Art review: John Byrne - Welcome to My World, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh
John Byrne: Welcome to My World, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh *****
Some volcanoes rumble away all the time, produce smoke, occasional fire, but never anything very dramatic. Others blow up dramatically every thousand years or so. Yet others, however, do both. They provide a constant fiery spectacle and occasional real drama. If a volcano is a metaphor for creativity as Hugh MacDiarmid once proposed, then John Byrne is of the latter type. His creative fire is constant and occasionally explosive. He has just passed his 80th birthday, but if he is indeed like a volcano, I don’t think he has ever had a dormant moment. Certainly his new show online at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh crackles with fire and yet the works all date from the last 12 months or so, from 2019 and 2020.
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Hide AdSome are small and the majority are on paper, though this has not precluded his working in oil. His iconography has revolved generally around certain constant themes: his own self-portrait, chameleon-like in a dizzying variety of roles; the pop culture of his teddy boy youth in Paisley, or at least the teddy boys of this youth; guitars, music and musicians; and the postwar urban culture of the cinema and dance hall. But this constancy has never been a limitation. On the contrary, the variety he works into it is dizzying. Equally chameleon-like, in all this he has riffed on all the styles of modernism, cubism, surrealism and the rest. In the present show there is even a portrait of James Dean in the style of Warhol, but whatever the style he always deploys it with the same confidence and virtuosity.
When he paints in the style of Picasso or Braque, for instance, as he does here in still-lifes like Guitar and Lime, or Mandolin and Bust, you would think he had worked beside Picasso all his life. But then he creates a small surrealist masterpiece like The Quandary. It is a self-portrait, or at least you can see a self portrait in it, but through it too you can see a townscape. His teddy boy quiff is an actual teddy boy. His beard and moustache become a breaking wave and above it, right in the middle, a hand is raised as though someone is drowning in this sea. Rapidly painted in oil, gouache and undercoat, or at least that is how it is described, it is an astonishing tour de force. To complete the picture, it is framed in a superb, 17th-century style ebony frame. His presentation is always both stylish and immaculate.
There is topicality here too. Portraits of Malcolm X, Chuck Berry, an anonymous Down Town Black Guy, and others too, all indicate his sympathy with Black Lives Matter and in a really striking image he makes an even more pointed statement about it. A black construction worker raises a mighty hammer in the heroic gesture of Miró’s defiant Catalan peasant in his great Civil War poster for the Republican cause, Aidez-L’Espagne!
In a different mood, the familiar images of the teddy boy life of Paisley in the Fifties have a new wistfulness about them, something suggested by the relative roughness of their execution too. The Dizzy shows a girl shunning a hopeful boy outside a cinema. In Stood-up, as the title suggests, a similar boy stands bleakly alone outside another cinema. Both are images of exclusion, for in the doorway of one cinema a notice declares it is sold out, in the other that the box office is closed. The iconography may be familiar, but these have become poignant images of loss. Poignancy or something even worse seem also to be hinted at in his self-portrait, The Shock. It is Picasso’s Weeping Woman turned into a tragic self-portrait.
Age surely is part of this imagery. Certainly it is a theme here. In Me and Him, Me and Him II, and in The Father of the Man, the artist seems to meet his own younger self. In Me and My Shadow, however, he meets not his younger self but death in the form of a skeleton smoking a pipe. He reaches out to push it away from him. This is in oil on scraper-board, an unusual combination that, as ever, he uses with great invention. Self-Portrait in Striped t-shirt is in the same medium. It is tiny, less than six inches square, but monumental in effect. The rough way he cuts into the scraper board and uses the brush and the starkness of his face and stripy shirt against the black ground give the picture a fierce and penetrating honesty. It is a remarkable image.
And if Byrne is like a volcano, fittingly, with his constant cigarette, smoke is frequently part of the image too. Smokey Joe is a superb example. It is a self-portrait. As he moves out of the canvas to the left, his hair and beard seem to be dissolving into the smoke of his cigarette: the wistful perspective of age encapsulated in a single, delicate image. Virtuosity can be a bit of a handicap. If everything is easy, then nothing is serious, but you could not say that of Byrne. He is truly protean and in this he stands apart from any of this contemporaries. He is an illusionist, a prestidigitator. Now you see him now you don’t. As he goes through his magical transformations you might almost expect to find, just as in a real magic show, that there is a scantily dressed female assistant standing by to distract you from his sleight hand. But there isn’t. He does it all in front of our eyes, but in this show more than ever his magic is not shallow, all on the surface. It has both depth and mystery.
Online until 25 July at www.thefineartsociety.com