Art reviews: Out of Chaos | Doug Cocker | Kenny Hunter | Paul Furneaux

The Out of Chaos exhibition at Edinburgh City Art Centre traces the story of Scottish art from the end of the Second World War to the turn of the millennium. Review by Duncan Macmillan

Out of Chaos: Scottish Art from 1945 - 2000, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Doug Cocker: Threads, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh ★★★★

Kenny Hunter, Let’s Forget, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

Paul Furneaux: Tabiji, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★

Fife-both artist William Gear was one of the Monuments Men, the unit formed in 1943 and given the task of finding and saving works of art and other culturally important items before the Nazis could destroy or steal them. After active service that saw him participate in the Allied invasion of Sicily with the Royal Corps of Signals, Gear joined the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit after VE Day and continued this work in Germany until 1947.

Installation view of Out of Chaos at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh | Contributed

No doubt, like George Clooney’s character in the film The Monuments Men, he dealt with some major art, but he was also remembered by the artists in Germany with deep gratitude because he worked to set them back on their feet by finding art materials and even organising exhibitions. The title of the show in the Edinburgh City Art Centre, Out of Chaos: Scottish Art from 1945-2000, drawn from the City’s rich collection, implies that background in the aftermath of war.

When he was finally demobbed, Gear went straight to Paris and, with his experience, naturally took his place at the exciting centre of a new European art. Fittingly, Tree, a small, abstract expressionist work by Gear from 1947 opens the show. Alan Davie joined him in Paris and was introduced by him to this international community of artists. Correspondingly, the show continues with a big and lively abstraction by Davie. Back in London, William Johnstone, principal of the Central School, employed Davie. A dark abstract painting by Johnstone hangs nearby to continue the story. Johnstone also recognised Eduardo Paolozzi’s talent and a vigorous sculpture of a horse’s head by Paolozzi from 1947 endorses his judgment.

Fallen Angels by Tom Pow in Out of Chaos at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh | Contributed

This group were not the whole story of progressive Scottish art of course. It was Margaret Mellis, also a prewar graduate of ECA, who with her then husband Adrian Stokes really led the move of artists to St Ives at the beginning of the war. She is represented here by one of her beautiful driftwood assemblages. Her friend and contemporary at ECA, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, followed her to Cornwall and built her career from there. She is represented by a large painting of rocks in the Scilly Isles.

Radicals always need to react against something. Notionally at least, William Gillies, teaching at ECA since 1925, might represent the old guard and a large, slightly conventional still-life by him hangs nearby. Anne Redpath’s subject matter might also seem conventional, but her Black and White Checks, a painting from 1952 of a table top with china on a black and white cloth is painted with real energy.

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Looking down the gallery you cannot escape John Bellany’s huge and magnificent painting The Obsession from around 1968. Five grim figures against the sea with in front of them a table laden with bloody fish and guts. Bellany’s friend and close associate, Alexander Moffat, painted members of the poetic circle around Hugh MacDairmid who had inspired the young painters. A fine full-length by Moffat of the poet Norman McCaig represents that inspiration here.

A gentle, documentary painting by Morris Grassie of fishermen landing fish makes a striking contrast to the Bellany. But the stand-out picture in this figurative part of the show is Robert Colquhoun’s Circus Woman. A sinister, mask-like face is somehow defined and held in place by planes of colour flat as a painted wall. It makes a further contrast with Victoria Crowe’s painting of shepherd Jenny Armstrong in her cluttered cottage.

READ MORE: John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture, Edinburgh review: 'a unique artistic voice'

Elsewhere the hang suggests unexpected continuities between, for instance, Barbara Rae’s big, dark Peat Bank, Carradale, William Johnstone’s abstract Wotan and a beautiful painting by Joan Eardley of flowery clifftops in summer. Nearby, too, are a panoramic drawing of Tiree by Frances Walker and a dramatic drawing in black and white by Kate Downie of the railway tracks at Haymarket.

The final room is dominated at one end by a triptych by Elizabeth Ogilvie of a boat, the sea and a weathered manuscript together suggesting journeys and memory. It has an affinity with Will Maclean’s Dark Shore Box hanging nearby. Similar correspondences link Maud Sulter’s black Terpsichore with a female figure dominating Calum Colvin’s Lust and Helen Flockhart’s strange Maire. A knockout picture here is Jock McFadyen’s big painting of the semi-derelict art-deco cinema at Great Junction Street in Leith. Much quieter, but equally resonant is Nathan Coley’s Waiting on the Scottish Parliament, a photo of the artist in 1999 standing wistfully on a street corner opposite the site of the new parliament building.

Detail from Music Universalis by Doug Cocker at Dovecot Studios | Contributed

Doug Cocker’s Coda is a big dark wooden piece with motifs in compartments suggesting themes and variations. It was made in 1989, but his more recent work can seen extensively in Doug Cocker: Threads, a major show at Dovecot. He continues to work in wood. Now it is more precise and more refined, but the musical analogy implicit in Coda is still a constant. One very long wall here is hung with more than 60 small sculptures collectively titled Musica Universalis - the Music of the Spheres. Hung in two rows, they again constitute a set of themes and variations. Indeed, the artist describes how they evolved one out of the other to provide in the end a kind of charming, visual chamber concert on the wall. The pieces are all made of dark and light ash wood with some more patterned elements painted in black and white. Most are constructed from intersecting, shaped planes of wood with freer arcs and rods. This latter break any simple profile and so open the compositions out towards each other, maintaining the musical flow from one to the next.

There are other themes and variations here, too. There is a set of tables, for instance, that however only meet that description in so far as they have legs. With their spiky profiles they rather suggest a group of elegant wader birds, while some of the shapes in a piece called Counterpoint get close to actual musical notation. There are landscape pieces, too, that suggest the breadth of the Angus landscape and the changing weather in its dominant skies.

Kenny Hunter with Feedback Loop | Contributed

In contrast to Cocker’s musical abstractions, the figure has always been central to the work of Kenny Hunter, whose solo show Let’s Forget is at the Fine Art Society. That might seem unfashionable, but he has managed to steer a luminous route between the sentimentality of the touch of the artist’s hand with all its overtones of La Vie de Bohème and the chilliness of neo-classical perfection. The result is a highly distinctive kind of noble simplicity, wonderfully effective in a work like Mother and Child, for instance, small, but truly monumental in feeling. In Feedback Loop, a Japanese teenager in baggy trousers waving a pink flower becomes a heroic revolutionary. There are revolutionary implications in Model for a Monument (Salvation of the State) too. The promise of salvation is a young girl with a megaphone — youth protesting at the irresponsibility of age. There is a subtle poetry in all these works. Over the Far Horizon, for instance, is a boy playing with a model ship and dreaming of where it might take him. In the artist’s mind he is Fraserburgh-born Thomas Blake Glover, architect of Japan’s industrial revolution. The ship did indeed take him a long way.

READ MORE: Rare chance to see work of one of Scotland’s leading sculptors

Japan is the inspiration and wood the medium of Paul Furneaux’s beautiful woodblock prints in Tabiji at the Academicians’ Gallery at the RSA. Having studied in Japan, Furneaux is an accomplished master of this beautiful art form. Recently too, in keeping with the near religious dedication that Japanese art forms require of their practitioners, Furneaux has been on the exacting pilgrimage of the 88 temples on Shikoku Island, the Tabiji, a circuit of around 750 miles. The work in this show follows that experience. There is nevertheless perhaps no obvious shift overall from his previous work, but some individual prints like Soft Rain, Sakura, for instance, Moon Gazing, or Blue Rain, Rain Blues, not only seem to echo his experience in their titles, but also to have a lovely, contemplative richness, an echo perhaps of a successful pilgrimage. On the spot sketches of scenes on the way are interesting to see. There are also one or two delightful prints where the actual landscape breaks through the austerity of his usual format.

Out of Chaos until 12 October; Doug Cocker until 19 July; Kenny Hunter until 30 August; Paul Furneaux until 27 July