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

John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★★

IN 1965, the year he left Edinburgh for the Royal College of Art, John Bellany painted on the ceiling of his bedroom these lines from Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: “To be yersel’s - and to mak’ that worth bein’, nae harder job to mortals has been gi’en”. So much is encapsulated here: Bellany’s Scottishness, his love of a drink, but most of all his passionate commitment to bringing his unique artistic voice into the world.

Installation view of John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, showing The Kiss | Ian Georgeson Photography

Artists use the self-portrait in different ways. For some it is an occasional, technical exercise, for others a building block in a larger project. For a few, it is an obsession, a determination to explore, unflinchingly, their own internal struggles and by that lens to examine the human condition. John Bellany was one of these.

A Life in Self-Portraiture is the first big survey of Bellany’s work in Scotland since his death in 2013. So important is the self-portrait within his oeuvre that it does not feel like a narrowing down, more an opening up of a rich seam which runs through everything he did. Put together with the assistance of his wife Helen and lifelong friend Sandy Moffat, it feels personal, if not intimate. It includes examples of his sketchbooks, fragments of a handwritten memoir and a good number of paintings rarely exhibited before.

READ MORE: John Bellany: The resurrection man - Susan Mansfield interview from 2012

These are large works, presented with a minimum of interpretation. Walking among them is a discombobulating experience, a reminder of Bellany’s dazzling skill and ambition, but also that the raw material with which he chose to work so fearlessly was the product of a psyche unlike any other.

Once established at Edinburgh College of Art in 1960, having grown up in the East Lothian fishing village of Port Seton, he transformed swiftly from a quiet, studious teenager into the life and soul of every party. He, Moffat and the poet Alan Bold became a triumvirate who imbibed thirstily all they could about art, ideas, politics, culture.

Detail from Self Portrait, 1965, by John Bellany | City Art Centre

In 1965, just before he left ECA, Bellany painted a monumental self portrait. He is a towering, solemn figure in a fishermen’s jersey and sheepskin jacket, paintbrushes in hand, the boats of Port Seton behind him. The dark background adds gives it an Old Master gravitas. The uncompromising stance and broad shoulders recall Hans Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. In the years that followed, he would paint many more self portraits, but none in which he occupied the space as authoritatively as he did at the age of 23.

His early work was in a realist, if always painterly, style. He depicted himself as an uncertain young father, holding the hand of his equally uncertain first son, and a face at the window of a fish-gutter’s cabin. In his 1966 portrait of his sister Margaret, his face skulks in a mirror at her side.

Installation view of John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, showing Homage to John Knox (1969) | Ian Georgeson Photography

In 1969, he painted his first major triptych, Homage to John Knox. By this time, the triumvirate had travelled in Europe, seen the work of Beckmann, Ensor and Munch, and stood in the ruins of Buchenwald. Now, Bellany was reckoning not only with the guilt-heavy Calvinism of his childhood but the problem of evil in the world at large. Art historian Bill Hare has described him as a religious painter, and with reason. He never stopped wrestling with its hold on his psyche.

And he had evolved a language in which to do it, a personal lexicon of symbolism and allegory drawn from classical myth, seafaring superstition and the folds of his own imagination. He appears in the final of the three panels, floundering among arcing waves. In a Bellany painting, the sea is never far away.

READ MORE: Scotland hit by great wave of ocean-inspired art

Strange creatures and figures began to populate his work as portents and tormentors. In the self-portrait painted on his 30th birthday in 1972, he wears a white spotted cap and a voluminous black cape which opens to reveal a fish, a monkey, and the ribcage of a skeleton. Death always haunted him: he painted an eerie Skull Self Portrait when he was just 27.

The 1970s were Bellany’s “wild years” in which he drank heavily and painted prolifically, often working all night. He divorced Helen and married his second wife Juliet. His work became raw and expressive. Demonic faces and skeletons seem to press in from the margins. In Sad Self Portrait (1976) only his face is clearly described, part obscured by a bird hood, while the lower half of the painting fragments into abstract brush strokes.

Installation view of John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh | Ian Georgeson Photography

In 1985, as his health began to pay the price for the wild years - ironically at the time when he was achieving long-deserved recognition - he painted Charon’s Boat, still managing a pun on the vessel’s name with the biblical Rose of Sharon; such is the existential force of his painting, its black humour is easy to miss. In the boat, he stands shoulder to shoulder with his demons, stoically playing his accordion like the orchestra on the Titanic. The lifebuoy, with its legend “Hope”, is ignored.

A medical diagnosis that his only hope of survival was a liver transplant seemed, paradoxically, to bring a kind of calm. He remarried Helen; a watercolour self-portrait in Êtretat, where they had a brief honeymoon, shows him grounded again in realism (Bellany’s watercolours are one of the revelations of this show). In The Old Man and the Sea - Homecoming (1987) he rows his little boat resolutely through shark-infested waters.

Installation view of John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, showing The Old Man and the Sea - Homecoming (second left) | Ian Georgeson Photography

When the liver transplant came, in Addenbrookes Hospital in 1988, it was a new John Bellany who emerged from the fug of the anaesthetic asking for pencils and paper. He sketched his way back to life: a man to whom fate had granted a second chance, who had no time to lose. He painted as prolifically and energetically as ever for a further 20 years.

This exhibition, however, crescendos up to a wild apex in the 1980s and then loses momentum. There are a few examples of outstanding post-transplant pictures, such as Prometheus III, in which he paints himself as the figure from classical mythology who, as a punishment for stealing fire from the gods, is tied to a rock by Zeus so an eagle can peck out his liver, and his birthday self-portrait from 1993 which is as rich and strange as anything here.

But the show then hurries on to a final group of works from his closing years, where the emphasis is on hospital stays and declining health. Vividly, he paints himself painting the portrait of a nurse in Addenbrookes in 2008, but there is little in this show of the reborn Bellany, the one who buys a home in Barga, Italy, becomes a happy grandfather and paints, paints, paints.

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

His last birthday self-portrait is his 70th in 2012. By then, his health was poor again and macular degeneration was working on his sight - though not on his ability to see himself. He looks diminished but unafraid, wearing a dinner jacket and holding his paintbrushes. Some of the animal symbols are there, but they look more like benign familiars than tormentors. He does not loom, like he did in 1965, but he looks, once again, like a man who knows who he is.

Two floors of Bellany is a lot to take in. The strange symbols and bright colours come at one with such force that one has to will oneself to take note of how well and vividly he uses contrasts, how assured and ambitious his compositions are, how he drank from the well of modern European expressionism while remaining entirely Scottish.

My only complaint is what isn’t there: particularly the works from the 1990s and 2000s which would allow us to form our own opinions about whether or not the “wild years” paintings are truly his best work. But they would have needed another floor of the City Art Centre for that. This is a strong exhibition about which the chief criticism is that it’s one floor too small.

John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture runs until 28 September

READ MORE: Art reviews: Solange Pessoa | Ciara Phillips | The Palestinian Museum in Scotland