Art review: John Houston - Age cannot wither such artistic talent

Published on Monday 18 May 2009 18:49

JOHN HOUSTON MEMORIAL EXHIBITION **** SCOTTISH GALLERY, EDINBURGH

WE DO NOT value age. Instead we put a premium on youth. This seems curiously inappropriate when we are told ours is an ageing society and that our heirs and successors are going to have to work till they drop just to pay off the debt left by the bankers' bonuses. Most societies value age because they value experience. Instead we try to appear young as long as we can and when we give up the struggle are shunted off into some grim waiting room to oblivion.

This ageist attitude is most pronounced in the visual arts. Every new grant scheme, every prize seem to be pitched at the young. Even the Turner Prize has an upper age limit of 50. It might be a lot better if it were the other way around and only artists over 50 were eligible, but that is another story. Nobody would begrudge youth its opportunities and that is the rationalisation that is always given. But in fact it is only a rationalisation.

The premium on youth springs from the Romantic idea of the pure untutored genius; that art springs from innocence within and is only burdened and obscured by experience. That idea, always shaky, is surely bankrupt now. The weakness of much contemporary art is because it is a feeble plant grown in the shallow soil of inexperience. When students are taught that to be creative they must mine their innate originality their resources are soon exhausted.

John Houston died last year, aged 78. The memorial exhibition for him at the Scottish Gallery demonstrates how wrong this all is, for he is a clear example of the opposite state of affairs: how when an artist of great talent dedicates his life to making art as he did, it grows richer and deeper with time.

It was not easy for him. He was exacting in his standards and he lived at a time when painting as an art was increasingly unfashionable, but the struggle was always a creative one. His latest work shows the authority, the richness and depth that can only come from experience; and furthermore, to contradict the current prejudice absolutely, as though finally riding above the struggle, it is often extraordinarily fresh and vivid. A beautiful example here is Morning Sea after Rain, finished in 2003. Sky and sea are united in an overall pattern of dancing light. Sea and Sky VI from 2005 is a pastel in a similar mode. In Venetian Red from 2007 he takes his favourite square format and then creates rhythms within it of vertical and horizontal bands of brilliant red and blue as he looks at buildings and light reflected in water in a Venetian canal. Dark Sea, finished in 2007, also in this square format, is more sombre and dramatic, but it has the same authority. From a glimmering dark red foreground the composition rises in bands of blue shading almost to black to end in a vision of jagged light around a dark sun.

This show is not a definitive retrospective, nor does it set out to be. It is just a tribute to one of our greatest contemporary painters put together from work that was available in his studio or in the Gallery's own holdings. Nevertheless, though inevitably it is a little uneven and, as he sold work throughout his career, it is also weighted towards his more recent work, most periods of his working life are represented. While throughout it shows his sheer love of painting and his passionate response to the world around him and above all to landscape, it also shows his unflagging curiosity and his willingness to learn and go on learning. He had a huge knowledge of painting of all periods and, like Turner, he had the courage to imitate, both to pay homage to someone he admired and to learn from their work. Thus only a few years ago he painted Autumn in Fife in homage to Van Gogh. Cliffs, les Petities-Dalles is a homage to Monet's paintings of the white cliffs of Normandy, while Kyoto from 1987 is an essay in the deconstructed forms of Cubism or Futurism.

Turner, Edvard Munch, Emile Nolde and the German Expressionists were a constant inspiration to Houston and he thought of himself as belonging very firmly in the northern tradition that they represent. Fields and Sky from 1966 already shows him exploring an expressionist vocabulary that reflects this – a vocabulary that he was to use with great effect for the rest of his career. It is a large watercolour, the composition built up of boldly demarcated horizontal bands, yellow green standing crops below, a low horizon and then heavy lines of dark clouds obscuring a brilliant red sky. You see a similar effect more than 20 years later in At the Coast, Winter, a big oil painting of sea and sky rising in bands of gold and black.

Houston painted watercolours constantly, and in them often achieved effects of scale and grandeur in a very small compass. He liked to return to favourite motifs, and Bass Rock was one of those he painted most frequently and in all weathers and in all moods. One of the first of these and a definitive example is Evening Sky over the Bass Rock from 1964. It is a big watercolour with the sky making a series of great blue arches above the rock. There are other examples here too, however, such as Rainbow over the Bass Rock, or Bass Rock Evening Storm. These are small but very beautiful, and as though to sum up, a small oil painting is called Celebrating the Bass Rock and it shows the artist raising his arms against the sky in front of the familiar view.

Landscape did not entirely preoccupy Houston, however. He painted still life and there are several brilliant examples here, notably the great red painting of Oriental Poppies and Fruit that dates from 1994.

As Celebrating the Bass Rock demonstrates, he also created figure paintings of considerable power. Other examples here are The Party, New York and a dramatic vision of nightclub glamour, Night Head, probably also painted in New York. These are expressionist pictures, like his later landscapes, but a dark-coloured portrait of his wife, Elizabeth Blackadder, is altogether more restrained. Indeed, the contemplative beauty of the drawing of her face is a reminder of how Houston was of the generation for whom drawing was the primary discipline. We see this same command in a drawing of Elizabeth done 20 years earlier, but the purity of the oval of the face in the painting is also a reminder of how admiration for the art of the early Renaissance was a formative influence for Houston and his generation.

It was this admiration that took him to Italy on a travelling scholarship in 1954. He may seem to have strayed from this example in his expressionist later works, but it is still there in the clarity and order that underlie even some of his most dramatic compositions. Indeed, in his latest work he seems to rediscover it, but now from a wholly independent perspective. It is as though this is the place he was struggling to reach throughout his long and very fruitful career.

&#149 Until 30 May