Artmag | Mar 3 2023

March 3, 2023

Issue 253

Agnes by Katy Platt is among hundreds of works for sale at the Borders Art Fair. See ART NEWS page 11.

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© 2023 Instant Publications Ltd. Reproduction in whole or in part is forbidden without the written permission of the Publisher. Instant Publications does not accept responsibility for unsolicited material. ADVISORY Readers are advised to check all listed information before attending an exhibition or event.

Inspire at the Whitehouse Gallery in Kirkcudbright (Mar 4-Apr 22) aims to lift the spirits with a mix of abstract and semi-abstract works as well as figurative, still life, floral, wildlife and landscape paintings. Established names such as Fee Dickson Reid with large scale seascapes, pastel specialist Margaret Evans and Kate Bentley SWA with interior scenes are joined by gallery newcomers Kerry Souter and Christine Clark and ten or so returning artists. There is also sculpture, glasswork, artist books, ceramics and jewellery. www.whitehousegallery.co.uk

The Mixed Exhibition at Aberfeldy Gallery (until Mar 31) includes framed and unframed original paintings and prints by both gallery regulars and newcomers on a range of subjects and in a variety of media as well as ceramics and sculptures. www.aberfeldygallery.co.uk

Iconic Iran at Nomads Tent in Edinburgh (until Mar 26) explores seminal moments in the arts and history of that country. Founded 2,500 years ago, at its height the vast empire stretched from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to Central Asia and the Indus Valley in the east, covering over 2 million square miles. Its extraordinary success was achieved through deft political management, cultural awareness and the promotion of trade.

At the heart of Iconic Iran is a symposium bringing together viewpoints and histories from authorities in their field such as Professor Robert Hillenbrand on Stories from The Great Mongol Shahnama, one of the greatest illuminated medieval manuscripts, and revelations about the Persian influences in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, particularly the illustrations by Pauline Baynes. There is also a selling exhibition of tribal lion rugs, reed screens and kilims and live traditional music.

This year celebrating its 40th anniversary, Nomads Tent is a veritable warehouse of tribal and village crafts sourced direct from Asia and North Africa. www.nomadstent.co.uk

Kelly Stewart, Daffodils

James Fraser RSW, Blue Pot, Black Dress

Image from the illuminated medieval manuscript The Great Mongol Shahnama

ON THE COVER The Borders Art Fair returns to the Borders Event Centre in Kelso in 2023 with over 70 artists, galleries and makers from across the UK (Mar 17-19).

Sponsored by investment management consultants McInroy & Wood, participants include painters Aine Divine RSW, Darren Woodhead SWLA, Gill Walton SSA, Chris Brook and Davy Brown, sculptors Richard Goldsworthy, Tish Potter and Michelle de Bruin, the Whitehouse Gallery from Kirkcudbright, Alpha Art Gallery from Edinburgh and Moy Mackay Gallery from Peebles and the Society of Scottish Artists. There will also be ceramics by Redbraes Pottery, glassware by Julia Linstead and botanical illustrations by Marianne Hazlewood.

This year the Spotlight Area will be curated by the Royal Scottish Academy and feature work by several of their Member Artists and Academicians. There will also be demonstrations by artists and makers, tours of nearby Marchmont House and a pop-up print studio where visitors can learn about different techniques and have a go at creating their own masterpiece to take home. Those unable to attend can enjoy a series of free online workshops.

www.bordersartfair.com

Land and Sea at Fidra Fine Art in Gullane (until Mar 12) features nine landscape artists who treat their subject in different ways. Styles include both detailed and loose, expressive drawing, paintings made ‘en plein air’ in all weathers, an abstracted, colourful approach, figurative scenes evocative of summer holidays and luminous pewter sculptures of sea creatures. www.fidrafineart.co.uk

David Esson: Nature at the Art & Craft Collective in Edinburgh (until Mar 25) is the artist’s first solo exhibition of his stippling and pointillism work (made entirely out of precisely positioned dots) inspired by the wildlife around him in the Highlands.

Also showing is Mark Kirkham: One Hundred Cats (Mar 4-Apr 1), the result of a project that Mark, also known as “The Edinburgh Sketcher”, undertook after the death of a beloved family cat to create a cat a day for 100 days. Varying in size, media and materials, the originals are for sale at £5 each with all proceeds going to Lothian Cat Rescue. www.artandcraftcollective.co.uk

Katy Platt, Agnes

Ronald F. Smith, RSW RGI PAI, Mediterranean Lighthouse, oil

It’ll Be Alright at The Alchemy Experiment in Glasgow is their third annual open call exhibition, featuring works from over 500 submissions from all over the world (until Mar 12). Artists were encouraged to take the theme of hope in any direction, interpreted as broadly or as literally as they wished. www.alchemyexperiment.com

The Love of Print at Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum in Glasgow (until Mar 12) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Glasgow Print Studio, which was founded in 1972 by a group of artists who needed access to printmaking facilities after leaving art school.

While the studio’s output could fill the whole of Kelvingrove, the show narrows down the selection to some 225 prints by 130 artists, including many of the biggest names in Scottish art, from Alasdair Gray, Elizabeth Blackadder and John Byrne to Adrian Wiszniewski, Alison Watt and Ade Adesina to Turner Prize-winners Martin Boyce and Richard Wright. Part of the exhibition is dedicated to 50 up and coming printmakers. www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/venues/ kelvingrove-art-gallery-and-museum

Michael Scott: The Fisher King at the Roger Billcliffe Gallery in Glasgow (until Apr 1) showcases an artist whose sudden death in 2002 at the age of 60 robbed Scottish art of a unique vision. Born and brought up in the fishing towns of Peterhead and Hull before studying in the port city of Liverpool and lecturing in sociology and philosophy in the ship-building city of Glasgow, it is no surprise that the motif of water, fish and fishing imbues his work, but so too does social critique, symbolism and reflections on the human condition. www.billcliffegallery.com

Michael Scott, Man, Donkey, Fish

Connie L, Floating Island

Nicolas Party, Landscape II, 2016, mezzotint

Cat Outram, Lucilla Sim & Laura Magliveras: New Work at Dundas Street Gallery in Edinburgh (Mar 10-14) features work by three women landscape artists.

Cat Outram’s etchings and mixed media sketches are based on walks she has enjoyed, including the 100-kilometre Camino Ingles in Spain that she completed last year. Lucilla Sim paints and also makes wooden constructions influenced by poetry and the patterns of weather, geology and archaeology in the Scottish landscape. Painter Laura Magliveras is particularly concerned with a sense of place beyond the representational to convey both the illuminating effect of light and an emotional response to her subject. www.catoutramprintmaker.co.uk

www.lucillasim.com

www.lauramagliveras.co.uk

The Torrance Gallery in Edinburgh has a solo exhibition by Fee Dickson Reid, whose atmospheric seascapes convey a sense of peace and calm, with a focus on pockets of light, gentle movement and reflections on sand and water (Mar 4-25). www.torrancegallery.co.uk

Repairs to her own gallery and a burst water pipe in a temporary space have forced artist and gallery owner Angela Lawrence of Clience Studio in Castle Douglas to take up residence in the Harbour Cottage Gallery in Kirkcudbright until the end of March. Angela is known for her atmospheric paintings and prints of the Galloway coast, Southern Uplands and Highlands and Islands.

www.cliencestudio.co.uk www.harbourcottagegallery.org.uk

Fee Dickson Reid, A Sliver of Sunrise, oil on canvas

Laura Magliveras, Interconnected, mixed media

Angela Lawrence, Early Spring, Rockcliffe

Featured artist in the Mixed Spring Exhibition at Goldfinch Gallery in Comrie (until Mar 26) is artist and sculptor Georgia Crook with five of her big ‘sky boats’ made from willow and paper using traditional craft techniques. There is also new work by Kathy Collins, Hetty Williams, Lin Pattullo and Sheila Roberts plus Nicola McCabe of Last Winter Ceramics. www.goldfinchgallery.co.uk

The Spring Exhibition at the Velvet Easel Gallery in Portobello (until May 28) presents work by over 50 artists, both gallery regulars and newcomers such as Sky Portrait Artist of the Year contestant KellyAnne Cairns. All media are represented, including figurative, landscape and abstract paintings of all sizes as well as prints, ceramics, glass, sculpture and jewellery. There is a wide range of price points and the gallery is a member of the Own Art scheme, which enables buyers to spread the cost of purchases. www.velveteasel.co.uk

Lucy Campbell, From there to here

Orla Stevens, Night Swimmer

Never Apologise at the Macrobert Arts Centre on the University of Stirling campus (until Apr 30) is an exhibition from the Lindsay Anderson Archive celebrating the life and work of one of the most distinctive British filmmakers of the 20th century.

Part of the generation which transformed the post-war cultural and artistic world in Britain, Lindsay Anderson’s films reflected life and society through films such as This Sporting Life (1963), starring Richard Harris as a Yorkshire rugby league player whose romantic life is not as successful as his sporting life, If…. (1969), with Malcolm McDowell as a schoolboy leading a savage revolt in an English public school, and

O Lucky Man! (1972), with McDowell again as an ambitious coffee salesman in a series of improbable and adventures which challenge his naive idealism.

The University of Stirling’s 2023 Culture on Campus exhibition, Never Apologise marks the centenary of Anderson’s birth by opening up the extensive collection of his personal and working papers held in the university archives. It features new insights into Anderson’s life and work through contributions from actors, artists, academics and curators, including memories of working with the director, favourite scenes from his films and overlooked aspects of his career.

www.macrobertartscentre.org

Lindsay Anderson directing Malcolm McDowell in If...

Featuring works by 60 tenants of studios across the country, WASPS x Kirkcudbright Galleries continues the partnership with Workshop and Artists Studio Provision Scotland (WASPS), which provides affordable studios for artists, makers and the creative industries (Mar 4-Jun 4). www.kirkcudbrightgalleries.org.uk www.waspsstudios.org.uk

Ian Cook RI RSW: Rural and Urban Episodes in The Room solo show space at City Contemporary Art in Perth (until Mar 26) features new paintings and drawings by the Glasgow figurative and surrealist painter who adopts historical, ethnic and tribal elements on diverse subjects. www.ccart.co.uk

Ian Cook RI RSW, Violinist

Rachel Bride Ashton, Cosmic Beginnings I

Margaret Evans: Scotland’s Coast and Mountains at the Glasgow Gallery (Mar 4-25) features over 30 new paintings of places which have inspired the artist throughout her career such as Glencoe, Easdale, Rannoch and Loch Earn. She says: “Whether my library of sketchbooks from all my travels initiate a work or the cameraphone on a quick local trip, the impact is the same. Sometimes it’s the sun setting behind clouds or the light over the landscape. It creates a magic moment which pastels can immediately capture.” www.glasgowgallery.co.uk

Fusation Art Group: The Colour’s Back at Artisanand in Aberfeldy (until Mar 17) features work by eight artists and makers who came together with the aim of breaking down the boundaries between art and craft. The resulting selection offers a mix of work not normally shown together, including a number of collaborative pieces. www.artisanand.co.uk

Marking the beginning of a year-long 10th anniversary programme by local, national and international artists at the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock, Willie Sutherland: Origins (Mar 4-Apr 1) showcases a self-taught painter and sculptor who launched his career in 2021 at the age of 50 after receiving intensive therapy and rehabilitation for alcohol addiction.

The exhibition explores Sutherland’s recovery and how he found his voice as an artist and a human being. The title refers to the origins of behaviours and personality with the suggestion that any story can be restarted at any time.

The artist describes his work as coming from “Mundanitism”, as he seeks to find the extraordinary in the everyday, while the large scale of his paintings invites viewers to mentally “wear” them as a costume, projecting themselves into the scene and experiencing their own emotional response. www.beaconartscentre.co.uk

Jan Miller, Clustered bellflower

Margaret Evans, Evening Calm on the Loch

Willie Sutherland, Portrait of the Artist as a Cowboy

Grand Art 2023 at Annan Gallery in Glasgow (until Mar 26) is a large mixed show featuring paintings by a wide selection of artists priced at £1,000 or lower. Look out also for solo shows by Ron Lawson, Alison McWhirter, Beth Robertson-Fiddes and Rosanne Barr and twoperson exhibitions pairing George Birrell with Ellis O’Connor and James Somerville Lindsay with Cecilia Cardiff. www.annanart.com

Rowena Comrie’s The Lake of Images: Surface Tension at Detail Framing & Gallery in Edinburgh (until Mar 25) is inspired by her visit to the unimaginable expanse of fresh water that is Lake Michigan in the United States.

She says: “I was left with an indelible memory of the strange, almost alien force encompassed by and contained within it. An unbroken horizon wider than the field of vision contradicts the idea of a lake. The lack of tides and the fresh water defy the notion of a sea. Like all bodies of water, its colours are defined by the weather, but Lake Michigan has its own innumerably subtle shades that, as a painter, I’m challenged to produce in my work.”

“These new paintings show aspects of the lake symbolically, the oppositional ideas of otherworldliness and functionality painted in harmony. The power contained and its potential force expressed in paint reveal a contradiction to the usual placid appearance of the lake. The beautiful colours, the transparency and variety of tone combine, comprising an edgeless mass of subtle movement and force contained within unseen boundaries.” www.detailframing.co.uk

www.rowenacomrie.co.uk

Jennifer MacLean: Fifty Years of Watercolour and Weaving at Birnam Arts by Dunkeld (until Mar 20) features her nature-inspired paintings and ‘organic wall designs’ woven with her own hand-spun and naturally dyed wool. In both, her subject matter tends to be ‘things enduring’ such as stones, old buildings, vegetation and the landscape, all depicted in strong, vital colour. www.birnamarts.com

Jennifer MacLean, Uig Flow

Rowena Comrie, Surface Tension

Jonathan Shearer, Summer Sky, oil on board

There is still time to catch the Winter Exhibition at Kilmorack Gallery near Beauly (until Mar 13), a rolling show with new works constantly arriving as sold works are taken off to their new homes. www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

Landscapes of East Lothian at Marchmont Gallery in Edinburgh (until Mar 11) is a group exhibition celebrating the seascapes, landscapes and harbours of that beautiful part of Scotland. www.marchmontgallery.com

Jo Perkins, Tumbledown Dunes, mixed media on canvas

Alan Macdonald, Heroica Botanica

The High St. Gallery in Kirkcudbright has a large collection of Georgian to midcentury retro art glass, pottery from the Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and mid-century periods and new paintings by James Macaulay, Davy Brown and Hazel Campbell. www.highstgallery.co.uk

Arusha Gallery in Edinburgh has work by the award-winning Argentinian photographer Romina Ressia, known for her Renaissance-influenced images combined with contemporary objects - chewing gum, water pistols, balloons, cigarettes – to create pieces of social commentary in both a nod to classical aesthetics and a break from the great masters. www.arushagallery.com

James Macaulay, Hard Standing, Cellardyke

Romina Ressia, Red Lips

Bernie Reid: Ornamental Breakdown at Edinburgh

Printmakers (until Mar 16) is the artist’s first solo UK institutional show and showcases his process of layering stencils and spray paint on a range of materials, including the kind of slip-resistant vinyl flooring often found in industrial and commercial spaces. The results are a series of psychedelic, figurative forms influenced by the graffiti movement and the work of the Italian futurist Fortunato Depero. www.edinburgh printmakers.co.uk

The next live and online auction at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh is Silver & Objets de Vertu (Mar 7), featuring gorgeously designed and skilfully made items from Britain, Scandinavia, the Continent, India and the Far East, including tea services, tankards, wine coolers, ink wells, cigarette cases, flatware, entree dishes, toast racks, trays, salvers and much more.

Next up is Jewellery (Mar 8), with a dazzling array of necklaces, rings, bangles, bracelets, brooches, earrings and pendants. www.lyonandturnbull.com

A pair of lapis lazuli & diamond earrings (Lot 14. est. £300-£400)

Bernie Reid, Photo: Neil Hanna

Released to cinemas on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day, Mary Cassatt: Painting the Modern Woman is the latest film from Exhibition On Screen, the producers who work with major international museums and galleries to create a cinematic immersion into some of the world’s best loved art.

American-born, Cassatt made a career painting the lives of the women around her. Her radical images showed them as intellectual, curious and engaging, which was a major shift in the way women appeared in art.

A classically trained artist who detested being described as a ‘woman painter’, Cassatt joined a group of Parisian radicals – the Impressionists – in a movement which transformed the language of art. The film traces a time of great social and cultural change, when women were fighting for their rights and the language of art was completely rewritten. www.exhibitiononscreen.com

Georgia O’Keeffe: Memories of Drawings at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock (until Apr 22) is a new Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition which features 21 photogravures of drawings produced by the American artist between 1915 and 1963. Photogravure is a printmaking process which produces etchings with the tone and detail of a photograph through exposure onto a copper plate.

Renowned for her distinctive balance of abstraction with figuration and her tenacity in pursuing her innovative style, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is one of the most important artists in 20th century American art. Her iconic works of organic forms such as flowers and bones, surreal abstractions, rural landscapes and urban cityscapes broke new ground for women artists.

Although best known as a painter, drawing was central to O’Keeffe’s practice in depicting the curve of a flower petal, a desert horizon, a wave of hair or a winding road. It was her pivotal charcoal abstractions which secured her inaugural exhibitions in 1916-17, organised by the prominent photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who later became her husband. https://eastayrshireleisure.com/events/georgia-o-keeffe-memoriesof-drawings/

Throughout the history of art, dogs have made cameo appearances, whether as doting companions, savage hunters or curious bystanders. They often inspired artists or gave a clue to an artist’s personality or lifestyle. Andy Warhol took his dachshund Archie to art openings. Edvard Munch’s terriers accompanied him to his studio or to the movies. (He left if one of them barked.) Frida Kahlo featured her Mexican hairless dogs in her self-portraits. Picasso had various dogs, the most famous being Lump, another dachshund, which he took everywhere. Gerber Fine Art in Glasgow has a veritable pack of dog pictures just waiting for you to fawn over. www.gerberfineart.co.uk

Mary Cassatt, In the Loge

Georgia O’Keeffe, Goat’s Horns II, 1945, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London 2023, Photo: Anna Arca

Neil MacPherson RSA RGI RSW, The Couple, oil on board

SIX of the best

by Susan Mansfield

Home is Not a Place, Stills, Edinburgh What does it mean to be black and British? Photographer, writer and radio presenter Johny Pitts and award-winning poet Roger Robinson went on a journey around Britain in a red Mini Cooper asking that very question. The project resulted in a book of poems and photographs and a series of exhibitions of which this is the first in Scotland.

Images selected from the thousands taken by Pitts celebrate the complexity and resilience of black British culture in coastal, rural, urban and suburban areas, including a number from the Scottish leg of the journey. Pitts says he wants to “celebrate black spaces, capture them while they’re still here and give them a home.” Mar 9-Jun 10, www.still.org

RSA New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh Every year, the RSA creates a showcase of emerging artists selected from the previous year’s degree shows. As the art world continues to play catch-up with the postponements caused by the pandemic, this show brings together almost 60 graduates from 2021 in art and architecture. Expect painting, sculpture, film-making, photography, printmaking and performance as well as work which does not fall easily into any category, as artists continue to push boundaries and combine disciplines.

This cohort of students suffered the full impact of the pandemic with studios closed and physical degree shows cancelled, so this exhibition is an important platform to show their work to a wide audience before moving on to the next stage of their careers. Mar 18-Apr 16, £8/£5, www.royalscottishacademy.org

Johny Pitts, Kenya Friend Chicken, Firth Park

Free unless otherwise indicated

Louise Black, Aching in the loneliness of detachment, Part 1 & 2

Chila Burman, Eat Me Now

What’s New? Recent additions to Dundee’s Fine Art Collection, The McManus, Dundee These are difficult times for regional museums and galleries, so it is encouraging to see that some are continuing to add to their collections in a dynamic way. This showcase of work recently purchased or gifted to Dundee’s major art gallery is a pleasing treasure trove, from a rare portrait by Dundee landscape painter James McIntosh Patrick to a major sculptural installation, The Plural, by Scottish sculptor Doug Cocker to Bell’s Byre by Joan Eardley, one of several paintings inspired by holidays on a working sheep farm near Selkirk. Contemporary works are also included such as the three haiku-like Ideas by Katie Paterson and a series of woodblock prints from Alberta Whittle’s Secreting Myths series, exploring colonisation, oppression and survival. Ongoing, www.mcmanus.co.uk

Poor Things, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Sculpture is perhaps the most rarefield and versatile of artistic media. This show, which hopes to ‘ignite conversations about class through sculpture’, poses fascinating questions: What impact does an artist’s background have on the work they make and does it affect choices about materials, aesthetics and how ideas manifest in the work?

The show is organised by artists Emma Hart and Dean Kenning, who have structured it as a series of conversations, with each artist filmed talking in front of their sculpture. This footage is shown alongside the works by some 20 artists, making it not only a series of dialogues on a theme, but also a snapshot of contemporary sculpture in Britain today. Mar 4-May 21, www.fruitmarket.co.uk

Donald Bain, Window by the Canal, 1953

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Pathways to Abstraction, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle The largest exhibition of work by the Scots-born abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham for over 30 years offers fascinating insights into the first half of her career. A 1937 graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, Barns-Graham moved to St Ives in 1940, then home to some of the key figures of the British avant-garde. This show captures her 20-year evolution from promising landscape painter to fully fledged abstractionist, enabling us to watch her experiments in form and colour, from her powerful, semi-abstract paintings of the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland to the pure abstracts of the 1960s focussing on colour and shape. This rare chance to see an artist’s development unfold before our eyes shows how she developed from being a minor member of the St Ives group to become a powerful pioneering painter in her own right. Until May 20, www.hattongallery.co.uk

Ifeoma U. Anyaeji: The Journey of My Masquerade, Tramway, Glasgow Nonbiodegrable plastics are an environmental menace, but Nigerian artist Ifeoma U. Anyaeji has found a way to turn them into distinctive and vibrant sculptures. She creates her large scale, hand-crafted pieces from bottles and carrier bags, weaving the plastic thread into braids using a Nigerian hair-plaiting technique and traditional West African basketry methods. The braids are then shaped and layered into brightly coloured spirals, coils and loops. For her first exhibition in Scotland, she celebrates the folklore, music, texiles and domestic and communal spaces of Nigeria, referencing the costumes of the Masquerade - traditionally performed only by men - using craft practices regarded as feminine. Mar 11-Jun 4, www.tramway.org

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Studio Interior (Red Stool Studio), 1945

Ifeoma Anyaeji, Ghangha the rainmaker

Music

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra continues its season with Folk Inspirations with Pekka, in which the Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto performs Janácek’s Kreutzer Sonata and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 3 and is joined by the American neo-folk singer/songwriter Sam Amidon in arrangements of Appalachian folk songs (Mar 9 & 10, Edinburgh & Glasgow).

Following a sold out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Scottish composer, harpist and singer Esther Swift is heading out on a solo Scottish tour (Mar 11-27). Likened to to Kate Bush, Anna Meredith and Björk, her music draws on her folk roots and takes influence from her love of jazz, minimalism and dance music to explore ritual, connection, isolation and the natural world.

Kuusisto also features in Les Illuminations, in which he is joined by tenor Allan Clayton in Britten’s work of the same name set to the phantasmagorical verse of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, along with works by Nico Muhly (including the Scottish premiere of the violin concerto Shrink) and Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D (Mar 15-17, St Andrews, Edinburgh & Glasgow). www.sco.org.uk

Traditional music promoters Soundhouse continue their Monday evening concert series at the Traverse in Edinburgh with the legendary folk triumvirate McGoldrick, McCusker & Doyle, masters of flute, fiddle, guitar and song (Feb 27) followed by fellow folkies Will Pound & Jenn Butterworth with a combination of harmonica, melodeon and guitar (Mar 6) and the all-women fiddle quartet Rant (Mar 13). Next up is the English button accordion/fiddle/concertina trio Leveret (Mar 20) and another threesome, the Firelight Trio, who take audiences on a broad and colourful sweep through European folk music from Scandinavia through Scotland and France to the Balkans (Mar 27). www.traverse.co.uk

www.soundhouse.org.uk

Esther Swift

As well as recent commissions from Celtic Connections, the Manchester Jazz Festival and the Edwin Morgan Trust, Swift has composed instrumental settings for works by poets such as Carol Ann Duffy, William Butler Yeats, Rachel McCrum and Edwin Morgan. The upcoming tour will showcase some of these alongside new original material. www.estherswift.co.uk

Sam Amidon

Fiddle quartet Rant

Music

Marking its 60th anniversary, Scottish Opera takes to the road from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands with the popular Opera Highlights (until Mar 25). The playlist for four singers and a pianist on the theme of love includes selections from Mozart’s The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Verdi’s Macbeth and Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers alongside music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Gounod and a composition written by Mendelssohn when he was just 12 years old. The production also features the world premiere of Told By An Idiot, a reworking of Macbeth by Scottish Opera’s 2021/22 Emerging Artist and composer Toby Hession, with libretto by Emma Jenkins. www.scottishopera.org.uk

Edinburgh’s first ever harpsichord festival, Harpsichord en fête, features music by local and European musicians performing works by Bach and French songs arranged for voice and harpsichord (Mar 10, 11 & 13). www.ifecosse. org.uk/Harpsichord-en-Fete-2023,1883. html?lang=en

Conductor John Wilson leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra into a world of moody, memorable and at times heartbreaking melodies in Rachmaninov’s final piece, his Symphonic Dances, preceded by RSNO Principal Clarinet Timothy Orpen performing Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto (Mar 9-11, Dundee, Edinburgh & Glasgow).

RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Elim Chan conducts Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the orchestra plays Anna Clyne’s free-spirited This Midnight Hour and Scottish pianist Steven Osborne takes to the stage for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 (Mar 16-18, Aberdeen, Edinburgh & Glasgow).

John Williams at the Oscars is a full-blown tribute to the master soundtrack composer, whose 50-plus Oscar nominations and five wins are unrivalled for scores such as Star Wars, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan (Mar 2325, Aberdeen, Edinburgh & Glasgow).

Rounding out the month is A Festival of Brahms, featuring grand, melodic and poetic symphonies by one of the Romantic period’s greatest composers (Mar 30, 31 & Apr 1, Perth, Edinburgh & Glasgow). www.rsno.org.uk

Guest Conductor Elim Chan conducts the RSNO for Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

(l to r) Holly Teague, Annie Reilly, Colin Murray & Andrew Henley in Opera Highlights, Photo: Kirsty Anderson

Educating Rita at Perth Theatre (Mar 16-Apr 1) follows a hairdresser who yearns to escape the routine of her work and social life for something more profound. She signs up for an Open University course in English Literature, where she meets jaded professor Frank Bryant, who finds her enthusiasm refreshing and is forced to re-examine his attitudes, while Susan finds Frank’s tutelage is an open door to a bohemian lifestyle and a new self-confidence.

Willy Russell’s modern classic premiered in 1980 at the Royal Shakespeare Company, went on to win multiple awards and was adapted for a feature film starring Julie Walters and Michael Caine. It is still as relevant and powerful as ever. www.perththeatreandconcerthall.com

In its Scottish premiere, Cyprus Avenue at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow (until Mar 25) follows Eric, played by David Hayman as a Belfast Loyalist stuck in the past. Convinced despite his family’s protestations that his five-week old granddaughter is in fact the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, he believes his Protestant cultural heritage is under siege and he must act. Hilarious, fast-paced and absurd with some dark twists and turns. www.tron.co.uk

The ever popular series A Play, A Pie and A Pint has returned to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which is this year celebrating its 60th anniversary.

The winner of the David MacLennan Award, which uncovers new writing talent and professionally produces the work of first-time and early career writers, Burning Bright looks at the climate crisis from the point of view of three people experiencing first hand the impacts of our rapidly changing world (Mar 7-11).

Drawing on Slavic folk tales, BABS is a musical adventure about self-discovery and a hagturned-hostess. Young quine Lisa has been dumped by her best mate for a new manand she’s raging. That’s their annual holiday to Ibiza out the window, and it’s looking like a summer alone in Aberdeen for poor Lisa until her fortunes change and she finds herself at a forest sanctuary run by eccentric oracle Babs (Mar 14-18).

In Write-Off (Mar 21-25) Freddie is a gay man who writes gritty, psychological thrillers and refuses to compromise his storytelling approach for the sake of political correctness. However, due to rising public criticism, he cracks under his publisher’s pressure and hires a young sensitivity reader to keep him in check. www.traverse.co.uk

Traverse Theatre

Gray O’Brien plays Frank in Educating Rita.

David Hayman in Cyprus Avenue

Cheddar Gorgeous in a suit designed by Liquorice Black

Tartan barmy

Both adored and derided, tartan appears everywhere, from kitsch souvenirs to haute couture. As V&A Dundee prepares to showcase it in a large scale exhibition, Susan Mansfield looks at its enduring appeal to artists and designers.

Visiting the New York home and studio of the late minimalist Donald Judd, restored to how it was at the time of Judd’s death in 1994 and now open to the public, Mhairi Maxwell, a curator at V&A Dundee, found herself taking a peek into the

wardrobe. A few surprises were in store, not least the artist’s plaid tartan jackets.

Maxwell stepped back in astonishment. She had heard Judd was a scotophile who hired a piper to play at his gallery openings. Now she remembered the print series he made in the early 1990s using bright colours in a grid

pattern. Suddenly it made sense. He was inspired by tartan.

Maxwell says: “Judd was fascinated by symmetry, pattern and colour and how that interacts in space. That’s exactly what tartan is. He was unpicking the warp and weft of a tartan, taking it back to its building blocks.”

So, if you visit Tartan, a large scale exhibition opening at V&A Dundee on April 1, one of the first things you will see is not a shortbread tin or a painting of Bonnie Prince Charlie, not even a Vivienne Westwood gown, but a set of prints by one of the fathers of American minimalism. This is a show which sets out to surprise.

Maxwell, who organised the exhibition with colleagues Kirsty Hassard and James Wylie, admits that she took some convincing that tartan was the best subject for the museum’s first home-curated show.

She admits: “My first reaction was to back away and say ‘I wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole’. I had the Commonwealth Games, Tunnocks teacakes and shortbread tins swirling around in my head. But that’s what makes it such a rich subject for a design museum to explore.”

Jonathan Faiers, Professor of Fashion Thinking at the University of Southampton and author of an influential book also titled Tartan, has been consultant curator on the project. He says: “We all understand tartan associations with the kilt and Highland tradition and big fashion designers like Westwood and McQueen. This show has all that, but

Doddie Weir by Gerard M. Burns (National Galleries of Scotland)

also so much more. It’s really exciting and surprising how widely tartan has been used and adapted as a pattern beyond its use in fashion. You will see things you expect to see, but you’ll see a lot of other things you never thought you’d come across.”

While the myriad uses of tartan in fashion will be explored, from punk to Dior and Japanese street style to the Bay City Rollers, the show will also include art, design, film, theatre and even architecture.

Faiers continues: “Tartan is unique. It’s both high culture and low culture. It’s intrinsically Scottish, but there are different versions across the world. It can be associated with independence, anti-establishment and subversion, but it is also deeply associated

with Conservative rule, the establishment and the royal family.

“Normally, if a fabric is associated with street fashion, couture stays away and vice versa. But tartan is both. It can be incredibly democratic or exclusively high end. It comes and goes on the runways from season to season, but it never goes away.”

“Part of its appeal is that it’s a patterned cloth both men and women feel okay to wear, though I don’t think you can help but make a statement, even if you wear the more subdued colours. A number of contemporary designers who are interested in non-binary, who don’t see design as exclusively for men or for women, are using it. It is continually being reinvented.”

“ Tartan is continually being reinvented.”

Portrait of Alan Cumming by Christian Hook

SUBJECT MATTER

While tartan has been used to sell Scotland around the world, it still divides opinion at home. Its history is complex. It is both a symbol of Jacobite rebellion and a romantic affectation imposed on Scotland by Walter Scott for the visit of King George IV in 1822. It has suffered from being used for kitsch souvenirs for more than 150 years.

However, Faiers believes the political charge in tartan - banned by the Government following the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746 - has added to its appeal. He says, “Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were very shrewd. They were aware of the cultural references. Even if to many people there might be associations with royalty, tartan was seen as having so much power it had to be legislated against. It was a rallying call for the resistance to English rule. Whether every punk understood that is doubtful, but it doesn’t matter.”

As the portraits in the exhibition show, tartan is powerful, whether as a status symbol or an act of ironic subversion. Lord Mungo Murray, painted in full Highland dress by John

Michael Wright in the late 17th century, was parading his credentials as a Scottish laird. Three centuries later, Alan Cumming by the artist Christian Hook lounges with his kilt provocatively around his neck. Gerard M. Burns celebrates a contemporary hero in his portrait of Doddie Weir in a tartan suit, while Liverpool-based artists The Singh Twins depict Sikh millionaire Sardar Iqbal Singh, the self-styled “Laird of Lesmahagow”, with gentle irony. Singh, who made Scotland his home, registered his own tartan.

Mhairi Maxwell believes that the secret of tartan’s endurance and ubiquity lies in the strong grid structure which so fascinated Donald Judd, a set of rules and creative parameters within which designers can explore all sorts of design possibilities and art concepts.

Take, for example, the Dutch architect (and Benedictine monk) Hans van der Laan, a leading figure in the modernist Bossche School, who used the grid of a Scottish tartan to devise a system for understanding architectural space. Materials relating to van

A woman’s boot, 1950s, courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum

Kilted dressing table by Precious McBane called Perfectly Peek-ed

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der Laan and his buildings will be displayed in the exhibition, the first time they have been loaned outside the Netherlands.

Also included are examples of The Manhattan Tartan Project by American artists J. Morgan Puett and Suzanne Bocanegra, who designed several tartans to represent New York, matching colours and thread counts to demographic and economic data to map the city’s racial and economic inequalities.

Lincolnshire-based artist Michael Sanders had a suit made of Polaris tartan (developed for the US naval base at Holy Loch in Argyll, where Polaris submarines were kept during the Cold War) and wore it to make “gentle interventions” at nuclear sites. His suit and Polaris tartan telephone box will be in the show.

Mhairi Maxwell says the show aims to bring a “global perspective” on tartan, which is made in Japan and the Caribbean as well as in Scotland. A new installation has been commissioned by artist and fashion designer Olubiyi Thomas, who grew up in Glasgow and fuses aspects of his Nigerian and Scottish heritage in his work.

Maxwell says: “We wanted to decolonise tartan, to de-centre it, and that has been a really rich theme, to see these takes on Scottish nationality looked at in a very inclusive global way. It poses interesting questions around ethnicity and national identity.”

Tartan is all of this, from Jackie Stewart’s tartan racing helmet or a kitschy kilted dressing table by interior designer Precious McBane to a Hillman Imp with tartan upholstery or a gorgeous 1950s evening gown, loaned by the Philadelphia Museum, made of beads in a tartan pattern by the American designer James Galanos.

One of Jonathan Faiers’ personal favourites, he says of it: “Not only does it look supercontemporary, it’s also typically American mid-century Mad Men. It was a surprise to me that tartan can look that glamorous and chic and American. From a monk who made architecture based on tartan to an utterly glamorous piece of New York design. That sums up the show.”

The Singh Twins, Laird Singhs his Tartan’s Praises (National Museums Scotland)

Hand-made for you & your home

Jeweller Allison Macleod of Phorme combines her medical background with a creative vocation to explore themes of connection and nurture. Her new collection, Microplasticology, was made in response to finding microplastics in human blood, with each brooch illustrating how we are all being exposed. www.phorme.co.uk

Using yarn from Cheviot fleece from the Scottish Borders, textile designer Janet Hughes of Balgarvie Weaving creates contemporary scarves, wraps, cowls, bags and accessories with Pop and primitive patterns woven on a hand loom. https://balgarvieweaving.co.uk/blog

Combining textured and formed silver with interesting and unusual semi-precious gemstones, jeweller Angela Learoyd uses a variety of techniques to produce threedimensional, sculptural shapes with bold, clean lines.

www.angelalearoydjewellery.com

All the featured makers are members of Applied Arts Scotland, which supports and connects makers working in a sector made up primarily of sole traders and micro-businesses in both urban and rural locations. www.appliedartsscotland.org.uk

One of only a few people in the UK using traditional enamel sign-making techniques, Jim Ramsay makes art pieces, limited edition homeware and bespoke signs by fusing multiple layers of coloured glass powder to steel plate in a kiln. Pictured: Two-part wall piece no. 3 www.jimramsaystudio.com

Jay Rubinstein creates mobiles which celebrate stories and poems such as The Conference of Birds (pictured), inspired by a Persian poem in which a group of birds combine to form a ‘simurgh’, a mythical bird. He makes extensive use of veneers - sheets of wood less than a millimetre thick – to make light pieces of considerable strength with less wastage than solid wood. www.jrubinstein.co.uk

Meg McGregor of NutMeg Glass has a range of contemporary, hand-blown functional glassware in bold forms and striking colours, including vases, jugs, candle-holders and scent bottles.

Pictured: Highlandscape candleholders. www.nutmegglass.co.uk

High five

From medieval masters to ‘metamatics’, Basel’s top five art museums cater to all tastes, writes

Ian Sclater

Ferdinand Hodler’s View into Infinity dwarfs a visitor to the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Tucked into the ‘three countries triangle’, where France, Germany and Switzerland interlock, Basel is known throughout the art world for hosting Art Basel, the leading global event connecting galleries, collectors and artists which also lends its name to fairs in Miami, Hong Kong and Paris. It’s part of a thriving cultural scene in a city which boasts the greatest density of museums in Switzerland, about 40 in all.

Architecturally, a blend of old and new ranges from the richly decorated, red sandstone town hall and the late Romanesque-Gothic cathedral to the most buildings in Switzerland by modern “starchitects” such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and local heroes Herzog & de Meuron.

The city’s art museums appeal to a wide range of tastes and include works by medieval to modern masters held in the oldest public art collection in the world (and the largest and most important in Switzerland) to a world famous private collection shown in its sleek, custom-designed museum (and Switzerland’s most visited).

The Kunstmuseum Basel (‘Kunst’ is German for art) has the largest and most important collection in Switzerland (and the oldest public art collection in the world), with around 4,000 paintings, sculptures, installations and video works as well as 300,000 drawings and prints spanning 800 years from the late Middle Ages to the present day - a journey through the history of art.

The collection is spread over three buildings: the modernist, 1930s Hauptbau (Main Building), the 2016 Neubau (New Building) across the street, dedicated to special exhibitions – the two are connected by an underground gallery - and the Kunstmuseum der Gegenwart (Contemporary Art Museum) in the picturesque St Alban quarter.

Visitors to the Main Building are greeted by Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais in the courtyard, which is illuminated at night by Dan Flavin’s installation Untitled. In Memory of Urs Graf, dedicated to the Swiss Renaissance artist. In the foyer three stained glass windows depicting painting, sculpture and the University and the Museum bathe the space in pastel light.

The museum’s two ‘patron saints’ are particularly well represented. The largest group of works by the Holbein family includes Hans the Younger’s The Last Supper and The Dead Christ in the Tomb, a horizontal, lifesize – and life-like – side view of the crucified Jesus. Both can be found in a large Middle Ages and Renaissance section.

The Kunstmuseum also has the world’s most important collection of work - over 90 paintings and sculptures - by Basel-born Arnold Böcklin, one of the key exponents of Symbolism and an influence on Surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali.

Kunstmuseum Basel

Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais stands in the courtyard of the Main Building of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Photo: Julian Salinas

Otherwise the many highlights include a beautiful Dutch/Flemish collection (Teniers, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brouwer et al), a roomful of Ferdinand Hodlers, a wonderful series of panoramic Alpine landscapes, Lucas Cranach’s The Judgement of Paris*, Pieter Bruegel the Younger’s The Triumph of Death (with his father’s eye for gruesome detail) and leading lights of the 19th and 20th centuries such as (deep breath) Degas, Corot, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, Delacroix, Matisse, Rousseau, Dufy, Gris, Kokoschka, Miro, Ernst, Calder, Dali, Renoir, Mondrian, Klee, van Gogh, Gauguin and Chagall. *See also IMAGE ANALYSIS page 68

The Museum for Contemporary Art has a pretty riverside location in the picturesque St Alban quarter amid timber-framed houses on the site of a medieval paper mill, with the mill stream still rushing by. Opened in 1980 as the first public museum in Europe exclusively dedicated to contemporary art from the 1960s to the present, its collection includes works by Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman and Jeff Wall. There is an ongoing series of special exhibitions. www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch

Museum of Contemporary Art

Fondation Beyeler

Fondation Beyeler

Reached by tram in the quiet suburb of Riehen, Fondation Beyeler is Switzerland’s most visited art museum. Designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano (Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Shard in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, etc.), it seems embedded in the landscaped Berower Park, its floor to ceiling windows bringing the outside in.

The museum houses the private collection of the late Swiss art dealer and collector Ernst Beyeler (an originator of Art Basel in 1970) and

On the site of the old city theatre, moving iron figures in the Tinguely Fountain resemble the mime artists, actors and dancers who once performed there.

his wife Hilda, which spans the Impressionist, classic modern and contemporary eras. Rooms are devoted to artists such as Miro, Matisse, Rothko, Picasso (some two dozen works), Monet, Cezanne, Giacometti, Warhol, Bourgeois, Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Bacon and Tillmans. There are also some 25 objects of tribal art from Africa, Oceania and Alaska and several rooms dedicated to special exhibitions (Mondrian, Wayne Thiebaud, Jean-Michel Basquiat, etc.) to complement the permanent collection.

A nice touch: You can relax with an art magazine in a long, sun-filled lounge area with views of the surrounding fields, vineyards and hills. www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Standing on the banks of the River Rhine, the Tinguely Museum is dedicated to the work of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, best known for his kinetic sculptural machines (known officially as metamatics) which satirised the industrialised and mechanised world (“We live in a wheel civilisation”, said Tinguely) and the overproduction of material goods.

Reached from the city centre along a pleasant riverside path, the museum has a sleek design by the Swiss architect Mario Botta (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, etc.), with curved, glass-walled corridors offering sweeping views over the river to the Old Town.

The collection is based on a donation of 52 sculptures by the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (one of her curvaceous, multi-coloured, resin sculptures stands in the grounds), from early filigree works to monumental machine sculptures of the 1980s, making it the world’s largest collection of Tinguely’s works. (De St Phalle and Tinguely collaborated on the Stravinsky Fountain in front of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.)

One of Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptural machines

Kunsthalle

Visitors are encouraged to interact with the works by using foot switches to set them in motion. A ‘traffic light’ system indicates whether a work is on pause (to reduce the running time and mechanical stress) or is ready to be activated. The larger contraptions are playfully festooned with found objects and toys such as a carousel horse, a drumming garden gnome and a wooden Pinocchio.

The works initially met mostly with incomprehension and were variously described by critics as ‘motorised heaps

of rubbish’, ‘bicycle graveyards’ and ‘scrap sculptures’, but by the time of his death in 1991 at only 66, Tinguely’s ‘art fonctionnel’ had made him one of the most popular Swiss artists of the 20th century.

Some of his sculptural machines can also be seen in the Tinguely Fountain, where the old city theatre once stood. Here ten iron figures appear to be playing in the water. In constant motion, they are like the mime artists, actors and dancers who once performed there.

www.tinguely.ch

Next to the Tinguely Fountain in the city centre, the Kunsthalle was founded in 1872, making it Switzerland’s oldest and still most active institution dedicated to contemporary art. Particularly recognised for its support of emerging artists, it stages up to ten exhibitions a year. The ground floor of the building, formerly an artist’s clubhouse, is now the Kunsthalle Basel Restaurant, its walls adorned with classical murals.

www.kunsthallebasel.ch

Just off the city centre, the Skulpturhalle has one of the world’s largest collections of plaster casts of ancient sculpture, including the complete and one of a kind reconstruction of the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. Bonus: Free entry.

www.basel.com/en/attractions/ skulpturhalle-basel-50f92d0d7a

Public art

Skulpturhalle

artful lodger Be an

Displaying distinctive art in a hotel can help to differentiate it from others and give it a unique identity. As the hospitality industry becomes increasingly competitive, hoteliers now recognise the need for individuality, and more and more of them are turning to art to achieve that. In the process they are creating art collections which not only enhance their interiors, but also engage with an increasingly sophisticated clientele. Artmag recently visited some San Francisco hotels which appeal to art-lovers.

After a day of gallery-hopping in San Francisco you can continue your art experience in some of the city’s top hotels.

Is it a hotel? Is it an art gallery? The lobby of the San Francisco Proper Hotel

At the CitizenM Union Square (‘Where art is as important as fluffy pillows’) the emphasis in the open plan living room and canteen (no formal lobby or restaurant here) is on playful, irreverent art, mainly by California artists, with primary colours, graphic nods to Lichtenstein, Warhol and Picasso and a whimsical collection of items – a colourful bust of Frida Kahlo, an outsize pair of red lips, a gold Jeff Koons-like dog and rabbit kissing couple, a multicoloured gorilla sculpture –suggesting this is not a hotel group which takes itself too seriously. Where else will you find a sign in the bathroom asking you not to flush goldfish (or cash) down the toilet?

A stand out commissioned piece in the living room is Digital Sunflower by Los Angeles-based FriendsWithYou. Composed of simplified geometric abstractions, it captures the hotel’s playful ethos, as does an assortment of games, including a chess set with pieces shaped like San Francisco landmarks such as Coit Tower, the Transamerica “Pyramid” and Salesforce Tower. Upstairs in the guest corridors you can walk the streets of San Francisco on a carpet emblazoned with its building facades.

The Amsterdam-based CitizenM group (the M stands for mobile) has joined the ranks of some of the world’s top museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Saatchi Gallery and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, by becoming a member of Smartify, the company behind an app for art-lovers which uses image recognition technology to identify artworks and provide information about them. A selection of pieces from CitizenM hotels worldwide can be discovered via the app, while the in-room iPad can take you on an art tour of the chain’s collection of over 400 original works.

Bonus: The hotel is a block and a half from the famous cable car turntable at the foot of Powell Street and across from one of San Francisco’s most iconic restaurants, John’s Grill, featured in The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s novel noir about the private detective Sam Spade. www.citizenm.com

CitizenM living room

CitizenM canteen

Kissing couple

There is hardly a better location for a hotel in San Francisco than the Presidio, the former site of a US army base (a presidio was a fort in Spanish California), which has been absorbed into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Hugging the western shoulder of the peninsula on which the city stands, it is now one of the largest urban parks in the world, with forests, hiking trails, beaches and stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Pacific Ocean.

Here there are two options for visitors wishing to escape the bustle of Downtown, the Inn at the Presidio in a 1903 Georgian Revival-style building which served as the bachelor officers’ quarters and its sister boutique hotel the Lodge at the Presidio in a former barracks building. Both have been tastefully modernised while retaining a colonial atmosphere and artfully appointed by curator Julie Coyle, who has dug into the archives and collated an impressive collection of images and artefacts to give a sense of where and how San Francisco began.

The art theme continues outside too, where the renowned English ‘land artist’ Andy Goldsworthy has been inspired by the location to create four installations, the largest collection of his works on public view in North America These are: Spire, a 100foot tall tapering tower constructed from the trunks of dozens of declining cypress

trees harvested at the end of their life; Wood Line, a sinuous, 1,200-foot sculpture of eucalyptus branches running along the forest floor; Earth Wall, a six-foot wide sphere constructed of eucalyptus branches embedded in an original adobe wall in a courtyard behind the former Officers Club; and Tree Fall, made from a huge tree branch suspended from the dome roof of the old stone Powder Magazine and covered with clay from the Presidio, which has dried and cracked into an organic pattern.

Bonus: Opened in 2022, Presidio Tunnel Tops is San Francisco’s newest park. Built over a stretch of freeway feeding traffic to and from the Golden Gate Bridge, its new elevation has created an unsurpassed view of the bridge, the Marin headlands and the North Bay. www.presidiolodging.com

Inn at the Presidio, Photo Paul Dyer

Lodge at the Presidio Junior Suite, Photo Paul Dyer

Bugle art at the Inn at the Presidio

San Francisco’s newest hotel, The Line has commissioned local artists to provide works to add to its collection.

In the lobby guests are greeted by a multipiece wall installation by Sasinun Kladpetch made from found objects such as bits of concrete, moss, glass and resin that she collected when the parking lot which was previously on the site was excavated.

The arts non-profit Root Division provides quarterly rotating pieces by local artists in the coffee shop (Artmag admired oil and pastel portraits by Adriana Raquel Ramirez), while the spacious lounge has a variety of works, notably Cannon Dill’s Basquiat-like Neighbour’s Dog (Barking On Repeat). A large dot matrix piece by John Watson is a stand-out in the Tenderheart restaurant. Corridor art includes day-glo photography by Kelsey McClellan, who finds beauty in the

everyday, while every room has black and white San Francisco street photography by Travis Jensen.

There are superb views of Downtown from the rooftop bar and restaurant and be sure to admire the murals on the famous Warfield Theatre next door. And how can you not like a hotel which ignores suspicion and has a thirteenth floor?

www.thelinehotel.com/san-francisco

Cannon Dill’s Neighbour’s Dog (Barking on Repeat)

Sasinuk Kladpetch’s wall installation in The Line reception

The Palace Hotel is the ‘grande dame’ of San Francisco hotels. Originally opened in 1875 with 750 rooms, the world’s largest hotel at the time was equipped with all modern technology, including ‘rising rooms’ – or lifts, as we now know them. Destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, it was rebuilt and reopened three years later.

An early 1990s refurb retained all of the Beaux Arts building’s turn of the century grandeur, with wrought iron filigree work on the facade, gold leaf embellishment and angels over every doorway, polished marble floors, coved ceilings, soaring archways, period brass and Austrian crystal chandeliers

and deep mahogany wood throughout.

The piece de resistance is the stunning historic Garden Court. One of the world’s most beautiful dining rooms, it is surrounded by gold leaf sconces and mirrored doors and flanked by a double row of massive Italian marble Ionic columns – all topped with a luminous stained glass dome ceiling. It has hosted many historic occasions, including a 1919 luncheon by President Woodrow Wilson in support of the Versailles Treaty which ended World War I and the official 1945 banquet honouring the opening session of the United Nations, which was established in San Francisco.

Art-lovers will want to head for the Pied Piper Bar & Grill, named for the Maxfield Parrish painting The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which was commissioned for the 1909 reopening and now hangs above the bar. Featuring Parrish himself as the Pied Piper, it now calls drinkers and diners to relax amid Carrara marble coffee tables, black granite dining tables, vintage images on centuryold oak walls, hand-welded metal torchiere lamps custom-made in Italy and antique mirrors framed by original mouldings. www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/sfolcpalace-hotel-a-luxury-collection-hotelsan-francisco

Maxfield Parrish’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin in the Pied Piper Bar & Grill The Garden Court is one of the world’s most beautiful dining rooms.

The ‘grande dame’ of San Francisco hotels

Is it a hotel? Is is an art gallery? Housed in a landmark Beaux-Arts era, flatiron-style building – a wedge-shaped structure named for its similarity to a domestic iron – the lobby of the San Francisco Proper Hotel is covered with art from floor to high ceiling. Acquired at auction or souvenirs of the owner’s world travels, sculptures and antique objets d’art are liberally placed around the space, while paintings and etchings are displayed frame to frame reminiscent of the days when a gallery’s wall space was considered prime real estate and ‘white space’ was an alien concept. You can admire them while perusing an art book picked from neat stacks on coffee tables.

www.properhotel.com/san-francisco

Gilda’s private dining room in the Proper Hotel

The five-star St Regis San Francisco recently completed an artful update of its lobby, bar, guestrooms and meeting spaces, and with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as neighbours, it’s a great base for art-lovers.

In the reception area Randy Hibberd’s Solitude depicts an abstracted city with gold accents hinting at sunlight glistening on San Francisco Bay, while in the dining area Janie Rochfort’s dream-like watercolour landscape Mountain Mist is rich in olive greens and pinks to suggest a sunset reflecting off the city’s hills.

In the reimagined St Regis Bar, where a sweeping brass trellis is inspired by the famous San Francisco cable car lines, a colour palette of Pacific Ocean blues and warm pastels seems to act as a counterpoint to the bustling 3rd Street traffic framed by the floor to ceiling windows. Beautifully lit display boxes, floating glass shelves and the bar’s illuminated backdrop seem to beckon passers-by.

In the lounge area dark green and dusty rose pink upholstery is set off by sharply defined black furniture legs, while custom tables with sculptural stone bases and brass detailing add to the modern noir ambience. www.stregissanfrancisco.com

Janie Rochfort’s Mountain Mist in the dining area of the St Regis

St Regis Bar St Regis reception

Named after Leland Stanford, one of San Francisco’s great railroad tycoons, the Stanford Court stands on the site of his villa, which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. It can be seen as part of a collection of vintage photographs on display in the hotel.

Leland was a big horse fan (Stanford University now stands on the site of his former ranch), who was convinced that, at some point during a gallop, all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground. He hired a photographer who set up a series of cameras which a horse set off by activating

trip wires in an early version of stop motion photography. The sequence is immortalised on a wall of the hotel lobby with the ‘money shot’, proving Stanford to be correct, front and centre.

Art and photography are to the fore throughout the hotel. Digital screens show rotating high resolution images by local photographers, an enlarged technical drawing depicts Descartes’ theory of what makes a rainbow, a huge time lapse photograph shows racing boats on San Francisco Bay during the 2013 America’s Cup and on the

ceiling above the bar is a scene from the most famous car chase in motion picture history – Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen and shot in San Francisco.

The floor numbers on each elevator landing show different themes – an 8 made of baseball gloves on the eighth floor, a 7 in Chinese fortune cookies on the seventh, a 6 outlined in rope to reflect a nautical theme on the sixth and so on, while the hall carpets are designed like continuous rows of San Francisco houses. www.stanfordcourt.com

The Stanford Court hallways are filled with art.

The San Francisco 49ers play under Steve McQueen’s Bullitt car in the Stanford Court bar.

Leland Stanford’s proof that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground

Part of a group with hotels in several US cities, Staypineapple takes its name from the fruit which was a symbol of hospitality in early America. Because trade routes between America and Caribbean Islands were often slow and perilous, it was considered a significant achievement by a host to procure a ripe pineapple for guests.

Artworks from the private collection of owner Michelle Barnet are displayed throughout the hotel. A white bronze, lifesize figurative sculpture from the Nocturnes series by artist Karen LaMonte stands in the lobby. Body-less and made from cast glass, ceramic, metal and bronze, it explores clothing as a metaphor for identity. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, LaMonte has exhibited at the Czech Museum of Fine Art in Prague and the Museum of Glass International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, Washington state.

In the bistro and bar there are two large scale glass on panel works depicting dancers by David Willis. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he has been an instructor in flame-working and has pieces in public, private and museum collections nationally and internationally.

Other works in the collection include: End Game II, a collage of figures in different activities by Victor Ostrovsky; the life-size Penguins in black and cream lacquer by Robert Kuo; a suite of iconic embossed serigraphs from the California series by Erte with foil stamping showing elegant costume designs; and Lustful Selection, a giant, heart-

shaped box of chocolates by Peter Anton. It all goes to create a fun, friendly atmosphere. Besides, you can’t take yourself too seriously in a fluffy, bright yellow bathrobe with a pineapple insignia.

www.staypineapple.com/union-squaresan-francisco

Lobby of Staypineapple

Peter Anton’s Lustful Selection

Sculpture in Karen LaMonte’s Nocturnes series

Close to Fisherman’s Wharf, the Kimpton Alton Hotel is named for the late artist Alton Kelley of psychedelic rock poster fame. There is a framed original concert handbill by him near the entrance.

The hotel has a retro-chic feel in keeping with the 1970s building, with dimmed lighting, vintage area rugs and a grounded, natural colour scheme of harbour blue and celery green. The living room doubles as an exhibition space showing mixed media contemporary works, many by California artists. You can admire them from a cheetah print sofa.

Elsewhere in the hotel there is a diverse collection of art pieces. A hand-woven textile artwork by Trish Andersen hangs behind the lobby reception desk, evocative of the shag carpets of the 1970s. Look out also for Kate Drewniak’s collage work deconstructed from found materials and sewn back together, Danny Scott Lane’s photographic work inspired by classic

cinema, abstract paintings by Brooks Burns with sleek geometric shapes painted in an oversaturated palette and Hayley Sheldon’s large format installations.

A nice touch: Victrola record players in the bedrooms with vinyl selections of indie, relaxed electronic and modern soul. www.altonhotelsf.com

Acrylic piece by Yihong Hsu, Photo: James Baigrie

Trish Anderson’s hand-woven textile piece, Photo: Alias Creative

The Kimpton Alton living room doubles as an exhibition space.

Huh?

Talk about giving art a bad name. (Sources withheld to protect the guilty.)

(The artist’s) work demands us to question how we typically experience the world and opens our imagination to expand the realms of what we believe is possible beyond physical realities and how we show up in ourselves and collectively.

(The artist’s) paintings portray an inner presence and sense of intimacy through their fluidity and organic composition.

Various types of fabrics usually used for underlining of dresses are strategically chosen for their smoothness, lustrousness and unique porous properties, allowing the ink and water to flow and create often unpredictable staining patterns determined by the force, speed and sudden densities of pouring of the liquids.

The satin and semi-translucent fabric plays a key role in maintaining a sense of fragility and delicateness, allowing for gradual metamorphosis of the composition due to the reflectiveness and sheen of the material that partially erases the image when seen from certain angles in light and transparency.

The medium of multiple exposure analogue photography focuses on exploring the fragility and impermanence of memory in relation to the context through highlighting texture, form, detail, light and ambience.

(The exhibition) critically questions the technological, aesthetic and political conditions of making labour visible.

African Art Now, by Osei Bonsu, pub. Ilex Press

Over the past two decades contemporary African art has taken its rightful place on the world stage. Today, African artists work outside the confines of limiting categories and outdated perceptions, producing art which is as much a reflection of Africa’s tumultuous past as a vision of its limitless future. Published in collaboration with the Tate, this expansive and far-reaching overview features some of the most interesting and innovative artists working today, celebrating the diversity and dynamism of the contemporary art scene across the African continent.

Vermeer, ed. Pieter Roelofs & Gregor

J. M. Weber, pub. Hannibal Books

The official publication accompanying the largest Vermeer exhibition ever staged, currently running at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (until Jun 4), immerses the reader in the immensely rich pictorial world of the master painter from Delft. All 37 works attributed to him, such as The Milkmaid and Girl with a Pearl Earring, are included and examined in extraordinary close-up detail. An international team of experts has conducted extensive research into the life and artistry of the 17th century artist which has yielded new insights into his social position, household, religious life, technique and the influence of his environment on his painting.

The Endless Coloured Ways, by Sanja Marusic, pub. Hannibal Books

The DutchCroatian artist Sanja Marušic creates new worlds with her intriguing, vibrantly coloured self-portraits and desolate landscapes, whether influenced by her world travels or by using her own living room as a backdrop. Experimenting with shapes, colours and layers, she explores recurring themes such as escapism, the relationship between man and nature, motherhood and finding a balance in human relationships. Starting with photography, she uses a variety of analogue and digital techniques, sometimes changing the image in such a way that it seems as if we are looking at a painting.

Anatomy of a Painting

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Judgement of Paris, 1528, Kunstmuseum Basel

The backstory: As first related in the works of Homer, Eris, the goddess of discord, peeved that she has not been invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, attends unannounced and throws a golden apple, inscribed ‘To the fairest’, into the midst of the guests.

The goddesses Aphrodite, Athena and Hera all claim the prize and Jupiter decrees that the dispute can only be resolved by Paris, who is living as a shepherd having been rejected by his father, King Priam of Troy, because of a prophecy that Paris would bring about the downfall of Troy.

Hermes, the messenger of the gods, brings the goddesses to Paris and stands by holding the coveted prize, here transformed into a glass orb. Paris has dismounted his horse and appears to have been resting under a tree when the group arrives. He holds a red hat festooned with ostrich feathers, a type worn by high-ranking military officers.

The three goddesses attempt to bribe Paris to win this beauty contest. Hera promises him power, Athena offers wisdom and Aphrodite the love of Helen of Troy, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta and the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris names Aphrodite the most beautiful goddess, his decision signalled by Cupid aiming his arrow at her from above as, also with a red hat, she appears to look confidently at the viewer.

Paris abducts Helen and flees with her to Troy. Her face launches a thousand ships, as the Spartans wage war on Troy to retrieve her and take the city. Thus the prophecy which causes King Priam to reject Paris is fulfilled when his actions bring about the fall of Troy.

In the Middle Ages, this mythological story was reinterpreted as a warning against the temptations of sensual passions. The subject can also be seen as an allegory on marriage or the importance of choosing virtue over pleasure. It was often adapted to contemporary customs, including turning the shepherd into a noble knight in armour, as seen here. The city on the hill in the background may represent Troy.

Cranach does not clearly distinguish one goddess from another. All three possess sexual appeal and their nakedness is emphasised by accessories such as gold chains and transparent veils. They are not dissimilar, perhaps to highlight the difficulty of Paris’s decision. Cranach is not so much depicting three different women as three different views of an erotic female nude. He painted this subject about a dozen times, with the Basel version being among the highest quality. www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch

Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472-1553) was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker who for most of his career was court painter to the Electors of Saxony. He occasionally competed for commissions with Albrecht Dürer. Born in Kronach in central Germany, his father was Hans Maler (painter in German) and he later adopted the name of his birthplace as his surname, as was the custom.

Among his vast output of paintings and woodcuts - his tombstone in Weimar bears the legend ‘Pictor celerrimus’ (‘swiftest of painters’)the most important are altarpieces, portraits of German princes and leaders of the Protestant Reformation. (He was a close friend of Martin Luther and godfather to his first child and his 1529 portrait of Luther is one of the best known.) Cranach also produced innumerable pictures of women, from elongated female nudes to fashionably dressed ladies with titles from the Bible or mythology.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, portrait at age 77, c.1550, by Lucas Cranach the Younger, oil on panel (Uffizi Gallery, Florence)

Cranach’s emblem is a winged snake.

See also ART & TRAVEL, page 50.

Callum Ollason first picked up a camera - a Rolleiflex SL35 film camera – while studying sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. The camera is digital now, but sculpture continues to influence his work, mainly still life inspired by science, nature and a particular fascination with liquids, which is a recurring theme. Recent work has blurred the lines between photography and his first love, illustration. www.callumollason.com