Impressionist Gardens
Until October 17; National Galleries Complex, Edinburgh

Joan Mitchell
Until October 3; Inverleith House, Edinburgh

Take 100 top-notch Impressionist paintings, and put them in Edinburgh’s most prestigious gallery at festival time: you’ll have people queuing out of the door. Now, add a couthy, accessible gardening angle: and you can devote the entire first room to an airport-style queuing system.

This is an exhibition so delightful, so easy to enjoy, that it should be easy to dismiss for pandering to populism. The shop, with its rustic trellises and artificial bouquets, is fantastically twee, but the exhibition, in truth, can’t be faulted.

Every key French Impressionist is present, but almost more exciting is the barrelful of international Impressionists also represented. These are names we’ve never heard of, from countries we never associate with the movement, and they’re good.

Spaniard Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s sun-kissed surfaces are so chocolaty rich that you want to lick them; Austrian Johann Viktor Krämer’s fluent brush strokes are chunky enough to cast their own shadows; and Scot Arthur Melville’s cabbages are shining jewels of pink, purple, blue and scarlet.

The rise of Impressionism in the latter half of the 19th century coincided with a new enthusiasm for private gardens. Formal parks and estates already played an important role in society, but with modern suburban life came the domestic family garden, an intimate space for enjoying privacy and relaxation. This was perfect subject matter for the Impressionists, who rejected the stiff formality of their predecessors in both form and content.

Symbolic of this shift is The House At Rueil, painted by an infirm Edouard Manet a year before his death.  The composition is shot through, against all convention, by a sturdy acacia tree charging upwards just off centre. The neoclassical doorway of Manet’s rented house is obscured in vibrant compositional anarchy.

Berthe Morisot’s charming Child Amongst The Hollyhocks seems at first to be wildly spontaneous, devoid of compositional intent; the flowers, the painter’s daughter Julie, and her toy are so roughly suggested that they verge on abstract, but this airy nonchalance disguises a sophisticated structure and elegant tonal harmony.

Claude Monet’s two versions of The Parc Monceau ignore the Napoleonic grandeur of the public park, and savour instead the play of sunlight through leaves of mature trees. This magical interplay of light and shadow, dancing over white-frocked women and children, captures the ephemeral soul of Impressionism. So too, the universally loved waterlily paintings; no less than four of which are drawn from galleries across Europe and America.

Occasionally symbolism edges into Italian paintings: two apparently innocent scenes contain hidden reference to Garibaldi, and Marco Calderini’s beautiful Winter Sadness mourns the loss of his friend. Vincent Van Gogh’s Undergrowth, painted in the grounds of a sanatorium, buzzes with fierce, writhing strokes, and is the nearest thing to angst in an exhibition which is full of the joys of sunny days and fragrant meadows.

The captions are an odd mix of art historical and horticultural information; gardeners will learn of every strain and variety represented, and a special i-phone application will even guide you around Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden to see specimens for yourselves.

At the centre of the Botanic Garden, in Inverleith House, is a decidedly 20th century show which nonetheless contains echoes of Impressionist Gardens. Joan Mitchell was an American Abstract Expressionist at the heart of the movement in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, moving subsequently to Paris where she befriended literary greats including Samuel Beckett. She was inspired by nature and by poetry.

A selection of seven oil paintings and five pastels offer a taste of what Mitchell was about. Every work is vigorous; colour and movement blasting in every direction. Garden Party covers the gamut: thin, wet paint drips straight to the bottom; thick, chunky lumps are left behind in a hurry; exuberant brush strokes arch; the brutal palette knife charges through; and spray crashes to the edges.

Some canvasses contain dense hunks of uncomfortable colour; others are bright, airy frolics. All leave traces of the artist’s movements as she followed her instincts to their conclusion.

The artist insists, as critics try to interpret her work on the video downstairs, that she has no grand theories for what she does – it just happens. But just as Morisot disguised her compositional forethought in that picture of 1881, it’s clear that Mitchell’s paintings are also structured beneath the blaze of activity.

The latest oil painting in the show, dated 1980, is surely a descendent of works such as Monet’s The Parc Monceau. Mitchell’s Cypress is a life-affirming blaze of sunshine yellow, its citrus strokes streaking across an aqua background like sun-dappled leaves on a shimmering summer’s day. The figurative link to nature has been broken, but the feeling remains. That, in a nutshell, is how Impressionism led to Abstract Expressionism.


Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 08.08.10