Art
Edinburgh
John McEwen
There is nothing very festive in the way of exhibitions this year in Edinburgh except for William Johnstone's flood of recent work at the Talbot Rice Centre (till Sept I I ). Johnstone will be eighty next year and continues to paint and print with the relish of a boy. Once Principal of Camberwell and later of the Central School he remains this country's most creative art school administrator of the post-war years. As a painter he appears to have been the only Scotsman of his generation to realise the growing artistic importance of America between the Wars. Despite his self-categorisation as a 'midAtlantic' painter, he has always brought his experience to bear on Scotland and never more so than today. It is the stone, the rain, the gothic darkness of the place which he reveres, best illustrated in the twenty lithographs he has recently completed to accompany twenty poems by his fellow borderer Hugh MacDiarmid. Scottish painting, as can be seen at the 150th anniversary exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA till Sept 19), has invariably forsaken Scotland in rustic pursuit of subjects and styles which were the rage elsewhere. Johnstone, an internationalist, stands apart from this continuing parochialism.
At the National Gallery of Modern Art there is an exhibition of surrealist drawings and paintings from the Edward James Collection (till Sept 12). The Collection, the largest of its sort in the country, is to be sold shortly unless enough money can be raised
by the Edward James Foundation to build a gallery for it at James's home near Chichester. This selection, devoid of any outstanding works by the artists represented with the exception of one Magritte, does not advance a strong case for the conservation of the rest. Outside in the Gardens. the memorial exhibition of late works by Barbara Hepworth is the grandest of this year's Festival. Barbara Hepworth has been blessed to have the art historian Alan Bowness as a son-inlaw, because it is surely due to his pious efforts that she continues to be taken as a figure of historical, as opposed to local. sculptural importance. To her artistic contemporaries she was affectionately known as 'Gracie' (after Gracie Fields. another Northern Dame), and nothing could better capsulise her increasinglY genteel and dainty ways with marble and bronze. Although as a spirited girl she was the first to bring her friends the good news from Paris in the 'twenties, she subsequently never did more than follow like a kid sister in the footsteps of Moore and Nicholson. with St Ives adding the finishing touches. In these last works. 'truth to materials.--the cry to which she rallied in her youth—goes by the board as she touches up another porthole with swimming-pool blue or makes penguins of two significant forms. And the same fussiness spoils the table sculpture. the sliced-up marble maquettes: a rough little chisel here for Henry, a lovely little circle there for Ben. This would be quite endearing were it not for her legacy to us of some of the most hideous public sculpture ever commissioned and, in a last effort to keep LIP with Moore, her bequest of a great heap of unsold works to the Tate. Maybe some of it can be incorporated in the floors and walls of the new extension withoutbreaking the law.
International art is half-heartedly represented in two Scottish Arts Council exhibitions: Dan Flavin at their Charlotte Square Gallery (till Sept 12) and 'Recent American Still Photography' in the Fruit' market (till Sept 19). It is odd to mount such a trifling, sample show of Flavin now when his neon installations have been around internationally for over a decade, though admittedly to no great extent here. It seemed symptomatic of this decision that the second part of the catalogue will not be ready till after the exhibition and that the information video was on the blink. 'New American. Still Photography' is as earnest, commercial and boring as it sounds. Only a large Kurt Schwitters show on loan from the Marl' borough to the New 57 Gallery (till Sept II) offers any relief. It is not an outstanding selection but Philip Wright's catalngli! provides an interesting commentary ad,u some of the small collages are of the artist 5 incomparable best. When Schwitters finallY had to flee Europe in 1940 Edinburgh vid,s the first place in which he was interned._ Now, twenty-eight years after his death, hi) work is shown in Scotland for the first tirrie• That gives a fair indication of the speed df Scottish cultural digestion.
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