Felicitas Vogler: World Of Light
Until July 9; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has always had a strong relationship with modernist painter Ben Nicholson, even buying two paintings straight from his easel in the early 1960s. Three years ago the gallery mounted a small show of paintings by his first wife, Winifred Nicholson, and now we have wife number three, Felicitas Vogler. All we need to complete the set is a good Barbara Hepworth show.

Barbara Hepworth was never dependent on her husband’s reputation for her own artistic success, but Felicitas Vogler is. Her best photographs, made during the time she lived with Nicholson from 1958 to 1971, are strongly influenced by his paintings. The two best in the show actually include his paintings. Those which she has made since are, for the most part, easily forgettable. It’s no wonder that this is the first major UK retrospective Vogler has had since 1973.

Vogler, now in her 80s, is coy about her exact age, and so is the exhibition’s slim catalogue. When she met Nicholson in 1957, Vogler was 30 years his junior. A writer by trade, she was researching a radio programme for her native Germany about the artists’ colony at St Ives. Within six weeks Nicholson had swept her off her feet and into married bliss. She, in turn, swept him off to Switzerland.

Only then did Vogler turn to photography as a serious pursuit. Encouraged by her husband, she explored the kinds of shapes and textures in the landscape that Nicholson brought together in his abstract paintings and reliefs. These were by far her most successful photographs, and they’re easy to spot amongst the later, less focussed images.

Chapel with Candelabra, Mykonos, is a case in point. Made in 1959, the chalky white curves, with their subtle tonalities, are first cousins to Nicholson’s celebrated White Reliefs of the 1930s. The walls she photographed in Pisa and Venice in 1966 echo Nicholson’s densely incised surfaces. In a room dedicated to Nicholson’s own works, you can see the originals which inspired Vogler.

Although she dedicated her life to landscape photography, Vogler’s two still lifes of 1967 are the most compelling in the show. She placed bottles in front of Nicholson’s works, all casually propped up on a working table. Her colours and textures are an intensification of Nicholson’s own grainy, chalky surfaces, and the glass vessels are totally incorporated into the painter’s own realm.

After Nicholson returned to England in 1971, Vogler travelled the world with her camera. The abstracted close-ups are replaced by vast tracts of land, vertiginous shots of exotic lagoons and mountains, and all-over compositions of blossom and rippling lakes in Japan. The places Vogler visited were spectacular enough in themselves, but her shots of them often add little.

There are one or two of Vogler’s post-Nicholson pictures which stop you in your tracks. Her salt mound in Namibia of 1974 is an abstract worthy of Ellsworth Kelly; the smooth, white pyramid of salt cutting through the vertical composition, with nothing but salty plains in the lower half and blue sky above. In Bohemia in 1980 she captured a puddle on a road, like a ragged hole into another world. In it, the pillars of a red and white building are reflected more vividly than the road itself.

But if you or I travelled the world, accumulating 2000 photographs along the way, it’s a fair bet we’d pull at least one or two rabbits out of the hat. Vogler’s inspiration left her when Nicholson did, and this exhibition, it seems to me, is the curatorial equivalent of vanity publishing.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.05.06