Art review: J.D. Fergusson and France

Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow

4/5

Fergusson’s Women

Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

4/5

‘I WROTE long letters trying to explain modern painting. Something new had started and I was very much intrigued. But there was no language for it that made sense in Edinburgh or London.” Thus J.D.Fergusson recalled his time in Paris before the First World War. ‘Something new’ was the birth of the modern movement, the revolution in art led by Matisse and Picasso. It didn’t make sense in London or in Edinburgh for quite some time, but it did to Fergusson when he moved to Paris in 1907. Indeed he was the only British artist of whom it could be said, not only that he understood what was going on, but that he really was part of it.

It was in 1905 at the radical Salon d’Automne that Matisse and his colleagues made the first big break with the past, earning themselves the name Les Fauves, or the Wild Beasts. Two years later Fergusson was showing at the Salon d’Automne himself and in 1909, elected a Sociétaire, he was given his own wall, effectively a one-man show, but he had not come to Paris a blank canvas. Born in 1874 and so already a mature artist, he was not a second-rate ingenu picking up other people’s ideas, but a first-rate Scottish artist with ideas of his own.

Fergusson died 50 years ago in January 1961. The Hunterian is marking the anniversary with a major exhibition, Colour Rhythm and Form: J.D.Fergusson and France, and concurrently the Scottish Gallery is commemorating him with Fergusson’s Women. He was one of the four Colourists, of course, but helpfully the Hunterian includes sample works by the other three to illustrate the links, but also the differences.

Fergusson stands apart because of his direct engagement with the birth of Modernism. This was possible because he did not come to it unprepared. Arthur Melville was the outstanding artist in the previous generation. He had already mastered the lessons of Impressionism and in the early 1890s struck out in a new direction using pure colour in a way that anticipated Matisse. Fergusson acknowledged his debt to Melville and here we see the artist following him in style, subject and technique in a watercolour of Morocco.

Whistler too was an inspiration, however. Compare Fergusson’s Feather Boa, for instance, to the Whistler portraits hanging nearby in the Hunterian. Fergusson’s picture is a lovely full-length of a woman standing against a dark background, dressed in grey with a grey hat and an extravagant white feather boa. So far he is with Whistler, but a single red rose on her white blouse matched by the red of her lips gives a sensuality to the painting altogether different from Whistler’s understated cool. So, too, is the irrepressible energy suggested by the way her hat continues the line of her body in a rising baroque spiral. These things indicate the direction in which Fergusson was to go.

In 1907, in Closerie des Lilas, Fergusson painted his partner of the time, Anne Estelle Rice, in primary colours with a bold green shadow across her eyes in direct acknowledgement of Matisse. By temperament, however, Fergusson was closer to the open eroticism of Kees van Dongen, a Dutch member of the Fauve circle, than to the chastity of Matisse himself. Van Dongen’s paintings of women, often with big hats and little else, challenged sexual mores as much as pictorial ones. For Fergusson too, sexual mores were an issue and although he painted landscapes and still lives, women were his real subject and his lifelong preoccupation.

You see it in paintings throughout his career. The full-length Red Shawl from 1908, showing in the Scottish Gallery, is of a woman in a pink dress. The red shawl is dropping off her shoulders and the roses of her corsage are matched in a flamboyant wallpaper behind her. It is an image of abundance. At the Hunterian, After the Concert, from much the same date, shows a big woman, her white face and neck, red lips and brightly coloured shawl standing out against darkness. She smiles at us over the head of a man, his back to us and almost lost in the shadow, who pays her tribute with a bouquet of flowers.

Déesse de la Rivière is another magnificent example of this kind of image and was bought for the French state from a show in Paris in 1931. The goddess of the river, she is a powerfully built woman reclining naked beneath trees with open water beyond. Spring in Glasgow dates from 1942 yet still returns to the theme as a young woman in a red dress and with flowers in her hair dominates the Glasgow townscape.

Perhaps the closest analogy among his contemporaries to this constant theme in Fergusson’s art is in the writings of D.H.Lawrence. Lawrence of course also tried to give these ideas expression in paint, but his pictures, anyway feeble, were banned for obscenity. Fergusson suffered no such fate, but there can be no doubt that he shared with Lawrence a belief in the liberating power of a mutual Eros.

Gauguin was Fergusson’s great example. In Noa Noa, Gauguin’s account of his life in the Pacific, his Maison de Jouir, or Orgasm House, seemed a retreat to an erotic paradise; Fergusson’s masterpiece, Les Eus, celebrates that vision. Two men and four women, life size and naked, dance together in a bower of abundant fruit and flowers. A sunlit landscape lies beyond. Matisse’s exactly contemporary La Danse may have been part of Fergusson’s inspiration, but there is nothing classical about Fergusson’s painting whereas we can see now there is about Matisse’s. Rather Fergusson has painted a modernist Garden of Eden, a paradise where there is no avenging angel to spoil the fun and no god presides other than the energy, the rhythm of life itself.

Nearby hangs the painting simply called Rhythm. Personifying this idea, it is Fergusson’s other masterpiece from the intoxicating years around 1910. A woman, built like a steam engine with breasts like polished steel, sits with an apple in her hand.

She is the naked Eve, but far from being ashamed of her nakedness like the biblical original, she is queen of her erotic paradise. Rhythm, an idea borrowed from the French philosopher Henry Bergson, is the dynamic that underlies and links all things; it’s the energy that binds time and space into a single continuum; or, indeed, that ties art and eros, or dance and painting, for Margaret Morris, Fergusson’s partner from 1913, was a dancer. Rhythm became a central aspect of his style. You see it clearly in the curling energy of his drawings, well represented at the Scottish Gallery. Endowed with such rhythm he can make Edwardian hats look sexy.

At the Scottish Gallery, Voiles Indiennes is one of several pictures in these two shows that are related to Rhythm. The most startling among them, however, is Fleurs et Fruits at the Hunterian. It is not a still life as the title suggests, but a picture of a naked woman almost lost in a cornucopia of fruit and flowers that echo her shape.

Fergusson was friendly with Picasso and here the way the woman’s face is painted, just a rough mask of pink and red, matches the shocking bluntness of his Demoiselles d’Avignon. There is nothing like it in British art for half a century or more.

The Scottish Gallery is to be commended for enhancing its show with significant loans. The Hunterian show, too, is admirable as always. Nevertheless I am not sure what exceptionalism allows several pictures of Glasgow to be included in a show called Fergusson and France, although it excludes two of the most interesting episodes of his career, his war paintings and the pictures he painted of the Highlands after a tour in 1922.

l Colour Rhythm and Form: J.D.Fergusson and France runs until 8 January. Fergusson’s Women runs until 1 October.

Art review: J.D. Fergusson and France | Fergusson’s Women