***** (5 stars)
This is an exhibition which needs visited again and again – it’s so full and rich you’d get violent indigestion if you tried to take it all in in one short visit… I turned up for one of the regular Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime tours, and am very glad that I had sufficient time to restore myself with a bowl of [excellent!] Indonesian soup and a cheese scone before diving back into the exhibition for a more leisurely examination of everything on display. Of necessity, the tour only looks at some of the extensive collection on display, which includes many exquisite works by other artists alongside those of Peploe, Fergusson, Hunter and Cadell.
Were there only four Colourists? Well…there were other artists with similar ideas – but many of them, both men and women, died young, and before the Four had become established as a group. How come they are a group? Well… a strong bond of friendship seems to have grown up between them over the years: they went on painting trips together, encouraged and criticised each other, and those who survived longer were devastated by the deaths of their friends. Why were they all men? Well… not for the lack of talented female artists of the period, but largely because they died young, often in childbirth. Why ‘Scottish’? Well… three of them came from Edinburgh, the fourth from Bute; they mostly came from wealthy families, so could go to Paris to study and paint – and of course there they came into contact with artists, styles of painting, and ways of living that were in strong contrast to their ‘respectable’ and mostly grey home city.
And why ‘Colourists’? Well…there’s a sudden explosion of colour into their work, and with the colour comes life, and joy, and a sense of freedom from care – creating a painting that makes the viewer feel something, rather than simply faithfully reproducing what the artist is looking at. There are landscapes, and still lifes, and portraits, and accompanying them are a wonderful assemblage of works by artists who influenced, assisted, accompanied the four Colourists on their journey of exploration of the world around them. Whistler, Singer Sargent, Lavery, Augustus John, Derain and others add context and contrast, and the explanations that accompany the works also name the people who contributed to [or hindered] the gradual coalescence of the foursome into a recognisable group of artists with a recognisable style. As a Quaker myself, I was interested to learn of the somewhat biased approach to assembling exhibition material of Roger Fry, member of the famous chocolate family, who didn’t seem to think the works of these Scottish artists worthy of inclusion. [but then I wasn’t particularly Impressed by the only example of Fry’s own work – Farm Buildings – on display at Dovecot.]
Okay, enough blethering – what about the pictures? Well, I could wax lyrical about most of them: and I still can’t quite fix on The One I Would Steal If I Could. [This approach, which is one I generally employ at exhibitions, leaves out all consideration of how it might fit into my tiny flat or how the theft could be managed!]. It was a joy to see paintings I know well from Scottish collections I’ve visited, and even more joy to see paintings new to me, which I’d happily see again and again.
One of the most surprising of my ‘likes’ was Composition with Grey Leaves and a Sliced Circle, a work by Duncan Grant which shows the influence Cubism was having: it’s a wonderfully random yet perfectly balanced assemblage of shapes which simply glows with colour. [On which note, I loved the warm, rich red of the walls on which all the works were hung.] Another surprise was Robert the Bruce and De Bohun by Eric Robertson. Labelled ‘ rare example of Scottish Vorticism’, it’s a wonderfully swirling canvas showing the moment when the two heavily-armed horsemen clash in battle in a wonderfully Scottish landscape. Near that is a Fergusson painting of Three Submarines – another surprise to me, for the subject this time. Another glowing surprise was Arenig, North Wales by James Dickson Innes, a Llanelli-born artist whose painting to me seemed almost tropical in its feel and colouring.
There’s a superb drawing by Cadell of his lover Charles Oliver – at a time when homosexuality was illegal, Oliver was referred to as “my most faithful friend” and called his “manservant” – it’s a lovely, intimate portrait which sits beside two other, more ‘public’ Cadell oils of The Boxer [a champion boxer who became a much-loved policeman in the Grassmarket] and The White Shirt, which is thought to be of a Black merchant seaman from Cape Verde who settled in Leith.
There’s a good sprinkling of paintings by women artists – look out for Anne Estelle Rice’s Seascape with Sailing Boats, Bessie MacNicol’s The Pink Hat, Margaret Rice’s Red Bowl, Devon Cottages and Portrait of Flossie Jolley – but the exhibition’s overwhelmingly male-dominated.
And of course, there’s a wonderful collection of canvases by the four Colourists – still lifes, landscapes, portraits; old favourites and new delights. Which one would I steal? With so many to choose from, it’s a really difficult choice – I’m torn between Fergusson’s Jonquils and Silver from 1905 and Cadell’s Carnations [1913]. I overheard a couple’s conversation which suggested they would nick Cadell’s Loch Creran, Argyll which he painted in 1932.
Which would you choose?
The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Run Continues https://dovecotstudios.com/whats-on/the-scottish-colourists
ScotsGay Arts 