Old College Quad, The University of Edinburgh, looking east. The Talbot Rice Gallery is situated in the south-westerly corner of the site, just to the right of this image. Courtesy of the University of Edinburgh.

Works from the Torrie Collection displayed in the interior of the Talbot Rice’s main neoclassical gallery space, 2016. Courtesy of the Talbot Rice Gallery.

Duncan, how did it all begin?

When I arrived in Edinburgh in 1964, straight from the Courtauld, the University Library was being built in George Square. The then librarian did the disgraceful thing of taking the books out of the library in Old College, but this left a vacant space. Professor of Fine Art David Talbot Rice’s first attempt to establish a gallery was when Adam House was built in the 50s. The top floor had been kitted out for a gallery, but this had never really worked. When the library was moved to George Square, the old reading room in Old College - originally part of the university museum - became our first foothold for the Talbot Rice. I remember this beautiful neoclassical space being done out by Robert Matthew. The oak floor was covered in red hog-bristle carpet and the walls in red hessian. I eventually got rid of all that.

Then the White Gallery, as we called it, opened in 1975. Originally the Anatomy lecture theatre and so a very deep space, it had been kitted out with several floors in cast iron and glass as part of the library stacks. There was quite a lot of shilly-shallying about the conversion though. The architect, John Reid, was determined to fill the space with a staircase. Architects don’t like art. A committee of myself, Giles Robertson, Ivor Davies and Michael Bury was in charge of the project. When we refused to allow the staircase, John Reid gave up and handed the project to a junior in his office so we got it done out in the way that it is today, with the upper level and the top light.

In the old university organisation there was something called the Pictures Committee, which David Talbot Rice chaired. He had a small budget and he bought art, principally as furniture. He did however acquire some pretty good things. Nevertheless, the collection didn’t exist in any formal way at all. The portraits had been catalogued but the wider collection hadn’t. So far as a catalogue existed at all it was in a card index in a box in the Secretary's office. So just by accident I think, because the Secretary’s office was in Old College and because the Pictures Committee was run through the University Secretary, if somewhat vaguely, the Talbot Rice gallery came under the Secretary’s office rather than the Faculty of Arts. It remains in Old College today, of course, although it came to be associated with Edinburgh College of Art after the merger of the College and the University in 2011.

Empty stacks in the former Anatomy lecture theatre, now the Talbot Rice’s White Gallery.

Would the gallery now known as the Talbot Rice have come into being without the efforts of David Talbot Rice?

David Talbot Rice had this ongoing engagement with the practical side of the visual arts, which he took very seriously. This responsibility came with the Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art set up jointly between the University and the RSA and so with a clear commitment to teaching practising artists. Up until the end of the Second World War, students from the College came to art history lectures in the University. William Johnstone and William Gear both told me how important these lectures were for them when they were at the College of Art. Nevertheless, Talbot Rice was very much a “gentleman” academic. He had a farm in Gloucestershire and initially his appointment was half-time. When he realised he was only getting half the salary by doing the job half the time, however, he decided to go full time! He was also a pioneer, though. He was really the first scholar to take Byzantine art seriously, certainly in the English-speaking world. At the University, he was very effective. He was a strong man and he got what he wanted. He appointed me in 1964, I suspect on the recommendation of Anthony Blunt, who had been my tutor at the Courtauld.

I think that when David died in 1972 and the whole thing was in limbo, nobody thought about setting up a committee to oversee the gallery, fortunately perhaps, and so it just grew. Things were much more casual in the University in those days. Nowadays the whole thing would be hidebound by committees, which is why when I became curator, I wanted to keep it away from the Faculty of Arts. I felt pretty sure that when times were hard, as they soon were, they would quickly shut it down. They would certainly also have wanted a say in what was going on, but I was completely free.

I think it’s important to reflect on the fact that the University was a much more loosely organised place in those days. There was no bureaucracy. If you wanted to set up a course, you just set up a course and taught it. This is how I set up my Scottish art course. I’d been teaching a British art course in the early 70s. I was teaching first years and second years, but my Honours course was on British art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pre-Raphaelites, Hogarth, Blake. I finished my PhD in I think ’74. It was on Alexander Runciman. There was so little Scottish art history written that I soon realised that to write my thesis I would have to cover much more than just his biography. That pushed me towards wider study of the subject and so I decided to teach a purely Scottish course, which was the first of its kind.

How did you come to be appointed curator?

Ivor Davies ran the Talbot Rice till ’78. I think Ivor did his best but the gallery got no significant funding at all. Ivor had made his name as an artist through destruction in art. Back in the 60s, he’d blown things up and burned things in the name of art. Perhaps this activity didn’t encourage the Scottish Arts Council, really the only available source of funding at the time. I’m guessing, really, but certainly there was a standoff between the Arts Council and the University about the Talbot Rice. There was just £1000 a year to run the gallery, half from the Arts Council and half from the University, and no staff. Even then, that was not much.

When Ivor left to teach in Wales, I was reluctant take the gallery over. With no funding, it didn’t seem to have much future. It was a bit of a lame duck in fact. There wasn’t any provision for time allowance or anything like that on offer. Being the curator was just an additional duty, on top of teaching. And our teaching burden in those days was very heavy. We did it all. Taking on something extra didn’t seem wise, but I did it.

In the beginning, I had no staff. I did eventually get a secretary however and I also had a servitor, but strictly to mind the door. I think it must have been in ‘81 that Giles Robertson retired as Professor of Fine Art. He wasn’t replaced, because that was the way things were then, so as the senior member of the department, I had to take over as head for three years. It was then that Peter Brand, professor of Italian and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the time, and a really nice and imaginative person, stepped in and said “it’s going to be really rough if you’re going to try and run the Talbot Rice and teach and chair the department, so we’ll get you the money for an assistant at the gallery and split your job, so that half of you is employed through the University administration – the Secretary – and half through the Faculty of Arts, and this will ease the burden”. That was an important step forward because it meant that for the first time, I had dedicated time to run the gallery, and some assistance too. Bill Hare started to help me part-time and I gradually worked him into the position of being my assistant. Later, Andrew Patrizio worked with me too. He was doing his PhD at the time, which I was supervising, so he kind of became adjacent to the Talbot Rice. Another good person to have around.

It might be a coincidence, but when I took over the responsibility of curator in 1978, the financial standoff I mentioned cracked. A nice guy in Lothian Region whose name regretfully I cannot recall, came along and said “look, I could give you serious support and that might unlock other things”. He offered us £5000 a year, which the Arts Council then matched - they were pretty much obliged to match it - and which the University had to match too. So we went from having £1000 a year to £15,000 a year. It was still not generous, but it was a viable budget. And that was how I was able to start a proper programme.

A typical exhibition installation in the Talbot Rice’s White Gallery. Here, an exhibition of works by Elizabeth Blackadder.

Your programme aimed to engage the public as well as those within the University. By that time, you had a reputation as a serious academic, and the growing team was made up of some serious academics too. Was it a challenge to develop a programme which would appeal to a broad public, not just those on the inside?

It was difficult getting people in. The attendance numbers were never really thrilling, but the visitors did seem to be more from the general public than the University. It wasn’t a very convenient place to get to, tucked away in a corner of Old College, up a stair. So that was an anxiety, but on the other hand it didn’t ever really hold us back. Making sure you had an interested public was the trickiest bit, which on the whole I think we did. The University certainly got more people in through the Talbot Rice than through any other way. The gallery was really one of the very few places in the University, other than the dental hospital, where people weren’t stopped from coming in! We also got more people into the gallery after 1984, which was the four hundredth anniversary of Old College. That was when I brought the Torrie Collection back together. Named after Sir James Erskine, 3rd Baronet of Torrie, who donated it to the University in the nineteenth century, the collection includes some of the finest Dutch painting and Renaissance sculpture in Scotland. It was important to bring the collection back together. Regrettably, it is now no longer on view. Nothing is properly shown anywhere now. I showed other collections, like the Hope Scott, several times in the gallery. We were able to make sense of things and demonstrate just how important they were.

Cover of the catalogue which accompanied the Talbot Rice’s exhibition of works from the Torrie Collection, 1984. The image shows a detail from Fishing Boats in a Calm by Willem Van der Velde the Younger.

It was my initiative to say to the Secretary that we really needed to put the collection onto a formal basis and make the Talbot Rice the centre for the University’s art collection. At that time, there was no organised collection strategy or administration or anything. We just had a shoebox with filing cards in it. I was also chairing something called the University Museums’ Group, which was a gathering of the university museums in Scotland. Prompted by that perhaps, I identified all the collections scattered around the University and brought the various individuals responsible for them in different ways together in a committee under my chairmanship. Thus the Talbot Rice became a sort of art collections agency within the University administration. I think that was very important because there were collections which were completely unidentified with nobody really looking after them at all. There was an important zoology collection which the technicians rescued from a skip because the zoologists had decided they didn't need it any more. There was a collection of forensic medicine that was dumped and lost. Very important musical collections had no central oversight. So it wasn’t a power grab or anything, but my efforts at that time were necessary in the development of the University as a modern institution. It was important that it recognised what it had and set it to some sort of use. All this sprung from the basic philosophy of the Talbot Rice, which was to bring people in and show them that the University had more to it than what they could see from the outside. And once we had the art collection onto a proper footing, we were able to receive pictures with a clear conscience too.

How important were gifts to the development of the collection?

There were various gifts coming in. John Bellany and Alan Davie both donated important works over the years. One of the most delightful gifts was actually from a person who came along and said “look, I've got these two portraits of the University porter and his wife from about 1840”. The porter was a very important individual. He was the guy who ran Old College! It was wonderful. I put these portraits up in the lobby of Old College. There were ladies and gents loos there, and I had these portraits at opposite ends. As pairs often do, the portraits were facing each other. But to hang them that way meant the wife was on the side of the gents and the porter was on the side of the ladies. And there was one officious woman who really complained about this!

In the muddle after the sudden death of the then librarian, Ian Mowat, and really without my being aware of it, the Talbot Rice and the collections were put under the Library. This was a step back as far as I was concerned. A whole different mindset was involved.

We did receive collections as well as individual gifts and one of the most important came from Hope Scott. She was a lovely lady. A member of the Younger family, she had a passion for art which was encouraged by her friendship with William Johnstone, the artist. When we gave William his honorary degree – I was very eager to push this through – she said she’d like to give her collection to the University. It included some great things, although annoyingly Douglas Hall at the Modern Art Gallery had cherrypicked it a bit. I think he took some of William’s wonderful abstract plaster reliefs.

You showed quite a lot of William Johnstone’s work at the Talbot Rice.

We did an exhibition with him quite early on, I think in ’74. It was a bit later, when I started writing for Art Monthly, that William, who must have been into the latter half of his seventies, sent me a beautifully written letter saying “I was very pleased to see a piece by you…” He’d been reading Art Monthly, aged 78 or whatever he was. “I thought your piece was brilliant… You have a great future”, or something like that. Wasn’t that a nice thing to do? I don’t say he was talent-spotting me but he did have an extraordinary record. When you look at his record as Principal at the Central School, he had appointed Eduardo Paolozzi, Alan Davie, William Turnbull… Talbert McLean told me that he, too, had been approached by William Johnstone in the 1930s. He was bringing in imaginative people and encouraging them. I don't think Eduardo or Alan Davie would have flourished in the way they did without William’s active encouragement.

The second exhibition of William’s work, which took place in the same year he received his honorary degree, which was actually the year of his death, was a major one. That was 1981. It was the retrospective that had been at the Hayward Gallery and I took it over, although not quite as it had been there, because William came along and together we rejigged the whole thing. It was great. A wonderful show. Later, for William’s centenary I put on a show of his work drawn mainly from the Hope Scott collection.

Abstract painting featured heavily in the Talbot Rice’s exhibitions during your time as curator.

Once I had equipped the inside of the Talbot Rice, which I did for the Jack Bush show in ’79 – I built big, solid, freestanding screens, and also put hanging surfaces across the windows – it became a high, white, light space which was very well suited for big abstract paintings. They looked great there. That Jack Bush show, William’s show, and others by Talbert McLean and John McLean… Their art just made that place alive.

The first show I organised in the Talbot Rice was of the work of Talbert McLean. I owed a debt of honour to Talbert because he was very influential to me. Apart from the exhibitions I saw in Edinburgh occasionally, travelling from St Andrews, it was Talbert who introduced me to contemporary art. When I was at St Andrews, I was in halls with Talbert’s son John, who became a close friend, and he had this amazing abstract picture hanging over his bed. I’d never seen anything like it really. It was by Talbert.

Talbert McLean. Carlingheugh. Oil on board. 1959. 71 x 122cm. Courtesy of the Fine Art Society.

Poor Talbert. He was an outsider. The RSA, even the SSA, turned him down, which is extraordinary given his art is of such quality. He remains an outsider. His oeuvre is not huge. He never had a proper studio. But his work is of real high integrity. His art is now rare, expensive and sought after!

There's a lovely early picture he did of a guitar player, which is very like James Cowie. Cowie was at Hospitalfield till 1948. And Talbert, after the war, settled in Arbroath. Cowie was there long enough to influence him, as many people were. Talbert was art teacher at Arbroath Academy. I remember walking along the pier in Arbroath with him and John and this enormous guy climbed up out of a fishing boat in his oilskins and wellies, and when he saw Talbert his face just lit up. “Mr McLean!”, he said... What a wonderful commendation for a teacher!

Talbert moved into rather more austere still lifes with greys and yellows in the 50s, then he moved into something considerably more abstract, and then, though he did it beautifully, he followed John into gestural abstraction. You could still see how Cowie had influenced him, even when he moved into gesture, which is about as far from Cowie as you can get. Like Cowie, he was such a fastidious artist. John McLean had the same sense of rightness and wrongness. John Bellany and Alan Davie were both a million miles away from John or Talbert. Alan Davie used to talk about his pictures in the third person: “that’s a great Davie”, he would say. Everything he did was great! Whereas Talbert and John would throw away anything that wasn't absolutely right. That's very important, I think, to have that sense of a standard. Talbert was such a model.

I did shows of John Mclean’s work in 1995 and 2003. He was an old friend and I felt no qualms about showing a friend because he was a first-class artist. I think I first showed John’s work at a group show I curated at the Fruitmarket in 1977. It was of four abstract painters, all Scots working in London: John, Fred Pollock, Alan Gouk and Douglas Abercrombie. We had this great show in the Fruitmarket, though it was very difficult to handle these four guys competing for space. It called for quite a diplomatic effort. These London-based Scots leapt at the opportunity to show back in Scotland.

That was when I got Clement Greenberg over. John knew Clem from the time he’d spent in New York and so through John, I was able to approach Clem, who was delighted to come across. It was wonderful. He was somewhat maligned, Clem, but he was a very bright, imaginative person. I drove him up to Arbroath in my Morris Minor to meet Talbert. They were two like-minded men. They shared a kind of austerity of vision which almost has a moral fibre to it: there’s good and bad in art and it is like a moral distinction. It’s not just a matter of competence. Bad art can be pernicious. That was something I learned from Talbert, and from Clem, likewise, that was how he thought.

Jon Schueler, another American, and an abstract painter, established a strong connection with Scotland. I gave him a show, but with a bit of theatre added. I suggested that he paint one or more big canvases in the exhibition and in front of the public over a period of weeks. It really did become theatre as people happily watched him working from the balcony for hours. He loved it. Indeed, years later he told me it was the best exhibition he ever had. Richard Demarco had Joseph Beuys visiting and brought him along to see the show. Much later I did the same thing with James Morrison and he painted a huge Arctic landscape on a semi-circular panel shaped like an arch. Jimmy's family later gave the picture to the Fleming Collection and it has recently been shown in a travelling exhibition on the theme of Scottish artists' early responses to the climate crisis. There were works by Elizabeth Ogilvie and Frances Walker in the show which also had their origins in a Talbot Rice exhibition.

Duncan Macmillan (far left) with Joseph Beuys (second from left) and Jon Scheuler (third from left) at Scheuler’s exhibition at the Talbot Rice, 1981. Behind the group is the work Scheuler painted before a public audience in the gallery. Image by Richard Demarco. Courtesy of the Demarco Digital Archive.

There were many other artists, of course, including some very important figurative painters.

The two shows I did with Steven Campbell were very grand indeed. But working with Steven wasn’t always easy. He was wild. When I wrote a book about him to go with his show in 1993, my system was I’d drop my daughters at their school which was on the west of Edinburgh then drive on to spend the morning with him in Kippen, near Stirling. I’d reach Kippen by quarter past nine or so and by the time I arrived he’d have a mug of vodka on the table. So he was quite difficult to work with because he was so erratic. But we got on and we understood each other. He was certainly one of the outstanding artists of the late twentieth century. In painting he was so original.

I remember Julian Spalding at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow bought a major work from Steven’s show, but that didn’t often happen. Edinburgh’s City Art Centre under Ian O’Riordan did buy a number things, but I think the only thing that Douglas Hall at the Modern Art Gallery ever bought from the Talbot Rice in spite of all these exhibitions of work by people who by any standards were very fine talents was work by Ken Dingwall. I think he did buy a picture by Tablet McLean, but for himself! I tried to sell the gallery a painting by Duncan Shanks, another excellent artist. This painting looked very grand in the gallery. I printed it on the cover of a catalogue. And I kept on pestering Douglas, along the lines of “look, are you going to come and see this exhibition?” Eventually I got through to Keith Hartley and he said “oh well, I'm on my way to the airport but I suppose I could get the taxi to call on the way…” No sense of responsibility at all! These pictures were cheap too. A big picture by Duncan then might have cost £3,000. He's an artist that I feel has been so totally neglected. A very good painter. In 1984, for the four hundredth anniversary of the University, in a nice gesture, we were given birthday presents from the other old universities. Glasgow gave us an excellent Duncan Shanks.

Cover of the catalogue which accompanied the Talbot Rice’s exhibition About Landscape. The image shows the Duncan Shanks painting which was offered to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

I worked with so many wonderful artists. I did one show with Ian Hamilton Finlay, which was fascinating. I got to know him quite well. He was a funny guy, Ian. He could be very difficult. He was the master of the vitriolic letter. It was Lindsay Gordon, who had been on the receiving end of a great deal of it when he was Head of Visual Art at the Arts Council, which Ian hated, who said that “Finlay is a practitioner of the old Scottish art of flyting”. You know, the poetry of studied insult. In fact, Ian was the gentlest soul but he had this wonderful gift for vitriol. Working with him, I didn’t find him at all difficult. We did a show called The Poor Fisherman – which was Ian’s symbolic image, after Puvis de Chavannes – in collaboration with him. It included loans like McTaggart’s Sailing of the Emigrant Ship, prints by William Wilson and the like, which all went together with Ian’s work. But for some reason, Ian drew the line at Will Maclean. He was happy to have his work alongside John Bellany’s. I would have thought Will was closer to Ian than John. But not, apparently.

For most of these one-person shows, I wrote catalogues, which I enjoyed doing. I have no idea how many there are but there must be a lot. Quite a resource. They weren’t very fancy productions – we would just go along to Featherhall Press, put it together and print it – but they were economical. We were never able to publish very fancy catalogues, unless I worked with Mainstream or Phaidon, which I did on a couple of occasions. We had an important exhibition of Will Maclean’s work, for which I wrote a monograph which Mainstream published. The book also went into a second, updated edition. There was the monograph on Steven too, also published by Mainstream. I would like to have updated Steven’s book. The title, The Story So Far, was Steven’s choice picking on a remark I made, and it would have been nice to have rounded it up after his death in 2007. I did that with the book I wrote on Elizabeth Blackadder. The first edition was timed for an exhibition of her work at the Talbot Rice, I think, the second after her death. There’s so much to do.

Throughout your time at the Talbot Rice, did you have a sort of philosophy to guide you?

I was developing a philosophy of the Talbot Rice as I went along really. The main thrust of my programme as it developed was one person exhibitions by artists who had got a reasonable track record but who had limited exposure. There was - and still is, to some extent - a group of artists who are not really getting the exposure they need. By that I mean artists who had already established themselves and who had their body of work, but with nowhere to show it. So that was why I tended not to focus on the young, for whom there was quite a lot of provision. Everyone was thinking about the young but when they grew up, there was nothing for them. In Steven Campbell’s lifetime, he only had three major public gallery shows and I did two of them. I felt it was important to give support to artists like Will Maclean, Frances Walker, John McLean, Steven Campbell. I gave William Gear his first show for many years and it relaunched his career. There were many others too who I felt deserved the kind of exposure and cachet that came from showing in a public gallery.

Guests at the exhibition of Steven Campbell’s work at the Talbot Rice, 1993. The central painting, Painting in Defense of Migrants, was acquired the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, by then curator Julian Spalding.

I felt the support of the artists in return after Lindsay Gordon retired as Visual Arts Officer at the Scottish Arts Council. He had been a good friend of the gallery but his successor tried to remove the main core funding from the Talbot Rice, so I got, I think, 60 artists who had showed at the gallery to write a public letter. Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Steven Campbell, Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, Ken Currie, and so many more… It was a powerful lobby. It just shut her up. It was important to have that public support, too. It showed us we were doing something right.

There had been other challenges to the Talbot Rice too. Our funding, though never generous, was never cut throughout the austerity of the Thatcher years when things were being really badly underfunded and cut. I’m not politically minded, really, but I had the wit to realise that it was very valuable to have the Talbot Rice associated with the University Secretary and not the Faculty of Arts, particularly throughout those hard times. Had the gallery been associated with the Faculty of Arts in any way it would have gone. So I stuck with the Secretary. It was also fortunate that two successive Principals, Sir John Burnett and Sir David Smith, were botanists and so understood the importance of the visual. So the Talbot Rice existed in a little cocoon away from University politics. I was very pleased with that.

How did your work at the Talbot Rice relate to the broader objectives you had in your sights? During your time as curator, your passion for Scottish culture was of course very great indeed. In 1979, the year after you became curator, the devolution referendum failed on a technicality, so Scotland was denied a parliament of her own, despite the will of the electorate. I’m interested to know what was going through your mind at that time.

The 1979 referendum was a real kick in the balls to all of us. It made us realise that we had to try a lot harder. That was what focussed my mind on what I wanted to do. Being brought up in Scotland in the 40s and 50s, it was a very depressed place. That art is an important part of a nation’s self-esteem and self-esteem is as important in nations as in individuals was the insight I began with; a thought inspired I think by the disappointment of 1979. Low self-esteem was not good for Scotland’s future, so the idea was to work to give the nation back its art. We were brought up to think we were a philistine nation. We weren’t, but even in the early 1990s, I remember reading a headline in the Sunday Times about Calvinist denial of art in Scotland. And I remember, too, spotting a catalogue in an Amsterdam second-hand bookshop in about ’71 or ’72. It was for an exhibition of British art put on by the British Council. It included Ramsay and Raeburn and other Scots but a helpful map didn't include Scotland at all. It showed the British Isles cut off at Berwick-upon-Tweed. Certainly, by the time I became curator, Scotland and its art were there to be discovered and re-presented. It was important that it was done at a level of popular access and it’s happened. People in Scotland take pride in their art now. I like to think that the long process of rediscovery which has eventually resulted in the new Scottish wing in National Gallery was helped by the popularity of the book I published in 1990. Whatever, it has now happened. And it's wonderful. So I feel very pleased, though it’s been a slow process.

The Talbot Rice was all part of that because it gave me an agency. My first serious public undertaking in the field was the show I called Masterpieces of Scottish Portrait Painting in 1981. I had loans from all over for precious things that hadn't been seen in public before. Wonderful Ramsays from houses in Fife, for instance, and Wilkie’s great Chalmers Bethune family portrait, now a star of the National Gallery collection, which was quite unknown before that show. It was an odd show in a way but it made a statement about Scottish art historical as well as contemporary and that was my purpose.

Cover of the catalogue which accompanied the Talbot Rice’s Masterpieces of Scottish Portrait Painting show, 1981. The cover shows Wilkie’s 1804 portrait of the Chalmers Bethune family.

How important was George Elder Davie to you as your conception of Scottish art developed? His 1961 book The Democratic Intellect is often cited as a key text which has stimulated thought about Scottish intellectual identity.

George was hugely significant to me. I was never taught by him. I don’t think I even ever sat down with him. He was a genuine peripatetic philosopher. You’d meet him in the doorway of the National Library and have 15 or 20 minutes of profoundly important conversation, then he’d move on. The Democratic Intellect was important, no question. George did two things for me really. He confirmed the importance of philosophy in what I was trying to do and he endorsed my thinking quite specifically with regard to Thomas Reid and my whole thesis about Reid and visual art. George was enthusiastic about it and you can imagine how that encouraged me. Crucially, George also stood for the importance of the history of ideas in Scotland. I told him the story about how a pro-Scottish essay I had written for an important show of Scottish art in Helsinki had been banned by the British Ambassador in the run-up to the devolution referendum, in case it ignited nationalist feeling. In reply George described to me how he had been shouted at by the Principal of the University, Sir Edward Appleton, for The Democratic Intellect with its exposition on intellectual history for Scotland separate from that of England and how its distinctive character was threatened by influence from the south. George himself was threatened with all sorts of sanctions for stepping out of line. However wrong Appleton was and however right George was, this prevented him for many years from trusting himself in print. That sort of academic beating-up had a very isolating effect.

In 1979, however, there was a sort of unconscious, collective getting-together of thinking “we've really got to do something about this situation”. Far from knocking us back, it stimulated quite a lot of us to try harder. There were attempts to knock me back, however. In the mid-1980s Eric Fernie, then Professor of Fine Art, tried to shut down, or at least radically curtail the Scottish course I was teaching. Fortunately and quite surprisingly, my colleagues rallied round me. But it wasn’t ever easy.

It seems to me that you made great strides in the 1980s. In 1986, the Talbot Rice and then the Tate played host a very significant exhibition of Scottish art, Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age.

That was a big project which was really very important in the development of my own thinking. I don't really remember how it evolved, but I wrote three essays in the early 80s in Cencrastus, the Scottish arts magazine founded in response to the 1979 Referendum, which in the end became the outline of my big Scottish book. I suppose my PhD was where it all began, but some catalyst then made me think that I could do a project on the whole Enlightenment period, which is key to the story.

In 1984, as Head of Department, I had the responsibility of organising the Association of Art Historians conference which brought a lot of art historians to Edinburgh. There I met Simon Havilland, who was head of Phaidon at the time. When I mentioned my project, he, being a nice, imaginative man, said “what a good idea, why don’t we do that?” From there, the idea of an exhibition evolved. One of the oil companies backed it – something you couldn’t do nowadays - so it became an exhibition on a really ambitious scale. At the Talbot Rice, it took up the whole of the White Gallery, the whole of the Red Gallery and the whole of what is now called the Playfair Library. We had Raeburn’s full-length portrait of Nathaniel Spens hanging at the end of the library. The only picture that I was initially refused was from the Royal Collection: Wilkie’s Penny Wedding. I was showing the Duke of Edinburgh around an exhibition - over the years I had quite a lot to do with him, as he was Chancellor of the University – and said “well, I’ve got this project but unfortunately one of the Royal Collection pictures has been refused”. “Ah!”, he said. I got a crawling letter from Oliver Millar, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, about a week later. “I've reconsidered… Your exhibition is more important than I thought”. I give full marks to the Duke of Edinburgh! It was wonderful. The show was only at the Talbot Rice for three or four weeks because of other pressures on the space. Alan Bowness was the Director of the Tate at the time, however. He had been one of my tutors at the Courtauld. He remained a good friend and said he wanted the show for the Tate, probably over squeals of protest from his staff. So the show went to the Tate in the autumn of ‘86. The first major exhibition of Scottish art in London since Caw’s exhibition before the war. The book that came out of that was my first major publication on the subject. Unfortunately, Phaidon then closed down abruptly, so the book didn’t have the circulation that it should have had. But it was a wonderful thing to do.

Surely your most significant book, Scottish Art 1460-1990, followed a few years later.

That again was made possible by an accidental conversation. It was with Bill Campbell at Mainstream. I met Bill at some reception and I said “I had this idea…” and he too replied “why don't we do it?” I’d had the idea of doing a big book on Scottish art much earlier but then in 1975 David and Francina Irwin published their book, Scottish Painters at Home and Abroad. That didn't put me off completely. Nor did John Nichol at Yale, who when I took the idea to him said there wouldn’t be a market for a book like that. These setbacks did postpone things, but also gave my ideas time to develop. The initial project with Mainstream was much smaller in scale than the book turned out to be, but Bill and his team were brilliant. Really, the whole future of Mainstream actually hinged on the project financially because it was such an expensive production. They backed it nevertheless and it was a success. I think briefly that Christmas it was the bestselling Scottish book, which did come as a surprise. Later, when I tried for a chair at St Andrews, I realised that as I was being interviewed, I was actually being asked to defend the fact that this book had been popular!

There’s good reason for us to focus on the Scottish dimension of your work carefully, but it is important to note that you brought a truly international dimension to the Talbot Rice too.

I had very good relationships with the various consulates and national organisations in Edinburgh. The Norwegian Consulate, for instance, and the Danish, French and Italian Institutes. Indeed, several of the directors over the years became good friends. Through them I was able to bring in exhibitions from abroad and this gave a real international dimension to the Talbot Rice programme. Through this kind of link, too, I established relationships with a number of artists overseas with whom I went on working. One of them was the Italian artist Eugenio Carmi and through him I ended up as joint author of a book with Umberto Eco! I kept a close connection with Denmark, too, where I published a variety of things, mostly for the artist Peter Brandes.

I was also closely involved with a pioneering organisation in Edinburgh called the European Committee for Cultural Cooperation, which brought together all the EU representatives in Scotland for cultural cooperation. Latterly, I chaired it. The biggest joint project we did was Lux Europae, a city-wide light show for the meeting of EU heads in Edinburgh in 1990. Ian Hamilton Finlay's contribution was the best. It was a big neon sign reading "European Heads", but the word “Heads”, which seemed to drop off at the end, had clearly been on the receiving end of the guillotine! The British Council eventually sabotaged the ECCC, but I recently learned that the idea has been taken up in Brussels with great success.

The international dimension was important. Even with limited resources, principally by connecting with Edinburgh's international diplomatic and cultural community, the Talbot Rice managed to run an international programme. Just from memory, we had shows from or took shows to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Czechoslovakia, as it then was, as well as the US, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, South Africa and Japan. John Pope-Henessy, then Director, was even keen that the Golden Age show went to the Met in New York, but that didn't happen!

How did your time at the Talbot Rice come to a close?

At that time, you had to retire at 65, which for me was 2004. I semi-retired in 2000, which meant I gave up teaching but I carried on at the Talbot Rice till 2004. So I served the University from the 1st of October 1964 to the 30th of December 2004. 40 years exactly!

The last project that I did was called Object Lessons. That was a kind of swan song for me because the purpose of the show was to demonstrate quite how profoundly important the visual had been in Edinburgh’s success as an academic institution. And not only the visual, but also collecting. These two things had worked together. From medicine downwards, there’s the Enlightenment tradition of the importance of seeing manifest in the vital role of drawing in medical research and publication. Amongst other remarkable things on show we had a model of a salt molecule. It was the first ball-and-stick molecular model and the prototype of all molecule models. That was made by Alexander Crum-Brown, the then Professor of Chemistry, using his wife’s knitting needles and balls of wool. And that's just what it is, but all molecular models derive from it. There were many wonderful things in the show. Napier’s bones, for instance, together with his portrait, or a photo of a girl who was the first child to be born under anaesthetic. Inevitably, perhaps, the poor child had to live with the name Anaesthesia.

Installation shot of the Talbot Rice’s Object Lessons exhibition, 2003.

40 years… I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t have the Talbot Rice. There, I was able to do what I wanted. Nobody cared, really, basically, because they didn’t think the Talbot Rice was important. I was just allowed to get on with it. I didn’t have any committee or anything interfering with me. I had my own space.

Today, administratively, the Talbot Rice is part of the College of Art and Humanities within the University. So the art collection, banished from the Talbot Rice by my successor and handed over to the library, has ended up without a meaningful place for it to be shown. That is very sad.

After our meeting, Duncan sends me an essay called The Thought Police. I suspect he would agree that his essay figures as a fitting conclusion to our conversation, setting out as it does his thoughts on the current state of public galleries like the Talbot Rice. The Thought Police, I find, is a rare polemic by Duncan. He considers this century’s professional class of curators and what he regards as their circular self-endorsement; as he suggests, they all promote the art that is trendy at the expense of the art that people actually want to see. When I suggest he’s speaking about what Brian Sewell observed as The Serota Tendency, Duncan is willing to put his feelings about Sewell to one side – “I loathed Brian Sewell from the bottom of my heart”, he says – in happy agreement.

It is worth noting that there has been no exhibition of paintings in the Talbot Rice since 2016, with Alice Neel’s one-woman show. This virtually coincided with the re-display of the Torrie Collection, which had not been seen in ten years, and which has not been seen since. These two shows fit rather uncomfortably into the Talbot Rice’s recent exhibition history of mixed media installations, video art and soundscapes.

It is evident that Duncan is out of sympathy with the Talbot Rice just as the gallery’s out of sympathy with the sort of art he stood for. It might be inevitable that the gallery would change so dramatically in its half-century. After all, as Duncan writes in The Thought Police, “the tree of art has grown tall and its branches have spread wide”. Whether the change in the Talbot Rice is good or bad – a moral distinction perhaps? – is not going to be settled easily, and certainly not here.

Certainly, the gallery’s current exhibition, Piedras de Fuego (Fire Stones) by Guadalupe Maravilla, is a world away from Talbert McLean. It is a wide-ranging show of sculptures, paintings and murals cast as shamanic healing instruments. It shows the Talbot Rice confidently holding its own in an international contemporary art context, while its strong public events programme seeks to engage the local public.

It would be a great stretch to say that Duncan’s hand is evident in the gallery’s exhibitions today, but his role in the story of the Talbot Rice has left an indelible mark. Dozens of major talents have derived great benefit from his exhibition programme which reads like a who’s-who of twentieth century Scottish painting; this is to say nothing of his successes in celebrating art which is historic and international. There is little doubt as to the value of high quality shows on contemporary audiences or indeed on the curators who followed Duncan: he reflects that the curators of Edinburgh’s City Art Centre may now hold the torch.

Today, the Talbot Rice is a changed gallery indeed. With such a varied if relatively short history – such a dramatic change of direction after Duncan’s retirement – an interview of his words alone cannot amount to the final word. It might be too early to reflect on the value and importance of the work that has been presented in the gallery after Duncan’s departure. But there can be little doubt that Duncan’s 25 years at the Talbot Rice have left a very great mark. His vision as curator, driven by the ideas and convictions which characterise his life’s work, helped to shape the Scottish art world as it exists today; the history of the Talbot Rice is bound inextricably to his achievements in the field of Scottish art which have left those of us who care about it all the more curious and all the more confident.

Douglas Erskine

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Duncan for his generosity in sharing his thoughts and memories, and his patience and enthusiasm throughout the preparation of this text.

Images have been supplied by the University of Edinburgh, the Talbot Rice Gallery, the Demarco Digital Archive and the Fine Art Society. All of these images are credited appropriately throughout the text. Many thanks to all for their kind permission.

All uncredited images are courtesy of Duncan himself.