Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  A SOURER NOTE

  So when a Glasgow baillie refers to the culture of Glasgow he is probably thinking of The Burrell Collection. This splendid modern building contains tapestries, church furniture and antiques from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Egypt, China, Japan, chiefly maintained by English art specialists, and visited by thousands of tourists from France, Italy, Germany etceteras who are able to enjoy the art of their own lands in a South Glasgow setting. If their feet get tired they visit the restaurant and sit on expensive chairs of tooled hide and polished timber bought from Denmark. Nobody recalls that between the wars Glasgow firms furnished the interiors of luxury liners and State Capitals. But Glaswegians have the consolation of knowing that, though the money which originally paid for all this was Australian, it was raised by a sale of ships built by some of their ancestors. Though nothing of Scottish make appears in it, the whole thing belongs to them through the agency of the Labour councillors most of them have elected.

  It is also likely that recent wide acceptance of Charles Rennie Mackintosh as a great architect and designer have led our councillors to think of his buildings as a cultural addition to the Burrell.

  DISCLAIMER

  This monologue is not another lament for puir auld Glasgow. I believe that, even off the football pitch, Glasgow art exists, but in such broken patchy ways that most folk think it is not there at all, or mistake something else for it, or believe, with Jack MacLean, that it is the pretentious hobby of wealthy snobs. He may be right. I will stop talking historically about Glasgow art and explain how I started trying to make the stuff, and met others with the same obsession.

  PERSONAL NOTE

  I grew up in Riddrie, a corporation housing scheme in East Glasgow where the Edinburgh and Cumbernauld roads diverge. Our tenements were fronted with red sandstone, and the green at the back was all grass with no bare earthy bits.

  Luckily from early childhood my painting and writing had been encouraged as a hobby by parents and teachers, who also said ‘Of course you’Il never make a living by your art in Scotland‘. But when 17 this hobby got me accepted as a student with a Welfare State bursary by –

  GLASGOW ART SCHOOL

  The money which created this school had been raised in the last century by wealthy manufacturers who needed designers for their buildings, furniture and vehicles. Since a designer’s basic training requires drawing and painting they did not mind producing some professional artists too. When our Golden Age ended most students looked forward to careers in teaching. I attended art school in a boom period for potential teachers. The increased birth-rate following the war had made more teachers necessary, and the new welfare state was paying for the further education of people like me whose parents could not have afforded it. So for four or five years a lot of us were able to feel we were entering the profession of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, while knowing that after receiving our diplomas there would be none to commission work from us, no dealers to handle it, and hardly any firms who wanted our skill as designers.

  It is not strange, in such circumstances, that few teachers in the art school excited their students’ imaginations. There had been a fine head of the painting deaprtment in the school during the war – Colquhoun, McBride and Eardley were trained by him – but the Art School governors thought him a bad influence and got the Director to dismiss him. So our teachers painted in what was then called ‘the academic tradition’. They painted as they thought Van Dyke or Corot would have painted had these great men been forced to work in Glasgow. They warned us against Post Impressionism, though one said Cezanne would have painted perfectly well if his eyesight had been repaired by decent spectacles. Students who wanted to make new, exciting art had to learn from each other. Luckily Alan Fletcher was among us.

  ALAN FLETCHER

  There is no such thing as an artistic type. Artists have been henpecked husbands, Don Juans, cautious bachelors and reckless homosexuals. They have been orthodox diplomats working for catholic monarchs (Rubens), fanatical agents of revolutionary republics (David), and comfortable bourgeois Hedonists (Renoir). Alan Fletcher is the only artist I know who naturally looked like the Bohemian artist of legend. He was the free-est soul I ever met, and impressed me so mightily that a diminished version of him has been a character in all the novels I ever wrote. He had to be diminished, or he would have stolen attention from my main characters, who were versions of me. Alan was more mature than most of his contemporaries, having come to art school after serving his national military service. His father was an engineer who maintained the heating in the Grand Hotel at Charing Cross. Alan had taught himself to build up a painting in broad, simple strokes by studying the Whistlers in the Hunterian museum. From reproductions in books and magazines he absorbed essential lessons from contemporary artists like De Stael and Giacometti. He could talk easily to anyone, looked with interest on everything, but laid aside all that was not practically useful to his own vision, his own soul or self. Like a true teacher he did not move others to act or work like him, his example helped us grow more like ourselves. It is not a coincidence that his closest friends (John Glashan, Douglas Abercrombie and Carole Gibbons especially) went on to become professional artists of very different sorts.

  I believe that Scottish painting, especially in the Scottish middle west, would have been a healthier, more public growth had Alan lived. Even without the machinery of art-dealing and patronage his existence as a strong creative intelligence would have drawn attention to his native city and given more courage to the rest of us. But he died.

  MORE PERSONAL NOTES

  Alan and I had only one thing in common: we both loved painting, but the painting teachers did not want us in their classes. He was directed into sculpture and I into mural decoration. Neither of us minded. Alan could master any medium and I was intrigued by the thought of painting on a public scale. Like many artists since the days when most art was commissioned to decorate public buildings, I often regretted that most of my work, if sold, would become just private property. At the age of thirteen I had read The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary, which made me want to paint the murals I imagined Gulley Jimson painting. It also described accurately how this would be. The greatest act of intelligent heroism I could clearly imagine was making a great art work for folk who could not like it. It would be nobler still to die in the attempt. I had no intention of dying, but readers of my first novel will notice that I was looking for the raw materials for it in my own life.

  So in the autumn of I957 I was given my Scottish Education Department Diploma of Design and Mural Decoration, and left Art School for the wilderness of the world. Though not inspiring, the staff were tolerant. They had not stopped me learning what I most wanted to do, and I was grateful.

  I worked as a part-time dominie from 1958 to I962, while painting, in a Church near Bridgeton Cross, a mural I hoped would make me famous. It didn’t, but this is not a hard luck story. I stopped teaching and some plays I wrote were bought by television: not enough to support me, but enough to comfortably support half of me while the other half was supported by occasional portrait or mural jobs. I got friendly with Alasdair Taylor and John Connolly, whose addiction to painting and sculpture would have made them very lonely hermits, had they not had good wives who loved their art too. They lacked the means to exhibit it however. When I first met them Alasdair was a dustman and John an electrical engineer. I was luckier. By the sixties the private galleries which had flourished when Glasgow was an industrial and artistic force had dwindled to nothing very useful. They could be rented, but were dear, so from 1959 to 1974 I put on at least one exhibition a year in places which could be rented more cheaply, such as the R G I Gallery (later called the Kelly Gallery) and places which would cost me nothing: in foyers of the Cosmo Cinema and Citizen’s Theatre, in Glasgow University Research Club, Strathclyde University Staff Club, and once (to coincide with my first TV play) in a colour television showroom in Cuthbertson’s music shop on Cambridge Street. I also showed in the Edi
nburgh Traverse Theatre Gallery, which was run for a few years by Sheila Ross. At none of these shows did I sell enough to pay for the framing and publicity costs, but they proved I was an artist. When the Herald or Scotsman printed a few inches of criticism by Martin Bailie or Cordelia Oliver my heart would leap and I would think “I exist! I exist!”.

  And some folk bought my work. Andrew Sykes, an eccentric curmudgeon who will not bring a libel action against me for saying so, bought steadily from the time he was a mature student at Glasgow University to the time he became a Professor at Strathclyde. In 1974 Mr Steven Elson of the Collins Gallery visited Professor Sykes, saw his collection of Grays, and offered me a large retrospective show for which I did not have to pay. It went well. I sold three pictures, which was all sheer profit. And the three usual Scottish art critics were quite kind, though Emilio Coia was a little surprised that such a big show had been offered to one so unvenerable. (I was only 40).

  A GOOD RESOLUTION

  But I decided never again to pay for an exhibition of my art, or display it unless someone else asked me so.

  WESTMINSTER DOES IT BEST

  Now, the government in South Britain had noticed Scotland was now a depressed province. Within fifteen years it appointed three Royal Commissions to investigate the problem, but since all three had advised that Scotland be given government of its own affairs, their findings had to be ignored. So while our main industries were acquired by outside companies which pulled them out or closed them down, some organizations were created to promote activities which might help us to feel something better was happening. Various Boards were set up, and we got our very own Arts Council. And the Arts Council helped to create new galleries and art centres, so by the late seventies we had many more salaried modern art administrators than self-supporting modern artists.

  The new galleries presented travelling shows of work from South Britain and also art by our own locals, though few of these left the place where they started. So I was delighted when Chris Carrell, director of GIasgow’s Third Eye Centre, offered me a big new retrospective which he wished to take to other cities. So he posted advertisements for this show to other British galleries, asking if they would like to take it. Hardly any answered, and those who did said “No”.

  A RESOLUTION SHATTERED

  Hell hath no fury like the neglected egoist. I was now really keen on a travelling show of my work, a big one which would appear in cities with perhaps more ardent publics. Since the Third Eye could not arrange this I decided to do it for myself, but to do it successfully I needed company. Galleries which had ignored the Third Eye offer of my work might accept me if I hid among Fletcher, Gibbons, Connolly and Taylor who are a very important, but hardly ever visible, part of Scottish painting. Most art students have never heard of them.

  The ploy worked, though it detached me from the Third Eye Centre which lacked the space to put on such an ambitious show in Glasgow. So my first act was to rent the greater part of the McLellan galleries for the December of 1986, and seek venues for my work elsewhere in galleries which would pay the costs of transport, hanging and publicity.

  I was lucky in Edinburgh. Dr Duncan MacMillan offered the Talbot Rice Centre in Edinburgh University’s Old College. So did Andrew Brown in his Cowgate 369 Gallery. Neither has space to show all our work, but in January the Talbot Rice will show Alasdair Taylor, John Connolly and me, the 369 Carole Gibbons and Alan Fletcher. In February 1987 we are recombining in the splendid municipal gallery of Aberdeen. I failed to get shows in England, but nearly got an Irish show through the friendship of Ted Hickey, curator of Belfast municipal art gallery. Something may still come of this. The show in its present form will not leave Scotland, so will be a financial loss to me, although I dearly hope, perhaps, an imaginative victory.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Scottish Arts Council helped us by lending us our work in their collection, and serving as a forwarding address when I advertised for information about works whose present ownership is not known. The Scottish Arts Council did not help us under their scheme of partial guarantee against loss. Their letter of refusal said this was because they ‘were particularly concerned about the basic concept of the exhibition’. I do not know what that meant, apart from being a refusal, but it was certainly final. The panel also felt the rent of the McLeIIan Galleries was too high for it to help me.

  I tried to do something about that. The gallery is owned by Glasgow District Council, so I asked for advice from one of the few Glasgow baillies who has helped the living arts as much as the antique ones. He said there were a couple of committees with the power to reduce the galleries’ rent, and if I sent him some copies of an information sheet about the show he would give them to the relevant people. I did so. A few months later we met by accident and he was not surprised to hear I had had no response. Many decision makers who don't say yes to a request prefer to reply with silence, since refusals often offend. But I suspect the fault may have been mine. My information sheet was seven pages of factual detail and politicians, whether local or national, have no time for a lot of reading.**

  * 1986 catalogue introduction to five retrospective shows in Glasgow McLellan Gallery, which transferred to the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, then to the municipal art gallery of Aberdeen.

  ** The friendly Glasgow Labour town councillor, Johnny Ross, was once the city’s treasurer, and one of our few baillies interested in Glasgow’s arts. He was the practical founder of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow’s oldest kirk, if we exclude the cathedral. Two or three months after McLellan gallery show ended, through him I received a cheque for the money I had paid to rent the McLellan gallery for this exhibition.

  Of John Glashan

  To the Department of German Literature,

  Edinburgh University,

  10 February 1986

  Dear Dr Manfred Malzahn

  Stephanie Wolfe-Murray tells me you would like any information I can give about John Glashan. All I can give you is gossip I have picked up about this great graphic artist whose verbal subtleties fit the eccentric character of his drawings. His father, Archie McGlashan, was a portrait painter and, I think, a Royal Scottish Acadamecian of Edinburgh, though living in Glasgow. I remember portraits of children he painted vigorously in an early 20th century realist style that would please parents, yet without the falsehood of flattery. John dropped the Mc from his second name after going to London in the late 1940s.

  John attended Woodside Secondary, a non fee-paying school for the children of manual workers, tradesmen, clerks and professional folk living near Woodlands Road. This runs from Sauchiehall Street toward Glasgow University, so this district had a wide social mixture, and local children from richer families in those pre-comprehensive school days, mostly went to Hillhead Secondary or Glasgow Academy, so although John’s dad was a professional artist his son, while perfectly self assured, did not feel he belonged to a superior class. In adolescence he was sometimes what in the first half of the 20th century Glasgow called a corner boy. These youths had not enough pocket-money to sit for long in cafes, so stood talking and smoking cigarettes at street corners near their homes, while also exchanging comments on the passing scene. After leaving school John, like all fit youths in those days, did two years National Service in the army. A younger Woodside School pupil saw him when home on leave, at a street corner eating chips from a paper bag. Whenever an attractive girl passed Glashan was heard to say, “Gad! A white woman!” which made his young contemporary think John was on leave from Africa.

  This contemporary, Alan Fletcher, told me nearly all I am telling you about John Glashan, for they became close friends when both were students at Glasgow Art School. The age difference meant that Glashan was in his final years when Fletcher was in his first, but they influenced each other in a way that I can only explain by describing Alan Fletcher himself. He was over six feet tall with a dark complexion, thick black hair, thick eyebrows, huge arching nose, large white teeth and pointed beard – he resembled
, in fact, popular notions of a devil. Without being a deliberate rebel he had no instinctive reverence for authority, so teachers and heads of department found him disturbing. But he was so remarkably talented and polite that they were afraid to become ridiculous by reprehending him. He twice repeated a year at art school, first for poor attendance (he worked hardest at night, so almost always slept late in the morning), the second time because a visiting assessor, faced by a studio of his sculpture, refused to assess it. Saying “I’m not going to say anything about this,” the judge left without passing judgement. This meant Alan repeated his last year, at the end of which a new judge declared Alan’s work excellent, and he was awarded a travelling scholarship – unfortunately. He travelled to Italy and in 1958 died in an accident outside the grounds of Milan youth hostel.

  I have described Alan Fletcher’s appearance because people in nearly all John Glashan’s cartoons are partly based on Alan. The bohemians, alcoholics and geniuses of Glashan’s world have John Glashan’s less than average height, his eyes and his spectacles, with Alan Fletcher’s nose, beard and hair. This visual hybrid stems from an intellectual amalgamation which happened at Glasgow Art School in the early 50s. Both brought that high degree of intelligence to their work which gets folk labelled geniuses. Both knew it and discovered together, or forged together, their own sort of verbal and visual irony. Glashan’s wit is so like Alan Fletcher’s that his cartoons give me the feeling that part of Alan is as alive, creative and funny as ever. I am prejudiced. Three of my novels have a main character based on Alan Fletcher. I first knew Alan after John left for London in 1951. Alan was a collector of discarded oddments, salvaging anything well-made, however useless, including fashion magazines of the Vogue and Tatler sort. The tall, rich, elegant looking models posturing like prostitutes in clothing adverts amused him – also Glashan who, visiting Alan, would draw additions to these in ballpoint pen. After making these additions John would scribble over it, like a cat scratching dirt over a spot where it has urinated. Alan showed me one he had with difficulty preserved. It was a double-page spread swimwear advert in which three beach beauties in bathing costumes smiled tenderly at a child holding a small pail above a sandcastle. John’s additions had turned the child into an adult dwarf with a clerical collar urinating into the pail. He had not touched the women, yet their smiles had gained a wide range of ambiguous meanings.