Interview: Richard Demarco

THERE have been a lot of "what ifs" in Richard Demarco's life. What if a stray Spitfire bullet had hit him while he played on Portobello beach when he was nine? He could have been a footnote in history: the first British civilian casualty of the Second World War.

What if he had taken up MI5's offer and become a spy during the Cold War – ironically at a time when he was running Sean Connery's charitable trust?

And what if he had been accepted by the art bureaucracy of Scotland and appointed director of the Edinburgh International Festival?

Now, as he approaches 80, the man who says he'd rather be described as a teacher and watercolorist than anything else – and especially not impresario – claims he no longer cares about the ifs, buts and maybes. There are no regrets.

No, he is more interested in celebrating what – and who – did actually happen in his apparently careless, reckless life. A life which is being played out on a stage where Dickens, Scott and Eliot have all walked before him – Craigcrook Castle.

"I bet you didn't even know this was here," he crows. "It's an amazing place, a fairytale . . . like Brigadoon. Everyone should know about this place. It should be where artists come, where poets come . . . look through that window, there's the ghost of Dickens in the library."

Talking to Demarco is never straightforward. Even approaching his 80th birthday (next Friday), he is as full of verve for his latest project as he always has been. His conversation wheels and darts like a swallow heralding the spring.

"It is art which keeps me this way," he pronounces. "For art is about love and only with love can you understand the human condition. Ah, but things could all have been very different," he laughs as he strides through the wet buttercups outside the 16th-century pile in Blackhall – his navy linen trousers getting sodden in the process.

"I was a breach birth in a nursing home in Grosvenor Street. Then, when I grew up in Portobello, I would play on the beach with my brother. One night, when I was nine, we watched this burning plane coming towards us. It looked like a dragon. I could see the German pilots inside, it was so close.

"Then, suddenly, the sand was flying around us like little golden jewels, and we realised there was a Spitfire behind the plane, shooting it down. If we'd been hit that would have been it. For the tide was coming in too, so if a bullet hadn't killed us, it would have been the water.

"I saw the news about the pilots' deaths in the paper the next day and I asked my parents if I could go to the funeral. There are photographs from that day with a small child in among all the adults, and that is me."

That perhaps is still Demarco. He has a boyish charm and a belief in la dolce vita which he cannot repress. Grey, Presbyterian, pre-Festival Edinburgh failed to quash it. The Scottish Arts Council, which at one point withdrew all his funding, claiming he "had dishonoured art", failed to quell it. It is the Italian in him, no doubt.

His family came from the southern Italian village of Barga, his father eventually pitching up in Portobello, where like many immigrants from his native land, he opened an ice-cream parlour.

Similarly, it meant that when war was declared in 1939, the Demarcos were, like all other Italian families, regarded as foreign nationals and interred.

"I'll be at a memorial mass in St Mary's on Saturday to remember all those lost on the Andorra Star," he says. "It was a terrible time, a time I realised it wasn't good to be Italian in Scotland. I didn't go to school the day Italy declared war – I would have been lynched. The windows of Italian families' businesses were smashed in. People said there was blood running down Elm Row from Valvona and Crolla's, but thankfully it was just red wine. I don't think Churchill realised what he was doing. I do think, though, that the government now needs to apologise."

He adds: "But without the war there would have been no Festival, no Traverse, no Demarco Gallery, no Iron Curtain, no Demarco archive. Art is the one language that links everything, it is a healing balm. Joseph Beuys – who was greater than Picasso – said that art is capital, that it is wealth, the commonwealth, for everyone."

It is impossible for Demarco to stop his memories. "I must write my memoirs, if only so that all the people who I have met are remembered – Hugh McDermaid, Norman McCaig, Kantor the Polish genius, Beuys, Cordelia Oliver. It is my job to make sure they aren't forgotten."

Born on 9 July, 1930, Demarco attended Holy Cross Academy, where he was a pupil when the first Edinburgh Festival was launched, opening his mind to music, theatre and art from foreign lands. "I saw the Vienna Philharmonic play German music in 1947. Can you imagine? It was very brave."

He went on to study graphic design at Edinburgh College of Art, where he met life model Sean Connery working part-time as a receptionist in the Caledonian Hotel and welcoming such Hollywood luminaries as Richard Burton and Audrey Hepburn to Edinburgh.

On graduating he spent two years' National Service with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, before re-entering civilian life as a teacher at Duns Scotus Academy in Corstorphine.

It was there that he realised he wanted to open the eyes and minds of the wider public too.

"I realised that I wanted an Edinburgh where the spirit of the Festival was there all the time. I wanted that internationalism. I didn't want a locked down, inward-looking Edinburgh 11 months of the year."

With the backing of his artist wife Anne, he and bookshop owner friend Jim Haynes launched the Traverse Theatre and Gallery at the foot of Victoria Street in 1963. "It broke new ground. It was about creating an atmosphere, a place where people could think differently, have that open mind that they did when the Festival came."

Unsurprisingly he was soon thinking bigger and wanted to move. The Traverse trustees didn't agree, and so in 1966 the Richard Demarco Gallery was opened in Melville Street. A year later he quit his teaching job and took up the post of director of contemporary visual arts exhibitions for the EIF. "The Festival director Peter Diamond said to me 'you can have the job but you have to pay for it' – so I raised 2.8 million over the 20 years. They were disturbing exhibitions, they asked big questions."

In 1972 he also became director of Connery's Scottish International Education Trust. "By that time I was going back and forth behind the Iron Curtain so often to bring artists here, that at one point I was asked to consider working for MI5. I said you don't need me, you need the guy I'm working for, James Bond."

It was in 1980, though, that he and the German artist Beuys hit the headlines. Beuys had struck a friendship with Barlinnie prisoner turned sculptor Jimmy Boyle, and when Boyle was moved to Saughton prison, where he was unable to continue with his art, he started a hunger strike and attempted to sue the Scottish Secretary for human rights abuses. At this point the Scottish Arts Council stepped in and said Demarco's backing of Beuys meant they could no longer give him any funding.

Despite still rankling against that SAC decision decades ago ("although I am still here and it is not", he laughs) Demarco has garnered worldwide respect.

He was awarded a string of international honours including the Cavaliere della Repubblica d'Itlalia in 1988, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres de France in 1996, a CBE in 2007, and freedom of the Polish city of Lodz two years ago.

Most recently, as well as establishing the not-for-profit Richard Demarco Foundation and Archive (a massive collection of gifted art works, photos and posters from his career), he has been Professor Emeritus of European Cultural Studies at Kingston University in Surrey.

"It is not easy to pigeonhole me and I wouldn't want that. What will happen to my archive needs to be resolved.

"It is here (Craigcrook Castle] although part of it is in the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. I have had interest from a new museum in Berlin, but it would be a shame if the story of contemporary art in Scotland and Edinburgh were not kept here.

"I am constantly trying to raise 1,500 a quarter to pay the rent for here by selling my work. I want people to become a "friend" of the archive and help me keep it here. And I have a series of events taking place during the Festival too."

He is also heavily involved in a tribute exhibition which will be held at the National Galleries on the Mound from November.

"I never thought that would be the case. I thought you had to die first," he laughs. "When I turned 70 I realised I was playing in extra time. At 80 I suppose it means I'm into a penalty shoot-out. I have reached the point in life which is the most exciting."

10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and the European Avant Garde will run at the National Galleries of Scotland from 28 November to 17 January.