Enfant terrible? Peter Howson: The Third Step

RARELY has an exhibition of contemporary art in Scotland been surrounded by such publicity. Peter Howson’s nude portrayals of Madonna have been the focus of massive media attention, and he has evidently been more than happy to play along with that angle even though this show’s title takes its cue from the artist’s own struggle with addiction.

Although Howson and the exhibition organisers have shamelessly milked the Madonna paintings as media leverage, this is actually a wide-ranging show encompassing various aspects of the artist’s work - his personal confrontation with alcohol problems, grand apocalyptic visions, paintings of coal-miners, drawings of Afghans, even some pastoral sketches at a country house.

But let’s follow Howson’s lead and go straight to the Madonna works. There are two large paintings of her - incidentally, the most expensive works in the show at well over 100,000 apiece - and ten drawings. As Ajay Close highlighted in this newspaper on Saturday, Howson appears to have had debatable motives for these pieces and had little or no assistance from the star herself. She has never sat for Howson, either nude or clothed, so these are not portraits in the conventional sense, but imaginary renderings.

One painting shows her squatting in a graveyard, her posterior poised with apparent intent above a church of the generic type seen in kitsch Christmas cards. In the middle ground a skull leaning against a tomb acts as a memento mori. Madonna may be renowned for her sinuous physique, but this seems to have got lost in translation and Howson has pictured her wiry musculature as fleshy folds of the type sported by new-born babies and sumo wrestlers.

This is not the hagiography to which the great lady is accustomed. Howson is said to be irked because Madonna, once an admirer of his work who bought some paintings during his first cycle of fame, subsequently cut him dead. So this is payback - Madonna as gargantuan she-devil, defiling the church with her blasphemous name, but poised to find out that death has the last laugh. This is arguably the most ridiculous painting ever created by a major Scottish artist.

The other Madonna painting shows her as a less-than-ideal odalisque somewhat after the style of Tamara de Lempicka, while the drawings fall between soft-porn and portrait sketches not dissimilar to the kind done for a few euros outside the Louvre. In the same room is Crusader, a painting of cartoon-like crudity showing a bloodthirsty figure representing Britain, the US and Israel bludgeoning Islamic culture to destruction. This particular work would not look out of place in a teenage art class.

But despite many works seeming to be indicative of an almost adolescent mind-set, it would be utterly wrong to castigate the whole exhibition. Howson is at his best when he depicts what he himself has experienced or knows. His series of drawings of downtrodden, exhausted figures in churchyards are emotionally charged and humane, and his pastel The Fifth Step is a bravura exercise in gestural drawing. Why then does he invite ridicule with his weedy copies after such artistic giants as Callot and Velasquez? Rarely have I seen an exhibition including work of such variable quality by one artist.

Maybe the answer lies with Howson’s much-discussed condition, Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism with a range of manifestations including an inability to deal with the complexities of social interaction. This exhibition proves that Howson cannot self-edit effectively, showing work that may get him publicity but does little to enhance his reputation. He has not lost his creative ability, but he needs to reveal less of his febrile imaginings, and more of his actual experience. Until 4 June