Modern Scottish Painting E-Book

J D Fergusson

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In 1939, Scottish artist and sculptor J.D. Fergusson was commissioned to write a fully illustrated book on modern Scottish painting. The Second World War made this difficult and the first edition of Modern Scottish Painting was published in 1943 without illustrations. This new edition – edited, introduced and annotated by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach – finally brings Fergusson's project to fruition, illustrating the argument with colour reproductions of Fergusson's own work. Moffat and Riach frame Fergusson's important art manifesto for the 21st-century reader, illuminating his views on modern art as he explores questions of technique, education, form and what it means for a painting to be truly modern. Fergusson relates these aspects of modern painting to Scottishness, showing what they mean for Scottish identity, nationalism, independence and the legacy that puritanical Calvinism has left on Scottish art – a particular concern for Fergusson given his recurring subject matter of the female nude.

Leseprobe

JD FERGUSSON, born in Leith in 1874, was one of the four artists collectively known as the ‘Scottish Colourists’. He lived in Paris from 1907 until 1913 where, more than any other of his Scottish contemporaries, he embraced and developed the latest advances in French painting by artists such as Matisse and Picasso. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Fergusson returned to Glasgow with his life-long partner, the dance pioneer Margaret Morris, where they did much to galvanise the Scottish arts scene. Fergusson died in 1961.

ALEXANDER (SANDY) MOFFAT RSA is an artist and teacher. Many of his paintings grace the walls of Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery, including the well-known Poet’s Pub and other portraits of significant Scottish writers. Born in Dunfermline in 1943, he studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art. He was the Director of New 57 Gallery of Edinburgh 1968–78, later joining the staff of Glasgow School of Art, where he became Head of Painting 1992–2005.

ALAN RIACH is a poet and the Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was born in Airdrie in 1957 and studied English at Cambridge University 1976–79. He completed his phD in the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University in 1986. His academic career has included positions as a post-doctoral research fellow, senior lecturer and Associate Professor at the University of Waikato, New Zealand 1986–2000 and he has been a visiting lecturer or keynote speaker at universities around the world. His most recent book of poems is Homecoming (2009).

Also by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach:

Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (Luath Press, 2008)

Arts of Independence: The Cultural Argument and Why it Matters Most (Luath Press, 2014)

Paintings as Arguments: Five Decades of Cultural & Political Change in Scotland (Peacock Visual Arts, 2014)

Also by Alan Riach:

Poetry

This Folding Map (Auckland University Press, 1990)

An Open Return (Untold Books, 1991)

First and Last Songs (Auckland University Press, 1995)

Clearances (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001)

Homecoming (Luath Press, 2009)

Wild Blue: Selected Poems (Wydawnictwo Maski, 2014)

Criticism

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)

The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1999)

Representing Scotland in Literature, Iconography and Popular Culture: The Masks of the Modern Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

First published 1943 by William MacLellan & Co. Ltd., Glasgow

This edition published by Luath Press 2015

eISBN: 978-1-913025-81-6

ISBN (HB): 978-1-910021-89-7

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emissions manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

Typeset in 11 point Sabon by 3btype.com

Illustrations reproduced by permission of The Fergusson Gallery.

The authors’ right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988 has been asserted.

Original text © The Fergusson Gallery

All introductory and editorial material © Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach 2015

Contents

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Modern Scottish Painting: An Introduction

The Year of the Manifesto: 1943

Fergusson: Four Key Points

Bécheron: Where the Book Begins

Fergusson’s Early Life: Sunshine in Leith

From the Glasgow School to Modernism

Paris 1907–1914

Fergusson and the Nude

Art and Nationality

Independent Art

The Final Period: Glasgow

Notes to Introduction

J.D. Fergusson: A Biographical Timeline

Prepublication Foreword 1939

Modern Scottish Painting 1943

CHAPTER I Bécheron

CHAPTER II Art and Nationality

CHAPTER III The Glasgow School

CHAPTER IV Art and Engineering

CHAPTER V Art and Philosophy

CHAPTER VI Scotland and Colour

CHAPTER VII Independent Art

CHAPTER vIII The Journeyman Artist

CHAPTER IX The Master

CHAPTER X The Artist and the World or the Public

CHAPTER XI Responsibility of Art Schools and Directors

CHAPTER XII Calvinism and Art

Notes to Modern Scottish Painting

APPENDIX I J.D. Fergusson, ‘The Artist’s Intention’ 1905

APPENDIX II Responses to Modern Scottish Painting from Hugh MacDiarmid and Douglas Young 1944

Notes to Appendix II

APPENDIX III J.D. Fergusson, ‘The Scotland I’d Like to See’ 1946

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the trustees of the J.D. Fergusson Art Foundation for their generous contribution towards the publication of this book; to Jenny Kinnear, Collections Manager, Perth and Kinross Council; to Amy Waugh, Art Officer, The Fergusson Gallery, Perth; to Professor Angela Smith and Jane Cameron of the University of Stirling; to Roger Billcliffe, of the Billcliffe Gallery, who kindly reviewed the introduction and timeline; and Ian Riffell of the Department of Greek and Classical Studies, University of Glasgow, who provided the notes for the Greek phrases used by Douglas Young in his letter in Appendix II. We are particularly indebted to Alice Strang, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for her help in sourcing Fergusson’s paintings and to Lord MacFarlane of Bearsden for giving us permission to reproduce works from his personal collection. We should also like to thank Duncan R. Miller, Fine Arts, London for providing colour transparencies of Fergusson’s paintings.

Illustrations

PAINTINGS (COLOUR)

Self Portrait, 1907 (Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council) p. 14, plate 1

Le Manteau Chinois, 1909 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 25, plate 2

Bathing Boxes and Tents at St Palais, 1910 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 25, plate 3

At My Studio Window, 1910 (University of Stirling) p. 27, plate 4

Rhythm, 1911 (University of Stirling) p. 29, plate 5

Still Life, Teapot with Fruit and Flowers, 1912 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 25, plate 3

Les Eus, 1913 (Hunterian Art Gallery University of Glasgow) p. 30, plate 6

Portsmouth Docks, 1918 (University of Stirling) p. 49, plate 7

A Puff of Smoke near Milngavie, 1922 (Private Collection) p. 36, plate 8

Storm around Ben Ledi, 1922 (Private Collection) p. 36, plate 9

Megalithic, 1931 (Private Collection) p. 29, plate 10

Summer, 1914, 1934 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 49, plate 11

Danu, Mother of the Gods, 1952–53 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 50, plate 12

SCULPTURE

Summer: Head of a Woman, 1916 (Fergusson Gallery) plate 13

Female Dancer, c. 1920 (Fergusson Gallery) plate 13

DRAWINGS

Margaret Morris Dancing, 1913 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 33, plate 14

Frontispiece for In Memoriam James Joyce, 1955 (Fergusson Gallery) p. 52, plate 16

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL (Fergusson Gallery)

Letter to Picasso p. 26, plate 15

Hand-drawn map of Montparnasse (Paris) plate 15

Photograph of Fergusson in his Paris Studio p. 187

Photograph of Margaret Morris and her dancers in Antibes p. 33, plate 14

Photograph of Fergusson in his Glasgow Studio p. 9

‘For me, considering myself a revolutionary, this was a very great honour – and being based on the Glasgow School, it had the effect of confirming my feeling of independence, the greatest thing in the world, not merely in art, but in everything.’

J.D. FERGUSSON, on his election as a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne in 1909

Modern Scottish Painting: An Introduction

ALEXANDER MOFFAT AND ALAN RIACH

The Year of the Manifesto: 1943

J.D. Fergusson’s Modern Scottish Painting appeared in the same year as Hugh MacDiarmid’s autobiography Lucky Poet: A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas and the major breakthrough volume of modern Gaelic poetry, Sorley Maclean’s Dàin do Eimhir. Taken together, these three key books signal the co-ordinate points by which a new Scotland was to be created, and Fergusson, MacDiarmid and MacLean might be seen together as artists whose shared vision of what Scotland could be has inspired the nation’s cultural and political regeneration, from the dark times in the middle of the Second World War, to the early decades of the 21st century.

Each book in its way is an artist’s manifesto. What each of these books mean enhances our understanding of them taken together. At this moment in the war, no victory could be predicted. Each man was writing a testament of faith in the arts that would maintain a currency of value beyond their present moment. The depth of their commitment and conviction must not be underestimated.

The physical books themselves, when you hold them and feel and see the quality of paper and print, speak of the era of their publication. Each appeared in the context of wartime restrictions. Dàin do Eimhir and Modern Scottish Painting were both published in Glasgow by William MacLellan.

Modern Scottish Painting was a pocket-sized hardback, prefaced by an ‘Author’s Note’ from Fergusson’s address, 4 Clouston Street, Glasgow, NW, and dated 28 April 1943:

In February, 1939, a Scottish firm of publishers in London commissioned me to do a book on Modern Scottish Painting, fully illustrated. The war made this impossible, so it has been decided to publish this book without illustrations meantime, and later to do an edition with reproductions, as many as possible in colour.

We hope the present edition fulfils Fergusson’s intentions at last.

William MacLellan (1919–96) was the major Scottish publisher of his time. Alasdair Gray, in an obituary tribute (The Herald, 19 October 1996), noted that he should have ‘a place in any thorough history of Scottish letters’. In the 1940s and ’50s, he published many of the significant Scottish poets then writing, including Douglas Young, W.S. Graham, Sydney Goodsir Smith and George Campbell Hay, as well as novels and short stories by Fionn MacColla, J.F. Hendry and Fred Urquhart, plays by Ewan MacColl and Robert McLellan, music scores by Erik Chisholm and Memoirs by Frederic Lamond, books on folklore by F. Marian MacNeill and periodicals such as Million, The New Scot, Scottish Journal and Scottish Arts and Letters (five issues, 1944–50, co-edited by Hugh MacDiarmid and Fergusson himself). At the back of the first edition of Modern Scottish Painting, there is the publisher’s manifesto, a one-page essay entitled ‘The Scottish Cultural Revival’, written by MacLellan:

In Scotland today there is a growing sense of identity, a realisation of a regional sense of community, which is partly a reaction to the mal effects of over-centralisation. There always has been a strong patriotic spirit, even at the time of the Roman forays into Scotland, but for the last 200 years the preoccupation of building an Empire has had the effect of diffusing this love of soil and awareness of environment.

The days of Empires and exploitation are, we hope, numbered, and it is now the primary concern of communities to organise themselves into the natural units which environment, climate and geography have forged on the human species. These units, recognisable as nations, have as their basis a culture, a way of doing things, which is in the very soul and spirit of man in action. This is one of the important elements in human nature, this is the quality which leads man to a fuller life, stimulates the individual to creative activity and nullifies the tendency to mechanical collective action, Auden’s ‘unrehearsed response’.

In Scotland we are today well served politically with two virile nationalist movements. In the cultural sphere we hope that our publishing organisation will become the focal centre for creative activity that recognises a Scottish tradition and way of life which is unique, distinct from surrounding cultures, has elements worth preserving and developing, and has a distinctive colour which can be harmoniously woven into the tartan of world culture.

Our list of publications overleaf demonstrates how far we have succeeded in our aim. We invite writers, artists and musicians to submit their work, which will receive sympathetic consideration. We ask the Scottish people to buy our publications and then talk about them.

The publications listed included books of poems, anthologies, novels, plays, history and music books, pamphlets and an opera libretto. The price of Modern Scottish Painting was 8/6 (45 pence) and MacLean’s Dàin do Eimhir was 10/6 (55 pence). In 1955, MacLellan was to publish Hugh MacDiarmid’s epic In Memoriam James Joyce, with illustrations by Fergusson, making a definitive intervention in modern literature with a major work that radically altered the possibilities of what poetry could do to an extent that has not been fully taken into account, half a century after its production. We shall return to this work later.

In the early 21st century, 100 years since John Duncan Fergusson was engaged in his most radical work, it is high time his achievement was comprehensively reassessed in the context of art and literature, political self-determination and educational understanding. By looking at Modern Scottish Painting together with the books published in the same year by MacDiarmid and MacLean, by considering the ways in which poetry and paintings work their magic and deliver their insights, we can open up the appreciation of any sympathetic reader, viewer and thinking person, to enhance the self-awareness and self-confidence that arises from critical and self-critical experience. As all three writers insisted, this is explicitly a matter of the utmost consequence in both cultural and political arenas of action.

Modernism was slow to be appreciated in Scotland, as it was almost everywhere. It was resisted. Yet Modernism in Scotland was prefigured in the late 19th century by such major figures as J.D. Fergusson himself, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Patrick Geddes and Robert Louis Stevenson. However, the breakthrough work in painting, architecture and literature was relegated after the turn of the century, in the second decade of the 20th century. It all had to be rediscovered and reinterpreted by the writers and artists coming after the First World War. At the heart of the matter are questions of politics and education. In Scotland, the idea of an independent, multi-faceted cultural identity already existed, but its political corollary was drastically disadvantaged by the status of the country in the context of the British Empire. Parliamentary bills pushing for home rule were put forward through the turn of the century, but were dismissed or held back at Westminster, so the imperial ‘North British’ identity was maintained, at the expense of cultural self-confidence and educational commitment. In schools and universities, Scottish writers might be encountered across Britain – Burns and Scott were as familiar to some as Shakespeare – but they were considered as British authors and the uniquely Scottish traditions they inherited and developed were largely ignored or consigned to positions of inferior significance. In terms of the state-sponsored education curriculum, the distinctive qualities of Scottish artists and writers were neglected. This is taken up by Fergusson in Modern Scottish Painting and is a major theme running through the entire book.

Fergusson: Four Key Points

There are four key points to keep in mind when thinking about J.D. Fergusson.

First, he was a Scottish artist working in Paris in a revolutionary period in politics and art, 1907–1914. At this time, he was on the front line of the cultural and political 20th-century avant-garde. One of his sketchbooks includes a portrait drawing of someone who looks remarkably like Lenin. As neighbours in Montparnasse, he was in Lenin’s company in his first extended residence in Paris (Lenin spent four years there, 1909–12, when Fergusson was living in the same neighbourhood).

Self-Portrait, 1907

Second, he embraces Modernist conceptions of painting, what new art might do, beginning with what he experiences in France, then introducing this to his sense of what Scottish art might be. He is not an artist who works in 19th-century genres in an unbroken line of Scottish tradition, reconfirming conventions and appealing to established structures of appreciation and the market. Rather, he is committed to new forms and deep refreshment, a regeneration of vision.

Third: after 1909, his central subject matter is the female nude. Always keen to promote sexuality in art, his nudes, large in scale, make a major contribution to modern painting. They are grand statements, clearly laying down a challenge to all of the leading artists in Paris. More importantly, they represent the first successful manifestations of his vision of a Celtic arcadia. These beautiful and strong women might well be pagan goddesses from a mythical Celtic past, ‘a place of unlimited happiness, feasting and lovemaking’.[1] They also represent Fergusson’s open confrontation with what he deemed the joyless puritan ethos of Calvinism.

The fourth main thing is that he writes a book, a manifesto, this book: Modern Scottish Painting. This is a declaration of practice, of painting, as national intent. Unlike any of his Scottish artist contemporaries, Fergusson gathers his thoughts, beliefs and commitments about art and politics in this book. He begins by defining his terms and spelling out clearly what he intends to do, then he elaborates his ideas in ever-expanding, sometimes repetitive or rambling fashion. His specific topics in chapter titles are prompts for variations on the central theme of painting and freedom – freedom from the tyranny of academic authority in taste, practice and artistic social priorities, and equally and increasingly, freedom from the coercive pressures to conform politically in British imperialism, as opposed to distinctively Scottish national art. His political nationalism and repeated call for Scotland’s independence is unmistakable, loud and clear, yet it has frequently been passed over in silence or only given muted acknowledgement by most of his commentators.

His book distinguishes him among the company of international artists. Other writings by significant contemporaries of Fergusson would include: Amédée Ozenfant’s The Foundations of Modern Art (France 1928; English 1931), Matisse on Art: Writings, Interviews and Broadcasts by Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and edited by Jack D. Flam (1973) and Functions of Painting: Essays 1913–1954 by Fernand Léger (1881–1955) (France 1965; English, 1973). The Russian Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) writes about the aesthetic, non-representational, psychological aspects of painting in his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), the Russian-French-Jewish Marc Chagall (1887–1985) writes an intensely personal autobiography, My Life (written 1921–22), and various statements are gathered in A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, edited by Marilyn McCully (1981), which collects writings not only by Picasso but also by André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Jean Cocteau, Carl Jung, Salvador Dalí, Wyndham Lewis and Tristan Tzara. However, the artist closest to Fergusson in writing of the kind in Modern Scottish Painting was the Mexican social realist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) in the essays collected in Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), dating mainly from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Here we find declarations of the social, political and aesthetic principles of the far left. The far right equivalent is to be found in the futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), whose Futurist Manifesto was published in 1909, clearly predicting Italian fascism. Article 10 is: ‘We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.’ This is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what Fergusson is leading us towards. Fergusson refuses the political fanaticism of his time. His own independence as an artist is too important for that. So Modern Scottish Painting is the manifesto of a major working artist, expressing his belief in, and commitment to, what modern Scottish art is for, could be, and should be. It is also a critical appraisal of how art in the modern world has developed and reached the point at which it has arrived.[2]

The artists who have written their own manifesto or set down their own theoretical considerations on art and society, who have committed themselves to political ideals, are, however, relatively few. Marinetti is perhaps the most infamous – and dangerous – of them. In his manifesto, like Marinetti, Fergusson is talking not only about art and especially painting, but also about politics and education. But unlike Marinetti, whose drive was towards destruction, militarism and war, Fergusson is a humanitarian, pacifist and Scottish nationalist. He places himself and his life’s work fully in the international context of society and people in all their diversity, and he centres his political and creative thinking in the national condition and potential of Scotland. He addresses the religious context, the oppression of Calvinist Scotland and its antagonism to sensual expressiveness in art and life, and he attacks that oppressiveness vigorously. The book is constantly and consistently engaged, actively taking part in a conversation with its readers about how Scotland might be made better through the work of artists and social change. As Roger Billcliffe says in his introduction to the catalogue for the exhibitions in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh in 1974, ‘Fergusson was a leader, not a follower’.

Bécheron: Where the Book Begins

The questions raised by Fergusson in his little book are always vital and valid. When Scotland becomes an independent country once again, they will still be with us. The book begins on the eve of the First World War, with reference to Jo Davidson’s sculpture of the great poet of American democracy, Walt Whitman (1819–92). Jo Davidson (1883–1952) and Fergusson, living and working in France, were hardly artists in ivory towers. They were all too aware of the world around them and what the coming war would mean. Davidson’s sculpture of Whitman shows the great poet purposefully striding out, the world yet to be discovered. The example of Whitman’s practice is always relevant: starting from where you are, to go out into the world and see what it is. By such methodology we come to understand how people still neglect the most important things. The future in September 1938 was not predictable, nor easy to be complacent about. What meanings Whitman’s poetry, Davidson’s sculpture and Fergusson’s art and book convey are as vital now as they were in the 19th century. In the first chapter, we read:

Then Jo said, ‘About time for the news,’ so we went to the dining room and listened to the latest news on the wireless. Suddenly we were thrown into a complete mess of everything that was wrong with the world, where everyone was anxious, worried, afraid, bluffing or attempting to disentangle from a mass of rumour and information, something to help or interest his side.

And towards the end of the book, in Chapter 11, there is this:

Although I am aware that at the moment art doesn’t seem to be the thing of the first importance, that ARP [Air Raid Precaution] is the thing to think about, I am hoping that the use of the preparations for war will be that they will bring about conditions of peace, and that art will be taken more seriously as part of the life of the person who will have time and a desire to think of other things than defence. And I think ‘we’ve got to be prepared’ for peace as well as for war. Starting to think about art only when we are quite certain that war can’t happen, seems to me to be a hopeless state, for everyone to be in.

Anyone who has devoted his life to the arts of peace should not be expected to throw everything aside until he is sure that peace has come for good. At the moment the problem is ‘how to make a living’ when only war is in everybody’s mind, and all the money is being spent on war preparations.

The pressure on the artist to become commercial is daily increasing, and research in art or science must be immediately applicable to the needs of the moment rather than attempting to develop people capable of making better conditions for the future.

The book is written in dark times, but Fergusson insists that we should be thinking about a future where art will really count for something valuable. In that spirit, knowing what he wants to endorse, Fergusson starts writing his book. It is not published until five years later, by which time he is back in Scotland, in Glasgow. The war is making the whole western world uncertain of its future. The need to say clearly what art is for, beyond all military contexts, is crucial. Every paragraph is made to activate awareness of what Fergusson’s commitment is to, and where it might lead.

It begins like a Modernist novel. Who is being referred to? Who is the narrator? What is going on here? Fergusson and Jo are listening to the radio, getting the latest news. Then the book takes us in, and the arguments begin, the questions take us through the context of its origin and open out the territory of Scotland, the worst aspects of the nation’s history and its best, and the matter of art, beginning from the fundamentals of reality. Each chapter is an elaboration of variations on the main theme proposed by each chapter’s title. This is most evident in Chapter Four, ‘Art and Engineering’, where the title and subject are repeated about eight times in order to remind us – and presumably Fergusson, writing it – what he’s supposed to be talking about. It’s an engaging way of writing, the opposite of academic, far removed from jargon-drenched analysis or exposition. We are in the company of a living human being.

The style of the book is erratic. We have pretty much left this as it is in the first edition. Occasionally we have corrected errors so glaring they could only be distractions to new readers (such as ‘MacKintosh’ for ‘Mackintosh’). Font and spacing have been revised, but we wanted to keep the book as pocket-sized and handy as it was when it first appeared. Read it at a sitting. Then, act.

Fergusson’s Early Life: Sunshine in Leith

John Duncan Fergusson grew up in Leith, near, but not part of, Edinburgh. Leith is and was a port and in Fergusson’s youth it was a town quite distinct from the polite establishment ethos of Edinburgh. It ran downhill from the respectable 18th-century New Town, and faced east, out to the Firth of Forth, the estuary and the sea. It was a centre for trade and the focal point for sailors of all sorts, ships’ crews and officers of all nationalities. Fergusson grew up with one eye looking at a world that opened out internationally, and the other looking at what was no longer the capital city of an independent nation.

He must have been impressed from an early age by the contrast between the austerities of Calvinism, Kirk elders dressed in black, and the colour of the port of Leith. The contrast he would have experienced was also linguistic. His parents were Gaelic speakers from Perthshire. He would have heard rich Edinburgh Scots spoken in the streets around him as a boy, and a range of other languages spoken by the seamen, and he would have been familiar with the polite, genteel English of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie. It must have been a rich mélange. After attending the Royal High School in Edinburgh, he enrolled at Edinburgh University as a medical student, becoming familiar with the shapes and structures of bodily form, and perhaps with the idea that he might go to sea as a ship’s surgeon in the company of the sailors who frequented the Leith of his boyhood, as the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) had done in the 18th century. Afterwards, he briefly attended classes at the Trustees’ Academy, but he spent little time in any formal academic pursuits. He walked away from them as quickly as he could.

Fergusson positioned himself as a modern and independent artist from the beginning, acquiring a studio in Picardy Place at the top of Leith Walk in 1894. He began visiting Paris on a regular basis from 1897 onwards. The subject matter and style of his early paintings show him exploring possibilities and attitudes to social realities around him. Fergusson clearly learned from the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), the American-born, British-based artist who emphatically asserted his Scottish pedigree as a McNeill. Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (1871), popularly known as ‘Whistler’s Mother’, had shown what might be done with subtle dark shades, while Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (1872) and Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1877) seem to foreshadow Fergusson’s paintings The Trocadéro, Paris (c.1902) and Dieppe, 14 July 1905: Night (1905), though in the latter, Fergusson characteristically erupts into the tranquil nocturne with the dazzle of fireworks more explosive than Whistler’s and depicts a carefully-posed onlooking man, the artist Sam Peploe, Fergusson’s fellow-Colourist who was accompanying him in France at this time, whose whole attitude seems sceptically and sensually engaged by what he sees.

He comprehensively rejected Victorian academicism and the legitimacy academic qualification would have conferred upon him. In Chapter Five, ‘Art and Philosophy’, he writes that the academic discipline:

…is a thing arreté, fixed and defined absolutely. Once learned or acquired further thinking or examining or awareness is quite unnecessary and undesirable. All that is necessary is to apply it and keep on applying it till it can be done automatically, and the métier, the trade is mastered.

As opposed to this, Fergusson insists upon the absolute requirement of artistic freedom, ‘free or liberated art’ and he refers to the Declaration of Arbroath to evoke this spirit of freedom. For Fergusson, academic painting was simply a lie. The task of the artist was to create, not to imitate: ‘Craftsmanship has generally a dehumanised accuracy.’ Also in Chapter Five of Modern Scottish Painting, he goes further:

To earn the name artist it seems clear that one must create something, must make something, be a ‘makar’. The modern movement has stood for that, and that’s the difference between the modern movement and the academic craftsmanship, which enables people to pass examinations on accepted academic lines, what is called a thorough artistic training.

From the Glasgow School to Modernism

Fergusson was looking for Modernism in Scotland and the Glasgow School seemed to him to fit the bill. He says in Chapter Three, ‘The Glasgow School’:

The modern movement in art was an attempt to get down to truths, to fundamentals, and start afresh to create a free art, or an art freed from the academic imbecilities which at that time dominated the world.

He argues that the Glasgow School was an attempt to do the same thing in Scotland, and it started about 1880, nearly 20 years before he began his search: ‘By started I mean took definite form. If there was any considerable progressive art in Scotland before the Glasgow School I didn’t see it or hear of it.’ However, later in the book, Fergusson qualifies this: ‘But at that time [the 1890s] the Glasgow School was not merely starting but established, and was a most inspiring lead to any young Scots painter.’ So for Fergusson, the Glasgow School was exemplary in being both modern and distinctively Scottish, but, as he explains, ultimately the Glasgow School failed the test – it was to fade out as a force for a Scottish tradition in painting because it gave in to academic conservatism:

While they were Scots they could not be academic. When they aimed at the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy, then the Bougereau, Gèrôme, Jean Paul Laurens influence was a help of course. It was just what was wanted, and the homespun was shed for the ‘Braidclaith’ which ‘gie’s folks an unco heese’, makes for ‘respectability’ and conformity.

I feel really depressed as I think of it. Here were twenty-five men, all painters, probably fourteen whose good work will stand anywhere to-day. Twenty-five men, independents, who established themselves without any official recognition; who even trained a public to accept their work in spite of it having been at first received with ridicule; who were recognised and bought all over the Continent. Twenty-five men who were not conscious of the tremendous contribution they had made in founding a first class tradition of Scottish painting. Twenty-five men who mostly preferred academic honours and success to the Wallace and Bruce example of patriotism, of fighting to the last for Scottish Independence.

He elaborates on this:

This perhaps is the truth about the psychology of the Glasgow School. Their weakness was their feeling of inferiority in face of the alleged culture of their time. This alleged and accepted culture was represented by Lord Leighton who was a Lord, the President of the Royal Academy, and a painter of classical figure subjects, so what more could anyone ask.

Fergusson’s disgust at the priorities of this kind of academicism, allied to the imperial status of London, is escalated by his disappointment at the failed potential he sees in the best of their work:

This is still the awe-inspiring combination for the bourgeois artist, and this brings us to something that for a long time I couldn’t understand. It is, that these men, even Melville who had complete freedom in landscape, seemed generally to become paralysed when dealing with a portrait or figure subject, apparently quite terrified that he might ‘go over the edges’ of accuracy, meaning by accuracy not emotional accuracy, but photographic or anatomically exact measurements. Paint was used freely and fully in dealing with anything but flesh. Liberties could be taken with landscape, but to paint figures you had to have a discipline that could only come of what’s called a sound academic training, such as that of Leighton, Bougereau, Gèrôme & Co., the super ‘pompiers’, expert extinguishers of the youthful fire of inspiration and free expression.

So now we come to realise that the Glasgow School’s achievement was wonderful, and if they weakened they did so on account of an atmosphere in which it was impossible or nearly impossible to carry on.

Reading this today, it might seem that Fergusson was much too obsessed by academic art, but we should remember the battle that had raged, especially in France, between the radicals, from Millet and Courbet onwards, and the conservative upholders of academic art. We should also remind ourselves of the enormous power and authority wielded by the Royal Academy in the early years of the 20th century, which persisted until the 1950s. The Picasso/Matisse exhibition organised by the British Council in 1945–46 as a gesture of renewed cultural co-operation after the ravages of the Second World War was met with a hostile reception from the then President of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings. In a notorious radio broadcast, he attacked Modernism and Picasso in particular for ‘corrupting’ art. The RSA in Scotland was similarly backward looking. As Fergusson says in Chapter Three, ‘The Glasgow School’: ‘The Scottish Academy at that time was hopeless, had nothing to do with progressive art. It was just the RA of Scotland, which is all right for people who like that sort of thing.’ It took considerable courage to stand apart from the established academic institutions as he did throughout his long life, never wavering from his central belief that painting and sculpture should never be seen as mere craft, ‘but as a means of expressing human reactions to life’.

Paris: 1907–1914

Fergusson moved to Paris in 1907, after a series of summer trips to France with Peploe from 1904. In Chapter Four, ‘Art and Engineering’, Fergusson tells us:

Paris is simply a place of freedom. Geographically central, it has always been a centre of light and learning and research. It is a place that has always been difficult to dominate by mere deadweight of stupidity. It will be very difficult for anyone to show that it is not still the home of freedom for ideas; a place where people like to hear ideas presented and discussed; where an artist of any sort is just a human being like a doctor or a plumber, and not a freak or madman, and where he doesn’t need to look fantastic. After going there over thirty years ago I have some right to speak – Salut! to Paris. It allowed me to be Scots as I understand it, and has made me so Scots that I am leaving it and coming home. I wish it was to the Highlands, but I’m not strong enough to cut myself off completely.

He established a studio in Montparnasse, at 18 Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and began his relationship with the American painter Anne Estelle Rice. In Paris, Fergusson eagerly embraced all the new discoveries being made in painting by Cézanne, the Fauves and the Cubists. His ideas were now thoroughly steeped in this new wave of French Modernism. It was a time of great optimism, an optimism almost tangible in all his work of this period. Also in Chapter Four, he says this:

[A]bout 1909 or 1910 Picasso and Braque simultaneously they say, realised the possibilities, or became intrigued in, the idea of compositions of forms; forms that were quite representational, and resembling objects or things as definite as roofs of houses, boats or trees, but not necessarily in the juxtaposition as they were in nature, but in the juxtaposition that seemed to them good in the composition of forms they were presenting. At a stroke these two liberated the world of art from the slavery of trying to make things fit the ordinary accuracy of position according to recognised conventional measurements, topographical, anatomical, or otherwise.

This was what John Berger called ‘The Moment of Cubism’. In his 1969 essay of that title, he compares the significance of Cubism with that of the Renaissance, noting that while the Renaissance lasted for over half a century, Cubism lasted about six years. Yet the similarity of the depth in understanding and perception is comparable, just as the changes enacted in one ‘moment’ and then in the other were similarly profound. Both signalled ‘moments’ in which the potential of the world was changing human perception of what the future might be, and the imagination was working to propose a future that would be utterly different from the past: ‘Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing it expressed a new relationship between man and reality.’ This is Fergusson’s definition of modern painting:

And that is the point about modern painting. I mean the modern movement of the last thirty or forty years. It was an attempt to get back to fundamentals, and it succeeded. It couldn’t possibly resemble academic painting which never is concerned with anything fundamental, so it naturally resembles any other art but the academic, and by that I mean the academic ancient or modern. So there’s nothing out of order about really modern painting resembling really ancient painting, which was in its time of course really modern, and there’s no reason to feel clever at having seen a resemblance, or to be astonished or to be sure that the artist has merely copied it from something in a museum.

Although influenced by Picasso and Braque, Fergusson was never a Cubist. He was too much in love with strong colour, decoration and all manner of sensual subject matter, and much less so with construction. But later, in the years after the First World War, he became as Josef Herman noted, ‘Britain’s leading Cézanne-ist’. The journey towards this Cézanne-ist position that saw him move forward from the influences of Whistler and Manet was a shared one with Peploe, who lived in France from 1910 to 1912. During this period the two friends worked closely together, often outdoors, painting rapidly and spontaneously as their paintings took on a new Fauvist simplicity. All of the major ‘advances’ of early modern art were the result of group efforts, and never the work of lone individuals. In this sense Fergusson and Peploe were well-matched collaborators, encouraging each other to explore new paths and take new risks.

Le Manteau Chinois, 1909