Art review: FCB Cadell

In 1898, when the Scottish painter Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell was just 16, he left Edinburgh for Paris, accompanied by his mother and his sister Jean, to train at the Académie Julian.

FCB Cadell

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

He worked hard, but he played hard too. Letters between his parents, some of which have been loaned to the National Gallery of Scotland for a major new exhibition which will open next week, are full of exasperation at their son’s behaviour.

There was the time he fell asleep on the train and ended up at the end of the line, the Sundays he spent in bed after a hard Saturday night and the cost of retrieving a bicycle he had left at Montparnasse.

“Genius is an expensive thing,” his mother wrote home to her husband. “But I shall forgive him if he has the genius and not just the expensiveness.”

Both the genius and the expensiveness were to haunt Cadell. As an artist, his depiction of elegant Edinburgh interiors, and the landscapes of his beloved Iona, his flair for colour and, in the 1920s his daring flattened composition and acid palette, were to earn him a place both in high society and in art history as one of the artists we now call the Scottish Colourists. But as a man, the expensive lifestyle would take its toll. He was to die of cancer and cirrhosis of the liver at in 1937 at the age of just 54. The loss of patrons after the depression, and a long-standing debacle over a New Town home he simply couldn’t afford, had played havoc with his finances.

In the year before his death, even as his work was entering important museum collections, he was applying for support from the Royal Scottish Academy’s Nasmyth fund for “decayed Scottish artists”.

Dr Alice Strang, who has curated what is the most important solo exhibition of Cadell’s work to date, almost 70 years after his memorial exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1942, hopes to shed light on an artist she thinks of as an innovator whose leading role has been somewhat forgotten.

“Elegance, sophistication, fashionability... people can discuss that in his work, but I also think that there was an awful lot of seriousness. Cadell has suffered from the reputation of being a gentleman painter.”

Strang highlights two periods of his art when she believes he was at his strongest. There were the immediate pre-war years: the paintings featuring elegant aloof women reflected in gilt and glass against lilac walls and black polished floors. And in the 1920s his unpeopled interiors and still lives, the blazing blues, red and oranges held together by strong blacks and near flat picture structures, are unique in British art. He was, she says, pursuing an Art Deco aesthetic even before the term had been coined.

Unlike older artists Hunter, Peploe and Fergusson, who were first grouped with Cadell by the dealers Alexander and AJ McNeill Read in 1924 and not called the Colourists until 1948, Cadell was not at the centre of artistic and social developments in Europe or further afield. Although he trained abroad and travelled and was particularly close to Peploe, Strang believes his achievements in the 1920s were all the more remarkable for their development in Edinburgh.

“He was the most Scottish of the Scottish Colourists,” she says. “He loved wearing a kilt. It’s interesting that he based himself in Edinburgh for all his adult life and spent his summers in Iona.”

According to Strang’s new book on the artist, Cadell was “charismatic, sociable and dressed with élan.”

But his art might be celebrated as much for what it doesn’t say as what it does. Cadell, initially rejected by the army because of “smoker’s heart,” was to see active service in the First World War. He made a series of wartime character drawings, but the horrors that he must have experienced never make it into his vivid post-war paintings.

The women in his paintings, among them long-standing friends and models are, says Strang, “props” in his pursuit of beauty, as much as the red lacquered chairs and the grand home in Ainslie Place with its door painted blue “to annoy the neighbours”.

The frank pictures of his manservant Charles Oliver on the beach in Iona and his paintings of a boxer and an unknown black male model suggest from a modern perspective an intense interest in the male body that is absent in his occasional female nudes.

But, says Strang, this is a subject for further research; the archive draws a blank on Cadell’s private life, and Oliver, though acknowledged as “essential” to Cadell’s household, is only recorded as an employee.

“Cadell was the only one of the Colourists to fight in the war, but it just doesn’t appear in his work afterwards,” says Strang. “Whether having to keep his sexuality secret because it was illegal also ties in with that, I just don’t know.”

Cadell remains in many ways an elegant mystery, gregarious as a person, now much-loved by the art market, but in some ways still underestimated as an artist. Strang hopes that the archive material and 79 pictures on show in Edinburgh this autumn will unlock some more of his secrets. “Many of the pictures we are showing belong to the children or grandchildren of the original owners, so they may not have been seen in public for a long time, if at all.”

FCB Cadell is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 22 October until 18 March 2012