pose of the figure that accompanies him, or seen twice in At Work in the Studio (cat. 28), he looks very confident. On first look the latter painting seems to almost deny this assertion and abnegate the centrality of the artist. The painter is seen virtually silhouetted against the light from the window and freely painted with little definition. At the extreme right however he is seen again, effortlessly cool in manicured, pointed beard. He is irresistibly reminiscent of Courbet’s self-portrait in Bonjour M. Courbet where a rich and successful businessman pays homage to Courbet the master. The same raised chin and elegant near profile view to the fore.
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That confidence however was in the face of a cultural climate in late 1950s and early 1960s Scotland which was bleak. Unemployment was rising rapidly, Scottish per capita spending in general was ten percent lower than the UK average and income from business and commerce was less than three quarters UK levels. In recent accounts of mid-20th century art in Scotland, the early 1960s are made to appear as the end of that and the rebirth of possibilities for painters and painting. In hindsight this is certainly the case but the development took place mainly, or at least initially in Edinburgh and tended to be jealously guarded by the established hierarchy in Scottish painting. Where access for younger painters was possible it tended to be for those who came up through the well-established route of Edinburgh College of Art, the Royal Scottish Academy and compliance with the prevailing beaux-arts manner of Redpath and Gillies. For younger west coast painters it was necessary to manufacture opportunities for themselves. And remember that in January 1959 Hugh MacDiarmid called Scotland ‘the most antiaesthetic country in Europe’. Into the 60s there were significant voices with grave doubts. Douglas Hall, Keeper of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art writing in 1963 said, ‘It is forgotten how few are the outlets for modern painters even in Edinburgh, and non-existent over most of the country. It is forgotten that even the most esteemed painters have scarcely dented public indifference’.
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Artist and Son in Kelvingrove, c.1985 Private collection
Given all that, it is not surprising that there was considerable dissatisfaction in Glasgow in the 1950s and early 60s.
make a living in Scotland by writing, painting or sculpture… In a society brimming with cheap comforts and luxuries there is actually less money to spare for the work of artists than there was a century ago.’ Scottish patrons, one commentator asserted, would support any non-Scottish work before indigenous art. He explained, patrons are so ‘scared of being thought parochial they fall over backwards in order to show how international they are – although most of them couldn’t tell [Béla] Bartók from Bela Lugosi.’
In this apparently bleak climate the work of Scottish artists was understood to be particularly disparaged by their fellow country men and women. ‘It is, indeed, rash nowadays’ a critic in the Saltire Review remarked, ‘to attempt to
There were signs of life in Glasgow however. Robert MacGowan, Carlo Rossi, Margot Sandeman, Angus Neil, Bet Low, Archie Graham and Dorothy Steel were all working in Glasgow. All painters of a slightly older generation than
Glasgow was not remotely in the vanguard of such opportunities as did exist. Hall again said ‘The image of Scottish painting which has been projected in recent years is predominantly formed in Edinburgh. It is forgotten that there are young modern painters in Glasgow whose work is as alien to Edinburgh as anything in London.’
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Alexander Goudie, most had attended Glasgow School of Art in the 1940s under Hugh Adam Crawford. All were what a contemporary of Goudie’s characterised as ‘serious painters’ and people to respect. None were producing the staple Glasgow Institute fair of sunny landscapes and bowls of flowers, and, as a result, all were to a certain extent marginalised from the comfortable world of Glasgow’s ‘official’ art. They had all been working as painters for some years and though in a disenfranchised position, this generation that came to the fore before 1950 must have provided encouragement for the emerging artists of the late 50s. With this generation as evidence that serious work could be undertaken in the city, the next generation, that of Goudie and the Glasgow Group, had all passed through, or were then passing through GSA under William Armour. They had been taught in first and second year by John Miller and Alix Dick, studied still life under Mary Armour and in third and fourth year had joined the studio of either David Donaldson or Jeffrey Squire. Goudie was taught by Donaldson. The painters this produced, though individuals and reflecting their artistic education in a variety of ways, possessed a strong and shared interest in muscular paint handling in a tradition that included the Glasgow Boys, Manet, Velázquez and Titian. Emerging from art school in the late 1950s into a city with no galleries at all selling contemporary art, Alexander Goudie made his own success. Goudie had been supported by his family to go to GSA where he had won the Somerville Shanks Prize and been granted a post-diploma year. The paintings we see here speak of success and a real belief in the power of his art from the very beginning. They are uncompromising in their optimism. With tremendous displays of dexterity, bravura brushwork and strong colour they deny the bleak reality of contemporary Paisley and
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Glasgow. Goudie had high ambitions for his art. He felt his job was to enlighten people, most of whom he asserted ‘walk about with their eyes open just enough to avoid falling under a bus’. For him art ought to open eyes. The apparently easy assurance of the paint handling and the sheer aesthetic pleasure to be derived from the works can generate the impression that it all came rather easily to the painter. There was no silver spoon here however. Goudie was given five years to become self-sufficient post art-school. His Paisley studio was paid for during that time by his plumber father – a manifestation of pride in his talented son and of the strong working class belief in education and self-improvement. As he worked to establish himself as a painter in Glasgow, Goudie appears to almost deny his everyday reality of life in a satellite town still recovering from the war and still deeply locked in an identity rooted in 19th century heavy industry. In an environment where the painter’s Paisley base could proudly proclaim ‘in quite a few years there should be a bathroom in every house in the town,’ the paintings are a triumph of optimism and light in an often dark environment. There are few early images of the city and the later paintings of Glasgow such as Autumn Morning, Cleveden Road Atelier (cat. 29), celebrate painting and life as a painter as much as they offer an image of the city. The large scale 1963 drawing The Bathers (cat. 11) is a good example of the work created by Goudie at a time when his contemporaries often painted the bleakness of the environment that surrounded them. There are echoes of old masters everywhere in Goudie’s work and they are here. The obvious reference is to Cézanne and his bather compositions of the 1890s but the sense of hedonism is emotionally more in keeping with Matisse’s sensibilities on the Mediterranean coast in the early 20th century. The beautifully drawn individual figures and the complex but entirely believable interlocking composition attest to the fact that the prize he won at GSA was for composition. In the Garden of Love (cat. 12)
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from 1970 evokes Titian’s Concert Champêtre in its transparent joy of life and its juxtaposition of a clothed male musician with nude female figures. Interestingly Titian’s work was painted at a bleak time in Venetian history. The painting is sometimes read as the creation of a world of harmony and love as a retreat from the real world. The physicality of the lovers on the ground, and the contemporary symbol of the dove of peace, give Goudie’s work a passionate intensity that makes it wholly modern, but it too offers an idyllic counterpart to everyday realities.
The paintings very often step beyond Glasgow. The works in this exhibition, with their understated but repeated evocations of great masters of the western tradition from Classical Greece and Velázquez to Gauguin and Picasso, celebrate the broad authority of painting and claim a place in its canon. They are a part, a distinctive one, of the rebirth of Glasgow and the West as a power in Scottish painting. professor john morrison
22. Kelvinbridge, c.1990 chalk on paper, 52 x 64 cm
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Glasgow Alexander Goudie lived in the West End of Glasgow for most of his career. From the windows of his home at Arnewood House he regularly admired the sweeping panoramas of Glasgow’s skyline; a cloudscape sometimes heavy with rain or shot with sun. This painting depicts the view from the upstairs bathroom. I like to think that over the years, as he was brushing his teeth, he studied the architecture of chimney pots, television aerials, skylights and gradually the everyday beauty of this scene compelled him to create a painting. lachlan goudie
* 23. Glasgow Rooftops, c.2002 oil on board, 61 x 75 cm
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* 24. Clouston Street, c.2000 oil on canvas, 198 x 96.5 cm
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25. At the Easel, c.2000 oil and charcoal on canvas, 152.5 x 152.5 cm
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At Home with Alexander Goudie Our days at Arnewood House revolved around my father’s studio. This room had three huge windows giving onto a tree-lined Cleveden Road and it was situated at the far end of the house – sufficiently distant from the kitchen, so that we children could avoid disturbing the man at work. Arnewood House was a kind of Secret Garden for my brother Budoc and myself, two years younger than me, and with whom I shared the beginnings of our father’s career as an artist. One of the first things I would do when I got home from school, would be to go the studio and look at what my father was working on. Each visit was defined by the subject of the day, from a still life, to the development of a new project or the finishing off of a portrait. My father was always paintbrush in hand. Entering this world was a formidable and unique experience but there were days when my mother would tell us that the studio was off limits. From an early age, hearing shouting and swearing eminating from that room, warned us that, today, inspiration was not forthcoming! The studio was a place where, as we grew up, conversation and exchange of opinions, became ever more intense. Topics of discussion ranged from Michelangelo’s sonnets, to Bach’s variations played by Glenn Gould, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes to Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, from Simone de Beauvoir to John Wayne or Jimmy Connors playing tennis at Wimbledon. The approach to debate was eclectic and demanding. There is no doubt that our father was an artist inspired by intense emotions. But he was also driven by discipline, tradition and an awareness of the great schools of artistic thought. He often worked to contextualise himself in a modern Scottish art world with which he did not always see eye to eye, but with which he undeniably shared strong roots and a sense of heritage. From use of colour, to the importance of line drawing, from Giorgione to Michelangelo, our father was always studying, doing his own research and learning continuously. In the evenings, whisky in hand, the books from his vast library would be brought out and laid on the hall floor alongside the paintings he was working on. gwen goudie
26. Kelvingrove Park, c.2000 oil and chalk on board, 115 x 114 cm
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Since childhood I have been preoccupied with drawing and painting. Everything which excited my imagination had to be set down in pictorial terms. A magic world where a different language helps explore human experience and makes permanent those transient encounters with the visually stimulating. The development of this language is for me what art is all about. To be articulate is vital and much of the joy I derive from my work is finding the most expressive and potent equivalent in line, paint, or clay for what I feel about life. The challenge is to cultivate a personal vision and see life freshly, extracting from it what is paintable and by dint of one’s skills compose images which will not only illuminate one’s experience but will, by their aesthetic merits alone, communicate this to others. Alexander Goudie’s Festival Exhibition, 1977, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Alexander Goudie preparing an exhibition, c.1983
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In the late 1990s Alexander Goudie began to draw on all his memories of living and working in Glasgow for almost 40 years. He distilled his experiences into a body of work entitled ‘Goudie’s Glasgow’. The painting opposite was inspired by the studios of the Glasgow School of Art and the portrait photo which was taken of him there in 1970. lachlan goudie
Alexander Goudie in the studios of Glasgow School of Art, c.1970
27. Self Portrait at The Glasgow School of Art, c.2000 oil and chalk on board, 112 x 81 cm
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From left: Alexander Goudie, Leon Morrocco, David Donaldson, James D. Robertson, Duncan Shanks pictured together for the exhibition Five Glasgow Artists, c.1970
The Glasgow School of Art was a hugely important part of my father’s life, he studied and taught there in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ‘Mac’ was a ferociously macho environment where tutors taught by example, demonstrating their creative bravado at the easel and tolerating little dissent. Life-long friendships between my father and colleagues David Donaldson and Jimmy Robertson were laced with rivalry, bitter feuds and passionately held grudges. But notwithstanding these tensions, this swaggering gang of artists, here including Duncan Shanks and Leon Morrocco, knew how to handle paint. This was something they recognised and respected in one another. lachlan goudie
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Alexander Goudie in his London studio, Tite Street, c.1983
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28. At Work in the Studio, c.2002 oil on board, 91 x 158 cm
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Sandy Goudie’s work has always stood out for me, partly because I knew him, and partly because of his skilful technique. Paint was applied with gusto and supreme confidence. You felt that he knew exactly what he was going to do before one brush stroke was applied to canvas. In this I feel he is very much in the tradition of Singer Sargent, de László and the Colourist Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell. The paintings sing because of his magnificent technique and a clear vision right from the start. robert ferguson, president, glasgow art club
29. Autumn Morning, Cleveden Road Atelier, c.2000 oil and charcoal on canvas, 183 x 153 cm
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30. At Work in the Studio, c.1995 charcoal on paper, 52 x 64 cm
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31. Self Portrait in the Studio, c.1995 pencil drawing, 52 x 64 cm
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I first met Sandy and Maïnée at Sandy’s Edinburgh Festival Exhibition in 1977 at The Scottish Gallery. It was a memorable and very busy event and my husband John bought me a gift of an exquisite drawing of Maïnée in a red dressing gown. In the future, should the house burst into flames… I would choose my dogs and this drawing. As something of a country bumpkin, I loved the social life in Glasgow; frequently attending exhibitions and events at the Glasgow Arts Club. The Gallery was a perfect space for hanging the latest works by Donaldson, Goudie, Cunningham, Robertson and the work of artist members. The opening of an exhibition was an important event for both the artist and potential buyer. I was duly dazzled by my first visit to Goudie’s home, Arnewood, in the West End of Glasgow. The bravura of colour – black dining room walls, electric green in the drawing room; a pervading smell of turpentine from the studio; a large wicker cage containing an ever-cooing pair of white doves at the top of the entrance staircase. Radio 3 booming away; a tiny kitchen resplendent with the original exposed, copper pipework, from which Maïnée produced endless delicious delicacies for fortunate friends. tessa thomson
32. Rooftops from the Bedroom, c.2002 oil on board, 80 x 59 cm
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Exhibitions were the apex of months of preparation in our father’s studio. No matter the theme, from Robert Burns to Salome, the procedure was always the same. Arnewood House became the exhibition per se, with paintings strewn out over our immense hall, taking up every nook and cranny. Hours of debating and deliberation would go into the selection of the entries. The choice of the frames, the hanging, the pricing would all dominate our family life. I have vivid memories of my father, fuelled with whisky, BBC Radio 3 blaring in the background, our doves cooing in their aviary and my mother coming out from the kitchen, apron on, to add her comments. Such experiences as a child, helped to mould my understanding of what creativity and the life of an artist really was. No romanticism, no facile path, but an idea – and a determination to achieve it. gwen goudie
Alexander at Arnewood House preparing an exhibition, c.1983
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Throughout history artists have portrayed themselves holding the tools of their trade. The romantic image of the painter with his palette and brushes has been reinterpreted across the centuries, from Velázquez to Rembrandt, Gauguin to Picasso. By 1985, when my father painted this self-portrait, the visual shorthand of brushes and smock were certainly outdated and even he himself did not paint using a wooden palette. But my dad loved being an artist and everything it represented. In this image he paints himself into the role of the painter across history with a commitment and theatrical conviction that confirms how little he cared for fashion or, in many ways, the contemporary art world. lachlan goudie
33. Self Portrait with Palette and Black Smock, c.1985 oil on canvas, 117 x 96 cm
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LA MER ET LA TERRE Goudie’s First Rencontre with Brittany
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André Marc, ‘Le Chanteur’, aboard his fishing boat, Loctudy, c.1959
Goudie’s First Rencontre with Brittany When I was born in 1976, my father was fortythree years old. By then he had been visiting and painting Brittany for over fifteen years and the story of his first rencontre with a landscape that would dominate his life as an artist, existed as part of a kind family lore. I remember dad holding forth at the dinner table as he recounted (yet again) his first visit to Brittany. My father described an impossibly romantic tale, one that flickered across my imagination, like a Pathé newsreel. It was December 1959, only a matter of months since he had met a young French girl named Marie-Renée Dorval in Glasgow, and now he was on his way to meet the parents. I visualised an animated route map, tracking his train journey from Scotland, across the channel aboard the boat-train, and onwards to Paris, where he boarded the ‘Quimper Express’. The ‘Express’, the story goes, turned out to be a provincial work-horse which crawled along the twilight chemin de fer, calling in at every regional town and village. And with every stop it seemed to dad that he was sliding decades into the past, as autoroutes gave way to muddy rural roads, tractors
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to horse-drawn ploughs, wide canopied stations to draughty platforms and telegraph offices. Six hours later my father finally disembarked in Quimper sporting a black, full-length trench coat and a distinct Paisley pallor. Here was an artistvampire hungry for inspiration but despite his epic journey he found himself in a town doing a very good impression of Glasgow; the streets were wintery, dark and damp. My mother, of course, brightened the encounter and was soon introducing her young Scottish artist to the family; five sisters, one of her five brothers, a suspicious pair of aunts and her parents, Dr Louis Dorval and his wife, Margeaux. There was, inevitably, a banquet, sudden and total immersion within the epic scale of Breton hospitality. Rich food, to which my father was unaccustomed, copious amounts of Muscadet which he accepted enthusiastically and the rowdy clamour of conversation and questions in a language he couldn’t understand. At one point my father excused himself, went to the bathroom and was sick. He returned, even paler than before, and accepted another glass of wine.
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Between Christmas and New Year my father was introduced to a new diet, a new landscape, a new culture. At first, however, he struggled to envisage how these experiences could ever filter into his paintings. He couldn’t see past the grey weather, the grey granite, the elements of the landscape that seemed familiar from Scotland. And then one day Dr Dorval drove the couple to a little seaside port called Loctudy. The harbour looked out across a sea-estuary towards another village and a lighthouse. Next to the quay was a villa with a pointed turret and elegant green balconies. This was Villa Ker Jane and Dr Dorval and his family were going to move there in the New Year.
decades, Sandy and Maïnée Goudie spent the summer in Loctudy at Villa Ker Jane.
My father was twenty-six years old. In Paisley he lived at home with his parents in a one-bedroom flat with a view of the tenements opposite. Sandy Goudie didn’t know that Loctudy would prove fundamental to his development as an artist. But standing on that quayside, looking out across the water in the strong Atlantic sunlight, watching gulls spiral across the sky and colourful fishing boats returning with their catch, the possibility of future paintings slipped into focus.
Trawlermen fished the inshore waters for langoustines, sardines and hake, whilst smallholders and farmers harvested seaweed from the local beaches and potatoes from the sandy soil of the surrounding fields. It was a region that embodied the overlapping worlds of farming and fishing, la mer et la terre, which characterised so much of the Breton identity.
Before this new chapter in family lore could be written however, Alexander Goudie returned, alone, to Paisley. There he fell dangerously ill with tuberculosis and for six months he languished in a sanitorium. It was a demoralising and depressing experience from which he eventually emerged thin, drained of energy and contemplating his future with bloodshot eyes. Tuberculosis was the catalyst which prompted my parents to accelerate their marriage plans. But also, and perhaps just as significantly, it crystalised in my father a determination to paint images that celebrated the vitality and great beauty of life. No subject would provide him with more inspiration than Brittany. Following their wedding in 1962 and setting a precedent that would be repeated every year for the next four
Brittany in 1962 was not the tourist destination it is now. There were no daily ferries disgorging hoards of caravans and campers throughout the summer. It was, instead, a relatively isolated region of France whose economy, when compared to the heavily industrialised West of Scotland, was underdeveloped and primarily agricultural. Sud Finistère, the department at the extreme West where Loctudy was situated was poor, largely ignored by Parisian politics and practically forgotten by time.
During those summer visits in the early 1960s, Dr Dorval would grant his son-in-law the use of his car. Dad would head off down the country lanes at the wheel of a black Citroen DS, drawing boards in the back seat. En route he would scan the horizon for a ploughman or a group of fieldworkers, suddenly stopping when a subject appeared round the bend. Using a mixture of pigeon-French, extravagant hand gestures and a broad grin, my father would manage to establish himself as an unthreatening presence, then he would begin to draw. His subjects, fieldworkers bent over their artichokes or trawlermen repairing their nets, might straighten up and briefly stare at him through narrow eyes. Sometimes they would turn their backs or disappear into a cabin and observe him through a window. But more often than not they would nod, unsmilingly, and carry
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on. Occasionally, when a pigman or a market stallholder would remonstrate with him, my father would cheerfully holler ‘Bonjour’ and repeat the tested password, ‘Le Docteur Dorval!’ As the rural GP for many decades, Dr Dorval was known across the territory. It was a name that quelled suspicion and granted access. It was this name that explains why, more than once, the bearded stranger was invited inside to draw the occupants sorting potatoes, stringing onions. On one occasion he spent an afternoon in an earth-floored cottage, drawing two farmers as they slipped into a cider-fuelled stupor. Every artist thrives on a motif, a subject in which they can immerse themselves. In the 1960s and 70s, Dad knew that in Brittany he had found something extraordinary, a well of inspiration, a place and a people that demanded to be drawn, painted and documented. Just as Catterline was for Joan Eardley, or the beach at Machrihanish was for William McTaggart, Loctudy and its environs became a creative focal point throughout my father’s career. It was the one location he returned to time and again, a landscape which he explored from every viewpoint, every angle and under every weather condition. It was a place he interpreted in his paintings and a place that shaped the way he painted. The piles of sketchbooks that resulted from those early decades, however, bear witness to a sense urgency. On every page is the evidence of an artist collecting snapshots like a lawyer collects evidence; harbourside debris, anchors and lobsterpots, a church altar, a rusty scythe. Details recorded for future deployment on canvas. And then of course there were the sketched portraits; weather-blasted faces, women lost in prayer, fieldworkers plunging their fat-fingered hands into the earth. André Marc, Madame Nicot, Madame Tanguy, Monsieur Thomas; dad knew many of them by name and he also knew that
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what he was witnessing would not last long. That these farmers in their velvet waistcoats and the women wearing bigoudènes headdresses, were the end of a story; the conclusion of an uninterrupted history of tradition and custom that had spanned generations. As he drew on the harbourside or at the edge of the wheatfield, dad was observing the social and economic evolution of a place and people. But he was also, and very consciously, taking his place in an artistic timeline, one that linked him directly to other artists who had entrenched themselves within rural communities: Van Gogh, Millet, Bastien-Lepage. It wasn’t lost on him that fellow Scots, James Guthrie and the Glasgow Boys, had not only revered the traditions of French painting but had, in many cases, travelled to France to seek out and paint in countryside retreats, rather like Loctudy. Prior to my father’s first trip in 1959, Brittany had already become a favourite imaginary destination. During visits to the National Gallery of Scotland he had devoted long hours to studying his favourite painting, Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon. This psychedelic depiction of the nun’s at Pont Aven, clothed in black, crowned in bizarre headdresses and framed against a red background as ferocious as their religious fervour, would become a creative talisman. It wasn’t only that Gauguin was a pathfinder, an artist who established for my dad an extraordinary iconography for depicting Brittany. It’s that he channelled into his work an emotional charge so powerful, that merely looking at his paintings seemed to intensify the glorious experience of being alive. Gauguin’s use of composition and colour deeply influenced the style of painting which my father began to evolve in the late 1970s and 80s. By this time Alexander Goudie had been documenting life in Brittany for almost twenty years and there had been a shift in the character
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of Loctudy and its environs. Tourism was replacing agriculture as the primary economic activity. Gradually my dad turned his attention from the fields and the fishermen to the holiday makers who filled the beach in front of Villa Ker Jane. My father would spend his days outside on the terrace or stationed at one of the balconies. From there he would watch the tide sweep in and out and paint canvasses saturated with summer sunlight and exuberance; parasols in the sand, seagulls gliding across an azure sky. These paintings were fuelled by euphoria. My father had spent his childhood summers on the Scottish Coast, two weeks in Girvan or St Andrews, then back to Paisley. For Alexander Goudie, the months at Villa Ker Jane never lost their sense of exoticism. The light, the gentle
lifestyle, the lunch table spread with a mountain of seafood, salads and great bowls of fresh fruit – for an artist who had endured tuberculosis, someone whose most cherished culinary memory was the first taste of a banana during post war rationing, whose childhood experience of summer was limited to the limp rays of the sun, shining hesitantly over the Firth of Clyde, an August spent in Loctudy was sensory overdrive. Increasingly this was the portrait that he wanted to paint – a land of luxe, calme et volupté. This vision would drive the series of paintings, sculptures and ceramics which my father would produce over the next twenty years, the final chapter in the story of Goudie’s Brittany. lachlan goudie
34. Portrait of Le Chanteur, c.1989 pastel and chalk on paper, 43 x 35 cm
This man was a favourite subject of my father’s, a local fisherman called André Marc who was known as ‘Le Chanteur’, or ‘The Singer’. He earned this nickname due to his habit of regularly bursting into song on the quayside after a few too many glasses of ‘rouge’. He eventually, perhaps inevitably, fell into the harbour one evening and drowned. Most of the skippers and trawler crews were a laconic bunch but they honoured dad with his own, rather unoriginal, soubriquet. Every summer when he reappeared on the harbour with his sketchbooks, they would look up and nod an acknowledgement, ‘Ah, l’artiste!’ lachlan goudie
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35. Breton Paysage, c.1965 pastel on paper, 28 x 42 cm
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36. Bedroom at Ker Jane, c.1980 chalk and gouache on paper, 45 x 56 cm
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Villa Ker Jane, the Dorval family home in Loctudy, Brittany, c.1980
Back of the House generates a strong memory, for me, of Villa Ker Jane, the home of my grandparents in Loctudy. This house would become the setting and backdrop for many of my father’s works as well as being the meeting point for a gigantic family of cousins, children of my mother’s ten brothers and sisters. This drawing depicts the kitchen window, the room where my mother and grandmother would cook together, preparing great platters of seafood, mussels and langoustines. gwen goudie
37. Back of the House, c.1985 pastel and chalk on paper, 52 x 78 cm
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* 38. Studies of Praying Bigoudène, c.1995 pencil on paper, 45 x 64 cm
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* 39. Study of Breton Fieldworkers, c.1990 pencil and watercolour on paper, 46 x 57 cm
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* 40. Potato Picker, c.1960 pastel and chalk on paper, 49 x 64 cm
* 41. Labourers at Work in the Fields, c.1995 pencil on paper, 28.5 x 39 cm
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42. Vase with Fouesnantaises, c.1995 ceramic, 36 x 18 cm
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43. Vase with Gwenn-ha-du, c.1995 ceramic, 36 x 18 cm
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44. Goudie’s Brittany, c.1990 gouache on board, 55 x 75 cm
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45. The Wave, c.1989 acrylic on board, 122.5 x 224 cm
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As a boy I had often accompanied my father to sketch the religious processions and local festivals that interrupt the months of July and August in Brittany. Dad could fill a sketchbook in one afternoon, drawing the people dressed up in traditional costume; the Breton bagpipe players; the dancers performing their circular gavotte and singing along to the music. lachlan goudie
46. La Gavotte, c.1989 chalk and pastel on paper, 20 x 63 cm
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47. Bigoudène, c.1980 chalk on paper, 39 x 25 cm
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Breton Funeral represents one of the most important works from my father’s early period in Brittany. The powerful composition and tonal control are a distillation of lessons he had learned from great artists like Courbet and Guthrie, who tackled the sombre subject of a rural funeral in their own work. This painting manages to convey a sense of the dignity and stoicism my father had come to admire in the people he befriended in Brittany, a community underpinned by faith and resilience in the face of the elements and often very challenging lives. lachlan goudie
48. Breton Funeral, 1965–66 oil on canvas, 106 x 100 cm
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49. Chapel Interior, c.1985 oil and chalk on canvas, 152 x 152 cm
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A painted homage to Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon. Alexander Goudie’s experience of living in Brittany made him appreciate even more intensely the power of Gauguin’s work. Vision After the Sermon was the painting he most admired as a student in the National Gallery of Scotland. Here it features as an image pinned to the background. Goudie employs Gauguin’s technique of simplifying his composition with blocks of colour. He uses the paint sparely, producing a still life inspired by the stark religious fervour of the farmers and fishermen he came to know in Brittany. lachlan goudie
50. After the Sermon, 1989 oil on canvas, 81 x 81 cm
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Painting in Loctudy, c.1965
Goudie painting on the harbourside, Roscoff, c.1989
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Goudie at Loctudy, c.1985 Photograph: John Thomson
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I work best from an inner discipline, not sitting around waiting to be inspired or looking… This is where my strengths come from. Some artists just look for a subject that they already have a solution for. I don’t do that. My paintings differ sometimes because I may make five or six studies of a subject and I try to let it tell me how to respond. By being in Loctudy, in that garden [at the Villa Ker Jane], on the terrace with these balconies, the windows, it became a great studio for me. The house faces north and provides lots of different kinds of light. In the evening at five o’clock is a fascinating time on a certain kind of day when the clouds are blown away to the east and the fishing boats are coming in. I’ve painted that view hundreds of times now, by making myself come to terms with the pictorial problems it presented. The energy of these boats coming in, speeding past the chequerboard of the lighthouse on Île-Tudy; a white house on an island, the metal chimney of an old factory silhouetted against the sky all gave form and pattern, a sense of construction to these pictures. Then I began to look down from the balcony to the beach and the water’s edge. I painted pictures of people coming in and out of the water, sitting on the beach, sunbathing. It gave me a lot of unusual angles, so high up. Gradually the whole thing came together and Loctudy became a confirmed and favourite subject for me. The house was vital, both its views out to sea and across the beach, and inside with the life of the kitchen. There were always lots of visitors bringing baskets of vegetables from the fields or fish and shellfish from the harbour. I would draw the peasants and also members of the family, especially an old aunt, Tante Germaine, who was a fantastic model for me. Peeling potatoes, shelling prawns, sitting in an old rocking chair knitting, she became a favourite subject. alexander goudie
* 51. Seagulls over Ker Jane, c.1989 watercolour on paper, 77 x 56 cm
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52. Passerby, Loctudy, c.1985 watercolour on paper, 50 x 65 cm
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53. Saturday Morning in the Harbour, c.1980 gouache on paper, 52 x 64 cm
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54. Fishing Boat, c.1980 charcoal and gouache on paper, 52 x 64 cm
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55. Fisherman in his Boat, c.1980 chalk and pastel on paper, 52 x 64 cm
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56. Lobster Pots, Baskets, Chains and Anchor, c.1960 pastel and chalk on paper, 41 x 51 cm
57. Fisherman Mending Nets, c.1960 pastel and chalk on paper, 40 x 50 cm
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58. Fishermen at Work, c.1960 chalk and pastel on paper, 50 x 41 cm
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59. Basket of Mussels, c.1989 acrylic on board, 40 x 36 cm
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60. Chickens, c.1980 pastel and chalk, 45 x 64 cm
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61. Fisherman’s Basket, c.1989 pastel and chalk on paper, 55 x 51 cms
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62. Basket of Garlic, c.1989 pastel and chalk on paper, 52 x 64 cm
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63. Baguettes, c.1980 chalk on paper, 38 x 26 cm
64. Artichokes in a Basket, c.1989 pastel and chalk on paper, 64 x 52 cm
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Alexander Goudie rp rgi (1933–2004) Alexander Goudie is widely acclaimed as having been one of Scotland’s finest figurative painters. Goudie was born in the Renfrewshire town of Paisley in 1933. He studied at The Glasgow School of Art under William Armour, David Donaldson and Benno Schotz. For many years he was a tutor at the school, before dedicating himself to his own studio work. As a portraitist his sitters included Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Lord Chancellor Lord Mackay of Clashfern, Billy Connolly and a host of other figures drawn from the worlds of politics, commerce and entertainment. Although he achieved great renown as a portrait painter Alexander Goudie distinguished himself in a range of other creative spheres.
1933 1950-55
1953 1956 1957 1958 1959 1962 1962 1966 1970 1974 1977
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Born Paisley Studied Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, Glasgow School of Art Awards: Somerville Shanks Prize for Composition; Newbery Medal for Distinction; Postgraduate Scholarship; Keith Award – Royal Scottish Academy First visit to Paris Elected Member of Glasgow Art Club Painting trip to Toledo and Madrid Tour of France; visiting Rouen, Royan, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Saint-Lizier, Nimes, Arles, Avignon, Annecy, Reims First visit to Brittany Marries Marie-Renée Dorval First of annual painting trips to Loctudy First major exhibition of Breton Paintings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Exhibition, La Forêt-Fouesnant, Brittany Elected Member of Royal Society of Portrait Painters Second exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Breton Images, Glasgow Art Club
ALEXANDER GOUDIE
1979 1982 1983 1986 1987 1988 1987-89 1990
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
2007 2008 2009 2011 2016 2021
Portrait, BBC Television series featuring comedian Billy Connolly, mountaineer Chris Bonington and Sir Edwin Brammal. Drawings, Pastels, Watercolours, The Macaulay Gallery, Stenton Studio Exhibition, 33 Tite Street, Chelsea, London Goudie at 50, major retrospective, The Fine Art Society, Glasgow Breton Idyll, The French Institute, Edinburgh and the Fine Art Society, Glasgow Breton Sketchbook, The Macaulay Gallery, Stenton Portrait of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern Décor for Brittany Ferries flagship, Bretagne Exhibition, Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Brittany Awarded the Freedom of Saint-Pol-de-Léon Publication of Goudie’s Brittany Goudie’s Venice, Harari and Johns, London Goudie’s Brittany, The Fine Art Society, Glasgow Portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, for the Caledonia Club, London Posthumous portrait of The 14th Duke of Hamilton Salome, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, The TSB Atrium, Edinburgh Décor for the First Class Passenger salons of the Val de Loire, Brittany Ferries Collaboration with the Musée de la Faïence de Quimper, Brittany Tam o’Shanter, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, Freemason’s Hall, Edinburgh Goudie Céramique, the Musée de la Faïence de Quimper, Brittany Tam o’Shanter, The Tale in Pictures, The Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow Goudie Céramique, The Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow The Goudie Collection of Tam o’Shanter paintings opens on permanent display at Rozelle House, Alloway, Ayrshire The Artist and his Muse, The Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow Breton Works, The John Davies Gallery, Stow on the Wold Tam o’Shanter; New Works, The Glasgow Art Club, Glasgow Portrait of the 15th Duke and Duchess of Hamilton Died at his home in Glasgow Breton Drawings and Watercolours, Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow Alexander Goudie Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Brittany Ferries collection exhibition L’Art est un Voyage, Musée National de la Marine, Paris Goudie’s Glasgow, Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow L’été Mediterranean, Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow Joie de Vivre! The Art of Alexander Goudie, Paisley Museum, Paisley Publication of Tam o’Shanter, illustrated by Alexander Goudie A Portrait of Spain, Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow Tam o’Shanter – Works on Paper, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Still Lifes and Interiors, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Alexander Goudie RP RGI: A Retrospective, Mall Galleries, London Alexander Goudie – An Artist’s Life, act i, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
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Public Collections BBC Scotland City of Glasgow College Dumfries and Galloway Council (Kirkcudbright) East Dunbartonshire Council Glasgow Museums McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Inverclyde Council Museums & Galleries Edinburgh Paisley Museum and Art Galleries Perth & Kinross Council RIBA Collections Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh South Ayrshire Council The Fleming Collection, London The Hunterian, University of Glasgow University of St Andrews University of Stirling University of Strathclyde
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ALEXANDER GOUDIE
From top: Alexander Goudie, James D. Robertson, Forbes W. Yule, exhibition Three former students of Glasgow Art School, c.1956; Portrait and sculpture by Alexander Goudie; Alexander Goudie, c.1956
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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition ALEXANDER GOUDIE An Artist’s Life act i 1–24 July 2021
acknowledgements The Scottish Gallery would like to thank the Goudie family, James Knox, Roger Billcliffe, Professor John Morrison for contributing to this publication.
Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/alexandergoudie ISBN: 978-1-912900-37-4 Designed by Kenneth Gray Printed by PurePrint 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.
Front cover: Self Portrait at The Glasgow School of Art, c.2000, oil and chalk on board, 112 x 81 cm (detail) (cat. 27) Inside front cover: Self Portrait with Palette and Black Smock, c.1985, oil on canvas, 117 x 96 cm (detail) (cat. 33) Back cover: Alexander Goudie in the studios of The Glasgow School of Art, c.1970
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Self Reflected in Studio Window, c.2000 Private collection
