R CROZIER VIEWS

Hockney's New Show

2012-01-30T20:34:00.001Z

For the second time within a few days, I am writing about an exhibition I haven’t seen. There has been much speculation about Hockney’s stature since the opening of his landscape show at the RA. Is he our greatest living painter as some have claimed? Andrew Lambirth on the contrary, suggests in The Spectator, that ‘this exhibition abundantly demonstrates, Hockney is not a great painter.’ His former teacher laments that he has become a decorator.

What is greatness anyway? Some time ago, a journalist suggested that Hockney was not a Mozart, more of a Cole Porter. Well. Taking his music and lyrics together, Cole Porter is great in my book: his songs have survived the outdated musicals with a life of their own. And if we are to have ‘a greatest living painter’ what is the opposition? Lambirth suggests Kossoff and Auerbach who use ‘paint in an inventive and interesting way’. The last thing I would attribute to this duo is inventiveness. I agree with John McEwan who called them Bombergian pretenders whose ‘heaps of paint, the thickness meant to indicate the depth of their feeling, merely disguises their conventionality.’ It is Hockney, throughout his career, who has been notably inventive, depicting the modern world as no painter has done previously. If not a Mozart, he may be more of a Stravinsky. In a recent production of that composer’s opera, his sets, designed some time ago, were said to have stolen the show.

I do have some doubts about what I have seen reproduced from Hockney’s latest show. I tend to think that some of the work is over-scaled. The subject Wolgate Wood, which might not be best as small as Hobbema’s famous Avenue, would hardly seem to justify an assemblage of six largish canvasses. The words garish, gaudy and even ghastly have come to mind about some of the pieces. Is the crude colour only due to newspaper reproduction? But this one group of paintings is never going to affect the status of Hockney’s life long achievement. Charles Pulsford, who was the only inspirational teacher I came across during my time at Edinburgh College of Art, used to say that if you weren’t capable of producing a bad painting, you weren’t going to produce a good one either. What I think he meant by this maxim is that boldness and willingness to experiment is vital. One work I have seen printed, has assure me that Hockney hasn’t lost his former magic. It is entitled The Arrival of Spring in Wolgate and shows leaves coming out on a stunted tree. It is not fractured by being formed from several canvas, so I assume it is not massive. I checked the text to see if there is any indication of size and find it is an ipad drawing.

Assessing Edward Burra

2012-01-24T09:16:00.002Z

Apart from making myself bankrupt, I wouldn’t get any work done if I insisted on travelling to every exhibition that I might want to see. An Edward Burra collection at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, certainly interested me, all the more so since a TV presentation made me doubt the severe judgment I had made about this artist. This was that he had produced three superb works, one of which was in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, but that the rest of his work fell below this high standard.

I contemplated at the very least buying a catalogue of the exhibition. However, after the frustration of a few unanswered calls to Pallant House, I put off the purchase. When, a few days later, I was passing the Central Library I popped up to the fine art section to see if they intended to order the book. They did and I was offered the first borrowing.

The book is now with me and I am beginning to revert to my former opinion. The three works which I rate highly are: Issy Ort’s, the Scottish National Gallery, Silver Dollar Bar, York City Gallery and one of Burra’s rare oil paintings The Snack Bar, the Tate. What seems to me to go wrong in so many of his other pieces, is that he reverts to mechanical modelling and space-filling detail that brings him nearer to the likes of Beryl Cook. It’s a kind of laziness and it’s emphasised when a George Grosz watercolour is reproduced alongside Burra’s paintings. In Grosz’s German work, there are never lapses of technique or imagery.

Burra has paintings like Minuit Chanson and Zoot Suits that come near to his best. And the landscapes, many of which are new to me, have their successes. But here too. there are disappointments. One such work. English Countryside, shows a road going over low, undulating hills. There is a band of fields of bare earth of a red/orange hue in the middle of the work. Through this is a sequence of delicately formed light-coloured pylons. The flanking fields are either light green or of dark foliage. The tiny silhouette of a plane is seen rising from an airport over the horizon. This might have been a masterpiece if Burra had only put into the landscape the sort of sharp drawing that holds together William Gillies’ border landscapes. Similarly, Burra shows fine unexplored imagery in paintings of traffic-clogged country roads. Waldemar Januszczak in a favourable review of the Pallant House exhibition, alludes to Burra’s Thomas the Tank Engine lorries. It is an accurate observation and damning. Surely Burra could have found a better way to depict his heavy traffic.

In the end, I was glad I didn’t buy the catalogue. Instead of sitting down to the delight of leafing through reproductions of works that I could admire unreservedly, I would have feelings of frustration and sadness. I cannot think of any other artist that brings out in me these emotions.

The Frenchness of Scottish Art

2011-12-14T09:42:00.001Z

I am old enough to remember Nicolas Pevsner’s Reith Lectures entitled The Englishness of English Art. They featured Hogarth’s Anglo-genre paintings and prints, Stubbs’ very English classicism, the work of Blake and Samuel Palmer. I do not remember that there was much about more modern artists but Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra and William Roberts are just a few of the artists that could be grouped under Pevsner’s title.

It is impossible to imagine any presentation on 20th century Scottish art having a similar heading. It wouldn’t make sense. It would have to be The Frenchness of Scottish Art. Certainly in the early 20th century, the group of artists known as the Scottish Colourists were following the example of French painters, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists who they took to be the progressive forces of the day, the obligatory track. Although they were not unhappy about it, they were in the position of the young man in the limerick by one of the Knox brothers:

… who said ‘Damn!
I have suddenly found that I am
A creature that moves
On predestinate grooves
Not a bus, as one hoped but a tram.’

Meanwhile the 20th century English painters mentioned above, and even others who did show the influence of the French school, always seemed to drive like the free moving bus in more individual directions wherever their fancy took them.

Viewing the current exhibition of Francis Cadell at the Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh, I found I could get little pleasure from it because I was always conscious of how much better the French originals did this sort of thing. Cadell invited comparison and came off badly.

I know enough of the work of the other members of the group to be pretty sure that I will have the same reaction to each of the painters that will be given an exhibition in an ongoing series. There are Scottish artists before and after the Colourists who are much more individual, but they are not so popular. The crowds viewing the Cadell exhibition were obviously in raptures. I felt a bit sorry for them. Have they never looked keenly at Manet’s paintings?

Exhibiting Small Paintings

2011-11-13T20:37:00.004Z

For the first time, I submitted two paintings (the maximum number allowed) to the RSA Open, running at the Royal Scottish Academy’s galleries from 12th November until 18th December. There is always a danger in entering for this sort of show: you may find your work rejected and then find the exhibition crammed with the sorts of works which you try hard to avoid. However, my pieces were duly hung. I show them above. One is based on a sketch I did when sailing down the Forth. Modern ships have been intriguing me, particularly container ships which look like Paul Klee’s magic squares afloat. The neatly arranged caravans on the Fife shore allowed an interesting interplay between two sets of rectangles. This is the first of what I hope to be a series.

The RSA Open has a size restriction of no more than 60cm. in any direction. The works are displayed in groups, triple-hung in some cases, forming shapes with spaces between. Although it makes for a rather dinky effect, I cannot see how so many small pieces could be shown otherwise. Small pieces of sculpture, even from distinguished practitioners always tend to look a bit like ornaments.

Being a long established venerable institution, the RSA has a varnishing day and a private view, unlike in France where the word for private view is a varnishing (un vernissage). I popped into the academy to have an unobstructed view of the work. Most people will be familiar with tales of J.M. Turner actually repainting parts of his works at RA varnishing days. I did not come equipped to tamper in any way with my pieces, but I would have liked to have adjusted the tones of the frames. Never before having exhibited small paintings, I was unaware of the larger part played by the frames. Normally I use a rule of thumb method: print frames with their white mounts I frame with an off-white lime wash effect, for oil paintings I use a warm, dark grey. This works well enough with large paintings, but I now see that with small works the tone needs to be varied. Bright paintings with lots of light areas need a lighter tone of frame. For economic reasons I sometimes have to re-use print frames. When I framed these paintings I thought that this was permanent but I have learned something which I will remember if I submit to this exhibition in the future.

Appreciating Foreign Poetry

2011-10-29T20:20:00.001+01:00

I have read one or two translations of the Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Whether or not he is a worthy winner I cannot say because I do not understand Swedish. Several people who do not read Spanish, tell me that Neruda was a great poet. Likewise non-Gaelic speakers have extolled the stature of Sorley MacLean. I wonder how they can make these judgments.

Can poetry in an unfamiliar tongue ever be fairly evaluated? I suspect not. But we can get a better idea of works in foreign or dead languages if they are translated again and again. For many years, the poet James Michie, set The Spectator weekend competition and one of his inspired ideas was to call for translations of Rimbaud’s Au Cabaret-Vert. With four or five published winners, we could get a good idea of the flavour of the poem, though the French original wouldn’t present much difficulty to people of my generation who would all have done some French at school.

Michie was no mean translator himself. I find his versions of the epigrams of Martial better than any of the others I have read. He also translated Catullus, Horace and La Fontaine. Probably, no poem has been more often translated than Horace’s ode addressing Pyrrha, Book 1 no.5, a who’s-kissing (or something more Anglo-Saxon) -her-now poem. Michie’s translation begins, ‘What slim youngster, his hair dripping with fragrant oil, / Makes love to you now, Pyrrha, ensconced in a / Snug cave curtained with roses?’ It then goes on to deal with Horace’s metaphor of shipwreck that awaits the new lover, finishing with, ‘My plaque tell of an old sailor who foundered and, / half drowned, hung up his clothes to, / Neptune lord of the element.’ This requires a note, explaining that shipwrecked sailors dedicated the clothes they were rescued in to the deity. Boris Johnson, who read Classics at Oxford, has written that Michie’s translations are so accurate that they can be used as cribs.

There is, however, another way of rendering a poem from an unfamiliar language, one that will be of no use to scholars but will bring it alive for new readers. Instead of scented oils and lavish roses, Anthony Hecht begins his version, ‘What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex / Hairstylist and bathed in “Russian Leather,” / Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha, / In your expensive sub-let?’ And after predicting the ingénu’s swamping and dismasting inserts an extra note of bitterness by changing the lady’s name in the last line to Piranha.

An excellent modern imitation of Rimbaud’s Au Cabaret-Vert by Fay Hart was published in The Spectator though not as an entry to the weekend competition. Entitled At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon, the gender of the speaker is necessarily changed and the setting is now South America. Instead of ‘Depuis huit jours,j’avais dechire mes bottines,’ we get, ‘I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail…’ and replacing Rimbaud’s buxom barmaid whom he suggest wouldn’t be averse to an encounter, is a ‘Cuban-heeled boy, able-bodied, slicked-back, skintight jeans and a scowl’ of whom the poet says, ‘he could have me in a heartbeat that one.’
I would love to give both these re-creations here but it is one of the unintended consequences of the copyright laws that they impede proselytizing.

The Swedish laureate’s work may not be suitable for this sort of treatment and perhaps we will have to go in ignorance of his poetic achievement unless we learn Swedish.

Exhibition

2011-09-28T17:43:00.004+01:00

ROBERT CROZIER
RECENT PRINTS
4th - 15th October 2011
Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm
The Gallery at McNaughtan's Bookshop
3A & 4A Haddington Place, Edinburgh

My exhibition Recent Prints opens next week at the gallery attached to Edinburgh’s premier antiquarian bookshop. I originally conceived it as something different. It is good economic practice to make small prints from scraps of material and off-cuts of the tosa shojo paper I use, left over from bigger works. Having made a number of these over the years, which I exhibited mainly in Glasgow, I had the idea of collecting them under some such title as Some of My Little Ones. But the economics of this proved less sound. A small frame has four corners just as a larger one and although it may use a little less moulding is not much cheaper. I toyed with the idea of mounting groups of the prints in large frames, but when this proved unsatisfactory, I decided to show my larger current work.

My small prints could be described as genre pieces. I based them on sketches produced on public transport, in cafes etc. In my latest work I have been using a different sort of figure composition, more cohesive, less aleatory. In the absence of a grand theme what evolved were prints of people engaged, as participators or spectators, in rather absurd leisure activities. I hope it says something about the modern world.

Another group in the collection consists of one or two garden images. I know a garden in France whose owner is not there all year. He has tried to make it drought-proof and weed-resistant with low, ground-covering plants from which the more architectural ones emerge. He did not manage, however, to achieve all-year-round flowering. I became intrigued by the variety of greens on display and I tried to produce the effect within the limits of lino cutting.

Integrating into the Digital Community

2011-09-01T15:54:00.000+01:00

I have metamorphosed from a digital immigrant into a digital emigrant, recently. My website has not been updated for ages and I haven’t posted a blog in months, the latter fact only partially accounted for by a hard drive failure. I do have a basic mobile phone (pressed on me by my wife) but I rarely use it. Actually, I seldom use a traditional phone.

Having an internet presence has proved worthwhile to some extent: the odd sale has come via my website and an all expenses-paid invitation to exhibit further a field. But there can be disadvantages too. A gallery owner has told me that she regards anything displayed on the ether as not virgin work and not worthy of being exhibited. Then there is the sort of bait that I’ve had from a New York gallery, offering to promote me for a fee. I’m not going to pay to practise as an artist.

A retreat from the computer may be more general as people become aware of the time wasted in front of keyboard and screen addicted to pointless googling. Readers of the philosopher Karl Popper may remember his searchlight theory of the mind about the futility of collecting random facts.

A digital device I do love is my radio. Test Match Special is my favourite working background and I’m able to listen to it without interruption from the Shipping Forecast and the Daily Service. I’m spared outbursts from my wife who seemed to think that the presence of the programme on Radio 4 long wave, was a personalised persecution with which I was somehow involved. Now she has her own digital set which helps to preserve domestic harmony. I only ever watched cricket on television during a coffee break. These days, even if it returned to terrestrial TV, I’m not sure I would be able to get the right channel, now that we have that little black box on top of our set.

I realise that I’m never going to pass myself off as a digital native and there is pride in keeping up ethnic traditions, consulting reference books accumulated over a lifetime, reading print without a light behind it.

But I will still continue to blog from time to time even if it is only to sort out my own thoughts. Looking at the map of my hits, there seems to be a cluster in Alaska. Perhaps Sarah Palin is a fan.

Postcards

2011-04-16T12:27:00.000+01:00

Foreign travel for me has always been about seeing art. Of course, I take in other things, but visiting galleries and museums has always been central. When I was fifteen I made my first visit to the Louvre during a school trip, and in my early adult years, I was able to see the Prado, the Brera, the Uffizi, the Venice Accademia and many other smaller collections. For many years the family holiday was always in Italy, based around one or other mural cycle or architectural figure. My family was usually interested or tolerant, although I remember my daughter going through the several miles of the Vatican Galleries neither looking to left or right, waiting for the bribe of an ice cream. In Verona she sighed and exclaimed, ‘Dad and his Sanmicheli gates,’ signalling that she well understood adult madness. In recent years it has become my custom to have a short break early in the year to visit the galleries of northern Europe: The Netherlands, Germany, Vienna. I have still to visit the Hermitage. This year I have already had the good fortune to see ten collections in New York and France.

The great change that I have seen over the years has been in museum shops. At one time, major museums would stock postcards of practically every work in their collections. Today they sell books, toys and anything on which they can stamp a reproduction of a well-known work, from wine bottles to cushion covers. There may still be a handful of cards of signal works – the very last ones I will need any prompting to recall.

The primary reasons for visiting the great collections is to see in actuality, the masterpieces of European art already known from reproductions. Collecting postcards, for me at any rate, was a way of retaining some memory of minor or unusual works that impressed. It consolidated the experience of the visit. I was often disappointed in smaller museums. I would see a small work, by Signorelli for instance, that seemed to me better than anything he achieved on a grand scale, or something in one of the minor galleries in Milan that contradicted the rule that paintings by the Leonardo followers are uniformly awful. By the very nature of the problem, my list of missed opportunities to get any memento of these aesthetic experiences is small. Any impression of these finding has escaped for ever. Among the cards that I treasure are those of a series of small murals by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, (who is for me a more interesting painter than his prolific and accomplished father), from the Ca’ Rezzonica; Venice, a painting of a flute player with a white horse from the Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen, attributed to Watteau, (it convinces me that it can only be by the master); and portraits by da Messina from the palazzo galleries in Genoa.

In a gallery shop, I am not going to buy a guidebook illustrated with works that are known worldwide. Nor am I going to buy heavy tomes that I can consult elsewhere and certainly not tat that uses great works of art inappropriately. From the now lapsed practice of stocking inexpensive reproductions of a large range of a collection’s exhibits, I have a personally selected gallery in miniature of works that would be difficult to track down even in a good library. I regret not being able to add to it.

New York, New York!

2011-03-15T19:47:00.002Z

A most generous and unexpected gift from our two children gave us five days in the Big Apple. In that time we viewed seven great art collections, took in an Off Broadway show and did a bit of the tourist stuff – marvelled from the top of the Empire State Building, exhilarated across Brooklyn Bridge and wondered at Harlem, Soho and Greenwich Village, where in Washington Square, we saw an outdoor performance, by students of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Were they from the nearby New York University, fees 56 million dollars per year?

The propaganda that New York is now a very safe city would seem to be true. I certainly felt more relaxed on the subway there than in a Paris metro carriage covered in graffiti, floor, windows and ceiling, with dubious youths parading up and down. It was striking how often we were aided by African-American ladies, middle-aged and middle-class, proud of their city and ready to help visitors.

If I had come to New York as a young man, I would have been most anxious to see more work by Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, the two Abstract Expressionists I loved. Today, I think of them much as I regard the Bop jazz musicians that I listened to at the time: with respect but with less passion. The painters still represent for me the peak of American Modernism and I was pleased to see more of their work. At the Whitney we started at the top of the building and wandered past much so-what sort of works, greedy of space but not notably inventive, down to the first floor (second floor in American parlance) where there was an exhibition of Hopper and his contemporaries. Hopper was certainly the most consistent of the bunch but there was very worthy stuff from others. I would have dearly loved to get a reproduction of a figure piece in watercolour by Delmuth.

Thanks to the wealth of America’s great industrial barons, New York has a vast collection of European art. It is not seeing the iconic pieces which is so enjoyable for me, but those that I have never seen reproduced. In the Metropolitan Museum there is room after room of paintings from most schools. Among the masses of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work there are pieces that seem better than those often seen in monographs. Is it just that the works are new to me? We barely touched the galleries devoted to early civilizations. In the shop (store to Americans), I picked up one of the few postcards on sale, a drawing of a horse’s head, taken from a Chinese scroll attributed to Hans Gan (Tan Dynasty). It is a wonderful, incisive piece of draughtsmanship but I didn’t see the complete scroll, if indeed it was on show.

The Guggenheim was showing an exhibition of early Modernism. Two new-to-me paintings I remember fondly were a wonderfully economical snow scene by Van Gogh and a Malevitch peasant painting also in snow.

Manhattan, as everybody knows, is an island dramatically crammed with skyscrapers, of every style from gothic fantasies to the latest that technology and human ingenuity can devise. It is ironic, therefore, that the buildings that housed two of the most enjoyable art collections were distinctly European in style. The Frick Collection in the steel magnate’s former mansion, has so many outstanding examples of the major European artists that it is easier to say what it doesn’t have – no Frans Hals, I think. The Cloisters which is actually built from bits of ecclesiastical masonry brought from France, houses the magnificent Unicorn Tapestries. Its site at the upper tip of Manhattan almost feels like countryside. Rockefeller, who was behind the project, bought the cliffed shore of New Jersey across the water so that it couldn’t be developed.

On our final morning it was raining heavily and we decided to take shelter in the Neue Galerie, with its re-created Viennese café. The decorative paintings of Klimt and Schiele are not great favourites of mine. I actually dislike Klimt’s portraits where the ladies gowns are made up of coloured shapes and gold leaf. But there is another aspect to him. Male visitors viewing a whole wall of his very explicit drawings of women masturbating may wish they had not hung their overcoats in the cloakroom.

Sawing My Beams

2011-02-15T09:58:00.002Z

The last book I read in 2010 was Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, not a self-help treatise, but a biography of the French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Montaigne did most of his thinking and writing in one of the towers of his chateau where he had his library and where he had the beams inscribed with favourite precepts. As he had been brought up to speak Latin as his first language, it is not surprising that these are all from classical thinkers. I have been wondering which aphorisms I might apply to the beams of my studio if they were visible. Here are ten of them.

1. Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child all your life. Cicero

I have a friend who thinks that revisionist history is only about authors selling their books. It would be odd if they were not interested in disseminating their views, but there is such a thing as peer review. If we do not read up-to-date history, we will have a Boy’s Own Comic notion of it.

2. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Pascal

We might have hoped this would be an outdated observation, but it has become more and more relevant.

3. There is no item of information however insignificant, which I would not rather know, than not know. Dr. Johnson

For me to be curious is simply to be alive.

4. Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice. Don Paterson

There wouldn’t be much point in either Montaigne or myself posting a series of wise sayings if this aphorism contained an absolute truth. Nevertheless, it is a good warning about being alert to lazy thinking.

5. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. Adam Smith

Some Scots who are proud of their great Enlightenment figure but can’t take his economic message are always trying to suggest that modern thinkers, who like to quote him, have somehow got his message wrong. Yet there is no way you can say that Adam Smith is talking about a planned economy.

6. La pire chose, c’est de vouloire être à la mode si cette mode ne vous va pas. Poulenc

The music of Poulenc should make any artist confident that there is no need to think that worthwhile art should follow a linear progression. The visual arts may be somewhat derrière garde in this respect compared with what is happening in literature and music.

7. Formal verse frees one from the fetters of one’s ego. Auden

I do deplore the self-indulgence of so much free verse, nearly always read in a special way that tries to say ‘This is so profound, full of deep insights and ultra-sensitive.’

8. I love the correspondence of viva voce over a bottle, with a great deal of noise and a great deal of nonsense. Sir Joshua Reynolds to James Boswell.

A good summing up of what makes a great evening.

9. My watch cost more than your car.

This is apparently a favourite insult of the super-rich. I’ve never been particularly concerned about people having much more money than myself and this sort of inanity makes me even more contented with my lot.

10. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it. Montaigne

To end with, one from the great essayist himself. When you think of what Keats and Masaccio achieved before dying in their twenties and Schubert, Raphael, Mozart, Seurat et al who were cut off in their thirties, one can’t help thinking that in these days of longer life expectancy, we tend to forget that we don’t live for ever.

.

2011-01-05T11:21:00.001Z

The thing about age,
though you may rant and rage
like a beast in a cage,
is that you can’t disengage
or turn back the page.
And there isn’t a stage
of being worthy and sage
as a long adolescence
goes straight to senescence.

I celebrated my 70th birthday on the penultimate day of 2010. Strangely, I never considered myself old even in my late sixties. Now the nought-ending digit has brought home to me that I am. Everything that Two Brains said about baby-boomers is true about we war babies: it has been easy for us; jobs were plentiful; on one modest salary we could buy a house; and wives, if they so wished, could give up work to look after children. I consider myself personally fortunate too: I got through the scrapes of early adulthood unscathed and my greatest piece of luck was to be able to leave teaching – always un travail alimentaire for me – at 56. These last 14 years have probably been the best years of my life.

When I went to art college in 1958, Pablo Picasso was the painter who most interested me. When I left, the abstractionists Miro, Pollock and Alan Davie were my heroes. Within a year an interest in Marxism had returned me to realism via John Berger and Fernand Léger. A period of intellectual sorting out followed. Working in a sort of representational mode meant going against a prevailing idea that, to adapt a famous limerick by one of the Knox brothers, the history of art ‘was a creature that moves / on predestinate grooves’ inevitabitly towards abstraction. Ironically it was Marxism, with its theory of historical inevitably, that had led me to reject aesthetic historicism. I needed some intellectual support and read Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism. It turned me completely away from Marxism and allowed me to see that the ideas that I had thought progressive, led to anything but humane regimes. I read Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies and the works of the so-called Popperian Knights, Hayek, Gombrich and Medawar, which have greatly influenced the way I think. Eventually I added Isaiah Berlin, Schumpeter and Oakshott to my personal canon. They are all exemplars of writing in a clear way about difficult things.

Having almost all my time to myself has been wonderful. I listen to more classical music: four string quartets can be played before coffee time, or alternatively, the time can be spent on serious reading. As soon as I left teaching I stopped painting in acrylics, which are more suitable for interrupted work, and took up oils again. In printmaking, I gave up screen printing and reverted to relief printing where I could do all the work except the editioning in my studio. (I imagine the young members of the printmaking workshop asking, ‘Who’s that old, bald guy that’s always on the relief press?’)

I am certainly not going to live to 140, so it’s easy to make the calculation that I am much more than half-way through my life. When I get half-way through a long book, I am always surprised how quickly I read the remainder. I expect it will be the same with life. Inevitably, I wonder a bit how I will end up, but I do not let thinking about it disturb whatever time I have left. Nor do I want to lay down elaborate funeral prescriptions to bother those that might either be a bit sad or guiltily relieved that my life is over. Crematoria are ghastly places, not because they deal with death, but because they are so naff in their designs and arrangements. I would suggest a few simple things for my last rites. I do not want any death professionals, religious or otherwise involved, beyond the clearing up people. Perhaps a friend could say a few words or read a poem. I chose music for both my parents but it was played so softly that it might never have been used. I would want some favourite music played at a decent volume. And anyone turning up should be invited, not to some crummy hotel, but to the flat for some decent wine. As for a humiliating end, what one wants is not the Swiss business, but just some professional help about how to prepare a hemlock bottle from a decent red wine. Then that cheesy euphemism ‘He passed away’ would become ‘He finally passed out’.

The Other John Adams and Others

2010-12-11T14:34:00.001Z

I have been reading Listen to This, Alex Ross’s newly published book.
It is not as substantial as his masterly The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, but essential reading for me. The hostility of so many people I know to any music written in the past hundred years and the absence of young people from classical concerts, is something that alarms me. So, the first paragraph of the book is indeed music to my ears: “I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be written today…” The second paragraph continues: “For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority...” The third: “When people hear ‘classical’ they think dead…”

Ross didn’t introduce me to John Adams. I had already a couple of CDs and had heard Nixon in China live. But his mention of Harmonielehre led me to seek it out and it hooked me. In the new book he has an essay on John Luther Adams, a composer who lives in Alaska where he has a sound and light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen. Here, by means of computer technology, seismic and meteorological phenomena are translated into “a luminous field of electronic sound.” It strikes me as the sort of tourist art that has many companions in the visual art world. They are very popular with the general public. I am unlikely to make a pilgrimage but will make a point of hearing some of the composer’s work on CD.

Ross writes of his belated attention to artists in the popular music field. He has essays on Radiohead, Bjork and Bob Dylan. The last is more akin to the more popular music that I listen to – work where the music provides an alternative prosodic structure to sung verse. I loved the series of programmes, Book, Music and Lyric, that Robert Cushman presented on Radio 3 many years ago, and which he followed up with another, New York Cabaret. They made me aware of musicals for intelligent people and singer-song writers of superb inventiveness like Dave Frishberg and Randy Newman. I have also enjoyed the great French chansonneurs, Georges Brassens, Leo Ferré, Boris Vian and Barbara. Even country music can surprise me with interesting lyrics. Cushman illustrated how it could work well in musicals such as Big River, based on Hucklebury Finn, and The Greatest Little Whorehouse in the West. In these related genres there can be great wit, often with a serious purpose, as in Brassens’ song about an escaped gorilla seeking to lose its virginity that turns out to be an anti-capital punishment piece. Some songs deal in a sort of humorous realism. A country song of disillusioned love contains the line:

Is this what I shaved my legs for?

And there is this from a Maltby and Shire review:

I didn’t know I had a prostate,
It’s the march of time.

From an extract from a Radiohead lyric that Ross gives:

You’re so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I’m a creep.

I realise that I’m unlikely to get the sort of verbal wit I like from his research into the non-classical area but he does make a case for the music. I will investigate.

Lest I give a wrong impression of this outstanding writer on music who rarely gets technically esoteric, I will add that Ross writes acutely about Brahms, Schubert, Verdi and Mozart in this book and recall that The Rest is Noise, not only made me enthusiastic about John Adams, but turned me on to Sibelius, thus making me more likely to listen to other composers I’d previously been prejudiced about: Rachmaninov, for instance.

Imports, Exports

2010-11-27T15:12:00.002Z

French academics and politicians have worried for a long time about the amount of English words coming into their language. The imports have certainly been substantial. The great chansonneur Leo Ferre in his satirical song ‘La langue francaise’ notes barmaid, darling, travelling, best seller, planning, starter, after shaving, parking, one man show, cash, starlet, scope, very good, baby, jockey, steeple-chase, driver, sleeping car, milk bar, glass, call girl, Kleenex, lucky, sex appeal, black out, standing, self service and there are many, many more. Hostility to the influx has been intensified by endemic anti-Americanism, despite the fact that America was the first to come to France’s aid in the aftermath of its self-inflicted disaster, the Franco-Prussian War and rescued it in the two world wars.

There have been several reactions to this perceived linguistic imperialism. Wasn’t it Clemenceau who said that English was only French badly pronounced? Andrew Hussey, in his book ‘Paris, the Secret History’, relates how the eccentric Anglophobe Michel Fleury would spell ‘weekend’ as ‘ouikènde’. Chirac stormed out of an international meeting when a French negotiator dared to speak English instead of French. In 1994 a law was passed making it obligatory to use the French language in government publications, adverts and workplaces. French words had to be in some cases coined e.g. ‘jardinerie’ for garden centre, ‘ordinateur’ for computer and ‘numèrique’ for digital. The Minister of Culture who shepherded the bill through the Assemblèe was called Jacques Toubon; ‘Le Canard Enchainé’ promptly christened him Allgood.

English has happily adopted words and phrase from many other languages. We even have French phrases like double entendre which the French appear not to use themselves, and I have yet to meet a French person who understands the psychological term folie à deux. Some phrases like le mot juste and sauve qui peut are a bit old-fashioned, even pompous these days, but l’esprit d’escalier, the retort you think of coming down from the salon where you might have shone if you had been a bit more quick-witted, still serves well.

But English could well adopt some very useful words from modern French. In my own field, the visual arts, I find myself already doing so. My favourite is croûtes, a word for lousy paintings, the type of crude landscapes and cityscapes painted for tourists. There is also un travail alimentaire: the sort of job after art school that in my day was teaching, but for younger painters is more and more looking after old people. The late Claude Chabrol described one of his works as un film alimentaire. I suppose we might say ‘potboiler’ but that has become a bit démodé. The generic word for printing in French is tirage, particularly apt for relief printing, my chosen form. It expresses well the exciting moment when you peel off a print from the block with the final colour and see whether all your calculations have worked.

Others in different occupations may well find French words slipping into their vocabulary because they are somehow more suitable than the English available. I rather like the noun corrumpus. We would have to say corrupt businessmen, politicians etc or make the adjective act as a noun by prefacing it with the definite article. Contrary to what we were taught at school as an absolute rule, the French use corrumpus without an article. It would work well in English if we simply sounded the ‘s’.

2010-10-23T19:39:00.002+01:00

The thing about being an intellectual snob,
which earns you the suspicion of the middle-brow mob,
is that it performs a really useful job:
if at some time you don't go through this phase,
you'll avoid the difficult all your days.

We had a good Festival this year. We found that ancient people like ourselves could get two tickets for the price of one, so were able to go to twice as many concerts as we had budgeted for. Looking round the sea of white coiffures and grey beards, it was obvious that we were part of a half-price audience. Young people don’t go to classical concerts these days and there is a danger that this music will have no audience in the future.

If this does happen, current concert-goers will bear some responsibility. At the Festival concerts it was noticeable that attendance was down whenever modern or unfamiliar composers were included. At a recent concert billed The New Romantics – perhaps a ploy to attract a younger audience – there were plenty of empty seats but perhaps a slightly higher proportion of young people. The featured works were Three Places in New England by Charles Ives, two works by John Adams and a piece by another post-minimalist composer, Ingram Marshall. Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony, with its prepared piano, double battery of percussion instruments and wealth of rhythm and textures, would be an ideal work to engage young people with classical music.

I remember an instance when I was working in Edinburgh’s print workshop, where instead of the usual popular music, somebody had put on a CD of classical stuff. A girl remarked that the piece playing was ‘naff music’. Recognising that it was from La Traviata, I initially put down her opinion as rampant philistinism. But then I reflected that away from the drama of the opera, middle period Verdi must seem very ordinary indeed. They have grown up in an environment where every piece of music — in adverts, in cinema, in jazz and pop — reflects to some extent the developments in classical music over the past hundred years in terms of harmonic complexity, instrumental mix, rhythmic and textural intricacy.

There is a great deal of class snobbishness in today’s conservative classical-music audience, which makes it risky for organisers to put on many modern works. Unlike the intellectual snobbishness of my ‘thingabout,’ which can make people curious about innovation and work at understanding the new, it is wholly negative. In France where we attend concerts in little 11th and 12th century churches during the heat of the summer, expats can be seen dressed up in collars and ties while the performers themselves are casually dressed, as they are more and more in concerts here. There seems to be a feeling that attending concerts is the right thing to do, even if one snoozes or reads the programme instead of listening.

Another anecdote: when I used to teach the history of painting to young people, a teaching aid on the German Expressionists was a set of slides that had to be coordinated with an LP of spoken commentary and music. My pupils were not impressed by Kandinsky and his Teutonic contemporaries, but they all liked the music. It was Schoenberg’s first chamber symphony.

2010-09-26T20:14:00.001+01:00

I hauled a painting out to trash
and was surprised to find it pleased.
Not for the first time I had the wish
that paintings could be stored on microfiche.

I have been tidying up my studio recently. My problem is that I have an idea for a painting, a print or a visual poem and want to get down to it immediately, but the table – which in my case is a reasonably small item topped with a sheet of chipboard – is piled with cuttings, workouts, books and deposits from other parts of the house which have been unceremoniously dumped there due to my tendency to extend my working area into other parts of the flat. I constantly try to create a place for everything so things can be sorted quickly, but the process has been going on for many years and never seems to be completed.

The biggest storage problem is, of course, paintings, and worst of all those that you think have something but are not quite successful. I spend as much time, even more probably, looking critically at work than actually painting. You can’t make final judgments quickly, either to exhibit or to destroy. Thus, I have propped-up canvasses everywhere that impede access to cupboards, bookcases and other storage. When you come to a firm decision, it’s best to slash the canvas quickly before you change your mind. Alternatively, I might cut out a piece that works on its own as a memento of something more ambitious on which I have spent weeks of my life.

Most painters I know could make much more money than they do if they ditched integrity, if they produced Mediterranean scenes in bright colours executed with a painting knife, or, a particularly Scottish equivalent, semi-abstract landscapes or still lives with lots of red, presented in gold frames. They may be deluded in what they are doing – we all have thoughts of that kind from time to time – but they can only continue with what they do. Many artists worry about what sort of problem they are leaving for their partners and children. A colleague told me that he has instructed his wife that if anything happens to him, she must seal up the attic, crammed with his unsold paintings. Otherwise, she will never be able to sell up and downsize.

The Vatican Tapestries

2010-09-13T09:35:00.001+01:00

Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times’ art critic has become very excited at the Pope’s lending four tapestries from the Vatican to be exhibited beside Raphael’s original cartoons. Januszczak even joked that we may risk eternal damnation if we do not go to see them. I am afraid (well not really afraid) that I’ll be risking hell’s fires. Certainly, the tapestries which use gold and silver threads in parts, were very expensive productions, requiring the skills of many weavers over an extended period. But when were man hours an indicator of aesthetic value? After all, Greek sculptors were paid more for a relatively short piece of egg and dart frieze than for complete figures. The pricy threads are only a reminder of the sybaritic lifestyles of Renaissance popes.

In fact, the tapestries are a dreadful travesty of Raphael’s work. The weavers took terrible liberties with them. Accustomed to works where every inch of the surface was covered with intricate designs, they introduced inappropriate detail. The worst example is in Christ’s Charge to St Peter, where Christ’s robe is covered with gold stars. It is as if the Son of God had breakfasted on a dozen or so runny eggs and dribbled them all over his attire. In other tapestries colours were altered upsetting the balance of the compositions. Generally the orchestration of the works is destroyed and Raphael’s powerful compositions are further diminished by the addition of broad, narrative borders of indifferent design.

Raphael was unfortunate that his major mural commission to decorate the papal apartments meant that he had to work with awkward spaces. He did this with great ingenuity, but even his School of Athens, painted on a great vaulted area, forced on him a symmetrical composition. Designing the tapestries, he had no such constraints and could give full scope to his genius. The cartoons are undoubtedly his greatest works. We are fortunate that we can see them at any time as they are on permanent loan from the Queen to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Turning High Renaissance paintings into tapestries wasn’t really a good idea. Anyone wanting to see tapestries that are great works of art in themselves, should seek out the mediaeval millefleurs pieces. The Lady with the Unicorn in Paris, the Tapestries of the Apocalypse, Angers, The Winged Stags, Rouen would do for a start.

The Scottish National Galleries' Offerings During the Edinburgh Festival

2010-08-31T20:25:00.002+01:00

It may seem an easy option to have as the main Festival exhibition yet another collection of the ever popular French Impressionists, but because of the nature of the Impressionist project – the landscape painters probably painted a canvas a day during large periods of their lives – these exhibitions can still spring surprises and even shift assessment. A show I saw in Vienna last year was full of work I hadn’t even seen reproduced and very credible impressionist works by Gustave Caillebote suggested that he should have a rather more prominent place in the canon. However, a mediocre work by him in the Edinburgh show, unaccountably used in the publicity leaflet, puts that judgment once more in the balance.

Crossing on the ferry from Dieppe, I picked up a leaflet for an exhibition entitled A City for Impressionism in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen. I would love to have seen this show. Pissarro seems to have been the star of it, with a group of canvasses that emphasise the industrial state of the city, with steamboats on the river and factory chimneystacks belching forth. He makes Monet’s sailing boats on the Seine seem old-fashioned and pretty, and his famous series of Rouen cathedral appears to be upstaged by Turner’s painting of the building.

Four paintings in the National Gallery’s ‘blockbuster’ would have justified the entrance fee for me: Manet’s Croquet Players from Frankfurt that is a wonder of free brushwork, Renoir’s Woman with Parasol from the Musee Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid is one of a handful of works by this artist – Le Coup de Vent in the Fitzwilliam is another – that captures an instant impression, Sisley’s stunning snow scene and the long rectangular Bonnard with a woman and a cat.

I wasn’t greatly thrilled by the Christen Kobke exhibition despite the obvious skill of the artist. You don’t need to be an expert in art history to be reminded of Dutch painting of the Golden Age, but compare any of Kobke’s large landscape paintings with the Cuyps still on show at the Queen’s Gallery and you see the problem. His portrait of the landscape painter seated in an interior with table and wall mirror, is not unlike the sort of interiors with figures that Vermeer painted, but in spite of the refined painting it is cluttered. The small portraits sometimes come close to the delightful smallscale portraits by Corot, but never quite get there

It is instructive to take a look at the reproductions in the Scottish National Galleries’ What’s On leaflet. The Impressionists may not appear to be interested in formal qualities, concentrating on a curtain of sense data, but the paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet show how they were instinctively able to focus in on perfect compositions. This is not true of the Charles Courtney Curran, the James Guthrie and the Kobkes which all have awkward intervals in their arrangements. The best paintings in the Kobke show are two little works of Naples. Relaxed in sketching mode, he was able to get the unity in these which evaded him in his larger works.

Gormley and Moore

2010-07-05T19:22:00.001+01:00

So Edinburgh is to have a sculptural work by Anthony Gormley. Well, it’s a keeping- up-with-the-Jones thing much less destructive than the bringing of the trams to the city. And more popular too: the general public are very relaxed about having our green and pleasant land covered with casts of this sculptor’s body. He certainly is a very effective entrepreneur, and one with clout. On his way to Edinburgh Gormley noticed that some trees were partially obscuring a view of his Angel of the North – known locally as the Gateshead Flasher – and he has had an assurance that they will be cut down.

I do wonder if Gormley ever thinks of what happened to Henry Moore. Moore became too successful for his own good. He snapped up commissions at home and abroad and younger sculptors felt blocked out. After his death his popularity waned. Some of his works were even removed from their public sites. Critics suggested that his disciple, Barbara Hepworth, was the better sculptor.

Moore did become a bit too ubiquitous. And perhaps there were just too many variations on his reclining-figure theme. But I, for one, never doubted his genius. When I visited the Picasso/Matisse exhibition at Tate Modern several years ago, there was a sculpture by Moore of a woman sitting on some steps exhibited in the central hall. I knew it previously from a maquette in Aberdeen Art Gallery. Seeing this larger version, I found it more impressive than the neo- classical works by Picasso in the main show. Although there was a nod to the Parthenon sculptures in the treatment of the drapery, it did not invite the prefix ‘neo’, often suggesting superficiality in art jargon. The sculpture by Moore that is at once a reclining figure and a landscape with cliffs and stacks, which for years has been stuck out at the back of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art like rubbish awaiting collection, is a wonderful work. The Falling Warrior is another great piece and I was recently taken by a more abstract work, in the grounds of the museums in Munich. Currently, there is a Moore revival.

Sooner or later, I predict the public and the art world will become bored with Gormley’s works dotted around town and country, here and overseas. Moore has come back now. Is there enough substance in the Gormley oeuvre to trigger a similar re-assessment when the time comes?

The World in a Hundred Objects and Appreciating Art

2010-07-01T13:34:00.002+01:00

As I often listen to Radio 4 when working, I have heard a good part of Neil MacGregor’s series The World in a Hundred Objects. He brings a great deal of background knowledge to the artefacts he discusses and I have found it fascinating. I will certainly seek out reproductions of some of these pieces and have been asking myself how the information I have gained from the talks will affect my enjoyment of them. While I agree with Dr Johnson when he said ‘There is no item of information, however insignificant, which I would not rather know than not know’, I have come to the conclusion that the intentions of the creator of an object have very little relevance when we give to it the status of a work of art. The knowledge conveyed by Dr MacGregor gives a satisfaction of a different sort.

This area of aesthetics was discussed by Edgar Wind in his Reith Lectures, Art and Anarchy in the early sixties. In one of the lectures, entitled The Fear of Knowledge, he arrived at a theory of vision which he opposed to Clive Bell’s view that ‘the representational elemental in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant.’ Because I have more interest in representational art than abstract art, I am not in agreement with Bell, but that does not lead me to believe with Wind that the intellectual ideas that may have been involved in the conception of a work of art are central to its appreciation. Experience has taught me differently. I am not religious but most paintings of the Virgin and Child can be appreciated merely as mother-with-baby images, even if some of them have rather ridiculous saucer shapes around the figures’ heads. On the other hand, if there is too much divinely ‘sent’ heaven gazing in a work on a religious theme, it will not work for me, although I know what that is all about. I tend to be familiar with the stories behind the forty-odd panels Duccio painted for his Maesta, but my interest is in the inventive compositions that the narratives inspired. They do not aid me in worship. My point is that works of art survive if we find in them some relevance to our contemporary concerns, which may be about deep human feeling or merely decorative delight.

A bit of personal history demonstrates to me how little iconographic detail impacts on the appeal of works of art. When, as a schoolboy, I first saw reproductions of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, which I immediately liked, I used to wonder why there was a decapitated head of a donkey in the foreground. Years later I came across the explanation. Today, I have completely forgotten what it was. But it makes no difference to my love of the painting.

A Curious Phenomenon

2010-06-13T15:02:00.001+01:00

The 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival is to open on Wednesday with The Illusionist directed by Sylvain Chomet. It is a hand-drawn animation about a magician working in Edinburgh and is apparently sold out. Edinburgh citizens obviously, are keen to see their city on the big screen. Yet, from all the stills appearing in the press, it is not views of the city that have caught my attention but one of Oban station situated by the sea which appeared in The Scotsman Magazine. I showed it to members of my family and with a little prompting, asking them to focus on the ferryboat, got the response I expected. All said it was too big for its position on the water.

The Scottish National Gallery has a painting by William McTaggart of boys in a dinghy entitled The Young Fishers. I like it very much but others have made the identical criticism, that the boat is over-scaled. I have heard the same comment on a small McTaggart painting in Aberdeen Art Gallery. Why I don’t share the reservation about all these works is that I was brought up in Stromness in a house overlooking its natural harbour. I know very well that there is an optical illusion in this setting that boats loom large and appear unnaturally close. Returning last summer to the Orkney Islands after an absence of nearly forty years, I noticed it again. I am sure an illustrator showing the ferry crossing Stromness harbour would have been tempted to scale down the ferry as it appeared.

I have noted something similar in the response of the ordinary viewer to acutely observed figure drawings. An etching of a nude woman hanging in my house by my friend John Binning is often thought by visitors to be out of proportion. I have even heard the same criticism made of works by Titian and Rembrandt. There is a tendency to look for a sort of lay-figure type of normality. The figures in The Illusionist are a bit like this. When twenty-four drawings have to be made for each second of this type of film, it could hardly be otherwise. The view of the harbour at Oban can be more authentic.

An Enthusiasm to Counteract the Economic Doom and Gloom

2010-05-30T10:07:00.002+01:00

‘I’ve never felt like a vanguard personality. My attitude towards creation is one of incorporating in my compositions everything I’ve learned and experienced of the past. I’ve never received any powerful creative energy from turning my back on the past.’

These are the words of the American composer John Adams extracted from an interview. At a time when so much art, particularly in the visual field, has been reduced to stunts, the quiet confidence of a creator that he can do important things by building rather than destroying is very refreshing. His articulation of his outlook vis-à-vis the past, could stand as a manifesto for the artists from the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first in all media that I most admire, the poet James Fenton for example, or the late Steve Campbell, the Scottish painter.

Not that Adams is in any way a cosy tunesmith. I first encountered his work when I attended a performance of his opera Nixon in China at the Edinburgh Festival. It was wonderful visually and I was intrigued that the libretto was in rhyming couplets with assonant rhymes. But I wasn’t sure that the minimalist music would stand up to repeated hearings. Somehow I had acquired a freebie, taster disk designed to advertise a 2002 Barbican weekend devoted to Adams’ work. The first piece was The Chairman’s Dances. The likelihood was, that I played this piece and having the same doubts that I had had about the opera from which it was extracted, put the disk aside. This was a mistake. If I had listened to more, an excerpt from the violin concerto, the Pavane: She’s So Fine from John’s Book of Alleged Dances, the choral piece from El Nino and Hoe-down (Mad Cow) from Gnarly Buttons, I would have been hooked much earlier. The breakthrough for me came when I heard the great symphonic work Harmonielehre.

With my almost non-existent technical knowledge of music, I find it difficult to describe Adams’ work. There is obviously development through repetition in the manner of Sibelius, remnants of the typical minimalist pulse, rich Wagnerian chords, fascinating orchestration details that emerge with repeated listening and beautiful lyrical passages. In chamber pieces like the middle movement of Gnarly Buttons, there is also humour, and he has written several moving pieces for voice and voices like The Wound-Dresser, a setting of a poem by Walt Whitman about his experiences during the civil war, and On the Transmigration of Souls, which he was commissioned to write to commemorate the victims of 9/11. I have not collected recordings of a contemporary composer’s work so enthusiastically since I sought out all Stravinsky’s major pieces shortly after leaving art college. Who would have thought that a composer much influenced by Sibelius would be pushing western music in new directions? Well, Constant Lambert did, actually, even if his biographer thought it was a ridiculous suggestion.

Bordeaux

2010-04-22T16:22:00.003+01:00

Stuck in Bordeaux due to the Icelandic volcano! It’s not a bad place to be stranded in, a UNESCO World Heritage Site full of magnificent architecture in honey-coloured stone with carving and wrought iron balconies. You can hardly be depressed in a city where everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, the adults in cafes strung out along the Garonne and children in the bike and skate boarding rinks where you watch acrobatic feats that any circus would be proud to put on.

Naturally I search out the art. It is disappointing that the twentieth century part of the Musée des Beaux Arts is closed. Bordeaux has three modern notables, Redon, Marquet and Lhoté (was he the minor Cubist William Gillies studied under? I can’t quite remember). The grands maîtres section was open. It has works by Titian, Perugino, Rubens and Delacroix as well as a good copy of Brueghel’s Wedding Dance by one of his sons. Scotland is represented by an Allan Ramsay portrait.

The Musée d’Aquitaine is very worthwhile, particularly its Roman section that has impressive pieces of sculpture and mosaics. The latter including a very large piece are geometric rather than representational. They work in the same way as Cezanne paintings. The tiny tesserae of Roman mosaics have minute variations of colour even when they are filling in an area meant to read as a single colour. This gives them infinite subtlety and makes them achingly beautiful.

The museum also has some intriguing English mediaeval sculpture in alabaster as well as two notable portrait sculptures, one by Bernini and the other by Zadkine. The Baroque Age is the great period of portraiture in painting with Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and others. I would find Renaissance sculpture to prefer to Bernini’s figure pieces, however skilful. Portrait sculpture is another matter. Bernini’s portraits are the best sculpted portraits since Roman times. Having missed the Musée Zadkine in Paris, I was please to see his striking bust of François Mauriac.

Having picked up probably my last Canard enchainé before I leave France, I was interested to see that even the French are turning against the POFTS (pointlessly obscure French thinkers). In the Lettres ou Pas Lettres section there is a review of Longévité d’une imposture, Michel Foucault by Jean-Marc Mandosio who apparently takes a chainsaw to the theories of the one-time celebrity.Vive la clarté!

Snakes and ideas

2010-04-13T11:46:00.002+01:00

Spending a few weeks in rural France, I find not for the first time, how difficult it is to get any ideas here for serious work. It is probably a fear that anything in the slightest exotic is apt to nudge in the direction of croûtes, a word the French have for lousy paintings, the sort of stuff produced for tourists. I can record things that interest me in a drawing or watercolour but I find I have no further use for them. On this occasion, I have come up with something that may do for a print, arising from the sight of a tree full of a dozen or so magpies.

There must be a collective noun for such a gathering but it is odd that I should have seen it in France, for I have just read in a local journal, that magpies have declined here by 61% in the last twelve years. The cause seems to have been predation by crows that raid their nests. In Scotland I suspect they are on the increase. Walking over Calton Hill, in Edinburgh, I see so many flying about that I fear for the nests of songbirds.

The birds I see here are much the same as in Scotland with a few additions. Black red starts are common and I have seen a male with the tail feathers spread to a bright orange fan. It is, of course, the mating season but I have never seen this before. I am pleased to see nightingales, so much a presence in Romantic literature, although plumage-wise nothing special, unlike the hoopoe that I have spotted occasionally.

But this year my most striking encounters have been with snakes, all the same species. In French they are couleuvres verts et jaunes, in English, western whipsnakes. They are not venomous but they can be aggressive if cornered and will rear like a cobra and bite hard. I read that they are fast moving, good climbers, with a diet of rodents, lizards, eggs and young birds. They will also eat other snakes including vipers.

My first viewing wasn’t much: a slim tail protruding from a woodpile. The next was more interesting. I saw a head above some old fencing stacked against a wall, with the short, black forked tongue flickering. As I watched, the head withdrew, but when I returned a day later, the snake was stretched out across the fencing, catching the sun. It didn’t even move when getting as close as I dared, I took a photograph. My third viewing came when I lifted a log and found a hibernator asleep beneath. I left it uncovered and it was still motionless when I returned with a camera.

They are beautifully marked creatures but I do not see them making any appearance in my visual work.

Paris Art

2010-04-08T19:46:00.002+01:00

I am not the sort of person who ticks off the countries of the world. If I have travelled to the other side of the globe on a couple of occasions and visited a European capital not noted today for its architecture and art galleries, it is only because I have had children working there. What I enjoy is creativity, so three days once more in Paris is a great delight. My first port of call was the Musée Jacquemart-André where there was an exhibition of Spanish paintings from the collection of Pérez Simón. Each section was titled and the part Le regard tourne vers Dieu had appropriately enough many pupils placed in the right or left corner of the eyes. Too many for my taste and despite works by EL Greco, Ribera and Murillo, only a Goya portrait in another category held much interest for me. As far as les toiles de maitres were concerned, the permanent collection was much more rewarding.

The Simón collection came into its own with the modern masters. There was for me a rare Dalì – one that I actually liked, apparently a ballet design for Romeo and Juliet – although another work by this artist was one of the most awful images I have ever seen committed to canvas. There were also bronzes which repeated ideas from his paintings, melting watches and people with drawers (the kind you pull out rather than pull off).

An interesting linocut by Picasso gave me the correct French term (linogravure) to use when explaining to French friends the kind of prints I most often make these days and there were wonderful works by the great twentieth century innovator. A drawing in water colour, Le Déjeuner du Pauvre (1903) seemed better to me than the Blue Period paintings which now appear a bit sentimental and Nature morte au pigeon (1919) which I have never seen reproduced was a beautiful painting with low intensity oranges and beiges and soft greys. It was a work in the genre developed by that great Poussin of the still life, Joan Gris, who was also represented. A particularly fine Mirò from 1944 Femmes devant la lune with the artist’s idiosyncratic shapes on a luminous background was a pastel and gouache on canvas.

The Musée Carnavalet is not an art gallery but a museum of the history of Paris and is well worth a visit. It has lots of delightful genre paintings and portraits of notables including an architectural hero of mine, Claude Nicolas Ledoux. The latter was imprisoned during the Terror as was the painter of architectural capriccios Hubert Robert. Both were lucky to escape the guillotine. Robert continued to paint during his internment in the Temple. Like all museums run by the Mairie de Paris, the Carnavalet is free. The only disappointment was the very poor selection of postcards. I would have loved a memento of Les Parisiens tirant le diable par la queue by Jean Weber (1864-1928) and one of Robert’s prison works.

Another Mairie de Paris museum I tried to visit was the Musée Zadkine which unfortunately was closed due to a forthcoming exhibition. Instead I went to see the Fondation Dubuffet, not free but worthwhile. When interest moved from France’s rather feeble Tachiste Movement to American Expressionism, Jean Dubuffet seemed to be the last late twentieth century French painter of significance.

The Madonna of the Yarnwinder

2010-03-19T23:33:00.002Z

Press reports of the trial concerning the theft of Leonardo’s The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, prompted me to go to the Scottish National Gallery and have yet another look at it. Few, I imagine, would elect any of the great trio of High Renaissance artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael as favourite painters. They inspire awe rather than delight. Probably the greatest draughtsmen who ever lived, they reached such perfection in the concerns of painters of their age,d that those who followed them were stymied for a time as what to do. It was only when Caravaggio showed that saints could be wrinkled and bald and even paunchy, that, with this new realism and heavy light and shade, Western painting was given a new lease of life.

With Leonardo in particular, the wide area where he employed his genius, somehow comes between the spectator and the paintings. It certainly came between Leonardo and the ability to finish them. Could we have had the crowning achievement of the whole Renaissance, if The Adoration of the Kings had been completed? Some may consider that his range of interests has caused certain paintings to be overloaded. Wouldn’t The Virgin of the Rocks, in both its versions, be more digestible if Leonardo hadn’t felt the need to bring to them all the fruits of his enquiries into geology and botany? Then there is The Mona Lisa with all the stuff about the enigmatic smile and the idea that the eyes follow you about. The composition of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is beautifully resolved in drawings, but in the painting something more ambitious with very complicated poses is attempted and the work left unfinished.

But there are Leonardo paintings with a subtlety of detail and handling unique in the history of art, that have all the serenity of any Piero della Francesca. The portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in Washington and the beautiful Lady with an Ermine in Cracow are such works. The Madonna of the Yarnwinder is another. This small painting makes every other work around it in the Scottish National Gallery look ordinary, the Raphaels, the Verrochio, the Perugino. The Wemyss Botticelli if it weren’t on loan to the Städel in Frankfurt would suffer the same fate.

I note that Kenneth Clark in his book on Leonardo, first published 1939, revised 1958, describes The Madonna of the Yarnwinder as a very good copy of a lost work. I doubt this. Copies of Leonardo are invariably squirm-makingly awful, witness the copies of the lost Leda and the Swan. The Madonna of the Yarnwinder is simply stunning.

The Edinburgh Quartet and its Part in my Eclecticism

2010-03-03T17:56:00.004Z

On 19 February I attended the 50th Anniversary Gala Concert of the Edinburgh Quartet. Apart, obviously, from the premiered work by Howard Blake, I knew the programme very well. The Mendelssohn octet had been a favourite work ever since I acquired an LP of the piece, but although I had updated to a CD recording, I hadn’t played it for several years before digging it out for a couple of hearings prior to the concert. Mendelssohn wrote it when he was sixteen. The earliest piece by Mozart that I have come to love is his Sinfonia Concertante K 364 written when he was twenty-three, so we might say that Mendelssohn was more precocious than the Austrian composer, although it is generally accepted that he declined after his early years of supreme brilliance. The Edinburgh Quartet was joined for the octet by the young Medlock Quartet in the only live performance that I have ever heard. It was an additional pleasure to see where the paired instruments played in unison and where they went their own ways.

I came to the song cycle On Wenlock Edge armed with a criticism of the third song. Colin Wilson, in his book Brandy of the Damned compares unfavourably, Vaughan Williams’ setting of Is My Team Ploughing? with the later setting by George Butterworth. The dramatic string effects and vocal repetitions are out of character with the simplicity of the poem. But Vaughan Williams can be forgiven a lot for the opening poem where the string quartet accompaniment evokes wonderfully the way the gusts of the storm build and subside, meteorological tone painting that is up there with Britten’s Sea Interludes. I think it’s because of this setting that On Wenlock Edge has become almost my favourite Houseman poem. I love the first line: ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble.’ It is a perfect example of how rhyme works to make poets say things in a more interesting way. The chiming line, the third one: ‘The gale, it plies the saplings double,’ obviously came first and to find a rhyme the poet came up with the wonderful opening. For me, the Roman in Uricon staring at the heaving hill has an echo of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, where it is Sophocles who is cited from antiquity, with a nature-inspired emotion that corresponds with the modern poet . Samuel Barber set the Arnold poem, also with string quartet, and I remember marking up the Radio Times so that I wouldn’t miss a recording of the composer singing the piece himself. Now I listen to it on CD with the Canadian baritone, Gerald Finley.

Colin Wilson’s book was important for me. I realised I was a musical eclectic like him. I like reading about music if it isn’t too technical, and when I read about a piece I have to hear it. I also went through a period of musical snobbishness, which serves a purpose: it may make you neglect fine works for a period but it also has you investigating difficult pieces which give their rewards in time. Wilson put me on to English song and in fact to Houseman as a poet. Saga Records (nothing to do with oldies) produced the first cheap LPs at ten shillings a time, and I bought Butterworth’s Houseman settings, my first Haydn quartets, Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross opus 51 and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. I also remember picking up a second-hand LP of the Edinburgh Quartet playing Haydn. The Razor quartet was one of the pieces. I collected the late Beethoven quartets, and it was surely the Edinburgh Quartet that I heard playing them all at the Reid School of Music, in those days for the price of a programme. The one worrying thought I had at this most enjoyable gala concert was the lack of young people. There were so few that I could bet they were all music students. The rest of the audience was all grey hair and grey beards.

In my experience, many from the older generation regard premieres with trepidation. That section of the audience must have been relieved at Howard Blake’s Spieltrieb, which proceeded through a series of playful sections and finished with a lush melodious episode. John Adams named his work Harmonielehre after Schoenberg’s book – in which Schoenberg claimed that tonality was dead. Alex Ross wrote that Adams’ piece said in essence ‘like hell it is.’ Blake’s work in a more modest way seems to be saying the same thing.

During the interval, in true eclectic fashion, I bought a CD of the Edinburgh Quartet playing three quartets by Mátyás Seiber, of whom I knew little except that he was a serialist. The two works that used that technique would be a good starting point for anyone frightened by the term. These are not angst-laden compositions. There are passages in both quartets that are lyrical, even soothing and the scherzo of no. 3 is – well, wonderfully scherzo-like.

Kandinsky's Nephew and Gallic Creations

2010-02-19T17:00:00.003Z

So another French philosopher has been duped by a hoax. The merde last hit the fan as one reviewer put it, when Sokal and Bricmont first wrote a spoof philosophical piece which was lauded in all the appropriate journals, and followed it up by a book, Intellectual Impostures, which exposed the POFTS (pointlessly obscure French thinkers), Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard et al., as trying to make their thoughts more impressive by larding them with science that they clearly did not understand themselves. This time the joke is of Gallic origin and the philosopher with egg on his face is the médiatique intello, Bernard-Henri Lévy, as much known for his silk shirts open to the navel and his starlet wife as his thought. In his most recent book he has been naive or slapdash enough, to quote the philosopher, Botul and his creed of Botulism, which are pure inventions. Lévy is not a POFT. He made his name by coming out against the engagé philosophers who in various convoluted Marxist forms were supporting Stalinist barbarism, but having read an article or two by him and reviews of his books, I feel that, on this side of the Channel, he would be considered more of a journalist than a philosopher.

Last weekend I came across what, for me, was a new name from the French philosophical world. Writing in The Spectator, Francis Fukuyama, he of The End of History notoriety, claimed that his thesis was, that ‘the true embodiment of the post-historical world would be the European Union’ and that he derived his ideas mainly from the ‘great French philosopher Alexander Kojève.’ Not wishing to be completely ignorant of any great philosopher, I did some research – not actually reading his work, God forbid – but finding out who on earth he was. All the following comes from a note by Jeffrey Mehlman in The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought.

Kojève, originally Kojevinkov, came from a wealthy Russian family who fled the Revolution. He was the nephew of the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Losing his fortune in the financial collapse of the dairy firm, La Vache Qui Rit, he had to earn his living interpreting the philosophy of Hegel. From his study of the German philosopher he evolved his own philosophy. Here are some of his conclusions. Napoleon is the secular Christ who brings history to an end by his victory at the Battle of Jena. Subsequently, there is some historical tidying up. Nazism was the ‘Democratization of Imperial Germany.’ The Chinese revolution was ‘the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in China.’ Beau Brummel and the marquis de Sade also play a part in the ending of history, Brummel because he concluded that man in uniform could no longer be taken seriously and de Sade because he understood that violence could only thrive in the boudoir. The surrealist touch to the story is that Kojève earned his living post-war as an important European bureaucrat and was the principal French architect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He died in harness in 1968.

One ends up having some sympathy for poor Lévy. Separating out the actual from the spoof in French twentieth century thought, is by no means straightforward. Raymond Aron who with Camus, is one of the few French intellectuals from the era respected in Anglo-Saxon circles, but who was criticised at home for lack of creativity, apparently described Kojève ‘as smarter than Sartre.’ I have read somewhere, of the view of a French intellectual that difficult things should be written about in a difficult way. Perhaps that is where the creativity comes in and where Kojève was very smart. Now that the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are on the verge of bringing down the Euro, in some cases by creative accounting, leading to who knows what other chaos, I’m very glad that the Continental input to British thought came, thanks to Adolf Hitler, via Austria in the persons of Hayek, Popper and Gombrich, all exemplary figures in writing about difficult things in a very clear way.

Frankfurt and an unusual Rembrandt Drawing

2010-02-14T14:14:00.001Z

A week or so ago we were in Frankfurt on Main for a couple of days. We had been there once before when we had an eight-hour wait on our way to China to visit our son but it was a Monday so we could not see the galleries. We had come to put that right, particularly to visit the Städel Museum, one of the great European collections.

Frankfurt is full of museums and galleries. A useful pamphlet lists thirty-one major museums plus fifty-four other exhibition sites. Near the reconstructed centre – reconstructed after British fire bombing – we took in the Museum of Modern Art (a great white interior where bored attendants and the odd visitor make dark specks and little perspex containers provide patronising explanations of the sparse exhibits) and The Caricature Museum (plenty of obscenity and scatology but more Otto Dix brutality than George Grosz quality and not a patch on the teams that have worked for fifty years on France’s Canard Enchainé). Across the river most of the other important museums are conveniently strung along the bank. We added applied art, world cultures, sculpture to our tally of subjects covered, leaving film, architecture, communications and more to another visit.

The Städel, the main focus of our trip, had the bonus of a major Botticelli exhibition centred round the gallery’s own wonderful portrait of Simonetta Vespucci. The exhibition was arranged with the portraits and allegorical works separated from the religious paintings and I came away with the impression that Botticelli was a far greater painter when dealing with secular subjects. In the amassed Christian works the expressions of the divinely sent did cloy a bit.

There is no point in my saying much about the permanent collection. It is just a must see. How did I put off for going there for so long? These are some of the things that enthralled me: a wonderful Poussin landscape with a counterpoint figure composition, including Pyramus and Thisbe, zig-zagging across, a Van Eyck and a Memling giving the northern equivalent of the sort of serene perfection you get in the south with Piero della Francesca, a Vermeer, two Rembrandt Old Testament scenes, Frans Hals portraits, no less than four Brouwers, a medieval lynch mob graphically depicted in Bosch’s Ecco Homo, works by Hugo van der Goes, Rogier van der Weyden and Gerard David. I was surprised at the amount of Italian works, Perugino, Tintoretto, Tiepolo (Giovanni Domenico as well as Giovanni Battista) and Bronzino, though the Bellini and the Mantegna weren’t first class examples. I don’t go to such collections to be educated: it’s sheer hedonism.

Another surprise was a postcard of a Rembrandt drawing from the collection, which I picked up in the gallery shop. I am addicted to Rembrandt’s graphic work, which I prefer to the paintings save the self-portraits (but having said that, the etched self-portraits are not far behind the paintings). The drawing I discovered was unlike anything in my two volumes of Rembrandt drawings and my book of the complete etchings. It is obviously a brothel scene. Rembrandt is not averse to frank depictions. There are etchings of a monk rogering a girl in a cornfield, another couple at it on a bed, a man peeing and almost unique, a very explicit one of a woman urinating. Rembrandt you might say does earthy but not erotic.

The brothel scene is common enough in Dutch art and is usually composed of three figures, a man, a girl and the bawd. The man, it is invariably a soldier, may have discarded his sword but he is behatted with great leather boots and buttoned into heavy breeches and tunic. The females are equally laced up and bodiced with hardly an ankle showing under long skirts. They look as respectable as De Hoogh housewives. You wonder how they are ever going to get enough off to get down to action. The Rembrandt drawing is in much the same vein except that there is a fourth figure, a girl who is obviously standing on something for her pubis is level with the first girl’s shoulder. She is strumming a musical instrument and is totally nude. It is not one of Rembrandt’s really great drawings but it is certainly unusual.

Quiz Answers and Result

2010-02-06T19:07:00.004Z

1. Caravaggio 2. Benvenuto Cellini 3. Richard Dadd 4. Apollinaire 5. Eubie Blake 6. Irving Berlin. 7. Irving Caesar 8. George Abbott 9. Joseph Napoleon 10. Nabokov 11. Saul Bellow 12. John Updike 13. Schoenberg’s Erwartung 14. Philip Glass 15. Claude Monet 16. Jean-Baptiste Lully 17. Alkan 18. Adriaen Brouwer 19. Granados 20. Jacques Louis David.

It is a slight embarrassment to me that the winner of my quiz, Ken Duffy, should be someone I know well. No underhand dealings were involved and the small print, which I am giving as a prize is not something that as a person so long involved with the printmaking world he would particularly covet in any case. I asked Ken to try my quiz and added that I had tried to make it google proof. He replied that no such thing was possible. Proving this point obviously became a challenge and he has been successful. I congratulate him.

I see google-quiz-solving in action every Christmas if my daughter spends it with us. She enjoys The Independent on Sunday's quiz that consists of a block of sixteen details from paintings, which must be identified. We usually get six or so straight off. Then books are consulted and finally the laptops are brought out. With collections all over the world available to consult, everything can be tracked down.

Ken had three answers to my questions different from the list above. For no.13 he gave Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano. Like Erwartung the work is from 1909 and is therefore a possible answer. Of the group of questions about writers who compared a woman’s bottom to an upside down valentine heart, he got Nabokov and Updike but gave James Joyce as the third writer. I take this to be wrong unless he can convince me otherwise. I am intrigued to how he got Nabokov and Updike without also getting Bellow. In Craig Raine’s essay Nabokov: The Russian Years, collected in In Defence of T.S. Eliot, he suggests other writers picked up the Nabokov’s trope like a virus. Nabokov’s phrase in Bend Sinister is: ‘her rump, which in those days of tight skirts, looked like an inverted heart.’ Saul Bellow wrote in Humboldt’s Gift: ‘You have a bottom like a white valentine greeting’ and in Rabbit Redux John Updike’s phrase, salutary or unconsciously smitten was: ‘the upside-down valentine of a woman’s satin rear.’ This question was I hoped very google proof and if I got anybody to look at Raine’s essay collections, I am very pleased, as they should be also, as he is a splendid critic as well as a superb poet. These were the questions that most were at sea with.

Ken’s third differing answer was to give Titian or Caravaggio as painters who might have been collected by both Rembrandt and Rubens. I suspect he thought this worth a guess because the northern painters were influenced by these Italian masters. The painter who they in fact collected, was the Flemish genre painter Adriaen Brouwer.

In truth, I didn’t get a very large entry for my quiz. Nobody came anywhere near Ken’s 18/20. But unlike The Independent on Sunday I was not offering a case of champagne

Feeling Sorry for Art Critics

2010-01-25T17:50:00.001Z

I have begun to feel a bit sorry for art critics appearing today in print and on TV. These are people who in the main, have studied art history in depth and visited the great museum of Europe and have to comment on what is called cutting-edge art, efforts at the attenuated end of a historical process which often require more imaginative resources to make them worth considering than the works contain themselves. When these poor art journalists get the chance to expound on past masters, they can be knowledgeable and perceptive but most of the time it’s either traditional-style mediocrity or the new stuff, that at one bound immunises itself against criticism by dealing in ready-mades and conceptualism.

What strategies do the writers employ? Consider these three quotations taken from reviews by The Sunday Times art critic, Waldemar Januszczak. :

‘Warhol’s most important achievement … is … he taught modern America how to feel comfortable with its with its dumbness … Warhol believed in shallowness. Warhol made it okay to love shopping, to drink coke, to adore Disney, to worship Marilyn and Elvis.’

‘A cheeky chappie has gone on show at the Tate Modern … He has a square head, an impressive length of dowelling for a nose and he’s roughly the size of the White Cliffs of Dover … This is Blockhead the latest in an intriguing line of contemporary whoppers commissioned for us by Tate Modern … The great shift in gallery purpose that has taken place in our lifetime has been the shift from education to entertainment. People used to go to museum to learn and to be enlightened. Now they go for fun. Museums … achieve … for art lovers what Butlins did for holidays.’

‘With such an artist on site (Bill Viola) the gallery (the National, London) could hope to feel younger, brighter. People inject botox into their wrinkles for similar reasons. These days contemporary art is better for business than old masters. It attracts bigger and younger crowds. It offers more spectacle, demands less education and has grown ever so adept at supplying the circus quotient of the bread and circus equation.’

There is consistency here. I’m not sure that we look at old masters for education or enlightenment but it is certainly for something different than we get from bouncy castles.

Matthew Collings another art journalist in the news and on the box, takes a slightly different line. The Chapman brothers are good, he has said, but they are not comparable with the great artists of the past. We just have to accept what art has become. In a recent television programme, he gave as his final example of beauty, the relationship between the vast white spaces of Munich’s Pinakothek Der Moderne and the works therein. Collings no longer expects anything from the artwork itself. He finds interest only in a sort of minimal interior decoration on a monumental.

While Januszczak tries to whip up enthusiasm for dumbing down as a democratising process and Matthew Collings regretfully accepts it as unavoidable, The Scotsman’s chief art critic, Duncan Macmillan is less yielding. There is more than a whiff of had-enoughness about his recent reviews. I had tended to argue for a time that the conceptualists were able to hold sway in the absence of anything substantial of another kind. Now I am not so sure. Macmillan is a historian who has produced the most complete history of Scottish art to date. He gave the memorial lecture for the Scottish painter Stephen Campbell who sadly died at the height of his powers. Could it be that the advent of an artist like this, so original and inventive yet preserving a connection with the great European tradition, allows a path for contemporary art beyond Januszczak’s ingeniously championed banality and Collings defeatism?

British Painters and Post-Impressionism

2010-01-12T14:27:00.002Z

Out of respect for the beams that hold up my flat, I don’t often buy hardback books. Only occasionally something comes along which I must have hot off the press. I can’t honestly say that David Boyd Haycock’s book, A Crisis of Brilliance, about six painters who attended the Slade School of Art before the First World War, is in that category – it is not a brilliant book – but I was very glad to receive it as a Christmas present. It cleared up lots of loose ends for me, the relationships of these painters with the Bloomsbury group and the role that Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary played as a patron to them. Then there are the details of their tortured lives: Dora Carrington shot herself; Mark Gertler stuck his head in a gas oven; John Currie murdered his empty-headed mistress and then turned the gun on himself.

Aside from personal agonies two events shaped their lives. In 1910 and 1912 Roger Fry mounted his exhibitions of Post-Impressionist art. Their Slade drawing teacher, Henry Tonks, advised a boycott but like any students worth their salt they paid no heed. The second notable influence on their careers was the Great War.

It is interesting to compare this group with a roughly contemporary Scottish group. The Slade painters were born anything from ten to twenty years later than the Scottish Colourists but things didn’t move so fast in those days and both lots of artists had to position themselves with regard to the innovations of painters across the Channel.

If you subscribe to a Manichean duality about the history of the arts, always judging in terms of the progressive and the conservative, the significant and the non-significant, in other words always seeing an obligatory trajectory, the Scottish painters win hands down. They were much more like the French big beasts. One of them, J.D. Fergusson, even exhibited in Paris with the Fauves. But there can be a danger in following what appears to be the progressive lead : the prompted works may only give a local variant of what is done much better by the original producers.

The Slade artists were much more circumspect. All were a bit influenced at first by the new art of France but when Stanley Spencer was asked about Picasso, he replied that ‘he hadn’t got past Piero della Francesca.’ Yet he never did anything that didn’t look as if it belonged to the twentieth century. Paul Nash took what he wanted from the European modernists but never lost in his best work his essential Englishness.

Nash and Spencer who are the only artists of the Slade group to be in the first rank of British painters, saw action in the Great War and became involved with the Official War Artists scheme. Both lived to be War Artists also during the Second Word War. Arguably Nash’s best works are from the two conflicts while Spencer’s 1941 series Shipbuilders on the Clyde is the culminating triumph of his career.

In some ways Richard Nevinson who was also a soldier and War Artist, was more like the Scottish painters, clinging more adhesively to continental influences. Today, his cubist efforts seem on the crude side and don’t challenge his French and Italian models. However, I rather like a painting of his entitled The Road from Arras to Bapaume, reproduced on a CD I have of the music of the Scottish composer Cecil Coles, who was killed in the Great War. It is almost a brown monochrome work and has something of the character of those empty seascapes by L.S. Lowry. In a work like this Nevinson too, preserves what Pevsner called ‘the Englishness of English art.'

The New Year

2010-01-02T17:06:00.002Z

The first papers of the year are full of summings-up and lists of forthcoming events. Looking at bestselling authors of the decade, I note that apart from the classics like Shakespeare and Dickens, I have only read one of the hundred cited. There is no getting away from elitism if you have a serious interest in the arts. Heading the list is the author J.K. Rowling. If my grandson were the right age, I might well have read to him some of her works. I did read The Lord of the Rings to my son when he was very small but I could never understand why adults were reading it for themselves alone. Grown-ups, who read children’s books, like those who go into middle age and beyond listening to nothing but pop music seem to me very sad people.

There are some interesting things promised for 2010 however. The Tate Modern is to have a major exhibition of the work of Arshile Gorky. In my final two years at art college when I became interested in abstract art, Jackson Pollock and Gorky represented to me the peak of achievement in the field. The other Americans, Kline, Hofmann, Sam Francis et al seemed no better than the French Tachistes who were the final fling of the dying School of Paris. I always failed to see what the fuss was about Mark Rothko, though I am prepared to admit that I completely lack the beatific gene, which is why I have never been tempted to smoke cannabis. But then I have never smoked nicotine either. An old school chum of my wife is married to an American lawyer involved with the estate of another American abstract expressionist, Clyfford Still. I believe he is now to have a museum built to house exclusively his works. I cannot think of anything that would be duller.

On the home front it has been pointed out to me that 2010 is the hundredth anniversary of the death of the Scottish Impressionist William Mactaggart. When many years ago there was a major Festival Exhibition of his works in the RSA Galleries, the art historian Martin Kemp, late of St. Andrews and Oxford universities, expressed the hope that the exhibition would firmly establish the reputation of the painter. (At the same time he said he was less sure of the Scottish Colourists, which coincides with my view.) Alas, it was not to be. Some amateur critics on radio and elsewhere found some narrative traces in some of his pieces and duly condemned him. Kirkcaldy Art Gallery and Museums, which has a large holding of his works, is to do something and the National Gallery of Scotland is, at least, to have a new hanging of his works. What I would like to see, is one of his really good works hung among the gallery’s French Impressionist paintings. I’m not sure the gallery actually has anything that quite fits the bill. Perhaps the town could lend its excellent work, Jophie’s Neuk, which they don’t often show.

Christmas Quiz

2009-12-23T13:51:00.000Z

The Bad Eggs of Art

Where do we start

with the bad eggs of art?

The Italians once had

several quite bad.

Gesualdo comes first

as one of the worst –

a child, lover and wife

deprived of their life.

Next the painting bad sport

who murdered on court

and the gay silversmith

who crossed, slew forthwith.

Though unreliable still

art hoods then go downhill:

there’s a painter gone mad

who did for his dad;

a poet not so deft

involved in art theft;

last, pathetic to see,

Tracey drunk on TV.

1, 2, 3, 4, There are four unnamed ‘bad eggs’ in the verse above. Who are they?

5, A famous jazz composer died as a result of the celebrations for his hundredth birthday. Who was he?

6, 7, 8, There are at least three centenarians connected with the American musical. Can you name a composer/lyricist, a lyricist and a producer/director who lived to be over 100?

9, Goya’s first portrait of the Duke of Wellington had been started as a portrait of someone else. Who was the original sitter?

10, 11, 12, In a critical essay, Craig Raine collected phrases of three authors who compared a woman’s bottom to a valentine-style heart.Who are these three authors?

13, A composition described in 1934 as ‘still the most sensational essay in modern music from the point of view of pure strangeness of sound’ and which might well be so described today, was one hundred years old this year. Can you name the piece?

14, Robert Hughes, the Australian writer who was at one time the art critic of Time Magazine, was surprised when an up-and-coming composer arrived to fit his dishwasher. Who was the part-time plumber?

15, Which French painter won the country’s lottery?

16,17, Two French composers met their deaths as a result of unusual accidents. Who died from a stab wound self-inflicted while conducting and who was crushed by a bookcase?

18, The works of which painter were collected by both Rembrandt and Rubens?

19, A European classical composer died when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship in which he was returning from America. Who was this unfortunate musician?

20. Which painter changed a painting to suit a dictator, had other painters imprisoned and signed death sentences?

I am offering a small print, Thinking, Reading, Writing (11 x 13 cm, pictured above) for the first correct, or the most correct entry. Follow the link to my website where you will find my email address and send answers numbered 1-20 by 1^st February. I will post the answers shortly after that date.

Getting Sibelius Wrong

2009-12-19T13:45:00.000Z

Sibelius, Nielsen, Berwald, Grieg

form the Norse composers’ league.

One for Finland, Denmark and Sweden,

Norway as if planned by some great but fair intrigue,

Sibelius, Nielsen, Berwald, Grieg.

I know people with some interest in classical music to whom the prospect of listening to those most accessible of twentieth-century composers, Shostakovitch and Poulenc, presents something of an ordeal. At a concert in a little eleventh-century church in France that I attended during the summer, both natives and expats were apprehensive beforehand because Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony was to be performed. Afterwards, the same people admitted that the experience wasn’t too bad, but I didn’t get the feeling that any of the group thought that the composer’s work merited further investigation. It’s a bit depressing for anyone connected with the arts. I discovered early on that it was worth putting in time to get to know new works. Yet I must confess to an appalling prejudice of my own, which I harboured for many years. It concerns the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.

In his wonderful book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross devotes a whole chapter to Sibelius. He describes how the Finn became a victim of the style war in which Continental composers postulated an obligatory trajectory along atonal lines. They may even have led him to destroy his eighth symphony and stop composing altogether. One ideologue actually published a pamphlet entitled Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World.

As a schoolboy in the Orkney Islands, I don’t think that I was part of that zeitgeist. But I do remember my prejudice being kindled by the remarks of two teachers. Why twentieth-century composers ever came up in history lessons in Stromness Academy, I can’t imagine but when they did, a teacher who played the organ in one of the churches muttered that Sibelius was the ‘only one’. By this time I was listening to the harmonically advanced jazz of Charlie Parker, and we had records at home of Stravinsky’s Petruska and The Soldier’s Tale. I put the history master down as a hopeless reactionary.

The comments of a science teacher proved even more damaging. He described to the class how pictures of Finnish landscape flashed up in his mind when he listened to Sibelius’s symphonies. Although I hadn’t heard a note of his music, Sibelius became for me an adjunct of the Finnish Tourist Board. The very title Finlandia seemed to confirm this and whenever I glimpsed a Sibelius LP cover, it was sure to depict Finnish lakes and forests. When I went to art college and interest in jazz gradually gave way to an involvement with classical music I would avoid any concert that featured Sibelius. As well as the major figures, I investigated all sorts of minor composers. These included Constant Lambert, whose book, Music Ho, I read. In it he has a large section on Sibelius, credits him with solving the problem of the post-Beethoven symphony and in the last part, Sibelius and the Music of the Future, champions him as the answer to the dodecaphonic and neo-classical impasse. I couldn’t have thought Lambert more wrong.

But had I read Lambert more closely, he might have allayed my fears. Of Sibelius’s symphonies he wrote ‘Though their grim colouring clearly owes much to the composers nationality and surroundings, there is nothing in them that can be considered a folk song’, and he chided critics ‘more noteworthy for geographical knowledge than for nervous sensibility’, adding that ‘the chilly atmosphere of the fourth symphony is something more than a Christmas-card nip in the air’.

Alas, it was not until Alex Ross’s book came out in 2008 that I realised how wrong I had been. I bought CDs of the great symphonies – four to seven – and eventually the earlier symphonies and tone poems as well. And Constant Lambert’s assertion written in 1934 that ‘of all contemporary music, that of Sibelius seems to point forward most surely to the future’ is proving to have much more substance. A host of contemporary composers including Maxwell Davies and Thomas Adès claim him as an inspiration, as did the late Morton Feldman. Meanwhile, John Adams, who seems to have emerged as the most significant figure to have moved beyond the easy listening of both secular and holy minimalism, mentions him constantly.

My new interest in Sibelius has led me to revisit other Scandinavian composers. I had heard a little Nielsen, for I once bought an LP of his clarinet and flute concertos for my father, who was a keen amateur flautist. Grieg I had always associated with pretty piano pieces of no great significance. That was until I heard his first string quartet. As for Berwald, who gives Sweden a famous composer to keep up with her neighbours, my Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (admittedly published in 1955) has an odd entry on this composer: ‘Works much praised by those by who know them’. I have apparently joined a select band.

Edinburgh's New Plinth Sculpture

2009-12-09T19:28:00.000Z

The remarks Ken Livingstone made about the figures celebrated on plinths around Trafalgar Square, which led to the projects on the empty plinth, missed an important point. It is this: statues in this ancient tradition, to work well, must make an architectural impact. They act as centres of interest in the formal urban scheme and can be life enhancing whether or not the people represented interest the public. In every major city throughout Europe and beyond, such statues have been erected through the ages with a well-rehearsed competence. Edinburgh has a great number of such works dating from the 17^th century right through to the early 20^th. Recently, no less than five more have been added, four of them by the Paisley sculptor Alexander Stoddart, now appointed the Queen’s sculptor in ordinary in Scotland

Stoddart cannot be faulted for his modelling skills. Judged by these, he can hold his own with the practioners of previous ages in Scotland. Continuing with this tradition today, however, is problematic not least because all the best positions for placing such works in the city centre have been taken. Two of Stoddart’s figures are seated and there is an additional problem with these. Seated figures do not form pinnacles like standing figures and the back view is likely to be unsatisfactory. The great examples of seated figures from the past, like Michelangelo’s Moses, in San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome or the figures on the Medici tombs, Florence, are all set in architectural facades. There seems to be some awareness of this problem with Stoddart’s statue of Hume (see photo above) in front of the old Sheriff Courts, as there is a rather pathetic attempt to link it to the building

by echoing its rustication on the low plinth. But to be effective it would have to have been embedded much higher up in the building. For this to have happened, Stoddart would have had to be involved when the building was being erected.

With his sculpture of James Clerk Maxwell (pictured right), the scientist, in George Street, the problem is even more acute. When we enter the street, Clerk Maxwell has turned his back on us. What is bad manners in life is bad manners in monumental sculpture. Again, the figure needs to face out from an architectural surround, which, in this day and age in an already completed city street, cannot be arranged. Photographs of the Clerk Maxwell sculpture in the artist’s studio have appeared in the press. It looked enormous. Placed among the buildings of George Street it looks too small. It therefore lacks the presence of the other sculptures at the junctions of the street. One of these is of George IV, unloved in his time and unrescued by any revisionist historian since. Yet serving as a finial on top of a monolith of the right scale, few would wish to remove him. It says a great deal about how these monumental pieces work.

Stoddart’s standing figure of Adam Smith on a high plinth in the High Street fares rather better. There is room for it on the widened pavement. On the other hand it is not obvious that a feature was actually needed at this spot. By far the best of Stoddart’s pieces is the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial featuring two characters from Kidnapped, mounted on a plinth of cyclopean rustication, giving some relief from the miles of blank wall on the right that is passed driving out of Edinburgh towards the airport. If any ideological objections to an artist working in a neo-neo- classical idiom can be put aside, everything here works very well, down to the little roundel featuring a relief of Stevenson himself.

The fifth of these revivalist sculptures is a representation of Sherlock Holmes by the pop-artist-gone-conservative-sculptor-turned-born-again-modernist, Gerald Laing. It is a poor piece, indifferently modelled and far too small in scale to be successful. Ironically, although removed, temporarily or for re-siting, by the tram works, it did have one of the best positions of any of the new works.

It is worth asking why we should again be raising statues to dead Scots males. The Roman purpose in celebrating heroes was part of the process of turning them into gods. We no longer believe in this. If we believe that it serves to increase interest in the achievements of the individuals represented, we should look at the evidence. How many citizens could locate the statue of Sir James Young Simpson, the Scottish doctor/scientist previously plinthed? As has often been said, the way to create greater interest in science and its heroes, is to teach the history of science in schools. Of our great Enlightenment figures, David Hume and Adam Smith, it could be said as Horace said of himself that they had constructed a monument more lasting than bronze, although it wouldn’t have been in the nature of either to so boast. As for statues of characters from literature making their authors more read, it should be remembered that Sir Walter Scott has a statue with a sixty metres architectural canopy which is very well known, yet Allan Massie has written recently, that he was stumped when asked how more reading of the great novelist could be encouraged.

Most important cities have masses of skilful sculptures in stone and bronze. Tourist guides, local historians and a few others will know what they represent but they are generally ignored precisely because they have become so common. Where they complete a pleasant urban composition everybody benefits but cramming in more may even destroy the balance already achieved.

The Greatest Scottish Painter of the First Half of the 20th Century

2009-11-07T15:00:00.000Z

Many years ago when I was teaching art in a high school, the certificate for 4^th year pupils required the submission of two short written pieces, one on a designer and the other on a painter. A rumour went round that one teacher had guided his charges to produce both on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, treating him as a designer and as a painter. Apparently, the markers decided that Mackintosh was a designer and not a painter and all the pupils were failed.

No doubt, the teacher had not behaved very wisely. Career teachers who become markers to add something to their CVs or to earn a little extra cash are not necessarily experts on the history of art or even very knowledgeable. But if the story was true, the exclusion of Mackintosh from the profession of painters was definitely wrong. He had turned his back on architecture in disappointment and resolved not to have anything to do with it again. in 1923 he moved to Roussillon in south-west France to make his way as a fulltime painter.

Mackintosh is said to have admired the Viennese painter, Gustav Klimt, probably in the days when as an architect and designer he was being fêted by the Secessionist artists. No one would deny that Klimt was a painter. Yet his paintings veer far closer to pure design than Mackintosh’s landscapes ever do. Mackintosh in his last period was indeed a painter and a very fine one. He was more original and weightier than any of the Scottish Colourists and he achieved this status with barely forty works in the medium of watercolour. To find anything comparable, where an artist established himself by sheer quality with such a small oeuvre, we would have to turn to the history of music where in the field of the art song, the French composer Henri Duparc, placed himself alongside the immortals of the genre with only fourteen superb songs.

The major art exhibition during the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, Scotland and Impressionism, only served to highlight how inferior Scottish efforts, that might have some resemblance in subject matter, were to French examples. If it’s felt necessary to recover a little national pride try this: place a reproduction of a Mackintosh painting, one with buildings or a rocky landscape, next to a plate with a similar subject by Cézanne. The Scottish work will stand up very well. Try the same thing with a work by J.S. Peploe and we immediately become aware of a crude follower. Mackintosh, on the other hand, owes nothing to Cézanne. He has his own style and methods. It could be said of him as Cézanne said of himself, that he was doing Poussin after nature, such is the analytical intensity that he brings to his landscapes.

One of the things that turned Mackintosh from architecture and design to painting, it might be said to be the last straw, was the criticism that he was old-fashioned. It was bound to happen. An undoubted genius in those fields, he was an exponent of what has come to be called design fascism. He would design everything in a building down through the furniture to the light fittings and cutlery. That is apt to put an insupportable burden on anybody who has to live in it. Mackintosh would design you an exquisite bookcase but you wouldn’t be able to become much of a book collector or even have many reference books. Even his architectural masterpiece, Glasgow School of Art, apparently the nation’s favourite building, and it is easy to understand why, probably isn’t really very suitable for purpose. His designs have a continued life as ‘Mockintosh,’ jewellery and other artefacts drawn from them. In the end, perhaps his design work has proved too precious in the derogatory sense, while his late paintings are the real gems. But then, aren’t we lucky to have both.

Scotland's Two Hidden Goya Masterpieces

2009-10-24T17:54:00.000+01:00

For the second year in a row, the Scottish Nation Galleries’ major exhibition running during the Edinburgh Festival has been a patched up affair. It features a few interesting, borrowed works but is padded out with paintings that can be seen throughout the year, plus lots of mediocre pieces and copies, advertised as ‘as a spectacular celebration of Spanish culture seen through the eyes of British artists and art collectors.’ Probably a mixture of curator’s arrogance that believes that the public can be led by the nose to follow a narrative, and economic constraints is behind this hotchpotch. Two far more rewarding exhibitions were actually available during the festival period, one of them in the same complex: From Raphael to Renoir, drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna, needed no curator impute other than an alliterative title, simply because it was full of masterpieces; at the Queen’s Gallery an exhibition entitled The Conservation Piece, contained two further masterpieces, Stubbs’ The Prince of Wales’ Phaeton, surely his greatest work, and a large oval-shaped painting by Gainsborough where he returned to the Watteauesque style of his early work and anticipated Goya in the delicacy of his paint handling.

Goya was the under-represented presence in The Discovery of Spain exhibition. The Scottish National Gallery does possess a rare Goya and it was included in this show. But it is a very rare Goya because it is relatively uninteresting. This cannot be said of two other Goyas in a Scottish collection. I call them Scotland’s hidden masterpieces because I have never seen them reproduced in any monograph of the artist other than as thumbnails in a catalogue raisonné. I have spoken to several Scottish painters with a keen interest in the master who know nothing of them. Yet. I have checked with Pollok House, now looked after by the National Trust where the Maxwell Stirling Collection is housed and I am assured that they are currently on show.

They are part of a small series of paintings of children playing by the Spanish master, none of which seem to be in any major museum or art gallery and are thought to belong to the same period as the tapestry-cartoon paintings. There may be a tendency to dismiss these works, which can be described as rococo, a term thought by some to be derogatory, but it would be quite wrong to do so. It was in these paintings that Goya developed his strikingly original approach to composition. In Boys Playing at Seesaw, one of the two masterpieces, the seesaw figure in the air describes an ‘X’ shape while two groups of wrestling boys form tripods. Another of the five pairs of figures in the composition make one more novel composite with their silhouettes linked by the brims of their hats. All these combine in a lopsided pyramid that is balanced by a little monkey chained atop a high wall. It is a startlingly inventive performance as is the other work, Boys Playing at Soldiers that can be analysed in a similar fashion.

I do not know if any attempt was made to borrow these paintings which belong to the same collection as the Portrait of a Lady in a Fur Cape, supposedly by El Greco, part of the Spanish exhibition and chosen for the poster. The Pollok House Goyas would have raised the exhibition’s quality considerably. To anybody who has not seen these two great works, I can only make the suggestion that they hot foot it to Pollok House, Glasgow. They have a wonderful aesthetic experience awaiting them.

The Tickle Factor

2009-10-12T21:11:00.000+01:00

There is a farm auberge in the area of France, which I visit frequently with my wife, which has often been recommended to us. Invariably the recommendation came with a strange suggestion. Do visit the loo when you go there, we were urged. Eventually, we did eat at the restaurant, where we were not disappointed, and duly inspected the facilities. Everybody is immensely tickled by the lavatory of this establishment. Above the porcelain there are a series of shelves filled with toilet rolls with their pastel shades arranged in a specific pattern. It has been described as a work of art.

Once upon a time avant garde art was the preserve of the cognoscenti or an elite. No longer. Today the Tate Modern is much more popular than Tate Britain. Where provincial cities have galleries providing programmes of contemporary visual art, they are generally well attended and the sort of people who formerly would have been stating that they didn’t know much about art but that they knew what they liked and weren’t finding it, are often enthusing about what they have seen. The tickle factor has a lot to do with this.

Some individual pieces have become immensely popular. Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the inside of a house and Richard Wilson’s work where he covered the floor space of various rooms with a shallow tray of oil which acted as a mirror and completely changed the spatial feel of the place, are just two examples of unconventional works which have greatly tickled the public.

Constructing objects from unusual materials, a little house made entirely of books for example, always provides a high tickle quotient. The Scottish artist David Mach has completed a whole series of works of this kind, a submarine and a Parthenon from old tyres (the latter with its maquette made from polo mints), a steam locomotive from bricks, heads from metal coat hangers or match heads. The most internationally famous work of this kind is Jeff Koon's puppy dog constructed from growing plants, outside Frank Gery’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

Now, there is nothing wrong with amusing the public in this way. Obviously, it adds to the gaiety of nations. It could be said, as D. J. Enright said of pieces from another art (quoted in The Movement Reconsidered, edited by Zachary Leader), ‘the effects may be striking but they don’t strike very deep.’ But at least these works give the lie to the notion that contemporary visual art has nothing to give the general public.

A few words on two local visual art controversies

2009-06-16T21:42:00.000+01:00

JACK VETTRIANO

From time to time a controversy breaks out about the merits of the painter Jack Vettriano and whether or not his paintings deserve to be bought by The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Vettriano’s work is highly indebted to the American painter Andrew Hopper and shares that painter’s lack of anatomical substance in the figure painting. This need not be considered a defect. Hopper had no need to become a modern Michelangelo. He was an original because of the modern social and industrial imagery he introduced and the hard light that he used that owed nothing to Impressionism.

Vettriano may be said to stand in relation to Hopper as J. S. Peploe is placed vis-à-vis Cézanne, but the he differs from the American master in one important respect: whereas Hopper painted his own times, Vettriano’s work seems to be stuck in the age of his model. This gives it a nostalgic feel and reminds the viewer of old films. Here, I think, Vettriano has missed a trick. Slowing down old films has become a hailed visual art pursuit. If Vettriano had done something similar and restricted his art to actual scenes from old films, he might have achieved cutting edge respectability.

Formerly, I was of the opinion that The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art should not buy Vettriano’s work. Now, I have changed my mind. He meets the criteria for inclusion: he is controversial and expensive.

I don’t know whether or not the following will soften the curators’ attitude to the popular Scottish painter, what with the marketing imperatives of recent years. Early this year in Munich, I saw the large exhibition of Kandinsky’s paintings from all stages of his career which was having its first showing in an underground space attatched to the Lembachhaus, along with an extensive display of his graphic work from the gallery’s own collection. In the gallery shop, believe it or not, cushions bearing reproductions of The Singing Butler were on sale.

2. THE SKATING MINISTER

At one time the little painting of The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch in the National Gallery of Scotland was attributed to Henry Raeburn but it was acknowledged that there was no evidence that it was by him. At some point, I am not sure when, the attribution was firmed up. Officially, the work is now deemed to be unequivocally by the great Scottish portrait painter and there has even been further inflation of its status. Writing in a column in The Scotsman Tim Cornwell referred to ‘Raeburn. famous for The Skating Minister and other landmark Scottish portraits…’ A work of which the authorship was once a hunch has become the signature work of the artist so identified. It has become to Raeburn what The Night Watch is to Rembrandt.

Going against the tide, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery has attributed the painting to the French painter Henri-Pierre Danloux. Another expert has come back with an assertion that it is definitely by Raeburn, the clinching factor being the treatment of the minister’s cravat.

I am not in a position to advance any opinion on the likelihood of it being the work of the French painter but the technique used in the painting of the cravat surely does not settle anything. If every painting where white paint was scumbled over a darker ground was to be attributed to Raeburn, the master’s oeuvre would increase enormously. It is the usual means employed in any number of routine portraits of admirals of the fleet and the like, who wore the once fashionable dress item. The technique is used in a painting recently bought cheaply on ebay and thought to be an early Gainsborough.

I am convinced The Skating Minister is not by Raeburn. My reasoning is simple : it is not good enough. Very few painters throughout the history of European art are very convincing with really small figures. Watteau would be one and Adrian Brouwer another. Although, the work under consideration is not tiny, the painting of the face is rather cramped. It is possible that Raeburn could not translate his bravura brushwork to this unaccustomed scale in the way that Brouwer could bring to his much smaller paintings what he had learned from his master Frans Hals. This I could understand. What I can’t accept is that he would have been satisfied with the placing of the single figure on the small canvas. Cut out, as the Scottish National Gallery has used it in some of its marketing material, the figure works well enough, and this may be of some significance in the whole debate. It may be inconvenient to downgrade the authorship. As a whole the composition is boring. A portrait painter has very few options in placing a figure, but in his full-length portraits Raeburn is a master operator using the limited possibilities to the full. It is inconceivable that this could be his work.