Art reviews: Modern Masters Women | Bodily Objects

Detail from Scorpio Series No 2, No 15 by Barbara Rae

Modern Masters: Women, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ****

Bodily Objects, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh ****

Barbara Rae, Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh ****

Detail from The Story Bridge, Brisbane River, by Kate Downie

Talent is gender neutral. You can’t sex a painting. It took a long time for that to dawn, but of course when it did the talent pool doubled. In Scotland it was the late 19th century before this happened. There had always been women artists, but when they began to have full access to the art schools, straight away a flood of new talent began to emerge. The Scottish Gallery’s show, Modern Masters Women, doesn’t go back that far, but its title turning “masters” into a gender neutral word does at least suggest that we need no longer talk about women artists as though they were somehow apart. It’s a verbal challenge perhaps, but the Americans did it with “guys” – once definitively male – so why not with “masters?” In the end there are just artists, good, bad and great. Gender has no part in it.

Still, it has not been easy for women artists. There are 18 here and several of the older among them can tell pretty dire stories of the prejudice they met teaching in the art schools, even though talented women had taught in them since the beginning of the last century. It is a shame perhaps that none of those pioneers are included here, but the intention of this show was not to be definitive, I was told, more as an anthology to open up the subject.

There was solidarity too. At Edinburgh College of Art during the First World War, Anne Redpath was certainly taught and no doubt encouraged by Dorothy Johnstone. Similarly, a generation later, Elizabeth Blackadder acknowledged her debt to the warm encouragement she received from Penelope Beaton. Mary Armour also recorded her gratitude to Beaton, her teacher at school, though neither Beaton nor Armour is included here.

The show is in two parts, work by an older generation no longer with us and work by our contemporaries, much of it recent. The earliest work is by Redpath. From the late 1940s, it is a delicately coloured gouache of cottages on Skye. Later her style became much freer, perhaps under the influence of the School of Paris painters. A good example here is a vigorously brushed painting of a vase of flowers. Because Redpath restarted her career in the forties, although more than 20 years her senior, she sometimes seems like a contemporary of Joan Eardley. They responded to similar influences, not only from French abstract painting but also from American. One of the stars of this show is a dramatic sea piece by Eardley, taking the freedom of Abstract Expressionism and confronting the power of the winter sea to turn it into something wholly original. Pat Douthwaite’s expressionism is quite different, however. It is the stuff of nightmares. Typical examples here are Woman with Reptile and Demetre. The latter, a black and spiky horse-woman, seems literally to personify a nightmare. Barbara Balmer offers an antidote in two beautiful, cool watercolour drawings of flowers. They are a model of the eloquence restraint can bring. Silvia Wishart’s Window with Bracken, grey, white and ochre with a setting sun seen through a window, is equally restrained and a lovely poetic painting. So too is Bet Low’s Northern Seascape. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham also belonged to this older generation. An early painting of buildings has an honest simplicity, but three later examples show how, following younger painters, she tried to update herself into an abstract artist, but with limited success.

Francs Walker, who will be 90 this month, is the doyen of our present artists. She is still active, but is represented here by earlier works, a beautiful green painting of Wester Tillyshogle Croft, a watercolour of flotsam on a beach on Tiree, and Green Geo from 1985, still one of her finest screenprints. A year behind Walker, Elizabeth Blackadder will be 90 next year. In the 1960s she lived for a while in the flat above Anne Redpath and a vivid drawing of a church in Brittany perhaps shows the example of the freedom of the older painter’s later work. There are also two characteristic flower studies and two cats, though of course her work is much more diverse than that.

Looking for masters, Victoria Crowe certainly qualifies and is well represented here with the beautiful Landscape: Mirror Reflection, a number of monoprints and several of her unique screenprints that turn a simple medium into something rich and complex. It is all inevitably a bit unbalanced though. There are a dozen of Hannah Mooney’s tiny seascapes and ten of Christine McArthur’s bold still life drawings, but onlysingle examples of less familiar artists of the previous generation like Winifred McKenzie, represented by Blue Still Life, or Lilian Neilson with a wide and vigorously painted Cottages on the Coast.

With the exception of Pat Douthwaite perhaps, this is all fairly tranquil, but across the road at the Arusha Gallery there are some very angry women. Bodily Objects is a show of the pioneering feminist artists of the 1970s and 80s, Judy Chicago, Helen Chadwick, Rose English and others. A small selection of their work, all photographic, is brought together in an admirable show. It is very much in your face. Chicago’s Red Flag is simply a dangling, bloody tampon. Helen Chadwicks’s Birth of Barbie involves a lot of raw steak. Alexis Hunter’s Sexual Warfare suggests various options in waging that conflict including a heavy frying pan, castration, poison and sharp objects. Rose English tackles pin-up stereotyping in static images and in an intriguing film where women appear as performing horses with hooves and tails. But Alexis Hunter’s naked model confronts us directly, or at least her torso does. Fully prepared to fight back, she’s holding a gun against her crotch in one image and pointing it directly at us from between her breasts in the other.

Finally, Barbara Rae, another modern master, is showing a group of her remarkable Arctic works at the Open Eye. One big painting, North-West includes figurative elements from old photographs transferred, not just onto the canvas, but by some strange alchemy seamlessly into the painting itself. There is an Inuit figure, a ship that might be one of the ships of Franklin’s doomed voyage to find the North West Passage. The picture sets the context for the other works here, but their iconography is mostly far simpler, the horizon, often with a band of flaming light from the setting sun, water and skies deep blue or even black and a rhythmic scatter of ice. Peel Sound Dusk is the outstanding example. The pattern of ice floes in the foreground against intense blue water shades into the distant, luminous surface of unbroken ice. There is a strip of fire at the horizon and then black sky. The surface is rich and flat, the pattern abstract, yet it invokes light and space and a strange and absolute wilderness. It links back to Eardley’s inspired transformation of the new language of abstraction into a metaphor for a dramatic encounter with the grandeur of nature. It is a picture that would look very good in the National Gallery of Modern Art where the artist is still a notable absentee. ■

Modern Masters Women until 29 August; Bodily Objects until 31 August; Barbara Rae until 29 August

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Art reviews: Modern Masters Women | Bodily Objects | Barbara Rae