Consider
The Lilies
Until January 14; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh
While the McManus Art Galleries and Museum in Dundee undergoes an
£8 million refurbishment, its 150,000 objects have been moved
into safe-keeping. With the galleries’ doors closed until 2008,
Edinburgh stands to gain – with some of Dundee’s best paintings
on show at the Dean Gallery.
In 1867, when the McManus was built, Dundee enjoyed a strong culture
of art collecting and exhibition, buoyed by the city’s prosperous
industries. Through private gifts, its collection grew steadily, and
in the 1940s, when other Scottish corporations were still wary of
abstract art, Dundee positively sought it out.
Focussing on the collection’s greatest strength, this exhibition
is devoted to Scottish painting from 1910 to 1980. Many of the key
figures are represented, such as the Scottish Colourists and William
Johnstone, and many of the artists, such as James McIntosh Patrick
and John Duncan, are Dundee born and bred.
The selection is by no means comprehensive – witnessed by the
miserable paucity of women artists (two out of 46) – but it offers
a plethora of high quality works rarely seen outside of Dundee. Arranged
in eclectic groupings (Colourists, Realists and Modernists all get
to share a text panel with each other), the show doesn’t tell
a coherent story about modern Scottish art, but it does set up some
interesting dialogues between the works.
At a fundamental level, two powerful strands weave their way throughout
the 70-year period. One is exemplified by James Cowie’s Portrait
of a Child, painted in 1948. His youngest daughter, Barbara, stands,
almost floating, against a cluttered oval aperture filled with objects.
The flatness of the image is slightly unnerving, the crisp outlines
like a lucid dream.
The influence of the Surrealists in unmistakeable in Cowie’s
work, combined with the theatrical perspectives and monumental stillness
of Early Renaissance art. These elements crop up repeatedly in the
show, where meticulous hyper-realism meets esoteric symbolism.
The other strand, also influenced by advances on the Continent, strikes
out against the cold control of academy techniques, and revels in
blazes of colour and painterly expression. SJ Peploe’s Roses
And Fan is a vivacious little painting by the Colourist who strove
for decades, with these same props, to create the perfect still life.
Still linked to progress in Europe, and looking also to the USA, William
Gear and Alan Davie took this strand of painterliness into the era
of abstract expressionism. Gear’s Red Feature is a vibrant explosion
of line and colour, while Davie brings the same exuberant spontaneity
to a subject of characteristic absurdity, The Man That Lived In An
Egg.
In doing so, Davie was bringing together the two opposing strands
which run through modern Scottish art: that wild freshness of the
Colourists (that can be traced back further to William McTaggart)
coupled with the mysterious personal symbolism of Cowie and his followers.
This combination is found, too, in John Bellany, whose large painting,
The Lovers, is an angst-ridden stabbing of colour on canvas, crammed
full, as all Bellany’s best works are, of dark, sea-stung metaphors.
But the story is by no means as simple as two strands converging.
The reality of art history is not as neat and tidy as the books make
it out to be, and while there are common concerns in this selection
of works, there are twice as many differences.
James Gunn’s suave, Whistleresque portrait of his wife seems
light years away from Robert Colquhoun’s bold, cubist Woman By
A Leaded Window, and yet only 25 years separates them. Such complicated
stories are left for another day, allowing us to get on with enjoying
a first-class mix of art.
Catrìona
Black, Sunday Herald 12.11.06