Kelvingrove Art Gallery showcase for Jack Vettriano

By SHÂN ROSS
Published on 18/06/2012 00:00

JACK Vettriano is to hold a major retrospective of his work in Scotland next year, he has revealed.

The artist, famous for his paintings of women and couples in highly-charged erotic poses, will also be launching a drive to promote the careers of young artists.

Vettriano is planning to stage the exhibition in Glasgow, and a source involved in the negotiations to bring the retrospective to the city said Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which already has a Vettriano painting, was to host the event.

“Final contracts are still to be signed. Glasgow has nine galleries but Kelvingrove is the one which will host such a major retrospective for someone of this stature,” the source said.

Vettriano, 60, revealed he has just finished curating his 20-year retrospective in an interview with the US magazine Vanity Fair.

“The gallery will also help promote edgy, younger artists.Showing landscapes and flowers doesn’t interest me. I’m trying to start a fire,” he said.

Last night, Nathalie Martin, the artist’s director at his Heartbreak gallery in London, said the retrospective being held in Glasgow was not a snub by Vettriano to Edinburgh and the arts establishment which had been slow to acknowledge his talent.

“The reason it will be in Glasgow is because we got a very positive, very significant approach from the public gallery in question in Glasgow. It was their idea,” Ms Martin said.

“This will be a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity to see the top ten, if not more of Vettriano’s works from the four corners of the globe.

“We’ve had a an extraordinary response from private collectors who own some of the works and have secured agreement for many of the paintings.”

Ms Martin said the Vanity Fair interview was the first time the American public had gained so much personal information about Vettriano as previous coverage, in newspapers such as the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, had mainly concentrated on his financial status.

The interview details the fierce attacks by a number of critics who do not regard Vettriano’s work as “proper” art and his rejection by the Scottish art establishment.

In the interview, Vettriano, who was made an OBE in 2003 for services to the visual arts, gives a robust response when asked about his detractors pointing to him copying poses from the Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual for The Singing Butler – which became the most expensive painting by a Scottish artist when it sold for £750,000 eight years ago.

“I don’t give a f***!!,” replied Vettriano, a former mining engineer from Methil in Fife. “Picasso said, ‘Other artists borrow – I steal’. And the same book I used was found in Francis Bacon’s studio when he died.”

Asked about accusations that his work was nothing more than “dim erotica”, as The Scotsman’s art critic Duncan MacMillan once described it, Vettriano said his fans were “disappointed that the pictures aren’t pornographic enough”.

Regarding Vettriano’s treatment in Scotland, the magazine says: “Vettriano’s rejection by the art establishment hurts – the National Gallery of his native Scotland too had snubbed him – but he has quietly taken matters into his own hands”.

It then details his highly-successful financial enterprises including a publishing company and the founding the Heartbreak gallery.

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