Art review: The Roberts/John McLean

Published on Monday 8 March 2010 18:07

THE ROBERTS **** SCOTTISH GALLERY, EDINBURGH JOHN MCLEAN: SCULPTURE FROM PAINTING **** BOURNE FINE ART, EDINBURGH

'THE noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!" said Dr Johnson. The poet Allan Ramsay had a gentler perspective on the pull of London, the city "to whilk our best lads rin and ride". Barely a decade after the Union, the poet was lamenting the departure of the painter William Aikman – painters seem always to have been specially susceptible to the pull of London. In the 19th century, the economy was robust enough to keep painters here, but the 20th century saw it dip again.

It wasn't just the economy and the pull of prospective patronage, however. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was followed by the war, life in Scotland was pretty drab. William Gear, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alan Davie and William Turnbull all settled in the south immediately afterwards; Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde moved to London during the war. The translation from rural Scotland to the metropolis was not always easy, with the Roberts, as they were always known, being from humble backgrounds in Ayrshire. Roger Bristow tells their remarkable but also rather sad story in a new book, The Last Bohemians.

The Roberts were already an inseparable couple as students at Glasgow School of Art. Student work by both of them in an exhibition at the Scottish Gallery – timed to coincide with publication of The Last Bohemians – shows how good they already were. Before the Second World War they travelled to France and Italy as so many Scottish graduates did. Indeed, they stayed in Paris till hostilities were imminent. They then faced the prospect of being called up or, if they escaped that, of scratching a bleak wartime living in Scotland. It was a chance meeting with Peter Watson, heir to a dairy fortune, that took them to London.

MacBryde really was medically unfit to serve. It looked, however, as though Colquhoun would be posted to the Far East, but then in a slightly mysterious way he too was deemed unfit and was discharged. Homosexuality was still illegal and Bristow remarks that the army authorities did not like to enlist known homosexuals, but rather than forcibly "out" them, they tended to find other reasons for their discharge. Perhaps it was an inadvertent consequence of this unexpectedly humane policy that the gay scene enriched artistic life in London in the war years.

Bristow's book charts the rackety lives the Roberts lived in a milieu that included Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan and John Minton. Minton lived with them for a while and was among those who helped them along as they were always short of money. But while Bristow's book is rich in that sort of social detail, it gives little insight into the art that for a while brought the couple real celebrity. They featured in Vogue and the exhibition includes striking portraits of them taken for the magazine. The book demonstrates very little knowledge of Scottish art, however, and even less curiosity. It wouldn't take much research to discover that "a Mr Sturrock and a Mr Foggie" who represented the War Artists Committee in Scotland were well-known artists. It is also startling to find John Houston as a student at Glasgow School of Art during the war. If it was another John Houston and not the well-known Edinburgh-educated painter, the author should say so. Such slackness of detail does raise a doubt about the book's reliability elsewhere. It does however include an invaluable catalogue raisonn of their work. Refugees were another element in the rich mix of art life in London. Jankel Adler was from Poland, but he had spent time in Paris and was much influenced by Picasso. He came to Scotland with the Polish army and stayed in Glasgow for a while before moving to London, as did his fellow Pole, Josef Herman. Both were friends of the Roberts, but Adler in particular provided a modernist inspiration which was not available in English art. At the Scottish Gallery, a wonderfully intricate etching shows how good he was and how he was instrumental in the Roberts moving into a distinctive modern idiom.

You can chart this shift in the exhibition. A still life of flowers by Colquhoun from about 1943 is straightforward, even if the vivid, curling energy of the flowers already has a sinister edge. Three years later, Two Irish Women shows him at his best and most characteristic. The two women stand tall and strange; their mask-like faces have a remote, hieratic dignity. It is as though the withdrawn, inscrutable faces of these timeless figures and their detachment from each other – even when standing close – reflect an isolation that is no more than a fact of the human condition. Colquhoun's work retains this quality. We see it in Owl and Boy, for instance, a work from 1962, the year of his death, even though by then the life of the couple had dissolved into a chaos of drink and financial hardship. It was Francis Bacon who called the Roberts "The Last Bohemians" and so gave Bristow his book title. It is some measure of Colquhoun's stature, too, that even in this small show you can see how much Bacon learned from him. MacBryde is a gentler artist than his companion, as he seems also to have been gentler person. He was funny, sociable and a great networker, constantly on the lookout for support. He was a fluent, even virtuoso painter with a distinctive colour sense. Still life with a Calf's Head is a big and complex picture, strongly reminiscent of Picasso, but it is painted with unhesitating assurance.

Coincidentally, a show at Bourne Fine Art also marks the publication of a book by Ian Collins on another expatriate, John McLean. There seems to be a lifetime between McLean's sparkling paintings and sculpture and the sombre, troubled work of the two Roberts. In fact, there was little more than 20 years between the day they settled in London in 1941 and McLean's departure from Arbroath for the south in the early 1960s. The national mood was lifting and, in painting, American colour-field abstraction was a new and liberating influence. Unconsciously reflecting the change, The Last Bohemians is a dowdy, old-fashioned looking publication, parsimoniously illustrated, while the McLean book is big and full of beautiful pictures. Ian Collins has not undertaken critical analysis any more than Bristow has done, but his text is as liberally illustrated with quotations from contemporary commentators as it is with pictures.

The exhibition is almost all new work apart from one very beautiful painting, Bartizan, from 1996. But the new work itself marks a radical departure, for the show is dominated by sculpture. McLean has always worked with colour, not as an aspect of something else, but for itself alone. The move into sculpture is an inspiration. The works are simple, with the most striking being made from sheet metal, bent along straight lines. Their only precedent is in Picasso's late sculpture. Drawing becomes three-dimensional simply by folding the paper and this is translated into painted and folded metal. These folded sculptures sit on three points, light as ballet dancers. The brilliant colours form triangles that abut each other or meet along an edge, creating lines like drawing, but that have no existence except as colour.

You might expect this work to be more solid than painting, that the pure colour would be weighed down by the material that supports it, but the opposite is true. Here is sculpture with internal space, with planes and lines of drawing, but entirely without mass. Not hewn out of something solid, barely even constructed, it is colour suspended in space, all its innate brilliance liberated.

&149 The Roberts runs until 31 March; John McLean until 1 April