Page 97 - Studio International - November December 1975

exhibition put on by Michael Spens assisted by the Arts
Council at Cleish Castle outside Edinburgh. It would be
doing an injustice to the vitality of the festival as an
unofficial event not to record that there were also
literally dozens of other exhibitions ranging from
anonymous amateurs to distinguished professional
painters. There were also, as well as James VI & I, two
other historical exhibitions devoted to the same period in
British painting, The Gentle Art of Painting (Hilliard and
Isaac Oliver miniatures) at the Arts Council's Charlotte
Square Gallery, and Scottish Painting 1570-1640 at the
National Portrait Gallery.
These three historical exhibitions devoted to this
unfashionable epoch in British art produced a picture of
its insular relationship to continental painting that seems
curiously familiar. There is something very like it in the
work of Ceri Richards and his contemporaries. It is easy
to go through his work spotting Matisse or Picasso, de
Stael or Max Ernst, but this is a superficial and unfair
approach. Behind this screen of borrowed language
there was a strong artistic personality. Alan Bowness
selected the paintings (and some sculpture) to illustrate
his continuing relationship with poetry and music, and
so isolates something central and very English in his
inspiration. At times the result was a too literal
application of painting to a preconceived end, but this
same inspiration also produced some of his best and most
painterly works. The outstanding pictures in the show
were three in the series inspired by Debussy's
Cathedral Engloutie, Cathedral Engloutie:
Profondement calme, 1961, La Cathedral Engloutie;
Augmentez progressivement, 1960-1, and La
Cathedral Engloutie. Lapis Lazuli, 1960-2. The last two
are very large horizontal compositions with three joined
canvases. All three use the same imagery of great floating
disks against a sombre sea of green or blue. They have a
simple monumentality not seen elsewhere in this show.
An earlier painting, Cathedral, Yellow Abstract, 1957,
suggests that the key to this moment of painterly
freedom was in Monet, but there is nothing derivative
about them. They are an authentic visual equivalent to
their musical inspiration.
The synaesthetic theme in the Richards exhibition
underlined the contrast with Kandinsky. Kandinsky's
meaning is inherent in the pictorial language that he
uses, and by concentrating on 'pure' painting he comes
closer to music (or poetry) than Richards does
consciously seeking to express a relationship. The
Kandinsky show consisted of thirty-three works covering
the whole of his life. Part of the intention was to show
him as an artist working throughout his life on a high
plane of achievement, and to lead people away from a
preoccupation with his first and most painterly abstract
works of 1912-14.
These early pictures do have a staggering vitality. Lines
and boundaries between colours vibrate in a soft colour
field. The picture plane, sometimes only stained with
Exhibitions at the light colour, is not fixed except by these reverberations.
The whole thing is dynamic, extension in space is like the
Edinburgh Festival, 1975 extension of music in time. It is punctuated but not
arrested by the events in the picture. When in the early
twenties he began to define these not only in relation to
Reviewed by Duncan MacMillan each other but as separate elements he returned to the
situation where the figure is against the ground not with
Although exhibitions at the festival are still sometimes it, but in the best pictures here, Yellow, Red, Blue 1925,
lavishly mounted like this year's James VI & I, it has for example, he solved this problem brilliantly. The forms
seemed for some time that the cause of the visual arts is are transparent or open ended, and overlap modifying
not as close to the hearts of the festival organizers as each other in depth on either side of the picture plane as
once it was, and if it were not for the efforts of well as across it.
independent institutions like the Scottish Arts Council, The return of the defined figure also meant that
or the three National Galleries, and of individuals within inevitably the picture would be 'read', and in the later
and outside of these, the festival would be a much poorer works one can detect an affinity to Klee where abstract
event. forms take on a poetic life of their own, but Kandinsky
The main painting exhibition this year was Ceri preserves a mysterious solemnity quite different from
Richards in the RSA Diploma Galleries. At the National Klee that makes even small works seem monumental
Gallery of Modern Art was a small but highly successful (Circle and Square, 1943), and the large ones truly
Kandinsky exhibiton. Living artists were only represented grand (Composition X, 1939).
in a major show by the Arts Council's exhibition of The eight contemporary German painters did not quite
German painting, Eight from Berlin, in the Fruit Market match up to Kandinsky. All eight are currently working in
Gallery. There was also however a small Kitaj retrospective Berlin, though two in fact are not German. These are
in the New 57 Gallery, and an outstanding sculpture Keinholz, who is an American, and Lakner, who is
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