The Edinburgh School of Painting

Edinburgh College of Art has been celebrating its centenary. We have been on our current campus on Lauriston Place since 1908, with the first students attending the ‘new’ College in 1909. However, the College is both older and younger than its hundred years, in the sense that it can trace its origins back to structured art education in the 1760s, which not only makes us the oldest drawing academy in the UK, but also enables us to celebrate our 250th anniversary in 2010! The College has changed considerably over the last hundred years but the flow of talented artists is undiminished. Today, Edinburgh College of Art has re-invented itself as a dynamic, youthful, outward-looking institution keen to operate on both a national and international stage. It is fitting, therefore, that the Lemon Street Gallery is putting on this exhibition, ‘The Edinburgh School of Painting’ at this time, celebrating the extraordinary painting talent that has emerged from Edinburgh over many years.

Professor Ian Howard, Principal

 

David Alison (1882–1955)
The Interior
91.4 x 88.9 cm Oil on canvas
Presented to the City of Edinburgh by the
Scottish Modern Arts Association, 1964.

As its name clearly indicates Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) has crucially important ties with its parent City. This historical relationship goes back to the setting up of its predecessor, The Trustees’ Academy in 1760, and continued over the next 200 years. Furthermore, the visual bond between the City and ECA was clearly underlined with the building of the College during the opening decade of the last century when Edinburgh made its last significant attempt to re-visit and re-create the inspiring architectural and sculptural glory that was Periclean Athens. This zealous ambition had begun around the time of the establishment of The Trustees’ Academy in the middle of the 18th century. Then the Enlightened Scottish capital so enthusiastically committed itself to such a rigorous urban building programme of Greek Revivalism that it soon gained the international reputation of being the ‘Athens of the North’. In true Janus fashion this highly self-conscious re-invention of ‘Auld Reekie’ as a modern city, through the radical town planning and neoclassical architecture of the New Town, was permeated with dedicated archaeological ambitions to recapture and revive that model of civic excellence and democratic reason which the Enlightenment ideal attributed to ancient Athens. For the historically informed, but progressive citizenry of 18th century Edinburgh, the visual appearance of their utopian ideal was founded on the newly discovered examples of Greek art and architecture and the growing scholarly exploration of its ancient writings which fired the imaginations of artists and architects and educated public alike.

Unfortunately however, despite the world wide acclaimed triumph of its splendid New Town the momentum of the Greek Revival in Edinburgh began to falter and dissipate throughout the 19th century due the impact of urban and industrial modernity and the growing nationalistic appeal of Romanticism and the Gothic Revival. Edinburgh’s international orientated neoclassical movement had however one last splendid flowering in the building of its new Art College at the outset of the 20th century.

Sir William G Gillies
St Monance Sketch
54.5 x 70 cm Oil 1932



Alan Davie
Untitled
85 x 75 cm Oil on paper 1939

One of the important reasons why the City’s art education institution was move from the Royal Scottish Academy building on Princes Street to its new site at Lauriston Place was to create much more accessible and appropriate accommodation for its exceptional collection of cast sculptures. The city was justifiably proud of this invaluable cultural asset and planned to have it displayed to its greatest advantage, both for the student body and interested members of the public who still have free access to the collection today. This is clearly demonstrated in the architectural design for the ECA building which, although Beaux-Art classical on the monumental exterior, is laid out in the interior to simulate similar spatial and optical relationships between architecture and sculpture as those found in the original Parthenon Temple itself. The dedicated collecting of Antique and Renaissance casts for the improvement of art education and public taste was vigorously carried out during the first half of the 19th century with the Athenian pieces, mainly from the British Museum and Lord Elgin himself, forming the jewel in crown of the then Trustees’ Academy’s Collection. The sculptural casts’ central role in the fine art teaching at the Academy and the RSA School unfortunately soon began to wane after 1858 when the highly rigid South Kensington mechanical method of instruction and examination of art and design was disastrously introduced into the Edinburgh curriculum. Furthermore by the time ECA was established and fully functioning in the early 20th century the life class had also began gradually to supplant study from the antique. Thus it is not entirely surprising when we look at the first installation photographs of the interior of the new Lauriston Place building that they seem to suggest that those sculptural presences, for which the College was built to house, were already turning into ghostly traces from a distance past which for most modernists would soon become redundant, if not, almost invisible.

John Maxwell
Still Life in the Country
79 x 92 cm Oil on canvas





William Baillie (b1923)
Child’s Table
50.8 x 61 cm Oil on canvas
Inscribed b/l: WJL Baillie 1961
Presented to the City of Edinburgh by the Scottish Arts Council 1984.

Edinburgh’s return to the AthenianWay has also had some unforeseen and unwelcome similar dimensions. For instance, just when Periclean Athens was glorying in its splendid civic triumphs the storm clouds of the impending disastrous Peloponnesian Wars with Sparta were already ominously beginning to darken the celebrations of the Athenian citizens. Similarly the initial euphoria attending the protracted completion of Edinburgh’s first purpose built Art College was quickly superseded by apprehension and dread as the nation sleepwalked into the nightmare of war in 1914. During the terrible conflict of the Great War ECA lost around 100 of its staff and students and to commemorate this terrible loss, along with the Panathenaic sculptures, the College’s own war memorial still holds a remembrance vigil over the main atrium.

Sir William MacTaggart
Poppies Against a Night Sky
81.5 x 71 cm Oil on panel

Thus the first generation of painters who emerged as a distinctive force from ECA were all touched, to a lesser or greater, degree by their war experiences. This undoubtedly had a profound impact on the direction and character of Edinburgh School painting during the inter-war years. Some chose to see modernism and modernity as synonymous; and because modernisation had had such a calamitous impact of destruction and radical change, they took refuge in a swift return to the seemingly safe and secure values of academic practice. On the other hand the dominant ECA group decided on a middle way between radical and conservative values. Most of these painters benefited from the travelling scholarships which were made available after the War. They all spent a good deal of time studying abroad, especially in the studios of the modern masters of the Paris School where they learnt the new pictorial languages of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and even Abstraction. It was this group of artists who dominated the Edinburgh School of painting for the next generation. In their College studios and throughout the

Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970)
Goalmouth
121.9 x 106.3 cm Oil on board
Inscribed b/l: Henderson Blyth
Purchased from the artist (Jean F Watson Bequest Funds), 1965.



Jeffrey Camp
Untitled
124 x 78 cm

Scottish countryside they sought to reconcile modern techniques of painting practice and pictorial form with conventional subject content. Unlike the work of the continental avant garde – from Matisse and Picasso to the Surrealists – the Edinburgh School mostly chose to turn their backs on the Greek example and avoid the human figure in their art. Instead they were drawn to the decorative and sensual appeal of landscape and still life rendered in a richly tactile and freely expressive manner. Finally, as with any institution, there were a few individuals of a more resistant and rebellious nature. The more ambitious of these usually set the future direction of their career out with Scotland and went on to make their own distinctive contribution to the development of British modern art within the London cosmopolitan scene.

James Cumming
The Invalid
40 x 57 cm Oil on board




Barbara Balmer
Self Portrait
46 x 66 cm Oil 1952

Figurative art had not of course completely disappeared with the Edinburgh School and it manifested itself most fully in the public art scheme carried out in the 1930s. Following in the footsteps of the civic minded Athenians, Edinburgh had a long distinguished history in beautifying the important buildings of the City through grand decorative schemes. In the early modern era this was very much linked to the Scottish capital’s commitment to the Arts and Crafts movement. The finest example of this was the National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle which involved the contributions of a number of the staff from ECA. Furthermore at the time when public art for the community was encouraged and promoted by the City, the College was very much involved, especially through the painting of educational inspiring murals for some of the local primary and secondary schools.

By the later 1930s ECA was seen by most people to be an important cultural and communal asset to the City, but again, its long term future was drastically disrupted and had to be put on hold for the period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. As before, a further generation of young artists had to re-think what should be the future course of Scottish modern art in general and their own in particular. After 1945 some of the older figures of the pre-war Edinburgh School still held a dominant position and influence within the College. Not surprisingly then, a number of the younger members of the painting school decided to build on the example of the previous generation by further developing and intensifying the particular qulities of decorative and expressionist painting. On the other hand there were a few restless individuals who, after their wartime experiences, and their inspirational contacts with the wider post-war art scene in Europe and America, set out to extend the visual power and semantic possibilities of their painting by incorporating into their challenging modernist work the language of arcane symbolism and gestural abstraction. Following on a little later, some of the more progressive members the College staff who emerged in the 1960/70s pursued their own mode of severely austere, minimalist abstraction which was, amongst other things, in marked contrast to the colour saturated canvases of the previous Edinburgh School.

Anne Redpath
The Ladies’ Garden, Palacio de la Fontiera, Lisbon
85 x 105.5 cm Oil on board 1962

By the turn of the 1960s Modernism, especially the formalism of pure abstract painting was the triumphant force on the international art scene which had now become highly institutionalised. Yet this was soon to be challenged by a range of counter-culture strategies and the almost ubiquitous Pop Art movement. At ECA however, the most significant resistance to High Modernism took a very different form. Amongst a few of the more rebelliously committed students (and with the sympathetic support of some of the tutoring staff) there was a return to a re-examination of the depiction of the human figure in a range of different generic and historical contexts. Modern realist and expressionist paintings were executed, some on an epic scale, full of human conflict and compassion that matched the universal themes of struggle and resolve to be also found in the Athenian works which graced the College’s central sculp-tural court. Such was the power of this approach that the return to figurative painting made a powerful impact on all the Scottish art colleges. Furthermore, on this occasion, Scottish modern art was also at the forefront of the international art scene where in the 1980s Neo- Figuration reigned supreme from New York to Milan. This relatively brief, but spectacular return to figure painting produced at ECA a body of fine painters. This was especially notable amongst the growing body of emerging women artists, a number of whom would use their perceptive skills to re-examine and re-present the visual depiction of the female figure in Western art.

John Bellany
IV
140 x 180 cm Oil 1963

Since the turn of this century however, there has undoubtedly been a clear shift in artistic and critical power, with painting no longer holding its former dominant position in the contemporary art scene. A whole new array of alternative modes of visual communication and engagement has emerged to challenge painting’s former central role at the forefront of aesthetic and theoretical debate. This situation is now all pervasive from the powerful institutions of the international art world to the standard art college curriculum. Whether this change should be welcomed or not is open to debate. Yet it does provide the opportunity for the practitioners and supporters of one of the longest surviving art forms to reconsider the new and relevant social and cultural roles that painting might be able to claim for itself in the vast multi-media world of the new millennium which beckons before us.

John Bellany
Untitled
97 x 120 cm Oil 1964

In an age of constantly accelerated progress it is easy to forget that the future is always dependent on how we regard and respect the past. Whether we like it or not the past is always with us. At ECA for example, they have recently achieved an important grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to help them restore their classical sculptural cast collection. This of course includes their unique Athenian pieces copied from the Parthenon which are integral to the original design of the College’s interior space. After decades of neglect and disrespect, these magnificent works will soon be revealed to us again in all their former glory. Hopefully this time they will stir and sustain the creative powers and artistic ambitions of staff and student alike.

Sir Robin Philipson
Entrance to the Cathedral
85 x 90 cm Watercolour




Gwen Hardie
Nude in Sunlight
180 x 140 cm Oil 1983




Eve Thompson
Self Portrait with Glasses
86 x 56 cm Oil on canvas 1977
Collection M Ellam




William Johnstone
Birth of Venus
193 x 137 cm Oil on canvas c1980

These Panathenaic masterpieces, and the ringing words of Pericles, demonstrate to all ages that art should on the one hand, pursue its own concept of the ideal; but, on the other hand, remind us that that ideal must always be born out of the circumstances of its own historical age and particular artistic heritage. All art that aspires to be worthy of that illustrious name – as with the Panathenaic sculpture or the great painting of the past, should always strive, if it is to make a memorial contribution to its age, to reveal ‘the power and beauty’ of the whole community which it is ultimately there to serve.

Dr Bill Hare Honorary Curator and Lecturer in Scottish Art at The University of Edinburgh