Wyllie’s legacy lives on beside the banks of the river where he first learned the ropes
He was the artist who sailed a paper boat down the Clyde and into Manhattan, set fire to a full-size straw locomotive after hanging it from a Glasgow crane, and spent his retirement making provocative pieces which have gone around the world.
Now the life and legacy of Inverclyde artist George Wyllie has been recognised in the place where his imagination took flight – on the banks of the river where he lived.
The Wyllieum, a new gallery space dedicated to the late visionary’s work, opened this weekend in Greenock, featuring a number of the prolific maker’s pieces from his 40-year career after retirement.
The gallery features a permanent exhibition of the former customs and excise officer’s vast output, which tells his story from his birth in Shettleston, Glasgow, in 1921, until his death aged 90 in 2012.
With its floor-to-ceiling riverside windows, the venue’s showpiece room, The Ardgowan Distillery Gallery, now boasts arguably the most stunning landscape view of any major gallery in Scotland, and is home to The Wyllieum’s first special collection of the auteur’s trademark spires. It will be used to show the work of other artist as well as Wyllie’s.
Director Will Cooper acknowledged an irony in the opening of The Wyllieum.
He said: “George had a funny relationship with art galleries. He didn’t always like them very much, and he might have had funny feelings about this but I’m sure he would have liked the fact that it was proudly local.”
After his time in the Navy, which took him to Hiroshima as a young man in his 20s, Wyllie settled in Gourock, where he raised his family, retiring from his job in his 50s.
“When he retired he decided, on the steps of the customs office on his last day, that ‘now was the time for art’ and repositioned himself as an artist,” said Will.
“From that moment, he embarked on a very serious, progressive, well-respected art career until his death in 2012.”
Wyllie’s output was prodigious, and his physical artwork is spread around the world. In 2020 his family issued an international appeal for those in possession of a Wyllie work to make contact to help log the spread of his influence. Pieces were logged from as far afield as Sri Lanka and America.
Wyllie was self-taught, and counted influential international artists such as American George Rickey and German Joseph Beuys as friends and contemporaries. Famously, he referred to himself as a “scul?tor” as he said the question mark “should always be at the centre of everything”.
His work was playful and humorous, thought-provoking and challenging, intimate and tender. One of the most affecting pieces in the collection is a spire he made for his wife Daphne’s bedside, visiting her in hospital during her final months.
Others have more of a pointedly political bite, a facet of the artist’s identity that formed in Japan at the end of the Second World War.
Will said: “The pivotal moment in George’s life was when his boat was off the coast of Japan shortly after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It docked and he was offered an ‘exciting excursion’ to go and ‘witness the power of the allies’. He wrote about it later saying that we had foolishly learned how to destroy the world at the push of an ‘idiot button’.
“He had seen what happens when you throw the world out of balance and drop a nuclear bomb on a city.
“And that stayed with him. He was in love with the Clyde and he cared about the industry on it, and that it provided a livelihood for generations of people.
“George didn’t have normal training, or a university degree. When it was taken away from them he could see through the lie that it was being taken away for the benefit of the communities and that something else would come and replace it, but now it’s a load of drive-through fast-food restaurants.”
The impact of his two most famous pieces, the straw locomotive and the paper boat, are illustrated in the gallery, outlining how the Clydeside industries were run down by Westminster governments.
“George cared about the people attached to making these ships. Scottish people in the 70s and 80s knew London politics wasn’t looking after them,” said Cooper. “And I think he wanted to stick two fingers up to that and tell the story of this place, tell a story about the river.”
The Wyllieum is part of a multi-million pound three-purpose development at Greenock’s ocean terminal, which includes Scotts restaurant and the processing centre for thousands of cruise holidaymakers. It sits yards from the steps of the customs and excise office where George made his artistic proclamation on the day of his early retirement.
Plans for a collaboration with Paisley’s Sculpture House, a special event on Hogmanay – Wyllie’s birthday – and a possible restaging of his 1990 play, A Day Down
A Gold Mine, will feature among future discussions.
Will added: “George had a strong reputation outside the UK and was highly respected across Europe and the States. I like that we can tell that story to people coming off these cruise ships.
“He was referred to as an outsider in arts circles, but I hate that. He made art, whether it was inside or outside of anybody else, and he said something about community.”