Visual Art
A survey of abstraction in Scottish art, Reduct at the Royal Scottish Academy shows how the tides of art can be complex and often unexpected, writes Duncan Macmillan
Duncan Macmillan on a show of abstract art
In 1951, the Arts Council put on an exhibition called 60 for ’ 51 to complement the Festival of Britain’s vision of a new and modern Britain with a bit of modern art. William Gear won a £ 500 purchase prize with Autumn Landscape, a painting that in spite of the title was completely abstract.
The pages of the Telegraph and Mail almost self- ignited with readers’ rage. Abstract art had been around for nearly 50 years, but the British public were not in tune with it. After the Second World War anything that looked foreign was suspect and Gear had gone straight from war service, latterly as one of the monument men, to Paris. There he had joined a new, Continental avant- garde. Alan Davie, catching up on a travelling scholarship delayed by the war, visited him and was introduced to the new abstract art. Before the war, abstraction had been cool, decorous. This art was wild, anarchic. Gear and Jackson Pollock exhibited together in New York in 1949; Davie then encountered Pollock’s work in Venice. He never looked back.
Now, with a single, slightly tame picture, Davie features in Reduct, an exhibition devoted to abstraction in Scottish art at the RSA. Like Gear, who is not in the show, Davie became an abstract expressionist, a gestural painter of subconscious moods and images. But Reduct, we are told, focuses on a more intellectual abstraction, “the pursuit of nonobjective form, through the prism of geometry.” What we would expect then is not Davie, or even Paolozzi, who is also here with a small work from the Sixties, but an art that is austere and ordered. Ultimately idealist, the kind of geometric art that this suggests goes back to the Bauhaus and de Stijl. It deals in an imagined order, unsullied by the imperfection of our sublunary world. There are certainly examples of this kind of imagery here. Joe Ganter’s prints, overlapping geometric shapes in blues and greys and greens with no hint of any expressive intention, look back to Bauhaus experiments with geometry and colour. With a set of three pictures composed of concentric squares, Rhona Taylor pays homage to Josef Albers, one of the masters of this Bauhaus abstract geometry. In a similar visual language, the complex perspectives of Bronwen Sleigh’s prints suggest an ideal architecture of the mind.
Then there are two small works by the late John Mclean. He was certainly an abstract artist and one of the works here is composed of interlocking shapes, but geometry was a long way from his mind.
"Like singing, like dancing,” was a simile he used for his art. It is purely intuitive and rooted in the world we live in, not an abstract realm. The same is true of Philip Reeves. One of the most beautiful works here is his Complementary Stacks, two sets of 25 squares, split diagonally with colour above, black and white below. The left- hand group hardedged, the right- hand softly brushed. P ure visual poetry, but the title still refers to the stacks along the cliffs of the north east coast which were an early inspiration to the artist, to landscape in fact. Given the simplicity of the original premise there is a lot of variety here. John Houston once told me how in the 1970s pressure to turn to abstraction was such he almost gave up painting. Others did yield to fashion and there are abstract works here from that time by Jack Knox and Ian Mcculloch. But these works are outliers. Both artists soon abandoned the experiment. Arthur Watson sticks more closely to the exhibition’s premise with Geometric Moonpath, an assemblage of screenprints arranged to suggest moonlight on water. Outstanding here and also close to the original
premise are a beautiful diptych by Paul Furneaux called Salt, and Multi- Coloured Chart 38 by David Batchelor, four blobs of poured glossy blue paint stacked vertically. Most intriguing however is Toby Paterson’s Messedamm, an elegant aluminium relief articulated in simple blocks of colour and texture. Stylistically it takes us back to the geometric style favoured for the Festival of Britain. It goes deeper though. Messedamm is an extraordinary underpass in Berlin constructed in 1936 at the height of Nazi road building. If anything continental, and even more anything German, was unacceptable, was the utopianism of the Festival of Britain nevertheless actually linked to ideas current in Nazi Germany? The tides of art are complex and often unexpected.
Also at the RSA, Peace Starts with a Smile by Stuart Duffin is a visual soliloquy on contemporary Jerusalem. Ultimately this show, too, goes back to the post- war years and to what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe, when in 1948, they were driven from their homes in Palestine by the creation of Israel. The terrible wound has never healed and much of Duffin’s work is a plea for peace and reconciliation. His rich, complex prints bring together imagery of the ancient city of Jerusalem, and indeed, of Babylon, where the Jewish people were themselves once in captivity. There are doves of peace, angels and images of war. Particularly striking is Still Dreaming of Jerusalem, a collaboration in film and music
between the artist and the composer Malcolm Lindsay.
There are similar themes, but an altogether different mood in Robert Powell’s Phantom Things at the Fine Art Society. The minute complexity of Powell’s prints is astonishing. So too is the dystopian vision they portray. Library of the Blind or Memory of Babel, takes its theme of the building of the Tower of Babel from Peter Brueghel, but Powell’s Babel is buried deep in one of Piranesi’s Carceri, his dungeons. In another, Label, Babel is literally inverted, the Babylonians, ( the modern Babylonians, I think) are not building a tower, but digging a huge hole. In Hole in the Ground, ten grotesque faces peer down into the eponymous cavern. Throughout, the quality of the printmaking is superb. Grisaille 1: Old Hamlet, – what would Hamlet have been like if he had lived into old age? – is in etching and aquatint, finished in watercolour, and the richness of effect is really striking. Across the road at the Arusha Gallery, in a show called Midnight Candy, Fiona Finnegan paints a mysterious, twilight world where, for instance, eclipsing the sun, the moon rules the sky, or where owls assemble for The Last Sunset, a world where magic might prevail.
Reduct and Stuart Duffin until 22 November; Robert Powell and Fiona Finnegan until 21 November.