Scottish Art News Issue 14

Scottish Art News

10 YEARS

ISSUE 14 AUTUMN 2010 £3

John Lavery – The Artist Reporter Looking Again at the Glasgow Boys The Glasgow Girls: Painters and Designers Susan Philipsz Hamish Fulton: 21 Days in the Cairngorms The Modernist Painting of Craigie Aitchison Martin Creed Edinburgh Art Festival Commissions The Lewis Chessmen

The

Glasgow

Boys

James Guthrie, To Pastures New, 1883 © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections.

Pioneering Painters

1880–1900

A major exhibition of Scotland’s greatest artists

Fine Paintings

SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE R.S.A (SCOTTISH 1871-1935)

1st December 2010

SOLD FOR £72,500 Fine Paintings Sale 10th June 2010

NEAR DOUGLAS HALL

An invitation to consign Enquiries: Nick Curnow | 0131 557 8844

9 April–27 September 2010

nick.curnow@lyonandturnbull.com

www.glasgowmuseums.com

Other forthcoming paintings auctions:

Admission £5 (£3) and under 16s free I Argyle Street I Glasgow G3 8AG I Phone 0141 276 9599 I Fax 0141 276 9540 I Text phone 0141 276 9500/9511 I www.glasgowmuseums.com I Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

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18th August

Scottish Contemporary Art

33 Broughton Place Edinburgh EH1 3RR

182 Bath Street Glasgow G2 4HG

11-12 Pall Mall London SW1Y 5LU

9th September

Paintings

0131 557 8844

0141 333 1992

020 7930 9115

14th October

Contemporary Art

www.lyonandturnbull.com Scottish Art News 2

Contents

Autumn/Winter 2010

Susan Philipsz, Installation view: Lowlands, Glasgow International, Glasgow, 2010 Photo: Eoghan McTigue. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

SCOTTISH ART NEWS Scottish Art News

THE FLEMING COLLECTION 6

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News from The Fleming Collection

by Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art

The Scottish Summer Exhibition The Fleming Collection has invited artists to take part in its first selling exhibition of contemporary Scottish art.

by Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art

Scottish Art News round-up

The Lewis Chessmen 30 Lewis Chessmen from the collections of National Museums Scotland go on display throughout Scotland in 2010/11.

by Dr David Caldwell

8 John Lavery –­ The Artist Reporter A comprehensive look at the work of Sir John Lavery whose achievements as a painter are far from limited to his position as a leading figure of the Glasgow School.

by Kenneth McConkey

34 Picture in Focus: James Pryde, The Unknown Corner, 1912 Peter Howson interviewed by Tim Cornwell

16 Looking Again at the Glasgow Boys The prevailing view that the Glasgow Boys were antiestablishment, even radical, tends to discount the conservatism at play within their work. A critical reconsideration of the Boys within a wider Scottish and European context invites a fuller and perhaps more subversive understanding of their legacy.

by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach

22 The Glasgow Girls: Painters and Designers A major retrospective exhibition The Glasgow Girls reaffirms the vital contribution they made to the originality and international recognition of the Glasgow School.

by Dr Marion Amblard

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The Fleming Collection is widely recognised as the finest collection of Scottish Art in private hands and was originally conceived as a corporate collection in 1968 for Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd in the City of London. Since 2000 the collection has belonged to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation which aims to promote Scottish Art to a wider audience. The collection consists of works by many of Scotland’s most prominent artists, from 1770 to the present day, including works by early nineteenth century artists, the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists, the Edinburgh School and many contemporary Scottish names. Regular exhibitions drawn from the Collection as well as loans from public and private collections of Scottish art can be viewed in the specially designed gallery.

The Fleming Collection | 13 Berkeley Street | London | W1J 8DU tel: +44 (0) 20 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com | gallery@flemingcollection.com Opening Hours: Tues – Sat 10am–5.30pm Admission Free

40 Susan Philipsz: Susan Philpsz has been announced as the latest in a long line of Scottish artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize (2010).

by Katie Baker

Regulars

42 60 Art Market Round-up by Will Bennett 62 Books 63 Preview 2010 The pick of art to see in 2010

Martin Creed: Down Over Up An exhibition of recent and newly-commissioned work by artist Martin Creed opens at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

by Katie Baker

James Paterson: Works from the Artist’s Studio, Huntarian Art Gallery

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The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum

Hamish Fulton: 21 Days in the Cairngorms Hamish Fulton’s walking project saw the artist walk in and around the Cairngorm Mountains for 21 days with only his rucksack.

by Ben Jones

McTaggart’s Children: A Centenary Celebration, Kirkcaldy Museum

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and Art Gallery

68 Scottish Art News: Edinburgh Art Festival Commissions 2010 76 Listings

Resolving Differences: The Modernist Painting of Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009) An exhibition of Craigie Aitchison’s work opens at this year’s Edinburgh Festival.

by Bill Hare

Scottish Art News 4

Editor’s Note

To subscribe to Scottish Art News please complete the subscription form on p.82 of this magazine. Alternatively, contact The Fleming Collection.

FINE PAINTINGS • ESTABLISHED 1955

T: 0207 042 5730 E: admin@scottishartnews.co.uk, or complete

This year the Glasgow Boys, a loose grouping of artists with close ties to Glasgow in the final decades of the nineteenth century are the focus of much attention in the shape of three exhibitions and a new publication on the life and work of Sir John Lavery. In this issue its author, Kenneth McConkey, significantly expands our knowledge of the artist, looking outside the parameters that such exhibitions place him within.

Alan Riach and Sandy Moffat look far beyond the surfaces of the paintings to pose critical questions on how we view and understand the work of the Glasgow Boys. And with such a focus on the Boys, Dr Marion Amblard looks at the work of the ‘Glasgow Girls’, the subject of an exhibition in Kirkcudbright.

Throughout this issue familiar surroundings are transformed into new experiences and spaces by artists, often highlighting the overlooked. Deveron Arts in Aberdeenshire continues to extend its invitations to artists, writers and curators to engage in the town of Huntly in which the arts organisation is based, increasing the range of possible scenarios that could develop within the specificity of the town. This year the invitation was to artist Hamish Fulton in whose practice, ‘walking is art’. Despite the solitary activity of the lone walker in Fulton’s ‘21 days in the Cairngorms’, the whole project also involved the artist as a more active member of the community, walking as a member of a group and opening up alternative, ‘step-by-step’ and shifting experiences of the place. As artist Martin Creed takes a prominent place in this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival with a commission and a show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Katie Baker examines the artist’s ability to convey something much more complex than his often seemingly single gestures might suppose. Also at this year’s festival, the personal artistic vision of the late Craigie Aitchison is celebrated in an exhibition by its curator Bill Hare. News from the sale rooms, books and exhibitions in 2010 round up this issue.

a subscription form online at www.flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News Issue 14 is published biannually by The Fleming Collection, London. Publication dates: January and June.

To advertise in Scottish Art News please contact: Evelyn Gladstone | T: 020 7042 5784 E: evelyn.gladstone@flemingcollection.com

Behind Scottish Art News at The Fleming Collection: Editor: Briony Anderson Assistant Editor: Katie Baker Picture research: Evelyn Gladstone

We would like to know what you think about Scottish Art News and anything you would like us to feature. Email your comments and suggestions to editor@scottishartnews.co.uk

Revised design concept by Flit (London) and Briony Anderson Printed by Empress Litho Limited

Scottish Art News Issue 14 is kindly sponsored by:

© Scottish Art News 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Scottish Art News accepts no responsibility for loss or damage of unsolicited material submitted for publication. Scottish Art News is published by The Fleming Collection but is not the voice of the gallery or The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.

Briony Anderson

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, RSA, RWS (1883-1937). Interior, the red chair Signed; inscribed and signed 3.8/INTERIOR/by/FCB CADELL on the reverse Canvas: 30 x 20 in / 76.5 x 51 cm. Price £425,000

MODERN MASTERS A selling exhibition

Cover Image

10 YEARS

Joseph Crawhall (1861–1913) Huntsman Taking a Toss, c.1894 Watercolour and chalk on paper © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

MADE IN LONDON BY FLIT

2010 marks the 10th anniversary

FLITLONDON.CO.UK

of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

Celebrating the diversity, innovation and wit of British painting from 1918 to the present day: including works by Duncan Grant, Francis Cadell, David Bomberg, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, LS Lowry, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Sir Terry Frost, Frank Auerbach and Bridget Riley

FULLY ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE £20 Monday - Friday 10am - 6pm, Saturday 10am - 1pm

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www.richard-green.com Email: paintings@richard-green.com

On view at 147 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1S 2TS TELEPHONE: +44 (0)20 7493 3939 Scottish Art News 6

PAT R ONS OF

TH E F L E MING -W YF OL D A RT F OU NDAT ION News from

THE FLEMING COLLECTION

FROM TOP Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) Luxembourg Gardens, c.1910 Oil on panel, 35.6x27.9 cm Sir Muirhead Bone (1876–1953) Piccadilly Circus, 1915, drypoint, 29.8x37.4 cm Samuel Bough (1822–78) Shipping on the Thames, oil on canvas All images © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

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We are continuing the tenth anniversary celebrations of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation by mounting a special exhibition in the splendid Terrace Rooms at Somerset House. City Living, drawn entirely from our permanent collection, encompasses a broad range of subjects relating to city life. The works by historic and contemporary artists, including recent acquisitions, explore perceptions of public space and imaginary scenes as well as human activity and thought.

Many of the artists see their works as realist, but it is not the ‘comfortable’ realism of, for example, the Glasgow Boys.

They portray life as it is, often depicting the seamier side of city life (urban existence seems a better description). Some find the inspiration for their work in a city’s inhabitants and for others it is the city itself. The paintings provide an important record – both social and documentary – of the ever-changing and evolving life of our cities. London is seen at its best in Shipping on the Thames

by Sam Bough and at its most mundane in the toil of commuters in The Angel, Islington by Crawfurd Adamson. Other cities depicted in works here include Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as Peploes of Paris; Amsterdam

by Anne Redpath and James

JOIN TODAY AND eNgAge wITh ARTISTS, cuRATORS AND muSeum DIRecTORS AT SPecIAl gATheRINgS * 2010 mARKS The FlemINg-wYFOlD ART FOuNDATION’S 10Th ANNIVeRSARY

McBey to more exotic climes in watercolours of Cairo by D.Y. Cameron and Arthur Melville.

I wish to thank the Director and Trustees of Somerset House Trust in allowing us to occupy the Terrace Rooms for the summer. The exhibition continues until 5 September 2010 and is open daily, free of charge.

The Foundation’s tenth anniversary was also marked with a gala party to open The Scottish Summer Exhibition in the gallery, our first selling exhibition. The Foundation invited a number of artists with close associations to the collection to submit works with a percentage of sales going back into The Foundation to fund our exhibition programme and new acquisitions. We look forward to making the next decade as exciting and fruitful as the first.

I wish to thank all the contributors and advertisers in this edition of Scottish Art News and in particular Lyon and Turnbull, Scotland’s oldest established auction house, for their continued support and generous sponsorship that has made this magazine possible.

Selina Skipwith Keeper of Art

T h e F l e m i n g - W Y F O l D A R T F O U n D AT i O n 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU T: 020 7042 5730 E: gallery@flemingcollection www.flemingcollection.com

* Subscribe using page 81

Image: Sir James Guthrie (1859-1930) The Bridge, Image:1882, Sir James Crowland, oil onGuthrie (1859-1930) canvas © FWAF The Bridge, Crowland, 1882, oil on canvas © FWAF Scottish Art News 8

In his latest book John Lavery, A Painter and his World, Kenneth McConkey contributes greatly to our knowledge of an artist whose achievements as a painter are far from limited to his position as a leading figure of the Glasgow School.

W

hen Sir John Lavery died at the beginning of 1941, he was one of the last two surviving Glasgow Boys and the only one to have attained an enduring international reputation. In the grim days of the blitz he had decamped from London to Kilkenny to stay with his stepdaughter and in the circumstances, there was little opportunity for public fanfare. After the war, as 9

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ABOVE Sir John Lavery RA, RSA, RHA, PRP (1856–1941) Shipbuilding on the Clyde 1889–1901 Culture and Sport Glasgow

the Tate Gallery and the newlyformed Arts Council set about turning British taste towards Picasso and Matisse, Lavery’s work, like that of many of his generation, was consigned to gallery basements. It was only in 1984, with a large touring exhibition held jointly by the Ulster Museum and the Fine Art Society, that a reassessment began, and since then, with major exhibitions of British Impressionists and Glasgow Boys,

(Museums) © By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow and Son Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir John Lavery

his place is assured.

Much of the emphasis in recent scholarship however, tends to concentrate on Lavery’s early output, largely neglecting the fact that forty years of productive life followed the moment when in 1901 his mural of ship building on the Clyde was unveiled in Glasgow City Chambers. This Banqueting Hall sequence marks a punctuation point when the Boys had gone international and all of their prominent members, with the exception of Hornel, had left Scotland.

Roche, Kennedy, Millie Dow and Paterson he studied at the atelier Julian in Paris. He later claimed that it was only after his visit to Grez-sur-Loing in 1883 that he stopped producing ‘beginner’s work’, painting classic pictures such as The Bridge at Grez and Under the Cherry Tree. These pictures reveal a student keen to learn. He was enthralled by the Salon Naturalism of BastienLepage and closely studied the work of older members of the Grez colony such as Stott of Oldham and Frank O’Meara.

However, Under the Cherry Tree

Lavery’s early experience was typical. With

was to be his thesis picture in that it adopted all of the characteristic

‘naturalist’ mannerisms – taking the eye from strongly modelled foreground detail to the pale, thin paint surfaces of the bridge in the background.

The Grez pictures were brought back to Scotland at the end of 1884 to be shown at a variety of exhibitions in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Paisley and it was with the collectors from this latter enclave that Lavery initially achieved success. This group was full of new ideas – they were energetic walkers, they rode newfangled safety tricycles and they indulged in the newly fashionable game of lawn tennis, which was to become the subject of his most Scottish Art News 10

Bastien-Lepage thus reinforced one of the basic tenets of French academic training – the perfection of visual memory. Do not look twice, or else you will confuse the first, fresh impression

celebrated canvas, painted in the garden of a villa at Netherlee Road, a southern suburb of Glasgow in 1885. This was like a grand theatrical set-piece in which the figures were carefully placed in order to accentuate the drama of the game. He later recalled that the painting gave the opportunity to show that he had taken Bastien-Lepage’s advice about observation of figures in motion – ‘Select a person – watch him – then put down as much as you remember. Never look twice. At first you will remember very little, but continue and you will soon get complete action.’ Bastien-Lepage 11

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thus reinforced one of the basic tenets of French academic training – the perfection of visual memory.

Do not look twice, or else you will confuse the first, fresh impression.

The self-confidence of Glasgow’s urban bourgeoisie was best expressed when, in 1886, the city announced that it would stage a great international exhibition of arts and manufactures in the park at Kelvingrove in the summer of 1888. The artists were initially excluded from the planning of this event, until Lavery’s close friend, James Guthrie, wrote to the Glasgow Herald. He wanted readers to know that there

was a radical group of young ‘sincere art workers’ in the city.

When the authorities acceded to his demands, the onus fell on members of the group to come forward with their best work for the exhibition.

Lavery immediately set himself up as an ‘artist-inresidence’, before this concept became common practice, producing oil sketches which were to be displayed at the Craibe Angus Gallery in Glasgow in October. In these we see the crowds visiting the exhibition, stands devoted to weaving and ceramic manufacture, tobacco

John Lavery, Under the Cherry Tree, 1884 (Ulster Museum, Belfast) © By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow & Son Ltd., London on behalf of the Estate of Sir John Lavery. Photograph reproduced courtesy the Trustees of National Museums Northern Ireland OPPOSITE John Lavery, The Tennis Party, 1885, oil on canvas, 76.2x183 cm. Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections © By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow and Son Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir John Lavery

kiosks and coffee houses, the military tattoo and performances of Herr Barzea’s gypsy string band in The Blue Hungarians.

Out of this, Lavery, ever the opportunist, achieved another career-changing coup. On 22 August 1888 Queen Victoria visited the Glasgow International and he was on hand to report the event. Civic pride dictated that Glasgow should have a permanent record, and who better than he to perform the service.

The project was to dominate his life for the following two years and its credibility depended on tracking and trapping the 254

people present on the occasion – including Her Majesty. He was initially supplied with other portraits from which to copy a likeness of the Queen, but he was not to be fobbed off and only after he obtained a sitting in person did the project become, in Lavery’s words, ‘plain sailing’. The doors of the Scottish nobility, the Glasgow merchant class and the lesser members of the Royal family immediately opened.

At this point, the artistreporter quickly became a foreign correspondent. Joseph Crawhall, Lavery’s close friend, had told him of the colourful world of

Tangier – a haven for escaped criminals, political refugees and gamblers, and he arrived there in 1891. Overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar it was, according to RB Cunninghame Graham, a city whose ‘chief note’ was ‘its whiteness’. Against this backdrop, the notes of colour a painter found in its streets and rooftops were shrill; they stood up in the street and sang. Lavery found the experience so entrancing that he was determined to return. As he attempted to launch himself in Germany, Italy and North America, Tangier quite literally provided a second home. Around Scottish Art News 12

1903, he purchased a house on the hills to the south-west of the city to which he returned every winter until the outbreak of war in 1914. Those first experiences of exotic rooftop soirées under the crystalline stillness of the Moroccan moonlight, were revisited and captured definitively in Night, Tangier.

Lavery fitted into the expatriate community that centred upon the British Legation and the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Sir Reginald Lister, became a close friend. In works such as The Greyhound, we catch the style and character of this agreeable colonial life. Sir Reginald nonchalantly relaxes in a comfortable armchair and chats to Eileen, the painter’s daughter, surrounded by Chippendale and chinoiserie shipped from England, to recreate the ambience of an English country house. There were endless garden gatherings, fancy dress parties, and forays for the Tangier hunt, of which Lavery was briefly master.

It would be wrong however to give the impression that this life of colonial luxury was all. Lavery staged three solo exhibitions in Berlin, two in London, with others in Boston and Pittsburgh during these years, and, understudying Whistler and Rodin, he was vice-president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.

The German, Belgian, and Italian governments all bought pictures for their national galleries and awarded medals of honour.

Particular accolades were the two French state purchases for the Musée du Luxembourg and these glittering prizes supported a successful portrait practice that 13

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attracted the Donoughmores, the Windsor-Clives, the Darlings, the McEwans and many others.

But all of this accelerated when Hazel Martyn entered his life. They first met in 1903 at Beg-Meil on the Brittany coast, and conducted a covert relationship for six years. Hazel in the interim married a young doctor from New York who died suddenly before the birth of their daughter, Alice, in 1904. So, in July 1909, the house in Cromwell Place, in which Lavery and his daughter, Eileen, lived, saw two new arrivals. Hazel instantly took to a life as consort to the internationally renowned portrait painter – as through the studio passed the rich and famous of the day, the Churchills, Lady Diana Manners, and a host of European notables. These celebrity portraits were trumped in 1912 when a rich publisher, Hugh Spottiswoode, commissioned the artist to paint King George V, Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal, in a group portrait to be donated to the National Portrait Gallery.

The declaration of war in August 1914 found the Laverys in Ireland amid spontaneous public meetings in which English politicians were upbraided. Back in London, St James’s Park was transformed into a military camp, and Lavery went immediately to the London Hospital to paint the arrival of the first wounded. He harboured a secret desire to equip a motor-van and head off for the Western Front, but Hazel refused to countenance the idea. In 1917 he was appointed an Official War Artist and his enthusiastic pursuit of his duties eventually led to his setting off in an air ship to sketch North Sea convoys off

Scapa Flow. On this occasion he produced what were among the first airborne oil studies for a large picture entitled A Convoy, North Sea, 1918, From NS7.

He returned from his war exploits to the realisation that during his absence there had been an upsurge of Irish nationalism.

As leading London-Irish society figures, Hazel and he were keen to take a role in Irish affairs and they played host to all the politicians negotiating the Irish Treaty in 1921, in return for portrait sittings. Of all the members of the Irish delegation, Hazel formed a close friendship with Michael Collins. The painter observed that, fearing assassination, he would only agree to sit for his portrait if he could be facing the studio door.

The Laverys were back in Ireland after the signing of the Irish Treaty to witness the civil war in which Collins lost his life. As he lay in state in the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, the painter produced a ‘portrait-in-death’, emotively inscribed ‘Love of Ireland’, a work which marked the dashing of hopes for a stable, united and independent country.

In the twenties Lavery’s career blossomed in other directions. Since the days of the Tangier Legation he had been painting what became known as ‘portrait interiors’. A well-known artist, writer, or member of the aristocracy was seen in the disarray of their daily surroundings in what was often no more than a quick sketch. These works were drawn together for an exhibition in London in 1925 that was adopted

by Sir Joseph Duveen for a tour of five cities in the United States.

The Laverys accompanied the show to New York for a portrait season which took the painter to

Joseph Crawhall, Lavery’s close friend had told him of the colourful world of Tangier – a haven for escaped criminals, political refugees and gamblers, and he arrived there in 1891

John Lavery, Night, Tangier, 1911. Reproduced courtesy of The Fine Art Society © By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow and Son Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir John Lavery

Boston. There were return visits to the States, to Palm Beach in 1927, staying at the famous Breakers Hotel, and by this point Cannes, Cap Ferrat and Monte Carlo had replaced Tangier as regular watering holes. We enter the world of Scott Fitzgerald; of gigolos, card-sharps and dissolute aristos playing the tables in the Salons-Privées.

However, the dizzying round of engagements ground slowly to a halt with Hazel’s failing health. She reacted badly

to the gas used by her dentist, Conrad Ackner, when he removed an impacted wisdom tooth and as a result the next few years were increasingly restricted.

Suffering from pleurisy, she died at the beginning of 1935.

The Times described her as a ‘beautiful, popular, socially gifted and devoted wife’, the perfect complement to a husband who was ‘modest and retiring’. Fate then dealt a second cruel blow.

Within six months his only daughter, Eileen, was also dead.

Now in his eightieth year, friends like Clementine Churchill felt that he would not last long.

Yet, despite his advanced years, it was not too late to set off, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, to seek a newer world. Fascinated by his granddaughters’ enthusiasm for the cinema, Lavery would go to Hollywood and paint the stars.

He made two winter visits to America, during which Maureen O’Sullivan, Loretta Young and Shirley Temple posed for portraits.

He was planning his campaign of Scottish Art News 14

John Lavery, Michael Collins ‘Love of Ireland’, 1922 Reproduced courtesy of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane © By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow and Son Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir John Lavery

He was a workaholic, multi-faceted and difficult to classify. He did not find one subject matter and stick to it.

He was nervous, energetic and possessed an extraordinarily quick visual intelligence

summer work when he died at the beginning of 1941.

In recent years there have been determined efforts to see Lavery as an Irish painter, although he lived for most of his life in London. The exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the Royal Academy in 2010 casts him as a Glasgow Boy, while any account of Impressionism in Britain accords him a prominent place. But none of this takes in the Orientalist painter, the portraitist, or the war artist. He was a workaholic, multi-faceted and difficult to classify. He did not find one subject matter and stick to it. He was nervous, energetic and possessed an extraordinarily quick visual intelligence. His huge reputation in his own day has, in some ways, obscured the possibility of true recognition in ours. Lavery was simply one of the last of a generation who believed that a painter should be able to paint anything, anywhere, almost at any time.

Kenneth McConkey is a specialist in British, Irish and French painting at the turn of the twentieth century, and is the author of many articles and books. He has selected, catalogued or contributed to exhibitions on the work of Henry La Thangue, George Clausen, John Lavery, William Orpen, Alfred East and other artists associated with Impressionism in Britain. His book John Lavery – A Painter and his World is published to coincide with the present exhibition. (Atelier Books, £45)

The Glasgow Boys from The Fleming Collection 14 September – 18 December 2010 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 020 7042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Tuesday – Saturday 10am–5.30pm Admission Free

Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900 9 April – 27 September 2010 Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow Argyle Street G3 8AG Tel: 0141 276 9599 www.glasgow.museums.com Monday – Thursday and Saturday 10am–5pm Friday and Sunday: 11am–5pm 30 October 2010 – 23 January 2011 Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD Tel: 020 7300 8000 www.royalacademy.org.uk Saturday – Thursday 10am–6pm Friday: 10am–10pm

John Lavery Mrs Lavery and Alice (Mother and Child) 1909 Reproduced courtesy of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane © By courtesy of Felix Rosenstiel’s Widow and Son Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir John Lavery

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Scottish Art News 16

On the one hand, their art might demonstrate sympathy, but on the other, its scenic value was primarily contributing to the viewer’s delectation, not to a radical reconsideration of art and society

FROM TOP Sir James Guthrie (1859–1930) A Funeral Service in the Highlands, 1882, oil on canvas © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

James Guthrie (1859–1930) Tennis, 1890, pastel, 49.5x42 cm © Private Collection

The prevailing view that the Glasgow Boys were antiestablishment, even radical, tends to discount the conservatism at play within their work. Alan Riach and Sandy Moffat’s critical reconsideration of the Boys within a wider Scottish and European context invites a fuller and perhaps more subversive understanding of their legacy.

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T

he Glasgow Boys – pre-eminently James Guthrie, George Henry, E.A. Hornel, John Lavery and Arthur Melville, but there were many others in this loose grouping – have been identified as constituting a significant movement pushing towards Modernism in late nineteenth-century Scottish art. There may be some truth in this, but we need to identify what was progressive and what was conservative in their work, and to locate it with reference to the co-ordinate points in the context of end-of-the-century convention and proto-modern radicalism, both in Scotland and in European terms.

The conservative aspect of many of their most famous works – for example, Guthrie’s A Funeral Service in the Highlands or A Hind’s Daughter – connects immediately to the Kailyaird literature

of the period, that body of writing which appealed to an international as well as local readership, celebrating the virtues of smalltown Scotland, family life and the domestic duties and priorities of the village. In many stories and novels by Ian Maclaren and S.R. Crockett, such conditions are tested by the aspiration of a young man who excels at school and goes off to university under the watchful but cautious eyes of

the minister and the dominie or schoolmaster. Normally the youth returns only to die of tuberculosis or a similar wasting disease, as if in punishment for attempting to rise above his station. The authority of local church and school are all you need, such fiction seems to imply.

Intellectual adventure and physical journeying are less important than the virtues of home.

This is a caricature, of course. Crockett – and J.M.

Barrie, also often linked to this group of writers – produced far more exciting and indeed subversive work than this would suggest. And the work of the artists noted has a more radical side too. Their depictions of the rural poor are ambivalent.

Naturalist in style and tradition, quasi-theatrical in posture and presentation, they are nonetheless linked to depictions of a similar social strata on the continent, most famously by Millet and van Gogh. None of the Glasgow Boys are as radical as van Gogh but that is not to say their sympathetic representations of Scottish peasants and farm workers are in themselves less revolutionary in implication. The ambivalence lies in the fact that as property, these paintings were acquired by rich people whose wealth was based on the intense, widespread and ruthless exploitation of the very men, women and children the paintings depicted. So on the one hand, their art might demonstrate sympathy, but on the other, its scenic value was primarily contributing to the viewer’s delectation, not to a radical reconsideration of art and society.

However there were other writers of the 1890s whose representation of experience chimes acutely with another aspect of the work of the Glasgow Boys. Robert Louis Stevenson and R.B. Cunninghame Graham were both Scottish to the bone, but both were also international travellers – Stevenson to France, then to America and then to the Pacific and Samoa. Cunninghame Graham – a founder-member of both the National Party of Scotland and the Labour Party, who insisted that both parties must be talking to each Scottish Art News 18

Glasgow rebels or ruffians. The idea is that they rejected the older conservative ‘Glue-pots’ – and yet, pre-eminent among that older generation was the heroic McTaggart himself. The Boys could hardly be called antiestablishment. Guthrie exhibited his first major picture at the Royal Academy in London and became President of the Royal Scottish Academy within twenty years of painting it. To McTaggart, people were never spectator sports or tourist attractions, and in some respects the Glasgow

other – travelled extensively in South America and in Morocco.

Such internationalism never compromised their Scottishness.

A famous letter from Stevenson to S.R. Crockett in 1888 tells the latter never, ever, to put ‘N.B.’ at the top of his letters, to ‘put Scotland, and be done with it’: ‘The name of my native land is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours.’

Reconfirming a sense of national identity and the value of that identity in an international context, both Stevenson and Cunninghame Graham might be considered side-by-side with E.A. Hornel, George Henry and Arthur Melville, Henry and Hornel travelling to Japan and returning with startling canvases, certainly exploiting the allure of the exotic, but also introducing new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. Henry, in A 19

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Galloway Landscape, revises traditional scenic perspectives with unsettling orientalism, applied to the thick silk flow of a local burn or a familiar cow looming bigger than it should be from behind an odd tree. Melville, travelling in some of the same locations as Cunninghame Graham, returns with pictures of intensely vibrant colour specifically located in ports and markets whose economy was very different from that of late-nineteenth-century industrialised Glasgow and late Victorian Britain generally. Their new visions held implications for a twentieth-century future in which experience of the international world and cultural relativism would become central to the prevailing ethos. So it is helpful to see the Glasgow Boys in their national and international contexts. But the question must be asked, how radical were they?

And the answer must be that in Scotland, the major co-ordinate points of the time are not in the work of the Glasgow Boys themselves but in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Patrick Geddes and William McTaggart: the Mackintosh and Geddes of totalising, comprehensive social aspiration, intellectual engagement and political challenge; the McTaggart who developed a sustained, constantly evolving vision articulated in radical painterly technique that engaged with the economics and language of a society to which he belonged, from which he came, people with whom he identified.

There is a notion that the Glasgow Boys were antiestablishment. The name itself suggests this. But the Glasgow Boys were at the furthest possible remove from the popular idea of

George Henry (1858–1943) Playmates,1884, oil on canvas 69x122 cm © Private Collection

Boys did treat the people in their paintings in such a way that viewers continue to look at them in voyeuristic, or puzzled, silence, as quaint examples of a different, Highland or historic, culture.

For all the enjoyment they offer, significant qualifications must be made.

By the early 1880s, Monet was already twenty years into Impressionism, Manet had come and gone and Cézanne was painting pictures that would change the face of art forever.

By contrast, the Glasgow Boys took as their model a type of conservative French painting taught in the Paris studios, long rejected by van Gogh and Gauguin. Of them all, Arthur Melville was the only one who really understood what colour could do and created what remain the most visually startling of all the works the group produced. This is surely connected to the work of Cunninghame Graham, writing of Argentina, Morocco and Scotland at the end of the era of the British Empire, exposing the ambiguity at the heart of the Empire’s colonial expansion, engaging with other cultures in ways that

pose deep questions about what the expectations of imperialism in art really are. In this both Melville and Cunninghame Graham are close to the work of the latter’s friend, Joseph Conrad.

The problem is that instead of challenging and provoking, the Boys were content to go along with middle class taste and this opens up questions about how we read art history against the largest of canvases.

In nineteenth-century France, from Jacques-Louis David through Gericault, Delacroix, Courbet, Daumier, Manet, Renoir, Pissaro and so on, the opposite was the case: challenge and provocation were inherent in their art. Courbet’s socialism, Delacroix’s sex orgies, Manet’s naked prostitute, Degas, the painter of modern city life: how different things would have been if that kind of painting had been introduced to Scotland!

And yet, this is not to dismiss the Glasgow Boys. It is rather to invite a reading of their work that places it more securely, critically and provocatively in a Scottish and European context.

One of the most ambiguous of all their works is Lavery’s The Tennis Party (1885) (see p.11), with its brilliantly skilful representation of energetic movement in a still afternoon. The spectators sit in their chairs. Focus is on the players, one woman standing on the left, arms lowered, the other, the centre of the whole painting’s wide-screen attention, is on the right, bent forward eagerly, her right hand swinging the racket off to her right in such an intensity of physical motion that the wooden frame is bending backwards; her partner, a man, is standing to the far side, and her

The problem is that instead of challenging and provoking, the Boys were content to go along with middle class taste and this opens up questions about how we read art history against the largest of canvases

opposite number, another man, is running, racket angled out, a blur of motion coming forward fast in response to the young woman’s serve. The painting is rich in implications of hidden narratives: what is going on in the minds of the girl, leaning back inside the fence, and the young man, leaning forward and smoking, on the outside, as they both seem to be looking at the young woman in action? She is demurely clothed in full dress and dark hat, yet displays a potent bodily engagement. The relative ages of the characters all suggest different stages of sexual and social self-consciousness.

All of these qualities connect with Stevenson’s writing, the suggestiveness of hidden motivations and burgeoning, late-Victorian or even Edwardian sexuality, or indeed of Stevenson’s American admirer, Henry James. In a sense, the painting connects with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and James’ Portrait of a Lady (1881). It is not too far to connect it to Madame Bovary (1857) or Anna Karenina (1877). Simply seeing it as one of the works of the Glasgow Boys may distract us from the power of its implications, even if this power was not part of its creator’s selfconscious intention.

Perhaps the conservatism which was characteristic of the visual arts in Glasgow for most of the twentieth century can be directly related to the Boys. When you consider the most radical modern Scottish artists – McCance, Johnstone, Gillies – none of them owed anything to the Boys, nor took much part in the Glasgow scene.

J.D. Fergusson was ignored in Glasgow when he returned there. Colquhoun and MacBryde Scottish Art News 20

escaped as quickly as possible and Eardley’s best work was made on the north east coast. A few brave souls knew they were ploughing lonely furrows in places like the Glasgow Art Club and the Royal Glasgow Institute, but most of the pipers were playing the tunes called by the middle class that paid them. Perhaps the most notable exception in this story is the young John Bellany, who clearly took something worthwhile and valid from Guthrie’s Highland Funeral.

For Bellany, this was the bridge to Courbet, and he was able to take forward the social implications of Guthrie’s painting in his heroic compositions of the life and work of east coast fishermen of the 1960s, something the Boys and their latter day imitators were unable to comprehend. Here is an extraordinary, major progressive influence which the Boys, or most particularly, Guthrie, did provide.

What is essential to see here is the way Bellany’s vision connected back through Guthrie to Courbet, then came forward again to give vital expression to the lives of people otherwise unseen and unspoken. It is a vital instance of the single most radical way that art intervenes in time.

There is more to be done, both to identify the conservatism of the Boys and their legacy, and to understand what subversive or dangerous qualities sometimes show through the conventions, even despite the artists’ commercial priorities, whether in the social sympathy and accurate insight of Guthrie, the intensity of foreign experience in Melville’s brilliant colours, or in the sexual energies of the ostensibly genteel in Lavery’s polite men and women at their garden games. And to see their 21

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place in Scottish art in the full European context.

To look again at the Glasgow Boys is to ask what their paintings represent implicitly, as well as what they show visibly. As Hugh MacDiarmid was to put it in the century about to be born, in his great poem ‘On a Raised Beach’: ‘What the seen shows is never anything to what it’s designed to hide.’

63124_Invite

Alexander Moffat is an artist best known for his portraits of the post-WWII generation of major Scottish poets now in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. He was Head of Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art until his retirement in 2005.

Alan Riach is a poet and the Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. His recent books include ‘Homecoming: New Poems, 2001–09’ and ‘Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography’. He is the President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

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Jolomo Scottish Landscape Painting Awards – The 2009 Finalists: Rosanne Barr, Toby Cooke, Maurice Forsyth-Grant, Jack Frame, Claudia Massie, Keith Salmon (winner) and Alistair Strachan Exhibition: 27th September to 2nd October, 2010 at The Royal Opera Arcade Gallery, 1-2 Royal Opera Arcade, Pall Mall, London SW1Y 4UY Daily 10am - 7pm (Sat until 4pm) Paintings will be available for sale and full exhibition will be on line at www.caledoniart.com from 13th September 2010 For info or catalogue contact: amanda@caledoniart.com 07718 516954

Simon Gillespie Studio Fine Art Restoration & Conservation

FROM TOP Joseph Crawhall (1861–1913) The Aviary, Clifton, 1888, watercolour, 50.5x34.5 cm

Moffat and Riach are the coauthors of Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (Luath Press, paperback edition 2009).

Arthur Melville (1855–1904) The Port of Passages, 1892, watercolour, 51.3x78.2 cm Images © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

Scottish Art in Spring Valuations in Your Area Bonhams is the only International Auction House with dedicated sales of Scottish Art in Scotland, and we are currently accepting entries for our annual Scottish Sale which is held during the August festival when the arts world comes to Scotland. We will be in your area the week beginning 10 May to provide free and confidential sale valuations.

To make an appointment or for further information please contact your local office or the specialist; Colleen Bowen on 0131 240 2292 or email: colleen.bowen@bonhams.com

Illustrated Samuel John Peploe, RSA (British, 1871-1935) Mull from Iona To be included in the Scottish Sale.

Estimate: £80,000 - 120,000 Bonhams 22 Queen Street Edinburgh, EH 2 1JX 0131 225 2266 0131 220 2547 fax www.bonhams.com/edinburgh

51a Cleveland Street, London, W1T 4JH 020 7580 0010 www.simongillespie.com Scottish Art News 22

B

THE

Glasgow

Girls

As a major retrospective exhibition representing the work of nearly 40 women artists, designers and craftworkers who studied at the Glasgow School of Art and worked in Glasgow during the early part of the twentieth century opens in Kirkcudbright, Dr Marion Amblard emphasises their vital contribution to the originality and international recognition of the Glasgow School.

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etween 1880 and 1920 a group of women artists who trained in Glasgow were at the forefront of the Scottish art scene and central to the development of the Art Nouveau movement in Western Europe. They were not the first Scottish women to take up an artistic career since, back in the eighteenth century, Anne Forbes and Catherine Read had worked as portraitists in London. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Christina Robertson was a fashionable portrait painter and miniaturist at the imperial court of Saint Petersburg. However, these artists from Glasgow belonged to the first generation of women who were allowed to enjoy a proper art education and who were able to earn a living through their art while working in Scotland.

These women had in common their training at the Glasgow School of Art and together they met at the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists, the first residential club in Scotland, created in 1882 by and for women. Now popularly known as the Glasgow Girls, this group of artists was composed of designers and painters who greatly contributed to the specificity of the Glasgow Style.

Margaret Macdonald and her sister Frances were the leading figures of the Glasgow Girls. Working as designers with their husbands Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Herbert MacNair, they became known as ‘The Four’. Among the designers, Jessie Marion King, Annie French, Jessie Newbery and Ann Macbeth were also talented artists who produced a wide variety of works such as book illustrations,

embroidery, ceramic decoration, metal work, wood engravings and jewellery. Only a few Glasgow Girls worked primarily as painters.

Some designers occasionally painted, for instance Jessie M. King painted landscapes and townscapes in her later career.

Among those who became painters, several specialised in the genre of flower painting.

Thus Katharine Cameron, a very versatile artist producing book illustrations, etchings and paintings, was above all famous for her delicate depictions of flowers painted in watercolours.

Apple Blossom and Bees is a typical work of Cameron who particularly delighted in the minute depictions of bees. Constance Walton and Lily Blatherwick were also flower painters whose works were

critically acclaimed and who, like Katharine Cameron, were elected members of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

The fact that many women painters specialised in flower painting reflects the pressure on them to confine themselves to what were considered as feminine subject matter. Women were generally not encouraged to take up art unless they were themselves related to an artist, as was the case for Katharine Cameron who was the sister of the landscape painter David Young Cameron. Besides, until the end of the nineteenth century, the access women had to artistic training was still limited.

In Britain they had been largely excluded from fine art schools and had to rely upon

instruction from privately hired drawing masters. It was only from 1871, with the opening of the Slade School in London, that women could enrol as fine art students on equal terms with men.

In Glasgow they were admitted to the Glasgow School of Art which was created in the 1840s to primarily train designers. They studied side by side with men attending the same courses except the life class. Francis Newbery, who assumed the direction of the Glasgow School of Art from 1885 to 1917, played a key role in the development of the Glasgow Style and in broadening the access of women to art education. Indeed, it was under the headmastership of Newbery that women were granted access to nude models.

Before that, life classes at the

OPPOSITE Bessie MacNicol (1869–1904) A Girl of the Sixties, 1899, oil on canvas Culture and Sport Glasgow on behalf of Glasgow City Council Bequeathed by John Keppie, 1945 ABOVE LEFT: Jessie M King

(1875–1949) They Wound Flower Chains Round Her, Ink and watercolour on vellum Private Collection Photo: Dumfries and Galloway College

ABOVE RIGHT: Annie French

(1872–1965) Untitled lithograph Private Collection Photo: Dumfries and Galloway College

Scottish Art News 24

Glasgow School of Art had been separate and different: women could only draw from the cast and from the draped figure, nude study being considered as morally degrading. As a result, many women painters turned to the painting of flowers and still life.

Some, however, decided to study in France where they could have the same artistic training as men: among others, Bessie MacNicol studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and on her return to Scotland produced paintings equalling the finest works of the Glasgow Boys.

The term ‘Glasgow Girls’, chosen by art historians to refer to the Glasgow women artists and designers who flourished between 1880 and 1920, is derived from the ‘Glasgow Boys’, who were a group of internationally renowned male painters. These artists transformed Scottish painting in the 1880s, rejecting the romantic landscapes and the sentimental genre scenes of the Royal Scottish Academicians and adopting a matter-of-fact approach to subject matter taken from contemporary daily life. The paintings of the Glasgow Girls show that they were deeply influenced by the work of their male counterparts whose paintings they were able to see in Glasgow or in their studio.

Several Girls were related to some of the Glasgow Boys: the flower painter Constance Walton was a sister of Edward Arthur Walton, Stansmore Dean married Robert Macaulay Stevenson and Maggie Hamilton was James Paterson’s sister-in-law. Hamilton was also a close friend of James Guthrie who painted her portrait around 1892.

As for Bessie MacNicol, she knew Edward Atkinson Hornel, whom 25

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she first met at Kirkcudbright in 1896. MacNicol was for a time influenced by Hornel as seen in her famous portrait of the artist in his studio with a Japanese kakemono in the background. In this picture, the influence of the Hornel is seen in her use of light and bright colours which contrast with the dark colours of her selfportrait. Painted around 1894, it shows the influence of Velasquez, whose works she had admired while studying in Paris. The subject matter of The Goose Girl, painted in 1898, is reminiscent of the works of Guthrie and shows that MacNicol shared the Glasgow Boys’ admiration for Jules Bastien-Lepage. In fact, MacNicol’s paintings have so much in common with the works of the Glasgow Boys that Ailsa Tanner has declared that ‘she should be considered a fringe member of the group’.1 The influence of the Glasgow Boys can also be noticed in the work of Margaret Wright. Her picture The Japanese Parasol is redolent of Henry and Hornel’s Japanese paintings. Yet, despite stylistic and thematic affinities with the paintings of their male colleagues, the works of some of the Glasgow Girls were highly individual and contributed to the originality and international recognition of the Glasgow School.

Bessie MacNicol, Stansmore Dean, Norah Neilson Gray and Eleanor Allen Moore were the most famous artists of the group of painters. In 1908, Caw wrote of MacNicol that she was ‘probably the most accomplished lady-artist that Scotland has yet produced’2 and at the time of her death, in childbirth at the age of thirtyfour, she had become a renowned

painter in Scotland and on continental Europe. She mainly painted portraits of women and children as well as what was then called ‘fancy portraits’ which were often stylistically reminiscent of the Glasgow Boys’ paintings.

Nevertheless, in The Green Hat, a painting that she sent to the Munich Secession Exhibition in 1896, she anticipates the works of the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson.

Norah Neilson Gray was probably the most original artist of all the Glasgow Girls who painted in oils. She had a direct painterly approach common to all the painters of the Glasgow School but her style and technique were highly individual. Her most powerful and original works are her wartime pictures inspired by her experience as a voluntary nurse in France during the First World War. In Hôpital Auxiliaire d’Armée 30 – Abbaye de Royaumont and in The Scottish Women’s Hospital she depicted doctors, nurses and soldiers with, in the background, the cloisters of the abbey. For her painting The Belgian Refugee she was awarded a medal when it was exhibited in Paris in 1921.

Norah Neilson Gray was a regular exhibitor in France and won another medal for her painting La Jeune Fille in 1923. She was not the only woman painter from Glasgow to achieve international recognition as Bessie MacNicol exhibited at Munich, Vienna, Dresden, Ghent, Saint Petersburg and in the United States, but only sent one painting, A French Girl, to the Royal Academy in 1895. As for Stansmore Dean, in 1889 she exhibited at the Paris Salon, Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and her work was also shown in Buffalo and Toronto.

Although their contribution to the development of art in western Europe cannot be compared to that of the women designers from Glasgow, the talent of these women painters was acknowledged internationally in their lifetime.

As was the case for many artists of their generation, the work of the Glasgow Girls fell out of fashion before the Second World War. It was only from 1976 with the exhibition West of Scotland Women Artists held in Helensburgh that the work of the Glasgow Girls began to be rediscovered and reappraised by art historians. Since then the Glasgow Girls have received much scholarly attention and several major exhibitions have been devoted to them. But it was really in 1990 with the publication of the groundbreaking exhibition catalogue Glasgow Girls – Women in Art and Design 1880-1920, a collection of articles edited by Jude Burkhauser, that the achievements of the entire group of Glasgow women artists and designers were fully reassessed. This reappraisal of the Glasgow Girls has gone hand in hand with their growing popularity with collectors. Indeed in 2008, The White Rose and the Red Rose, a panel painted in 1902

by Margaret Macdonald, sold at a Christie’s auction for £1,700,500 and set a new world auction record for a Scottish work of art.

FROM TOP: Eleanor Allen Moore (1885–1955) The Silk Dress, oil on canvas Private Collection Photo: Marylin Muirhead

Norah Neilson Gray (1882–1931) The Belgian Refugee, 1916 Oil on canvas Culture and Sport Glasgow on behalf of Glasgow City Council Presented by Mrs A G Lochhead, 1978

1 Ailsa Tanner, ‘Bessie MacNicol’ (1869–1904), in

Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Pierre Mendès France University in Grenoble and is a researcher in British studies. She is a member of the French Society for Scottish Studies.

Jude Burkhauser (ed.), ‘Glasgow Girls.’ Women in Art and Design 1880–1920, Edinburgh, Canongate, 1990, p.197.

2 Sir James Caw, Scottish Painting Past and Present 1600– 1908, Edinburgh, 1908, p.436.

Scottish Art News 26

THESCOT TISHGALLERY CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1842

Rebecca Collins 12 - 30 June The Scottish Gallery in Cork Street 7 - 12 June

A Portrait of a Gallery & Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 5 - 30 July Victoria Crowe 6 August - 4 September William Crozier 8 September - 2 October Henry Kondracki 6 - 30 October Frances Walker 3 - 30 November Frances Macdonald 3 - 24 December This summer the town of Kirkcudbright will hold a major exhibition which will bring together works from the Glasgow Girls, designers and painters, drawn from public and private collections to celebrate the work of a group of talented and independent Scottish women artists, covering the period 1880–1930. It will feature works by painters and designers such as Bessie MacNicol, Stansmore Dean, Norah Neilson Gray, Eleanor Allen Moore, Lily Blatherwick, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, Jessie M. King and Jessie Newbery.

FROM TOP How Four Queens Found Sir Launcelot in the Wood

16 Dundas Street Edinburgh EH3 6HZ Tel. 0131 558 1200 mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

(1911–12) Embriodered Panel

An exhibition of

Private Collection

Attrib. Margaret Gilmour Brass with enamel letter rack

Fine art by fine printers

16th – 26th November 2010

Mary Thew Silver with enamel brooch Private Collection

Photos: Dumfries and Galloway College

Hugh Byars, Partick, Glasgow, 2006, oil on canvas

STUART BUCHANAN SARAH COGHILL JOHN MacAULAY

Stuart Buchanan, Rock Pool, oil on canvas

HUGH BYARS CAROLINE McADAM CLARK Ceramics by JANE MUIR

LENA BOYLE FINE ART 1 Earls Court Gardens London SW5 0TD 020 7259 2700 lena.boyle@btinternet.com www.empresslitho.com

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Scottish Contemporary Paintings

Private Collection

The Glasgow Girls Kirkcudbright Town Hall, Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway 3 July – 30 August 2010 http://www.kirkcudbright.co.uk/ kirkcudbrightexhibition.asp

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Image: Victoria Crowe, Landscape Sentinel, La Suvera, mixed media

Forthcoming Painting Exhibitions 2010

Please visit our website www.lenaboylefineart.com or call us for more information and opening times (by appointment only) Scottish Art News 28

Selina Skipwith, Keeper of Art, discusses The Fleming Collection’s first selling exhibition.

T

o celebrate the tenth anniversary celebrations of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, The Fleming Collection, which has established itself as an embassy for Scottish art in London, invited a number of artists represented in the permanent collection to submit a work to our first selling exhibition.

The title of the show echoes that of the Summer Exhibition held at the nearby Royal Academy at the same time, although artists submit work to the latter while The Fleming Collection’s show is by invitation only.

Since The Foundation was established in 2000 our aim has been to promote Scottish 29

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art to a wider audience through our exhibition programme in The Fleming Collection gallery and through acquisitions to our permanent collection. The acquisition policy over the last few years has very much focused on buying works by contemporary Scottish artists and this exhibition enables us to promote this wealth of talent and allow our visitors and supporters a chance to acquire works by some of the best established and emerging Scottish contemporary artists. A percentage of the proceeds go to the Foundation.

Many of the works have been created especially for the exhibition and, while the majority are paintings, The Scottish Summer Exhibition also includes prints and sculpture. Among those exhibiting is Will Maclean, one of the outstanding Scottish artists

of his generation, who will be the subject of a major retrospective at The Fleming Collection in Spring 2011. In the lower gallery there is a wall dedicated to the artist Abigail McLellan who sadly passed away last year at the age of 40. The display includes works from our permanent collection along with a work for sale from McLellan’s estate, Sea Fan on Blue.

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust has generously allowed two works from Wilhelmina BarnsGraham’s estate to be included for sale in the exhibition. In 2012, The Fleming Collection, in association with the BarnsGraham Charitable Trust, will mount an exhibition to mark the centenary of Barns Graham’s birth.

The exhibition also includes The First Cove Park Portfolio. Cove Park is an

OPPOSITE Will Maclean, Circle Log, 2008 Mixed media on arches paper, 56x76 cm Photocredit: Colin Ruscoe. Courtesy the artist and Art First ABOVE Simon Starling Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006 Giclee print with Epson pigment Ultrachrome inks

Scottish Art News 30

international centre based in Scotland for the arts and creative industries. Situated on a 50-acre site overlooking Loch Long on the Rosneath peninsula, Cove Park was founded by Eileen and Peter Jacobs and also celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.

Cove Park’s annual programme of residencies enables national and international artists, working in all art forms, to undertake research and develop new projects. In 2006, seven of the UK’s leading visual artists were commissioned by Cove Park to produce a new limited edition print. This work is available for sale either collectively in a highquality presentation portfolio or individually and offers an affordable opportunity to acquire works by key contemporary artists, including 2005 Turner

Prize winner Simon Starling and 2007 nominee Nathan Coley. All the artists are closely connected with the west of Scotland and were commissioned to produce a new print which takes Cove Park’s location – its landscape, history and context – as its starting point.

2010 Invited Artists: Briony Anderson, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham , Patricia Cain, Michael Craik, Paul Chiappe, Victoria Crowe, Jake Harvey, Harriet Mena Hill, Kenny Hunter, Margaret Hunter, Susannah Hunter, Alan Kilpatrick, Marian Leven, Helen MacAlister, Jock McFadyen, Will MacLean, Abigail McLellan, Nina Murdoch, Ann Patrick, Peter Thomson,

Graeme Todd, Alasdair Wallace Cove Park Portfolio Artists: Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, Nathan Coley, Graham Fagen, Louise Hopkins, Ross Sinclair, Simon Starling The Scottish Summer Exhibition runs until 4 September 2010 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Tel: 0207 042 5730 www.flemingcollection.com Tues – Sat 10am–5.30pm Admission Free This exhibition has been generously supported by Gallery Support Group www.gallerysupportgroup.com Cove Park www.covepark.org

Kenny Hunter, Black Lion 2009, painted plaster Photocredit: Kenny and Ursula Hunter

Paul Chiappe, Untitled 32, 2009 Graphite on Paper, 21x14.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Madder139

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Scottish Art News 32

Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931) Hellebores, 1987–88 (detail), watercolour on paper The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

This publicaTion was made by FliT, london

THE FLEMING COLLECTION WE THANK THE FOLLOWING FOR SUPPORTING OUR EXHIBITION AND ACQUISITIONS PROGRAMME

Founder Member Fleming Family & Partners Ltd

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Berkeley Law Limited Evercore Partners Limited Eton College Fleming’s Hotel, Mayfair RFIB Group Limited Ridgeway Partners LLP

Patrons of The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Friends of The Fleming Collection

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T he F leming C ollection 13 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London W1J 8DU 020 7042 5784 |│ gallery@flemingcollection.com | www.flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News 34

Peter Howson. Image © Scotsman Publications Ltd Media Partners: The Scotsman

Melancholy is what I suffer from regularly, between bouts of ecstasy.

James Pryde (1877–1941) The Unknown Corner, 1912 The following is an extract from Inspired: Works from The Fleming Collection Published by The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, 2010 Inspired comprises contemporary responses to works of art in The Fleming Collection. Internationally renowned author Alexander McCall Smith, journalist Andrew Marr, former Scottish Minister for Culture Michael Russell, actor Michael Palin and artist Peter Howson join many leading figures from the art world in selecting their favourite work from the permanent collection.

Peter Howson interviewed by Tim Cornwell, 23 March 2009 James Pryde is a particularly interesting artist, as a person, and a marvellous painter of atmosphere.

He’s a mixture of Daumier and Goya for me. In the paintings that he’s most well-known for, there’s a tremendous atmosphere. He works with a limited palette, doesn’t use much colour, it’s about tone and small patches of colour.

I don’t know what this painting is about – I don’t think anyone does. It’s a romance, but the romance of darkness, there’s no exuberance in these paintings.

It certainly looks menacing, with that huge area of nothingness, and there is always something to catch your eye. It’s almost 35

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as if a giant scythe is about to come down on these people, like death, it’s a shadow on the wall caused by an alcove, but while the upturned horseshoe is a symbol of protection and hope, this goes down the way, to me it’s a symbol of an evil presence.

Pryde was a bit of a strange character altogether, what attracts me to him is he was an alcoholic, myself being a recovering alcoholic; you remain an alcoholic to the end of your days, I’ve just stopped drinking.

He was supposedly alcoholic, melancholic, and a Bohemian. If he died in poverty, he wasn’t very good with money. I’m not very good with money. I can certainly understand the idea of letting go and leading a Bohemian lifestyle.

The genius of the painting is the use of the spaces.

There’s one absolute touch of genius, almost in the middle of the painting, veering towards the west is the net that hangs over. It reminds me of Canaletto in the way he has done it, this one touch, this wee bit of net hanging down, it’s almost like a spider’s web over this scythe-shaped shadow. It has a touch of Goya’s black paintings about it, the paintings Goya did at the very end of his life, a lot of small paintings of cannibalism and rapes and murders.

It’s nearly all tonal apart from a few flashes of colour, there’s only one area of the painting that’s white, that’s the woman’s dress, most of the figures are in shadow, but there’s one part of the bustle of the dress that is pure white. It catches your attention right away, your eye immediately goes to that area, because eighty per cent of the painting is a creamy colour that’s almost a white. It’s very subtle, very beautiful. I will be interested to find out what people think of it, but I love it.

Peter Howson was born in London and trained at Glasgow School of Art. In 1992 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, an event which changed his perspective entirely. He is represented in numerous public collections.

James Pryde (1866–1941) The Unknown Corner 1912, oil on canvas, 18.3x14.9 cm Purchased 1988

Scottish Art News 36

The art and the science of Mobile Communications

FLEMINGS MAYFA I R

W W W. F L E M I N G S . C O. U K 48 Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9EP. T:020 7557 9800

www.tancroft.com

WE DON’T SAY WE ARE UNIQUE... OUR GUESTS DO TELEPHONE +44 (0)20 7499 2964 7 - 1 2 H AL F M O O N S TRE E T | LOND ON W1J 7HB

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Scottish Art News 38

Following the record breaking Scottish sale, Sotheby’s is delighted to announce the second Scottish sale of 2010 to be held on 29th September. Considering the current interest in the Glasgow Boys we would be delighted to offer advice on works by Edward Arthur Walton, James Paterson, Joseph Crawhall, George Henry, James Guthrie,

Antony Gormley, 6 Times, 2010 Six cast-iron figures, each 191x50x36 cm Commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland, with support from the Art Fund, The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, The Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland, Claire Enders and The Henry Moore Foundation © The Artist. Image: Keith Hunter

York Macgregor, Sir John Lavery, William Kennedy, Alexander Roche and Thomas Millie Dow. For advice on buying, selling and insurance, please contact the head of Sotheby’s Scotland, Anthony Weld-Forester on +44 (0)131 558 7799.

Glasgow-based artist Karla Black has been selected to represent Scotland at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the world’s largest and most prestigious showcase for contemporary visual arts. Black’s expansive floor works and hanging sculptures are created from materials that suggest both a sensory recollection of childhood: powderpaint, crushed chalk and sugar paper; and a distinct feminine association: lipstick, nail varnish and body cream. www.scotlandandvenice.com | www.marymarygallery.co.uk

Samuel John Peploe Tulips SOLD FOR £623,350, SOTHEBY’S LONDON, 22ND APRIL 2010 AUCTION RECORD FOR SCOTTISH COLOURIST PAINTING

Scottish Pictures AUCTION IN LONDON 29 SEPTEMBER 2010

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ENQUIRIES +44 (0)131 558 7799

ANTHONY.WELDFORESTER@SOTHEBYS.COM 39

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A multi-part sculptural project by Antony Gormley, commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland, will begin to appear in June. 6 Times will consist of six life-sized figures positioned between the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the sea. Four of the figures will be sited in the Water of Leith itself, acting as gauges for the height of the river as it swells and recedes – the first time that a work in the National Galleries’ collection has been permanently located across the city of Edinburgh. www.nationalgalleries.org

Aberdeen’s controversial plan to raise Union Terrace Gardens and create a civic square has been approved much to the bitter disappointment of Peacock Visual Arts who have campaigned tirelessly for an alternative proposal to create a £13m contemporary art centre on the site. Despite a public consultation on the issue finding that most people were against the plans and the backing of Peacock’s proposal by The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS), councillors

Scottish Art News

AN INVITATION TO CONSIGN

voted to back the scheme, which involves a £50m donation from the oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood. An anonymous businessman also pledged £5m. www.peacockvisualarts.com

Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz is one of four artists in the running for this year’s Turner Prize. She was nominated for a work that was commissioned by the Glasgow International Festival – a site-specific outdoor sound work on the banks of the River Clyde. The installation, Lowlands, saw her recorded voice simultaneously singing three different versions of the sixteenth century lament, Lowlands Away, played under the Caledonian, George V and Glasgow Bridges over the Clyde. www.tate.org.uk (for further details see pp.36–37 )

New Artist Studio Development: Kirkcudbright continues to attract artists, increasing its already numerous art spaces with Wasps Artists’ Studios who are developing two former town houses in Kirkcudbright to provide up to 17 artist studio spaces, expected to be completed in July 2010. www.waspsstudios.org.uk

Landscape artist and architect Charles Jencks and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy have been commissioned to produce a landmark project to be completed by 2012 which will mark the border between England and Scotland. Close to the M74 at Gretna, the project will be known as ‘Gretna Landmark – The Power of Scotland’. www.gretnalandmark.com

7 HOWE STREET EDINBURGH EH3 6TE Scottish Art News 40

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Susan Philipsz

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usan Philpsz has been announced as the latest in a long line of Scottish artists to be nominated for high profile arts award the Turner Prize. Her inclusion on the 2010 shortlist was based on presentations of her recent work in the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and in Mirrors at the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain. Philipsz is best known for her sound installations which commonly feature recordings of her own a capella singing voice inserted into specific locations and spaces.

Philipsz initially studied sculpture at Dundee and this early interest is still in evidence in her investigation of the relationships between sounds and the structure of the spaces they inhabit. Her work has been sited in various places ranging from sparsely fitted galleries to roof terraces, seaside shelters and neglected railway arches. Other pieces have staged an intervention into more pedestrian spaces – addressing the commuters of busy bus stations, broadcasting into the homes of late-night Finnish television viewers and, perhaps most famously, singing live down a tannoy to shoppers in an East London Tesco. Her involvement in the Glasgow Festival last March saw a return to the city of her birth for the Berlinbased artist and her biggest installation to date. Set under the arches of the bridges that span the river Clyde, Philipsz placed recordings of herself singing simultaneously three different versions of the sixteenth-century Scottish lament Lowlands Away. Untrained though tuneful – as a child she sang in a choir – this lack of professionalism and all its attendant polish adds a note of vulnerability to the encounters she sets up. Her lone, disembodied voice is more suggestive of a private moment overheard than the usual dynamics of performance.

The sounds themselves are appropriated from a range of different sources including national anthems, popular music and lullabies from classic horror films. These ‘cover versions’ draw on a rich and complex web of references and allusions primarily in response to the places they are set in.

Multi-layered histories repeat and reframe in Philipsz’s work as she plays on the power of sound to evoke emotion and memory. Its place in collective and subjective consciousness is explored, both as a trigger and memorial to the past, but also in its ability to reconfigure the present. Her musical

interventions investigate the spatial properties of sound, altering the listener’s perception of the space they inhabit and their self within it. Philipsz often chooses to interject her sounds through the noises of the everyday – the squeak of the shopping trolley and the dull drone of passing traffic. Allowing them to mix in with the work provokes a consideration of the part sound plays in shaping the spaces we occupy – the train announcements, mobile ringtones and MP3 players that make up the aural backdrop to our lives.

Susan Philipsz, Lowlands, 2010 Courtesy the Artist and Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art Photographer Angela Catlin

It remains to be seen what Philipsz will produce for the Tate exhibition, although, given recent political events, a revisiting of one her earlier works may be appropriate – ‘The Internationale’, latterly sited at the ICA, is a performance of a left-wing revolutionary anthem, and hovers somewhere between mournful elegy and melancholic ‘call to arms’. A later

Richard Wright produced an intentionally temporary wall painting long since whitewashed over at the show’s end. This year may see the opposite – a work destined to echo for a long time to come.

Katie Baker is an artist and writer based in London.

installation in Oxford took as its inspiration Marconi’s idea that sound never dies, merely fades into infinitely reverberating sound waves across the universe. Last year’s Turner Prize winner Scottish Art News 42

MARTIN CREED:

Down over up An exhibition of recent and newly-commissioned work by artist Martin Creed will open in July at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

by Katie Baker

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FROM LEFT Martin Creed Work No. 508, 2006 Private Collection, Zurich. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich.

Martin Creed Work No. 998, 2009 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Barbora Gerny Martin Creed Work No. 997, 2009 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Barbora Gerny

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t the start of this year the façade of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art glowed with the optimistic neon sign Everything is Going to Be Alright – a reassurance, possibly, to gallery-goers about their first rehanging in twenty-five years.

The statement was an artwork

by Martin Creed and has also heralded the beginning of something of a homecoming for the artist. Brought up on the outskirts of Glasgow, since leaving for London to study at the Slade School of Art in the 1980s Creed has only shown twice in Scotland, both times in group shows. A series of events over the year is redressing this. Creed held his first Scottish solo show last February in Glasgow and has

been awarded a commission from the Edinburgh Art Festival, supported by the government’s Expo Fund, to create a permanent work of public sculpture. This will be sited on the historic Scotsman Steps which Creed plans to resurface in contrasting marbles from around the world.

In addition his Ballet:Work No. 1020, a dance work premiered at Sadler’s Wells in London, will be presented at the Traverse Theatre and a collection of essays on the artist, published

by Thames and Husdon, will be launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Finally, a major exhibition and his second Scottish solo show, is set to open in Edinburgh.

The upcoming show, entitled Down Over Up will open on the 30th July at the Fruitmarket

Gallery and will present new and recent work

Down Over Up shares it name with the title of one of Creed’s works published to coincide with an exhibition in 2005. Work no 394: Down Over Up consists of the word ‘down’ printed over a line, underneath which is the word ‘up’. It looks like one of those Dingbat puzzles where you simply have to say what you see to unlock the well-known phrase. Indeed, ‘say what you see’ is an approach to Creed’s art that their very titles would seem to encourage. As well as the numerical labelling of his art that provides an idea of Creed’s output over time, the works are frequently accompanied with a reduced description. Work No. 79 Some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled

into a ball, and depressed against a wall is…some Blutack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall. If there is poetry to be found in the work, it will be found in the work, in the very ordinariness it is crafted out of, not in over-blown statements from the artist. Creed typically refuses to mediate further between his objects and the viewer, gently steering them back to what is there in front of them, pointing out the obvious in all its banal splendour.

It is this straightforward approach and subtle, pareddown art that Creed is best known for. Objects are made largely of ordinary, modest materials, drawn from the stuff of everyday life, that for the most part are rarely manipulated beyond their

If there is poetry to be found in the work, it will be found in the work, in the very ordinariness it is crafted out of, not in over-blown statements from the artist

basic functionality. Yet despite their often austere sensibilities they are far from being sober works, inflected instead with a generous and gently subversive humour.

Creed began his career with small, unassuming interventions that announced themselves in a space with a polite cough, rather than grand fanfare. Masking tape cut into small squares and stuck down on top of each other to form a cube on a wall; A4 paper, sometimes crumpled up, sometimes folded and unfolded. These early pieces were suggestive of the bored office worker – thwarted creativity diverted into idle fiddling with the stationary cupboard supplies. Other works challenged the viewer’s navigation of the space with Scottish Art News 44

minor alterations – a cubic stack of tiles built on top of one of the existing tiles of a floor, forcing itself to be negotiated around; a doorstop fitted to prevent the door from opening fully, hampering entry into an otherwise empty space. Creed has often looked no further than the fabric of the gallery itself for his material. Doors are jammed, the walls swell with bulbous protrusions, the lifts sing to people as they move up and down. Perhaps most famously of all, the lights go on and off. This latter work, Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off was presented in 2001 for his winning Turner Prize entry. Nothing was added physically to the space – the existing light fittings were manipulated to alternately plunge the viewer from light into darkness and back again.

Yet by the most minimal of acts the whole space was entirely filled in an encounter that challenged conventional expectations of looking at art.

With works made within such a tight economy of means, slight gestures that appear on the cusp of disappearing altogether, their status as an artwork seems at times as secure as that of the Blutack stuck on the wall. Creed appears to make work out of nothing at all; indeed his work can suggest an effortlessness that has exposed him on occasion to tabloid controversy and derision. More precisely, he makes work from exposing the overlooked and unnoticed, noting that everything is something, even an apparently empty room. If Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off 45

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commanded attention to the space through a process of illumination and eclipse then Half the Air in a Given Space was made out of the very space itself – absence given joyful form in the shape of dozens of colourful balloons half-filling the gallery.

Without abandoning his devotion to the ordinary, Creed’s art has got progressively bigger and louder. With bright neon signs, filling a gallery with balloons and ringing the bells in a city as loudly and quickly as possible in three minutes, there has been a growing exuberance to the work. In 2008 he responded to the Tate Britain’s Duveen Hall commission by having runners sprinting through the space at thirty second intervals. Having once shown works that were in danger of being missed altogether by viewers, this new work required them to avoid being literally knocked over by it. His 2.5cm cubic stack of Elastoplast tape has grown into stacks of plywood and tables reaching to the ceiling. Latterly Creed’s work has become increasingly performance based, working with athletes, orchestras and most recently dancers in his work with Sadler’s Wells. A natural extension perhaps of his involvement with the band he formed in 1997, named Owada, whose song titles also share a direct relation with the work itself. The Fruitmarket Gallery show will embrace visitors into the artwork too, with a staircase that has been turned into a synthesiser, each step sounding a different note on the scale as the

Objects are made largely of ordinary, modest materials, drawn from the stuff of everyday life, that for the most part are rarely manipulated beyond their basic functionality.

Yet despite their often austere sensibilities they are far from being sober works, inflected instead with a generous and gently subversive humour

audience walks up and down.

It is an altogether different engagement with his audience than the slightly passive aggressive gestures of his older work that mildly antagonised them by frustrating their passage through the space.

Now they are being invited to add to the space, musically at least, by virtue of their own movements.

Down Over Up will focus on Creed’s enduring interest in stacking and progression in size, height and tone, with works set to feature stacks of planks, chairs, tables, boxes and pieces of Lego.

Creed shares an aesthetic relationship to minimalism, with his ongoing use of repetition and sequence, but there is a playfulness and wit to the art that owes much to his loyalty to the low-tech and delight in the unremarkable.

Items such as columns of Lego bricks and a row of nails in decreasing size, hammered into the wall, have kept the work firmly rooted in the realms of the commonplace.

It is our experience of this everyday world that is shaped by our ability and urge to organise it, to draw the random and inchoate into order. We know this world through categorising it, understanding the relationships of objects to each other – what is smaller, what is bigger, what is brighter, what is dimmer. Creed’s organisation of objects speaks to this impulse to classify and there is a pleasing logic to a tower of chairs, placed one on top of the other, from largest to smallest. It alludes to conventions and

rules which suggest a world of rationality and stability, a world that is comprehensible and intelligible. Yet the works inevitably fall short of that promise of a universal rationale, showing up instead the arbitrariness and insecurity of own systems of order. They operate much like Creed’s neon signs Don’t Worry and Everything is Going To Be Alright. The phrases are empty optimism. Meaningless statements that in reality say nothing at all – or are the kind of thing you say when circumstances are such that there is nothing left to say. But Creed offers them up, just as he offers up his quasi-logical ordering of the universe.

He understands our wish to hear it. Creed’s work has a generosity of spirit to it, an acknowledgment of something of our human condition. His materials are drawn from the prosaic rather than the luxurious and he makes the banality of our lives seem somehow more meaningful, elevating the ordinary and trivial into something beautiful and profound. His neon statement The whole world + the art = the whole world, that once emblazoned the Tate Britain like some kind of manifesto for contemporary art, invites a nihilistic interpretation that would suggest art has no impact on the world. Yet this would be to misunderstand the sentiment of Creed’s work. Another way of viewing it is not as a depressive comment about art but rather as an affirmation that art is a part of the world, a part of everyday life. There

is no such thing as nothing in Creed’s work, or, as the title of one of his songs has it, ‘Nothing is Something’. In an often uncertain world where we may keenly feel our own apparent lack of agency Creed seems to say that even the smallest, slightest gestures are worth something and are, perhaps, the most truthful of all.

Katie Baker is an artist and writer based in London.

The Fruitmarket Gallery Martin Creed: Down Over Up 30 July – 31 October 45 Market Street EH1 1DF Tel: 0131 225 2383 www.fruitmarket.co.uk

Martin Creed, Work No. 792, 2007 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: John Short

Scottish Art News 46

HamishFulton: 21 Days in the Cairngorms In Spring 2010, Deveron Arts in Huntly, Aberdeenshire invited the artist Hamish Fulton to realise a project which would connect the town itself with the Cairngorm national park.

by Ben Jones

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Two hour walk round the block, Huntly, April, 2010 Photocredit: Angela Catlin

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Photocredit Ben Jones

everon Arts works under the modus operandi the town is the venue, where the town of Huntly becomes the venue, studio, gallery and stage for the visual and performing arts. With the nearest city about an hour away, connectivity for the town of Huntly is an issue. Whether this is by transport (Huntly is a 4000-strong community that is on the direct rail link between Inverness and Aberdeen) or through communication, such as the post, telephone or internet. As the town is in the

foothills of the Cairngorms national park, walking is a mode of transport that is also important to Huntly. The Cairngorms are one of the last wilderness areas in Europe where there is the possibility of several days of walking without human interaction or interference. As Huntly is outside the boundaries of the Cairngorm national park, there is debate among some residents inside and out as to whether it is better, economically or otherwise, to be within or outwith its borders.

Scottish Art News 48

Photocredit Ben Jones

In spring 2010 Deveron Arts invited the renowned walking artist, Hamish Fulton, to develop a project that connects the town to the Cairngorms through ‘Walking as Art’. Through his walks Fulton tries to actively test himself mentally and physically, such as undertaking a full week of walking without sleep; walking from one side of the UK to the other; refraining from talking for a full week while walking. Through the physical act of walking Fulton’s experience and understanding of the landscape, the environment, and of himself become interconnected.

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Fulton proposed ‘21 days in the Cairngorms’ during which he would walk from Huntly over and through the Cairngorms with one rucksack in which was packed everything he needed to survive. He would start in Huntly and end in the heart of the national park, throughout the period having no means of being tracked (carrying no GPS).

Exploring Huntly’s town motto Room to Roam Fulton wanted to highlight both the mental and physical room to roam and make a geographic and psychological link between Huntly and the Cairngorms national park.

At 10am on Sunday 18 April, followed by a group of artists, curators, students and hardened walkers, Fulton set off from Huntly to the Cairngorms. The group only accompanied him for the first five hours, after which he said farewell and disappeared into the national park. The walk took the group up and down hills, across fields, over barbed-wire fences and gates and along tree-lined pathways.

Throughout the walk there was a sense of everything slowing down and a heightened awareness of the surroundings and the small details which are possibly taken for granted

in our rushed modern lives.

There was also an awareness and acknowledgment of the physical and mental demands Fulton was going to face by living in the Cairngorms for 21 days with no means of communication. As a result the people who saw him off carried his experiences themselves throughout, wondering where exactly in the Cairngorms he might be and how he was surviving, creating an imaginary mental map through having the relatively short experience of the five hour accompanied walk.

Alongside the main walking project, a series of talks and walks were developed to generate discussion around the idea of ‘Walking as Art’ which involved the Chicago-based curator Mary Jane Jacob in a so-called ‘Shadow Curator’ capacity.

In his public presentation and discussion with Jacob, Fulton not only raised the idea of walking as art and discussed his various walks across the UK, Tibet, and other parts of the world, but the strength of the body and its ability to withstand such physical and mental pressure.

Fulton cited such people as John Francis who, for almost three decades, travelled the globe by foot and boat with a message of environmental responsibility (for 17 of those years without speaking), and as a result brought another dimension and position to the conversation – the possibility of walking as activism.

The first of two choreographed walks, performed before and after the

‘21 days’, involved participants walking around a block of buildings in Huntly while keeping two metres behind the person in front of them for two uninterrupted hours.

What started as an endurance activity developed, for some of the people involved, into a kind of meditation where the only object in their line of vision for the two hour period were the heels of the person in front of them. The second choreographed walk in the ski centre car park of the Cairngorm national park was at a slower pace, but still involved physical endurance, as Fulton asked participants to walk the short distance of three metres over a full one hour period. Through both of these walks the participants developed an understanding and acknowledgment of walking, the surrounding environment, meditation and internal contemplation.

The idea of ‘Walking as Art’ was questioned by many in the audience and participants in the project.

Can walking be art and where does the walk end and the art begin? For Fulton the

answer to these questions has constantly changed, from the walk being a walk and the art emerging from the experience, to his current belief that the walk can also be the art work.

Through Fulton’s experience in the Cairngorms will emerge a series of works (one of which will be added to Deveron Arts ever growing Town Collection of public art) and a book that will present his experience and thoughts throughout the 21 days.

Fulton aims to investigate, through his art practice, the experience of walking as well as the themes that run through and alongside it. This includes the physicality of the body, mental fortitude, environmental responsibility, activism, and the reclamation of something that has perhaps been lost in this technological and modern age – the ability to slow down, take stock and appreciate and acknowledge our surroundings.

Ben Jones is a curator and writer currently working as Shadow Curator intern at Deveron Arts. www.deveron-arts.com Scottish Art News 50

Resolving

Differences The Modernist Painting of Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009) With an exhibition of Craigie Aitchison’s work opening at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, its curator, Bill Hare, discusses the artist’s personal vision and how it addresses and resolves certain tensions at play within modernist painting.

We want something else. We work toward serenity through simplification of ideas and of form. The ensemble is our ideal.

– Interview with Matisse, 1909

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ith the death of Craigie Aitchison in December last year the art scene in this country is undoubtedly now a less colourful place with the loss of one of its most distinctive and attractive individuals. He was a much loved figure in British painting and with his life-long air of mischievous childhood 51

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innocence, was affectionately regarded as the Peter Pan of the art world. For many furthermore, his pictures of animals, especially his Bedlington terriers, his charming still lifes, his haunting landscapes, his arresting portraits and even his intensely radiating crucifixions seemed to reflect an uncorrupted and blessedly naive nature which was as simple as it was pure. Yet can this really be the whole story? Could such an uncomplicated approach in a major artist sustain such a long and successful career? As Oscar Wilde pointed out, the truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Unfortunately in this country there is often a prevalent feeling that it is dangerous, if not downright sinful, to intellectualise about art. This is especially the case with a medium such as painting which has such a direct impact on our immediate sensibilities.

Such an attitude holds the view that in matters of aesthetics we should solely rely on our instincts and personal taste. Of course no one who cares about painting would deny that these intuitive gut reactions crucially matter. However, we may also be required to utilise some of our other, more mental faculties, in order to further understand and appreciate why the work of an artist like Craigie Aitchison is of such a high and consistent quality.

One of the recurring difficulties in giving his painting the serious critical attention it deserves is that Aitchison’s work has tended to be placed mainly within a British art context. With this country’s love of quaint eccentrics and artistic outsiders, Aitchison has too readily been seen in the same kind of company as ‘mystical mavericks’ such as Blake, Palmer and Spencer.

There could of course, be something in this English connection; yet an alternative European approach to the interpretation of Aichison’s art should also lead to a richer and more rewarding appreciation of the work of this remarkable, highly gifted and intelligent artist.

Viewed from this wider international perspective Aitchison can be regarded as one of the most dedicated

Crucifixion with Angel, 2007 Oil on canvas

Scottish Art News 52

modernist painters this country has produced. Within this critical approach it has to be pointed out that modern art and modernism should not be taken as being synonymous.

In fact it could be argued that modernism grew out of a critical and creative reaction to modern art, especially if we regard impressionism as the foundation of modern art.

Matisse certainly felt this when he exclaimed, ‘Impressionist painting – and I know, having come from there – teems with contradictory sensations, it is a state of agitation. We want something else.’

As with Matisse, Craigie Aitchison’s art also seeks to resolve these ‘contradictory sensations’ through a concentrated process of distillation and simplification. That complex refining process however, draws on references from a range of modernist practices.

Thus Aitchison’s work can, in varying degrees, be linked to the expressionism of Van Gogh, the synthetism of Gauguin, the symbolism of Redon, the fauvism of Matisse and even the colour field painting of later American abstract expressionism.

In addition, as with many other modernists, Aitchison also greatly admired earlier artists who, under different circumstances, appeared to pursue similar painterly aims, such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca – the latter being a particular favourite of the artist. Certainly Aitchison could sympathise with Matisse’s antirealist reaction when, looking past the merely illustrative to 53

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reveal a much deeper insight, he observed, ‘when I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble myself to recognise which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I immediately understand the feeling that emerges from it. The title will only serve to confirm my impression.’ It is this concentrated pursuit and sensitive expression of ‘feeling’ which is at the heart of the painting of both Matisse and Aitchison.

During their careers both Matisse and Aitchison were sometimes attacked for appearing to be too crude and direct in their seemingly primitive approach to painting.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Both, despite the initial powerfully sensual impact of their paintings were highly sophisticated artists whose paintings were constantly enriched by their understanding and response to a wide range of artistic sources. ‘I have never avoided the influences of others’, Matisse admitted to Guillaume Apollinaire, while Aitchison in his typical tongue-incheek school-boyish manner confessed to Andrew Lambirth that he also readily ‘cribbed’ from other artists. Of course it is certainly not the ‘borrowings’ in themselves which raises the aesthetic level of these artists’ work. Rather it is the highly intelligent and subtle way they incorporate these sympathetic influences and transform them into their own stylistic vision.

Maybe this shared respect for the artistic achievements of the past resulted from the fact that both Matisse and

OPPOSITE FRO M TOP Boy Seated and Crucifixion, 1985 Oil on canvas Scottish Landscape, 2007, oil on board

Aitchison studied law before deciding to become painters.

The law is very much built on past precedents and likewise, as Gombrich pointed out in Art and Illusion, the making of art has more to do with the examples of previous art than any other factor.

So what is the essential characteristic that distinguishes the modernist painting of Craigie Aitchison?

To answer this we have to return to Matisse’s comments on impressionism. Modern art wished to represent visually the modern experience with all its fragmentary ‘contradictory sensations’ as directly and truthfully as possible. On the other hand, modernist painting, while fully aware of the conflicting nature of modernity sought, not to ignore, but to resolve the tensions created by these differences and create a vision of ‘balance, of purity and serenity’.

Like the French modernist master, Aitchison laid the foundation of his art on a solid academic training.

Aitchson studied at the Slade under the strict empirical teaching of William Coldstream and continued to practise what he had learned there. Like Matisse he always preferred to work directly from the motif – as he stated ‘I paint what I see… to get a likeness.’ Yet that ‘likeness’ could never be a mere mimetic facsimile.

On the contrary it needed to be a harmonious plastic one in which the emotional involvement of the artist emerges through the creative process of painting itself.

Ultimately what a modernist artist like Aitchison seeks is a personal vision of the complex optical and psychological relationship with his source of inspiration. As with Matisse’s art the range and nature of subject matter in Aitchison’s art is relatively narrow and conventional – for what really matters is not so much what he paints, but how he is able to convey to the viewer that inner bond between himself and his subject. Stylistically Aitchison achieves this in his own distinctive manner by imaginatively resolving the contradictions at the heart of modern painting. Thus he eliminates inessentials; his absorbing saturated colour holds the appropriate balance between factual description and decorative expression, while outline and form give a distinct identity and presence to all the interrelated formal elements in a perfectly harmonious pictorial ensemble.

Through the artist’s highly refined skill and graceful elegance the central dialect of modern painting, between figuration and abstraction, achieves its perfect synthesis of the real and the ideal on the surface of Craigie Aitchison’s painting.

Scottish Art News 54

ABOVE Girl in a Red Blazer, 1974 Oil on canvas OPPOSITE Cypres Tree and Bedlington, 2005 Oil on canvas All images © Artist’s Estate

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Bill Hare is an Honorary Fellow in Scottish art history at Edinburgh University and Honorary Curator of the University’s Fine Art Collection as well as Exhibition Curator of the ECA Cast Collection. He has curated many exhibitions both in Britain and abroad, working with major artists such as Sam Francis, Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and Boyle Family. He has published extensively on Scottish modern art, including Contemporary Painting in Scotland (1992).

An exhibition of Craigie Aitchison’s painting, curated by Bill Hare, will be shown in The Georgian Gallery, The University of Edinburgh from 30 July to 25 September 2010 at the Edinburgh Festival.

University of Edinburgh Old College, South Bridge EH8 9YL Tel: 0131 650 2210 www.trg.ed.ac.uk

Scottish Art News 56

UNMASKING THE LEWIS CHESSMEN 57

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An exhibition of 30 Lewis Chessmen from the collections of National Museums Scotland and the British Museum draws on significant new research undertaken by Dr David Caldwell, Keeper of Scotland and Europe at the National Museums Scotland, which questions age-old assumptions about their origins.

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t is the job of a curator to present collections to the public, to make them interesting and to impart knowledge that adds to our appreciation of the past or the world we live in. A curator should always be ready to delve into the furthest reaches of the archives to reveal hidden gems that can provide illumination of new themes. Perhaps these are objects which have been misunderstood in the past and which can now be reinterpreted. Sometimes however, it is the most famous

Found in sand dunes at Uig Strand on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, these superlative examples of Scandinavian ivory carving date to the late twelfth century

or well-liked objects that are most in need of scrutiny. That is certainly the case with the Lewis Chessmen. Their story has remained remarkably stable over the years. Found in sand dunes at Uig Strand on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, these superlative examples of Scandinavian ivory carving date to the late twelfth century. They must have been a merchant’s hoard, abandoned at Uig by a trader planning to take them elsewhere. Perhaps he was shipwrecked in this remote spot, far from any markets.

They must have been a merchant’s hoard! It was doubts about this assumption that set the writer on a whole course of discovery, supported by two colleagues, Mark Hall of Perth Museum and Caroline Wilkinson of Dundee University. If you accept that the Lewis hoard belonged to a passing merchant, then you probably assume the chessmen were all new when lost and all belonged together.

This has been the exclusive position of academics for the last 180 years. Question this

belief, and several new lines of enquiry open up, not least an assessment of the hoard’s place in Lewis.

Some view Lewis as a remote part of the British Isles, a bleak island that cannot support a comfortable way of life for its people. But remote from where? After Norse settlement of parts of Ireland and the northern and western regions of Scotland, Lewis was in fact well placed on sea routes between Norway and the important Scandinavian trading centre at Dublin. Much Scottish Art News 58

Photocredit: Steve Lindridge

of the island may now provide a challenge for modern farming methods but a good living could be coaxed from it with a less intensive medieval technology.

It is a pity that the relevance of the hoard to Lewis has been played down. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the chessmen belonged to someone on that island. Some knowledge of Lewis history shows that it was not actually part of Scotland until 1266, but was ruled by a Scandinavian dynasty of kings based on the Isle of Man. It is possible to identify leading men – kings, princes, bishops and clan chiefs who might have valued and possessed such high status playing pieces.

If the Lewis Chessmen belonged to a local, we do not have to assume they were new when lost, or even that they all belong together.

Perhaps they come from different workshops, are of different dates, or even include substitutes for broken or lost pieces. With these thoughts in mind a detailed analysis has been undertaken to identify 59

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the work of different craftsmen and show that some of the chessmen are later in date than has hitherto been supposed.

Underpinning this work has been a photogrammetric survey of the faces of the kings, queens, bishops, knights and warders. Most of them fall into five groups which we think represent the output of five different craftsmen.

Our research has taken us in yet other directions.

Re-examining age-old assumptions can produce a vast array of new knowledge.

Have we got the ‘findspot’ on Lewis right? A lot hangs on the answer to this question, not just local pride in staking a claim to them. A more detailed understanding of the location and circumstances of deposition of the hoard may provide information on who originally owned it. Are all the pieces really chessmen?

The answer to this may be surprising to many, but we think the hoard represents the remains of a top-class gaming compendium for at least three different games on more than one board at a time.

We have even dared to ask whether these gaming pieces are Scandinavian. The answer has to be yes, and we may hope eventually to identify the actual places of manufacture. We believe that Trondheim in Norway is one of the main contenders. This was an important royal centre, the home of the Archbishops of Nidaros who exercised authority over the Bishops of the Isles (including Lewis). It is exactly the sort of place that craftsmen working in a valuable commodity like walrus ivory would be undertaking important commissions for rich and high status clients.

And that brings us round to a final big question that has not been asked until now. Are they works of art?

We believe that many of them are, with sensitive and finely rendered faces and hands and a complete understanding of the

robes and equipment worn by contemporary kings, bishops, etc in the Scandinavian world.

Others however, are not nearly so good, and some even have careless mistakes, evidence perhaps of a workshop under strain to complete an important commission in time.

Perhaps our work has introduced some elements of uncertainty. It will not be the last word on the subject, and even as I write, we are considering other avenues of research.

Readers can judge our ideas for themselves by visiting the

exhibition. What I believe is absolutely certain is that the Lewis Chessmen will continue to fascinate all who see them.

For me it is their faces that make them so attractive and hold the key to so much we know, and hope to discover about them. Unmasking them has enhanced their beauty.

Dr David Caldwell is Keeper of Scotland and Europe at National Museums Scotland.

The Lewis Chessmen Unmasked National Museum of Scotland until 19 September 2010 Aberdeen Art Gallery 7 October 2010 – 8 January 2011 Shetland Museum & Archives 29 January 2011 – 27 March 2011 Museum nan Eilean, Stornoway 15 April 2011 – 12 September 2011 www.nms.ac.uk The accompanying book, The Lewis Chessmen: Unmasked,

by David H. Caldwell, Mark A. Hall and Caroline M. Wilkinson is priced £6.99.

Scottish Art News 60

2010 Art Market Round-up

S.J. Peploe (1871–1935), Tulips £623,650

by Will Bennett

A glance inside the galleries of The Fleming Collection earlier this year was sufficient to show just how popular the Scottish Colourists have become. For two and a half months visitors flocked to see more than 30 works by Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, George Leslie Hunter and John Duncan Fergusson as the Collection put all its Colourist pictures on show together for the first time. A year of events marking the tenth anniversary of the Collection becoming a charity could hardly have got off to a better start.

At first sight the public love affair with the Colourists

appears to be repeated by collectors in the salerooms. It is certainly the case that The Fleming Collection could not now afford to acquire the works that David Donald so cannily bought in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the beginning of that period they could be acquired for a few hundred pounds apiece and even by the late 1970s a good Peploe would only cost £5,000. Compare that to the record £623,650 paid for Peploe’s still life Tulips at Sotheby’s auction of Scottish Pictures in London on 22 April and one can understand why The Fleming Collection last bought a Colourist painting in 1992.

Sotheby’s trumpeted this undoubted triumph to the

rooftops. The price paid by an anonymous telephone bidder identified only by the bidding number LO60 was not just a record for Peploe but was also the biggest sum ever paid for any Scottish Colourist picture. Just as remarkable was the £553,250 paid by the

Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935)

same buyer only a few minutes previously for Cadell’s exuberant

Tulips

Florian’s Café, Venice, another artist’s record. Carrying an estimate of

£623,650

just £150,000 to £250,000 this painting breathed life into a saleroom which until then had showed only intermittent interest in the mainly

couple of anaemic still lifes by Hunter, a drab rural scene by Peploe

bidder for £10,000 hammer price which came to £12,500 once

nineteenth-century pictures being offered for sale. With another

and three products of Fergusson’s time in France between the two

Sotheby’s had added its commission.

Peploe, Still Life of Fruit, fetching the day’s third highest price of

World Wars. These failures tell us as much about the market for

£289,250 from a British private collector, the Colourists had once

Colourist paintings as the successes. Buyers want quality and will

Milne, sometimes referred to as the ‘Fifth Colourist’, fetched a record

again dominated a sale of Scottish art.

not meet over-optimistic estimates for bad pictures such as the

price of £75,650 at Sotheby’s and a second painting by the same artist

Interestingly Cottages in Provence by John Maclauchlan

Hunter still lifes. They certainly want colour, which ruled out Peploe’s

sold for a healthy £32,450. Cottages in Provence is a fine painting and

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937)

What is not in doubt is that the best paintings command prices that

predominantly green and brown North Berwick, and they also like

the market preferred a good picture by a man working in the circle

Florian’s Cafe, Venice (detail)

would astonish the artists, who never regarded themselves as a

pictures which look as though they are by the Scottish Colourists.

of the Scottish Colourists to some poor ones by his more famous

£553,250

group and who only exhibited together on three occasions during

The problem for the three inter-war Fergussons, At the Bathing Place,

contemporaries. Above all the Sotheby’s sale provided a timely

their lifetimes. Peploe’s Tulips ticked all the right boxes not only

Dejeuner sur L’Herbe and Nude and Cliff was not just that they are not

reminder that the Colourists produced an enormous range of work

being one of the best examples of a still life technique that he spent

what some Colourist collectors expect to see in a sale but that other

and so the market for their pictures varies accordingly.

three decades striving to perfect but also boasting an impressive

artists do these scenes of Bohemian life so much better.

provenance having been in the collections of David Cargill and later

William Bowie. Cadell’s vivid Venetian scene was completely fresh to

Sotheby’s did not inspire great enthusiasm. The hammer price for

Daily Telegraph who now works for the marketing and public relations

the market having long been in the possession of the same family who

Fergusson’s The Blue Dress, a portrait of the artist Anne Estelle

consultants Cawdell Douglas.

had been given it by the artist possibly in lieu of payment of a medical bill.

Rice, was at the bottom end of its £50,000 to £70,000 estimate

and Peploe’s gloomy Cottage at Corstophine aroused only modest

61

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Yet the reality of the Colourist market is rather different.

But the Sotheby’s sale showed that the market does not

Even some of those Colourist paintings that did sell at

view all Scottish Colourist works with such enthusiasm. Of the 20

interest. A Fergusson wartime pastel The Guns’ Rhythm, the Gunner

Colourist pictures in the auction nine failed to sell. They included a

and The Gun, estimated at £10,000 to £15,000, sold to a telephone

Will Bennett is the former Art Sales Correspondent of the

Scottish Art News 62

Books

An Unfolding Gift The Pier Arts Centre Collection

David Batchelor Waldella, Dundee, 2010

Foreword by Nicholas Serota

Mixed media

Introduction by Mel Gooding

Image © rossfrasermclean

Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2010 The Art of J.D. Fergusson,

Hardback £29.95

A Biased Biography Margaret Morris

The Pier Arts Centre in Orkney

J.D. Fergusson Art

was opened in 1979 to provide

Foundation

a home for a remarkable collection of British paintings and sculpture

February 2010

gathered together and donated to Orkney by author, peace activist

Paperback £15

and philanthropist Margaret Gardiner (1904–2005). Her friendship

This book is a lively account

her interest in art and throughout the 1930s and 40s, she was a

of the life of J.D. Fergusson,

significant supporter and patron of the St Ives group of artists,

lovingly told by

including Margaret Mellis who studied under the Scottish Colourist

his lifelong partner, Margaret

S.J. Peploe at Edinburgh College of Art. Much of the work produced

Morris. She recounts his

by the artists working in St Ives evokes some sense of the place,

childhood years spent with his family in Edinburgh and his early

especially of the sea, making Orkney a particularly fitting home for

days there as an artist. She tells of his time in Paris at the beginning

the collection to be ‘held in trust for Orkney’. An Unfolding Gift is

of the twentieth century, and how his art developed there as he

introduced by Nicholas Serota and Mel Gooding with short texts

experienced, first hand, the radical developments of modern art, such

by Patrick Heron and Alan Bowness. Beautifully illustrated and

as Impressionism and Fauvism. Much of his time in Paris was spent

supplemented by artists’ profiles and commentaries by Margaret

with fellow Edinburgh artist, S.J. Peploe and the second chapter of the

Gardiner, An Unfolding Gift gives the reader a generous and

book opens with Fergusson’s memories of Peploe. It describes their

comprehensive overview of the works in the collection, fascinating

friendship in Edinburgh, and their holidays together in Scotland and

for those both familiar and unfamiliar with Orkney and the Pier Arts

France and so links the two periods. By 1909 Fergusson had firmly

Centre Collection.

established his reputation in Paris, and his status as a modern artist was acknowledged when he was elected a sociétaire of the Salon

Van Gogh’s Twin:

d’Automne. It was also in Paris, in 1913, that he met Margaret Morris

The Scottish Art Dealer

as a young woman of 22, and an intense and enduring relationship

Alexander Reid

ensued. Her Biased Biography recalls their life together as they moved

Frances Fowle

in artistic circles in Paris, the south of France, London and Scotland. It

National Galleries of Scotland

also paints a picture of a man who was of great support and inspiration

October 2010

to her dance and art, as well as to many other young artists.

Paperback £15

Much of this fascinating account is told first hand as it

includes numerous letters from Fergusson to Margaret, and extracts

Alexander Reid was one of the most

from Fergusson’s unpublished biographical notes, of which he left

influential art dealers of his time. A

many handwritten pages. It also includes correspondence from

close friend of Whistler and the Van

notable contemporaries including Katherine Mansfield, Charles Rennie

Gogh brothers, he was the first British

Mackintosh and Jo Davidson.

dealer to take a serious interest in Impressionist art. He was also a

contemporary of the Glasgow Boys and supported emerging artists

The Art of J.D. Fergusson was originally published in 1974.

This new edition has been produced to coincide with the centenary

such as Henry, Hornel and Crawhall as well as the Scottish Colourists.

of the Margaret Morris Movement (the system of modern dance and

His clients were rich Scottish merchants and industrialists who made

remedial exercise that was devised by Margaret Morris in 1910). While

their fortunes on the back of Scotland’s rapid economic development,

remaining true to the original edition, it includes a new foreword by

and whom he persuaded to buy Impressionism well in advance of

the current Chairman of the J.D. Fergusson Art Foundation, Robin

their English contemporaries. In this first biography devoted to an

Anderson and a new afterword by Roger Billcliffe. It has also been

unsung hero of the British art world, Frances Fowle traces the history

enhanced with more colour illustrations, all of which have been sourced

of Reid’s gallery against the background of a fascinating period of

from The Fergusson Gallery in Perth, where Fergusson’s vast collection

economic boom and bust.

of artwork and archive is now housed. (Jenny Kinnear) 63

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Preview 2010/11

with artist Barbara Hepworth did much to strengthen and influence

Scottish Art News 64

An improved visitor experience was at the heart of the

James Paterson: Works from the Artist’s Studio

redevelopment project, realised in the airy new entrance area,

26 March – 27 September 2010

containing Reception, Cafe and Shop. From here visitors can

Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, 82 Hillhead Street

orient themselves with an AV on the History of the Museum and

Glasgow G12 8QQ

explore What Is A Museum?, before launching themselves back 400

Tel: 0141 330 5431

million years to the opening displays in Landscapes and Lives. The

www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk

development of the city is highlighted in thematic case displays in The Making of Modern Dundee. Upstairs, Dundee and the World focuses

Glasgow Boy James Paterson was a proficient amateur photographer

on the city’s international collections, evidence of Dundee’s rich

whose collection of photograph albums and glass negatives were left

trading history.

by his family to Glasgow University Library, Department of Special

Collections in 2003. Paterson inherited his love of photography from

At the heart of the building is the Hugh Ker Creative

Learning Suite, comprising studio space for practical activities and

his father, Andrew Paterson (1819–1907) who was one of the earliest

study space for more contemplative pursuits. Alongside, the new

amateur photographers in Scotland. Most of Paterson’s photographs

Long Gallery contains a display of studio ceramics – part of the city’s

were taken in the 1880s and 90s when he was living in Moniaive, and

nationally significant collections of fine and decorative art. A suite of

record family life, visits to the studio, sitters, landscapes and his own

three art galleries then take the visitor through the city’s fine Victorian,

work. They constitute a remarkable archive that illuminates Paterson’s

Twentieth Century and Contemporary Art collections.

large and varied output as an artist.

The densely hung Victoria Gallery features Scottish painting

Using photography as an inventorial tool, he mounted

from 1750 to 1920. From the portraiture of Allan Ramsay and Henry

photographs of his completed paintings in albums and annotated

Raeburn through the work of the Scott Lauder artists who were such

them as a record of exhibitions and sales. Several of his photographs

favourites of Dundee collectors, to the Glasgow Boys and Dundee’s

illustrate how the camera was also put to work as an aid to

own John Duncan.

compositions, as in the case of his elegant portrait, The Artist’s Wife,

Eliza Ferguson, in her Wedding Dress, 1886 (private collection).

In the Twentieth Century Gallery, the exhibition Consider

the Lilies, finally comes home. A partnership project with the National

Galleries of Scotland, the exhibition toured throughout 2006–7 to the

a cottage in Moniaive near Dumfries, to which he added a purpose-

Dean Gallery, Edinburgh; The Fleming Collection, London and was

built studio and a conservatory. The artist’s pleasure in his studio is

the centrepiece of the Kirkcudbright Art Festival.

reflected in a group of interior studio scenes, such as ‘At the Organ’,

Following his marriage to Eliza, Paterson moved to Killniess,

It is a survey of the best of Scottish painting from 1910–

1980 with a distinctly Dundee flavour – as is acknowledged in the exhibition’s title. Initially inspired by the painting Consider the Lilies, painted by Peter Collins during his time in Dundee, it is also a nod to Dundee’s coat of arms – the pot of three lilies symbolising the Virgin Mary, the city’s patron saint. The original exhibition has been enhanced by a small display of works recently presented to the Collection including Storm at Sea Remembered by Jon Schueler and Majestic Sea Brooder (for the Wild Bird) by Neil Dallas Brown.

Consider the Lilies, ends 25 July 2010

Titian: Diana and Actaeon, 7 Aug – Sun 5 Sept 2010

of the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland. Reflecting current

Consider the Lilies 2, 8 September 2010 – August 2011

contemporary art practice, new acquisitions include work by artists

Orchar Prints and Watercolours, 13 November 2010 – 16 January 2011

Wolfgang Tillmans, John Stezaker, Callum Innes, Moyna Flannigan

The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum

and a new commission for the contemporary new circulation core.

Albert Square, Meadowside, Dundee DD1 1DA

Dundee-born David Batchelor has created a stunning new work

Tel: 01382 307200

Waldella, Dundee. A coral-like form made of plastic coloured bottles,

www.themcmanus-dundee.gov.uk

it was designed to draw visitors up through the building and has

Here and Now showcases new works purchased as part

ABOVE FROM TOP Landscape with Hayricks, 1889, Watercolour and gouache. Dedicated to Henry Walton

proved a popular new addition to the collection.

(Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery,

The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum reopened its

(Anna Robertson, Senior Curator of Art, The McManus: Dundee’s Art

OPPOSITE FROM TOP

doors on Sunday 28 February 2010. The results of the building’s

Gallery and Museum)

Here and Now

© Department of Special Collections,

Victoria Gallery

Glasgow University Library

refurbishment had been the subject of fevered speculation within the city and visitors queued for over an hour to be the first to gain entry.

Open: Monday – Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday 12.30 –4.30pm

Twentieth Century Gallery

It was the start of a busy afternoon that saw nearly 2,000 visitors in

Admission Free

All images © Dundee Art Galleries and

four hours.

65

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Museums (Dundee City Council)

Glasgow University)

Outside studio on Craigdarroch Burn in snow © Department of Special Collections, Glasgow University Library

Scottish Art News 66

and in numerous photographs recording family activities, visits from

William McTaggart, (1835–1910) The Village,

friends and family, and sitters.

Whitehouse (detail), oil on canvas

Paterson’s love of landscape inspired a great number

© The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

of photographs focusing on his beloved Glencairn Valley in Dumfriesshire, some of which in turn inspired his paintings and watercolours such as Ewanston barrier on Craigdarroch Water. The artist was fascinated by the changing weather around Moniaive and the nearby Glencairn Valley and he had a wooden shed built beside Craigdarroch Water to enable him to capture the varying seasons more closely and to take shelter from their vagaries. He would often walk along the rivers and about the hills, making rapid sketches or taking photographs of details that caught his eye. Clouds were a major interest and a number of photographs, sketches and finished works in watercolour and oil exploring cloud formations around Moniaive have survived.

Nonetheless Paterson strongly believed that photography

could not replace drawing and painting. In a lecture to the Edinburgh Photographic Society in 1911, he stated that ‘The ideal day for the average landscape photographer is that on which not a leaf stirs, the cattle stand still, the sun shines of a cloudless sky, and the reflections in the water are more real looking than the trees they mirror ... In comparison with drawing, as a means of penetrating and recording for oneself impressions of beautiful things in the world around us, photography is of far inferior value… It is evident that pictorial representation must ever be of the nature of a compromise; absolute truth is impossible, and the artist, whether he wish it or not, must select, from the coloured tones in nature, those which he requires for his purposes.’ (Anne Dulau Beveridge, Curator, Hunterian Art Gallery) Open: Monday – Saturday 9.30am–5.00 pm Admission Free

67

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McTaggart’s Children: A Centenary Celebration

the gallery’s own extensive collection and from sixteen other public

in-depth study of McTaggart’s Consider the Lilies.

3 July – 3 October

and private collections. The exhibition will bring together oils,

Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, War Memorial Gardens,

watercolours, sketches and related material such as photographs of

as Going to Sea and The Barley Field, Sandy Dean, the exhibition

Kirkcaldy, Fife

the artist with his family.

will present a comprehensive overview of McTaggart’s career and

KY1 1YG

the development of his art giving the opportunity to see well-known

Tel: 01592 583213

the painter’s earliest portraits and narrative paintings, including Dora,

paintings and to discover works that have never been on public

www.museumsgalleriesscotland.org.uk

a crucial work in McTaggart’s career and the painter’s diploma picture

display until now. (Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Pierre Mendès

following his election as a Royal Scottish Academician in 1870. The

France University in Grenoble and is a researcher in British studies.

Often compared with the French Impressionists, William McTaggart

brushwork is looser than in his previous works and was to become

She is a member of the French Society for Scottish Studies.)

was one of the most original and outstanding nineteenth-century

an important characteristic of his style. Another display ‘Children

Scottish painters. Born in 1835 on the Mull of Kintyre, McTaggart

and the Sea’ explores McTaggart’s fascination with this subject

Open: Monday – Saturday 10.30am–5pm

spent his childhood on the south west coast of Scotland. In 1852

matter. In his seascapes he suggested the relationship between

Sunday 2pm–5pm

he moved to Edinburgh to attend classes at the Trustees’ Academy.

the children of fishing communities and the sea by relating the

Admission Free

Along with William Quiller Orchardson, John Pettie, Hugh Cameron

figures atmospherically, physically and emotionally to the landscape.

Eliza Paterson in her wedding

and George Paul Chalmers, he studied under the tutelage of its

Paintings like The Storm and Away O’er the Sea – Hope’s Whisper

dress, modelling for portrait

Director, Robert Scott Lauder. McTaggart was mainly a painter of

explore the role of children in dramatic narratives such as sea storms

painting

landscapes with figures, depicting Scottish landscapes and seascapes

and emigration, while ‘Children and the Rural Idyll’ focuses more

© Department of Special

which marked a departure from the McCulloch tradition.

particularly on children in scenes of harvest and seasonal change, also

Collections, Glasgow University

stressing their presence in nostalgic views of rural life with pictures

Library

McTaggart’s death and will show a selection of works drawn from

This major exhibition celebrates the centenary of

‘McTaggart and the Victorian Child’ display will largely show

By displaying works painted between 1858 and1905 such

such as The Old Pathway. One of the displays will be devoted to an Scottish Art News 68

Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Players, installation view, Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, 2009

W

orking in partnership with the city’s artists, galleries and museums, Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art continues to

Scottish Art News

strengthen Edinburgh’s position as a world-

class centre for culture and the arts. Having added an extra week of events to its programme, the festival will run from the

This summer sees the return of the Edinburgh Art Festival and its seventh year of promoting and celebrating the best of visual art in the city.

29th of July to the 5th of September, and will present a range of works by leading British and international artists as well as emerging new talent.

2010 will be the first year that the EAF have directly

commissioned artists. Three projects have been made possible through a grant from the Scottish Government’s Expo Fund, set 69

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Scottish Art News 70

up in 2008 to recognise the exceptional creative talent that exists in Scotland and provide it with an international platform. Established artists Martin Creed and Richard Wright will install new work in some of the city’s historical spaces while a third commission has been awarded to rising art stars Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright is set to make a

major new painting at the Dean Gallery. The Stairwells Project will see Wright working in the stairwells of the Thomas Hamilton designed building – now a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art but originally built as the Dean Orphan Hospital. The building is one of Hamilton’s most important works and the twin stairwells (one for boys, one for girls) are a key feature of his design. The inward inclination of the windows exaggerate the height of the stairwells, giving the appearance that the towers are falling in on themselves, while the banisters are unusually high – to prevent the orphans from being able to climb up onto them and slide down. These unusual features have given the space what Keith Hartley, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the gallery, terms an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ effect.

The building’s intriguing architectural details and

melancholy history offers rich scope to Wright’s intervention in the space. The stairwells provide a fitting location for an artist who has often chosen to show in unconventional or overlooked spaces.

Previous work has been inserted into corridors and corners, painted onto ceilings and slotted round skirting boards and pipes. Wright began his career painting figurative works on canvas until a change in direction led him to destroy most of these early pieces and turn to making wall paintings in response to site-specific contexts. His

Victoria Crowe, Lying Snow, oil

abstract designs often seem to straddle opposites, described variously

and mixed media on paper

as decorative and minimalist, organic and mathematical. Their scope

© The Artist

of reference is wide, the delicately worked marks recalling traditional frescoes, Islamic calligraphy, embellished fabrics and medieval script.

The winning 2009 Turner Prize installation was a baroque

constellation of gold leaf that tattooed an entire wall with shimmering, ethereal swirls. Delicate scrolling lines brought to mind geometrical precision in the same breath as it evoked the works of Turner and Blake. The word painstaking is frequently used to describe Wright’s work and this work was no exception. Using traditional techniques,

Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Players, installation view, Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, 2009

it took four weeks and the help of four assistants and like much of Wright’s art was laborious and time-consuming to complete. Therein perhaps, lies part of its appeal. It is hard to stand in front of a wall that

something of a departure from his usual practice as it is hoped it will

a series of invited guests. The projections will be receiving from three

since 2003 and have exhibited regularly across the UK over the last

bears the evidence of myriad handmade marks and not be impressed

become a permanent installation. His biggest artwork to date, it may

different feeds – live footage from CCTV cameras from pre-negotiated

five years. Staged follows on from their 2009 Frieze Art Fair project

by the sheer scale of the endeavour. Other works may obscure the

also be remarkable in being one of the few extant works of Wright in

sites around Edinburgh; live video footage of performances by actors

Players which also featured projections of stage-managed and live

history of their own process but in Wright’s art it is laid out in onerous

the world today.

and volunteers deployed by the artists; pre-recorded footage of

events filmed on location at the fair. The artists directed actors to

detail.

the artists performing scenarios in the studio and in the sites of the

mingle with the crowd, interacting naturalistically with them. The

be Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth with their new work Staged. This

CCTV cameras. Making use of the city’s CCTV cameras, Coleman and

footage was then combined and shown in a small tent-like room

impact of the eventual erasure that typically faces most of Wright’s

will be a multi-channel video installation incorporating stage-managed

Hogarth will film a programmed series of shots at certain times of

underneath a viewing platform from which visitors could observe the

wall paintings. Their impermanence has been a central concept of his

performances with live events filmed around the city by CCTV

day which will inevitably vary as they reflect the changing volumes of

fair from on high. Coleman and Hogarth’s work is typically concerned

oeuvre over the years with most of them being painted over come the

cameras, transforming Edinburgh Festival into a mise-en-scène and

people, and shifting conditions of the weather and light. This footage

with the participatory and the performative, often using other people

end of the exhibition. Wright has spoken of being more interested in

the visitors, tourists and locals into players. The work, which will be

will be mixed and projected in repeating patterns, the work’s looping

in the making of it. A previous work by them, Timebank, 2006,

the fragility of the moment than in creating work that will outlive him.

produced by Collective Gallery, will be shown in a city-centre venue

nature confusing what is recorded and what is re-enacted.

involved the curator quite literally bending over backwards to support

The Stairwells Project, set to be unveiled on the 1st of July, will be

and feature five video projections to be mixed live by the artists and

a projector, while a project in 2008 at the ICA saw them re-enacting

71

The arduous nature of the task only serves to heighten the

14

Also exploring some of the city’s locations and spaces will

Coleman and Hogarth have been collaborating on projects

Scottish Art News 72

Other Highlights Martin Creed will be making new work on the city centre’s historic Scotsman Steps which will be completed by the end of the year. Built in 1889, they link the North Bridge with Waverley Station and have long been regarded as a key point of connection between the old and the new towns of the city. The steps, decorated with ornate Victorian tiling, have deteriorated with age and vandalism and have been identified by the City Council as a priority for refurbishment. Creed is planning on covering the stairs with marble, using a different and contrasting type of marble for each step.

These will be sourced from all over the world and are intended to dramatise Edinburgh’s international significance.

Scotsman Steps. Photocredit: Angela Catlin

Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Players, installation view, Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, 2009

the work Oh What A Lovely Whore, originally orchestrated by the Boyle Family in the sixties, in which guests were invited to create their own happening. For Coleman and Hogarth, drawing attention to the process of making is an essential part of their art and this work in Edinburgh will continue to explore the actions of creating, compiling and editing. It is frequently observed that Britain is a nation which is intent upon watching itself, with one of the highest numbers of CCTV cameras per person in the world. CCTV cameras, a ubiquitous feature of urban life may appear to dispassionately watch over us, the unfaltering gaze of a disembodied, disinterested eye placed high above the crowd. Coleman and Hogarth, however, in manipulating both what is recorded and what is done with that material, exploit the very mechanisms and construction of that gaze and our own part as performers within it. Staged launches on the 29th of July and will coincide with an exhibition at the Tate Modern exploring the history of surveillance and covert images in photography. At a time when we are being frequently watched and more people than ever carry a camera and video recorder with them, in the shape of a mobile phone, Staged looks set to be a timely work on these practices of observation.

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Scottish Art News 74

show of Joan Mitchell – the youngest ever member of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Talbot Rice Gallery is exhibiting new work on the theme of childhood by Julie Roberts which is being paired with a celebration of the late Craigie Aitchison. The Scottish Gallery is showing both new and existing work by Victoria Crowe. The artist and author Hiro Steyerl is being shown at Collective with After the Crash – a new single-screen film work. Steyerl’s background lies in documentary film-making and she mixes documentary and found footage along with fictional elements in her work.

Following its refurbishment City Art Centre returns to the

EAF with two major photographic exhibitions. William Wegman: Family Combinations is the first comprehensive show of Wegman’s work in Scotland and the only UK opportunity to catch the show. In addition will be the only UK showing of iconic American photographer Edward Weston’s work.

OPPOSITE Victoria Crowe, Lying Snow

Komachi, a new pop-up guerrilla art space in Edinburgh will

include the Berlin artists collective BASSO in their festival show, who

Oil and mixed media on paper ABOVE Richard Wright at the Dean Gallery with Joanne Brown, Director of EAF

will be in daily residence creating, discussing and changing the art

Photocredit: Angela Catlin

space. Additional exhibitions will include local young and emerging artists’ work and will be shown across the surrounding area and towards the city centre.

Katie Baker is an artist and writer based in London.

Staged will launch on 29 July at the opening of the 2010 Edinburgh

Julie Roberts

Art Festival running until 5 September.

Craigie Aitchison 30 July – 25 September

Iran Do Espirito Santo

The Talbot Rice Gallery,

29 July – 25 September

The University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge EH8 9YL

Ingleby Gallery, 15 Calton Road EH8 8DL

www.trg.ed.ac.uk

www.inglebygallery.com Victoria Crowe Work at Jupiter Artland is on view now:

6 August – 4 September

Bonnington House, Kirknewton EH27 | www.jupiterartland.org

The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

Elsewhere across the city, the Ingleby Gallery are showing the first

pieces. Peter Liversidge’s six and a half thousand Queen of the Night

ever UK exhibition of one of Brazil’s leading living artists, Iran Do

Tulips, which he planted last November, will be able to be seen by

Espirito Santo. The artist is known for his wry subversion of Minimalist

visitors on their approach to the park.

Impressionist Gardens

tradition and a major installation involving a large-scale wall drawing

31 July – 17 October

William Wegman and Edward Weston

and new marble and granite sculptures promises to be one of his

Gardens will be the first ever to be devoted to this subject and will

Christian Købke – Danish Master of Light

From 31 July

most ambitious works to date. Jupiter Artland will be unveiling

feature around 90 works including loans from international collections.

4 July – 3 October

City Art Centre, 2 Market Street EH1 1DE | www.edinburgh.gov.uk

site-specific permanent works by Nathan Coley, Jim Lambie and

All the big names of Impressionism will be well represented as well

The Royal Scottish Academy EH2 2EL

young British sculptor Peter Liversidge, as well as a new installation

as those of the following generations for whom the Impressionist

www.nationalgalleries.org

by Cornelia Parker adding to her Nocturne (A Moon Landing) which

gardens were of continuing significance, including Cezanne, Gaugin

she created for the opening last year. This will take the form of a 9m

and Van Gogh. Meanwhile, a major exhibition of Surrealist art,

Another World 10 July – 9 January 2011

Collective Gallery, 22-28 Cockburn Street EH1 1NY

steel sculpture of a gun leaning vertically against a beech tree in

Another World, will give visitors the chance to see the gallery’s

The Dean Gallery, 73 Belford Road EH4 3DS | www.nationalgalleries.org

www.collectivegallery.net

the Gala woods inspired by the gun in Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs

world-famous collection of Surrealist art in its entirety for the first

Andrews, c.1750. Coley has created a small family graveyard, of the

time, with masterpieces by Dali, Magritte, Picasso, Giacometti and

Joan Mitchell 27 July – 3 October

Komachi’s programme of events will run from the 1st August

type commonly found in the grounds of a country house or estate,

Miro. Christian Købke:Danish Master of Light presents an extensive

Inverleith House is located within the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

162 Fountainbridge EH3 9RX

and Lambie will unveil what is for him a rare outdoor sculpture named

selection of paintings by one of the foremost talents of Denmark’s

Arboretum Place/Row EH3 5LR

Mail2Komachi@gmail.com

A Forest, after the 1980 Cure hit. He’ll also present the temporary

Golden Age, the largest to be shown outside his native country.

www.rbge.org.uk

installation ZOBOP (Fluorescent), part of his ongoing psychedelic floor

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The National Galleries of Scotland’s exhibition Impressionist

At Inverleith House will be the first ever UK gallery

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Hiro Steyerl 29 July – 19 September

For further details: www.edinburghartfestival.com Scottish Art News 76

Listings SCOTLAND ABERDEEN

EDINBURGH

PERTH

Impressionist Gardens

Royal Scottish Academy

New Paintings

all seven Jolomo 2009

147 New Bond Street

31 July – 17 October

Geoff Uglow

2 – 24 December

finalists exhibiting together

London W1S 2TS

Bourne Fine Art

The Young Vermeer

2 July – 1 August

16 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

Perth Museum & Gallery

27 September – 2 October

The Summer Exhibition

Maclauclan Milne

10 December – 13 March

Scotland and the European

Tel: 0131 558 1200

ARTIST ROOMS:

Caledoniart Christmas

until 31 August

Aberdeen Art Gallery

16 – 31 July

The Mound EH2 2EL

Avant Garde

scottish-gallery.co.uk

Andy Warhol

Exhibition 2010: 25 Scottish

39 Dover Street

Julia Margaret Cameron

McGill Duncan Gallery,

Tel: 0131 624 6200

28 November – 17 January

until 23 October

Contemporary Artists

London W1S 4NN

and Roger Fenton:

Castle Douglas

nationalgalleries.org

The Mound EH2 2EL

Talbot Rice Gallery

Stella Steyn

29 November – 4 December

Tel: 0207 493 3939

Early British Photography

9 – 28 August

Tel: 0131 225 6671

Craigie Aitchison

until 16 October

Royal Opera Arcade

richard-green.com

from The Royal Collection

Festival Exhibition

National Museum of Scotland

royalscottishacademy.org

30 July – 25 September

Trailblazers: Women Artists

Gallery (La Galleria)

until 21 August

6 – 4 September

The Lewis Chessmen:

University of Edinburgh

in the Collection of Perth

Pall Mall SW1Y 4UY

Celebrate: 125 Years of

6 Dundas Street EH3 6HZ

Unmasked

Scottish National Gallery

Old College

Museum & Art Gallery

Tel: 07718516954

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Tel: 0131 557 4050

until 19 September

of Modern Art

South Bridge EH8 9YL

until January 2011

www.caledoniart.com

4 September 2010 –

bournefineart.com

Chambers Street EH1 1JF

What you see is where

Tel: 0131 650 2210

Perthshire Art Association –

Tel: 0131 225 7534

you’re at: Part 2

trg.ed.ac.uk

59th annual exhibition

The Fleming Collection

17 August

nms.ac.uk

From 27 March

12 November – 11 December

Scottish Summer Exhibition

22 Queen Street

78 George Street PH1 5LB

until 4 September

Edinburgh EH2 1JX

Tel: 0173 863 2488

The Glasgow Boys from

Tel: 0131 225 2266

pkc.gov.uk/museums

The Fleming Collection

bonhams.com/

14 September –18 December

scottishpictures

13 November 2011

AUCTIONS Bonhams The Scottish Sale: Pictures

The Lewis Chessmen

Dean Gallery

7 October – 8 January

Another World: Dali,

BP Portrait Award

Magritte, Miro and the

Open Eye Gallery

George, Robert Therrien

20 November – 22 January

Surrealists

Summer Show:

29 July – November

Hunterian Museum and

Schoolhill AB10 1FQ

10 July – 9 January

Figurative Sculpture

75 Belford Road EH4 3DR

Art Gallery

Tel: 0122 452 3700

73 Belford Road EH4 3DS

8 – 31 July

Tel: 0131 624 6200

James Paterson: Works

The Fergusson Gallery

13 Berkeley Street W1J 8DU

aagm.co.uk

Tel: 0131 624 6200

Barbara Rae CBE RA RSW

nationalgalleries.org

from the Artist’s Studio

Sculptures & Sketches:

Tel: 020 7042 5730

Lyon and Turnbull

nationalgalleries.org

RGI RSA, Matthew Draper,

flemingcollection.com

Scottish Silver Sale

Artist Rooms: Gilbert &

GLASGOW

until 27 September

J.D Fergusson

John Maltby

The Scottish Gallery

ARTIST ROOMS:

until 4 September

Edinburgh Printmakers

6 – 31 August

Scottish Art Survey

Joseph Beuys

until 3 October

Royal Academy of Arts

16 August

The McManus: Dundee’s

Prints of Darkness

Sarah Carrington, James

5 – 30 July

until 27 September

Dancing as an Art: 100

Pioneering Painters:

33 Broughton Place

Art Gallery and Museum

17 July – 4 September

Fairgrieve, Gill Tyson

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham:

Aspects of Scottish Art

Years of Margaret Morris

The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900

Edinburgh EH1 3RR

Titian: Diana and Actaeon

Winter Exhibition

3 – 21 September

Small Works

1860–1910

Movement 1910–2010

30 October – 23 January

Tel: 0131 557 8844

7 August – 5 September

13 November – 23 December

Angus McEwan RSW, David

5 – 30 July

until 11 September

until 12 February 2011

Burlington House

lyonandturnbull.com

Consider the Lilies 2

23 Union Street EH1 3LR

Schofield, Doug Cocker

Victoria Crowe:

Past, Present and Future

Marshall Place PH2 8NS

Piccadilly W1J 0BD

8 September 2010 –

Tel: 0131 557 2479

24 September –

New Paintings

1 October – 26 February

Tel: 01738 783 425

Tel: 020 7300 8000

Sotheby’s

August 2011

edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk

12 October

6 August – 4 September

Blue and Silver: Whistler

pkc.gov.uk/museums

royalacademy.org.uk

Scottish Painting Sale

Brent Millar

William Crozier: Paintings

and the Thames

DUNDEE

Orchar Prints & Watercolours 13 November – 16 January

The Fruitmarket Gallery

15 October – 2 November

Derrick Guild: Paintings

8 October – 10 January

Albert Square DD1 1DA

Martin Creed

Leon Morrocco RSA RGI

8 September – 2 October

82 Hillhead Street, University

Tel: 0138 230 7200

30 July – 31 October

Margaret Smyth

Henry Kondracki:

of Glasgow G12 8QQ

mcmanus.co.uk

45 Market Street EH1 1DF

15 October – 2 November

New Paintings

Tel: 0131 225 2383

On a Small Scale:

The Glasgow Boys:

fruitmarket.co.uk

Christmas Show

Paintings

26 November – 24 December

William Kirk Retrospective

Kelvingrove Art Gallery

Tower Foyer Gallery Twenty Years Ago

AROUND SCOTLAND

34/35 New Bond St

City Living:

London W1A 2AA

Kircudbright Town Hall

An exhibition of works from

Tel: 0207 293 5077

Tel: 0141 330 5431

The Glasgow Girls

The Fleming Collection

sothebys.com

hunterian.gla.ac.uk

3 July – 30 August

until 5 September

Kirkcudbright DG6 4AA

The Strand WC2R 1LA

Tel: 0155 733 0291

Tel: 020 7845 4600

kirkcudbright.co.uk

somersethouse.org.uk

LONDON

Richard Green

Royal College of Art,

Modern Masters

Kensington Gore London

National Gallery Complex

34 Abercromby Place

6 – 30 October

and Museum

University of Dundee

The Glasgow Boy:

EH3 6QE

Frances Walker:

Pioneering Painters: The

Nethergate DD1 4HN

Drawing Inspiration

Tel: 0131 557 1020/

New Paintings

Glasgow Boys 1880–1900

Tel: 01382 384 310

until 5 September

558 9872

David McClure & Alberto

until 27 September

dundee.ac.uk/museum

Christen Kobke:

openeyegallery.co.uk

14

29 September Somerset House

25 September – 14 November

77

Wemyss Pottery Sale

ART FAIRS 20/21 British Art Fair: 15 – 19 September

Morrocco: Paintings

Argyle Street G3 8AG

Jolomo Scottish Landscape

until 30 June

SW7 2EU

Danish Master of Light

3 – 30 November

Tel: 0141 276 9599

Painting Awards: The 2009

Master Paintings Week

Tel: 0208 742 1611

4 July – 3 October

Frances Macdonald:

glasgowmuseums.com

Finalists – ‘One Year On’,

3 – 9 July

britishartfair.co.uk Scottish Art News 78

Events 2010 External Visits & Events

Enjoy a drawing class with Susanna Lyell at The Fleming Collection

Lectures & Events at The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU

Annual Friends Lecture: Sir John Lavery and The Glasgow Boys by Kenneth McConkey Tuesday 23 November 6.30–7.30pm Tickets: £10; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members and Patrons free A specialist in British, Irish and French painting at the turn of the twentieth century, Kenneth McConkey is the author of many books and articles. His lifelong interest in Lavery began as a boy going to Belfast Art Gallery and Museum. Sir John Lavery was a leading member of The Glasgow Boys in the late nineteenth century and is remembered for his striking portraits and everyday rural scenes. Kenneth McConkey will be signing copies of his new book John Lavery: A Painter and his World. Price £45

79

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Drawing Classes at The Fleming Collection with Susanna Lyell, Artist and Tutor Monday 12 July, 2–5pm Monday 18 October, 2–5pm Monday 22 November, 2–5pm Tickets: £25; Friends, Philanthropic Friends, Corporate Members and Patrons £17.50 Max. 12 places for each session.

Following the success of Susanna Lyell’s drawing classes at The Fleming Collection in Spring 2010, Susanna is leading three more workshops suitable for both beginners and experienced painters. Working alongside The Fleming Collection’s exhibitions, these drawing sessions will provide the opportunity to closely observe the paintings, look at line, tone and colour, and learn new techniques of drawing. There will be the opportunity to discuss the results of the session at the end of the day. All materials, tea & coffee will be provided.

Scottish Contemporary Art Evening with Lena Boyle and artist John MacAulay Tuesday 16 November 6­­–7pm Drinks and Canapés 7–7.30pm Talk Address given with your ticket, Nearest underground: Earls Court Tickets: £20; Friends, Philanthropic Friends and Corporate Members £15; Patrons free Over the last 25 years Lena Boyle has staged exhibitions of Modern British and Contemporary artists at her private home. You will view an exhibition of Scottish artists including works by New Glasgow Boy Hugh Byars; Sarah Coghill and John MacAulay. MacAulay, who trained at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art will give a talk on the techniques he employs and observations of Scottish life dear to his work.

Private view: The Glasgow Boys at Royal Academy of Arts Friday 5 November, 8.30–10am Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J OBD Tickets: £10; Friends, Philanthropic Friends and Corporate Members £7.50; Patrons free This exhibition includes highlights from the Glasgow Boys exhibition at Kelvingrove as well as further loans from private collections. Entitled Pioneering Painters the exhibition focuses on the Glasgow Boys’ most prolific period of work during the 1880s,

when their new ideas were to influence future generations of artists.

To book tickets for any event or for further information or travel advice tel: 020 7042 5730 or email: gallery@flemingcollection.com You can also book online: www.flemingcollection.com

John MacAulay, At the Edge Courtesy of Lena Boyle Fine Art

La Maison du Chateau, Burgundy – France

The Perfect Holiday: Ideal for Families, Groups, Wine and Painting Holidays

La Maison du Chateau is an idyllic 18th Century Manor House that sleeps 6-16+. It is set in its own 24 acre park with river, boat, fishing, heated pool and simple grass tennis court (hard court close by). This combined with our wonderful cook and charming maids mean a real holiday for you. There is also a secluded Gate House (sleeps 2-4) that is available to rent either separately or with the Manor House.

Painting Holidays: La Maison du Chateau has proved to be the perfect venue for painting holidays. This part of Burgundy with its beautiful light, rolling country, rivers and canals, historic chateaux, abbeys and fortified towns is a superb location. We couple all this with delicious food and wines from the region and a really good house party atmosphere. (Non painting partners also welcome)

If you would like to know more please visit our website: www.lamaisonduchateau.co.uk or telephone 01582 840 635

Scottish Art News 80

Become a Friend and support the world’s finest collection of Scottish Art in private hands and dedicated art gallery 2010 MARKS THE FLEMING-WYFOLD ART FOUNDATION’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY Friends enjoy: • Scottish Art News magazine • Friends private views of exhibitions • Annual Friends Lecture • Monthly News Bulletin • A varied programme of exciting events • Discounts on tickets and in-house publications • Annual Behind the Scenes trip • Annual abroad trip Artist Jock McFadyen discussing his exhibition Landscape with its Clothes on at Clifford Chance during Behind the Scenes: London, April 2010

To become a Friend or Patron complete this page and send to: The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU Or telephone: 020 7042 5730, or visit www.shop.flemingcollection.com

MEMBERSHIPS AND CHARITABLE DONATIONS I would like to make a donation to The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Registered Charity no. 1080197 £50 □ £100 □ £250 □ other ________

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Please contact us for information on gallery hire for Corporate & Private Events

T he F leming C ollection 81

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Scottish Art News 82

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ISSUE 12 AUTUMN 2009 £3

Sir Muirhead Bone Face of Scotland Martin Boyce The Discovery of Spain The Public Catalogue Foundation Edinburgh Art Festival

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Scottish Art News 84

The Fine Art Society 148 New Bond Street . London . W1S 2JT . www.faslondon.com telephone + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 . art@faslondon.com

Lavery and the Glasgow Boys

ARTHUR MELVILLE ARSA RSW 1855-1904 Tobit’s Mill (detail) c.1889 Watercolour 10 x 15 inches (25.4 x 38.2 cm) Provenance: Mrs Morton Robertson n.d., The Fine Art Society, 1980; Private Collection, Scotland Exhibited: London, Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, 1899, no.63; Glasgow, Royal Institute of the Fine Arts, 1907, no.98; Edinburgh, Bourne Fine Art, Arthur Melville, 1855-1904, 1996, no.33

Contact: London . Patrick Bourne . 020 7629 5116 Edinburgh . Charlotte Riordan . 0131 557 4050