Full Description
For seventy years, William Gillies has been seen as a placid painter of landscape and decorative still life. Andrew McPherson explodes this view to reveal a modernist whose response to the instabilities and violence of modernity touched universals of human experience. Gillies' idiom was shaped by institutions for artistic production unique to Scotland. But it was the politics of Scotland's connections to the rest of the British Isles that produced his mythic and misleading reputation.New paintings and new meanings are uncovered placing the micro-effects of modernity on mental health, family and community in the wider contexts of war, nationalism and public patronage. McPherson also shows how this changing world led Gillies towards new applications of modernist expression. Lavishly illustrated, and referencing almost one thousand works, this major reappraisal is an indispensable source on the cultural politics of a four-nation state and the reception of modernism in Britain.
Contents
Select Abbreviations
Foreword
Note on the Dates and Titles of Images
Preface
Purpose
The two books
Method
Organisation
The List of Works
First Acknowledgements
Preview
1 Introduction
Introduction: 'something ... generative was happening'
Modernity, modernism and the countryman fiction
Patronage, cultural politics, mentors, intuition and chance
Haddington and Edinburgh reconsidered
'Leading artists and sculptors of the modern school': Gillies in context
Methods, sources and organisation
2 Origins and Childhoood
Introduction: perspectives on family and change
Town, city, asylum: the family diaspora, 1860-1910
The educational ladder
Primary-school friendships, 1903-10
Secondary-school Dux, 1910-16
Conclusion
3 Childhood Sensibility
Preview
Eclectic memories
Learning to picture: childhood mentors, 1910-16
Seventy-one pictures: the visual evidence
The emergent sensibility
4 The Afterlife of War
Introduction: the silence of the survivor
Haldane and Haddington, 1905-16: test-bed for a modern army
To the trenches and back, 1917-19
Infantry private and artist: preview of a future self
Fiction and experience: the existential legacy
Back to college, 1919-23
Time bent back: the legacy extended
5 The Family Economy
Preview
Supported by sisters: the family pact, 1920-29
Edinburgh years: retrenchment, insecurity and loss, 1930-39
The flight to Temple village in 1939
Promotion, security, and selling-up in Edinburgh, 1946-48
6 Kailyard and Kin
Modernism or sentimentality? J M Barrie, MacDiarmid and Kirriemuir
'a spot where pilgrimages are made': the family-origins story
Divergent family values: recasting past and future
Lived modernity: scepticism, mutuality, science and gender
'grown silent': when experience controverts narrative
7 Bohemian Edinburgh
Introduction: public images, private lives
The Society of Eight and dead men's shoes
Munch, decadence, scandal and Herbert Read
Cultured circles: gilded, Catholic, nationalist, gay
Frustrated love in Oslo, Edinburgh and the French Riviera
An audience schooled in modernist sophistications
8 Emma, Janet and Margery
Introduction: aspects of thyroid disease
Emma Smith Gillies: potter, feminist, casualty
Living and dying with misdiagnoses
'Sweet on Gillies': the artist and Margery Porter
9 Portraits
Introduction: 'to whisper rather than to state'
The 1920s: keeping his hand in
The 1930s: sacred and profane, playful and confessional
Artist and mirror: facing present, future and past
10 Landscapes and Still Lifes, 1925-39
Overview: 'a charter of liberty'
Cubism in Paris, Edinburgh and London
Shaken by Munch: the disintegrated landscape
The emergent idiom: perception, abstraction and Klee
'The tree in the field': perception, introspection and imaging
Beyond mere appearance: still life and existential crisis
11 Later Still Lifes
Introduction and overview: abstraction and the 'curious gap'
Hundreds of still lifes: trends, 1925-73
Wartime: 'just what the times demand'
The 1955 RSA Diploma painting
Life and death in abstraction, 1947-60
Inner and outer worlds: in pursuit of a unity, 1960-72
12 Later Landscapes in Oil
Introduction: Temple continuities, 1940-49
Dispersed forms of imagination: the Borders, 1949-60
Visual summations, 1960-72
13 Politics, Patronage and Later Landscapes on Paper
Introduction: 'a curious exaltation'
The works on paper, 1940-72
The Edinburgh Festival, nationalism, and the countryman fiction
The countryman and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Conclusions
Timeline
All Abbreviations
Notes to Chapters
Details of Illustrations
List of Works
Select Bibliography
Indicative Primary Sources
References
Permissions
Image Credits
Acknowledgements
Index of Gillies Artworks
General Index
