Scotland and the Visual Arts, Helsinki 1978
In the Autumn of 1978, Scottish Devolution was the hot political topic, Thatcherism was gathering momentum, the IRA and the Cold War provided ongoing tensions, and The Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, working with the Scottish Arts Council, (Note 1) presented a major exhibition of Modern Scottish Art. Sixteen Scottish artists exhibited (Note 2), and eleven were invited to visit Finland for a week as guests. There had been Scottish art exhibitions abroad, but never on this scale, and never with such a large group of Scottish artists present. Has there been one since? We don’t think so.
How was Scottish art presented to another nation?
Duncan Macmillan was commissioned to write the original catalogue introduction, and we publish it in English for the first time here. Duncan has talked about the significance of the occasion and we are delighted that he has written a new preface. This sets out the context of the event and his rather strange relationship with it.
We are not able to track down images of individual works, but thanks to the archives at what is now Amos Rex, we are able to publish, again for the first time, photographs of the exhibition, and the substantial comment and critique published in the Finnish press. How interesting it is to know how others see us.
Over the last few weeks, art-scot has talked to four of the artists who made the trip, and their recollections round off this documentary.
Poster for Modernia taidetta Skotlannista Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, 1978
INTRODUCTION, 2024
by Duncan Macmillan
In the run-up to the first referendum in 1979, sums of money suddenly became available for projects that might make it look as though Westminster cared about Scotland. Colin Thompson, then director of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), built the extension to the gallery on the Mound with this bribe. (The result however was the glum basement in which for years Scottish art languished. It was eventually incorporated into the new Scottish wing.) Colin also told me that money was available for a gallery of modern art, but Douglas Hall, then director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), failed to move quickly enough. The Scottish Arts Council (SAC) was evidently encouraged to do something similar and it was decided that an exhibition and trip to Finland for sixteen artists could provide evidence of Scotland’s international outreach without actually taking any risks. An exhibition in Paris might have been more dangerous. The powers that be had evidently overlooked the fact that Finland’s history was one of embattled, but eventually triumphant independence. (The boost to the cause of Finnish independence from Russia given by Akseli Gallen-Kalella’s overtly nationalist paintings in the Finnish Pavilion in the Paris World’s Fair in 1900 was also overlooked.)
Even so, this event was closely monitored. I was commissioned to write the catalogue essay for the exhibition. What I wrote was a historical introduction to Scottish art with further commentary on the situation as it was then in Scotland. I was also due to go on the trip to Finland with the artists and to give two lectures, but time went by. No invitation materialised and the trip went off without me. Eventually Lindsay Gordon, then head of Visual Art at the SAC, revealed to me what had happened. My essay had been sent for vetting to the British Council. That an art essay needed vetting shows just how political this event was. The British Council had then passed the essay to the British Ambassador in Helsinki, Sir James Cable, and he had demanded that it be scrapped. It was pointed out to him that banning an essay in Finnish and Swedish in an art catalogue might be more contentious than just letting it be published. He insisted nevertheless that my invitation should be withdrawn. Richard Demarco was sent in my place and, much to the astonishment of the Finns, I was told, in my absence the ambassador devoted his speech at the opening of the show in Helsinki to an attack on me. When the Finns found out what had happened they invited me on a lecture tour anyway.
Scottish artists at Amos Anderson Art Museum, 1978 (Gavin Scobie, third from left; Robert Shaw (sixth from left), Elizabeth Ogilvie (seventh from left) (photo: Robert Callender, courtesy of Elizabeth Ogilvie )
SCOTLAND AND THE VISUAL ARTS.
by Duncan Macmillan
The historical position of Scotland is like that of Finland. It is a small nation on the edge of Europe, her history dominated in recent centuries by her relationship with an overmighty neighbour. Independent through her history, in 1707 for political and economic reasons she gave in to pressure from England and by the Act of Union surrendered her autonomy to join in what the Scots thought was a new political unit, the United Kingdom. Until very recently the English simply regarded it as a larger England, but the Scots, though they lost their political autonomy with this treaty, kept their sense of their own identity which could not be disposed of so easily. In spite of the shift of political power to London, Scotland retained her own culture, not just at a folk level, but at the level of serious artistic and intellectual endeavour, and though this became increasingly involved with England where the main source of patronage lay, it has remained distinct.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Gallery Photo 1, Donald Mackenzie works to the left, Robert Callender to the right of the arch (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
For more than a century after the Union with England much of this endeavour in the arts was concerned with the question of identity and the relationship between history and national culture. This certainly began in the crisis of identity brought about by the loss of autonomy, but it coincided with the development of a wider European preoccupation with national cultures and national history that I believe also affected Finland. This conjunction produced some of the most original and important achievements in the arts in Scotland. It is a factor in the poetry of Burns, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott are a complex commentary on the nature of the Scottish historical identity, creating for all of Europe the genre of the historical novel out of the Scottish experience. In painting it contributed to the pioneer romanticism of Alexander Runciman (1736-1785) friend and contemporary of the Swedish sculptor Tobias Serghells, and to the work of one of the greatest of all Scottish painters, David Wilkie (1785-1841).
The arts carried a burden of national feeling, but it was not a simple matter of artistic nationalism. It was not the result of a will to be Scottish above all else. Although from the eighteenth century it has been customary to see the arts in Scotland in close relationship to what is happening in England they are the product of distinct social, economic, and cultural conditions. In painting this was very clear. The dominant form in the later eighteenth century was portraiture. In England this was marked by the evolution of the clearly aristocratic styles of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, and Lawrence, imposing, generalised, and fundamentally unreal. The same style flourished in Ireland which had a dominant English aristocracy, but Scotland’s great portrait painters Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) and Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) were by contrast masters of the direct informal portrait. Their best work is anti-aristocratic with a bourgeois rational stress upon the nature and importance of the individual. They reveal the same pragmatic directness and humanity as marks the achievement of their great Scottish contemporaries such as David Hume and Robert Burns. Ramsay is master of portraiture which is social but psychologically penetrating. Appropriately, he painted the most memorable portrait of Hume who was his friend. It makes a marvellous pair with its companion portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The difference between these two great philosophers is nowhere more clearly summarised than in these two likenesses by Ramsay.
Even though Raeburn painted some imposing portraits his style too is immediate. He blocks in his summary of the sitter’s character with trenchant force using a broad brush and no preliminary drawing. Though Walter Scott is not a realist the establishment of what is real and true is the objective of his best novels as it is of the best paintings of David Wilkie, and for both of them this is based in their knowledge and experience of Scotland. In the first half of Wilkie’s career his paintings are key Romantic works based on an intense and unsentimental analysis of this experience even though he left Scotland to work in London. They can be compared in this to the works of his great English contemporary Constable, though with the important difference that Wilkie chose to depict the social world rather than the neutral world of landscape. He created a new kind of genre painting, but although he was not a politically motivated artist, nor a social realist in the modern sense of the word, in one of his major paintings, Distraining for Rent, by simply stating the facts, he was believed to have come dangerously close to seditious propaganda. The Scottish directness of his style proved incompatible with conservative English taste. In England the pressure was on him to paint amusing pictures of comic rustics not to record the human dignity of the lower classes. The tension eventually broke Wilkie. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-career, abandoned painting for two years, and when he eventually returned to it adopted a generalised academic style no longer based in his own perceptions but in those of the old masters. He fell back on the teaching of the great English conservative, Sir Joshua Reynolds. His art was the victim of the conflict between two different sets of social values, the Scottish, where he formed his style, and the English, where he practised it. The difference between these two is still clearly apparent in the art of his successors for he was widely influential in both countries. In England his followers produced sentimental genre painting, but in Scotland there was some wholly unsentimental and startlingly direct art in the works of the deaf and dumb etcher Walter Geikie, for example.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Gallery Photo 2, Liz Ogilvie works on the wall, sculptures by Gavin Scobie (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
The directness that Wilkie and Raeburn stood for survived in Scottish painting, though in a muted form, throughout the nineteenth century. There is much that is sentimental in the later century but the visual language that is used by artists like the Faed brothers or Hugh Cameron, as too with landscape painters like Alexander Fraser, is still essentially direct and first hand. This is also true of men like John Pettie or William Q. Orchardson who worked in England. It was partly due to the influence of Wilkie transmitted through a remarkably continuous teaching tradition, but it was also clearly a reflection of public taste in Scotland.
In England the group known as the Pre-Raphaelites who in the generation after Wilkie’s death sought to bring English art back to a basis in first-hand perception and authentic feeling were defeated just as he was by the pressures of conservatism. But in Scotland artists who were less ambitious and who did not intend to be radical nonetheless managed to remain loyal to a tradition of visual truth.
The most outstanding painter in this generation was William MacTaggart (1835-1910). He painted landscapes and seascapes of great freedom in their handling of paint and colour. Their achievement is freshness and an immediately recognisable spontaneity of feeling based in real perception. In his sense of space and the way his work is enlarged by his feeling for the quality of his native landscape and the ever-present sea one could compare him in position if not in absolute achievement to his great contemporary, Sibelius. In painting however his work has clear analogies with that of another great contemporary, Claude Monet, yet there is no demonstrable connection between his work and the Impressionists. As well as the analogies there are fundamental differences and it seems that he evolved along a parallel route to theirs.
MacTaggart remained much closer to his Romantic origins but his work suggests the possibility of a parallel although much humbler development to the dramatic evolution of painting in France. In both countries the first premises of painting are the same, that it begins in a statement of the visual truth and that one must accept the consequences that this brings. If this is so it helps to explain how it was that Scottish painters were able to respond as quickly and sympathetically as they did to the new developments in France.
Although they were now followers and not leaders, they were amongst the earliest painters outside of France to do so and it is significant that this was especially true in Glasgow. At the time it was a major European city, cosmopolitan and outward-looking, its culture quite uncluttered by conservative traditions. It is fitting that the Glasgow School of Art built by Charles Rennie Macintosh and begun in 1897 is now widely regarded as one of the pioneer buildings of modern architecture. Glasgow painters from the early 1880s responded intelligently and sympathetically not only to Impressionism, but also to Post-Impressionism. A group known as the Glasgow Boys represented a remarkable collective achievement in painting between 1880 and 1910 which was matched on a less spectacular scale by painting on the other side of the country in Edinburgh.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Gallery Photo 3, John Mooney works on the wall, sculpture by Ainslie Yule (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
Ever since the early eighteenth century Scottish artists had been willing to travel and to find their inspiration wherever the best art was available. The link with France that they established in the late nineteenth century remained central to the evolution of their painting up until the 1950s. Painters looked to progressive French art for their first inspiration, and recognising its continuity with their own native tradition of visual truth it enabled them to realise some first-class painting. After the painters of the 1880s and 90s, around 1910 Peploe, Hunter, Cadell, and Fergusson produced an authentic and original version of Fauvism becoming known as the Scottish Colourists. Of the four, Fergusson was the most adventurous and was also the longest lived, dying only in 1961. Together with his younger contemporary James Cowie he kept the tradition of thoughtful, disciplined, and sensitive painting alive, but in the next generation though the talent, the commitment and the dedication were not lacking, even the finest painters seemed to lack some essential robustness and self-confidence. William Gillies, William Johnstone, John Maxwell, and Joan Eardley continued to look outside for their inspiration to France or to America. They continued too to show the same sensitivity to real values in painting as their predecessors and not infrequently to touch them in their own painting, but, too, they all produced paintings that suggested that at some vital point their judgement was insecure. This insecurity was common to all British art in the years on either side of the Second World War, but in Scotland it appeared much earlier and had a particular character and significance.
From the late seventeenth century, Scotland evolved a strong outward-looking and sometimes radical culture remarkably unified in its social spread. With the Act of Union it linked its fortunes to those of England whose culture became increasingly polarised between radical and conservative along class lines. While the British political and economic unit was expanding and prosperous, Scotland could coexist with its partner without losing its sense of itself, but when this unit entered its decline at the end of the First World War, Scotland as the partner without control over its destiny was the first to suffer. By 1919 Scottish prosperity had collapsed. In that year there were tanks in the streets of Glasgow. With the collapse of capitalism it was a textbook case for Marxist revolution. Both conservatives and radicals alike believed that an uprising was a real possibility, but it never came. Ironically John Maclean, the Scottish Communist leader, lost the support of the Bolsheviks in 1920 over the issue of Nationalism. The International could not support the idea of an independent revolutionary Scotland. Instead, Scotland entered half a century of neglect and decline.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Gallery Photo 3, Fred Stiven works on the wall, sculpture by Ainslie Yule (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
This was a protracted disaster that one might well have expected would destroy the national cultural tradition, and it was certainly hardly surprising that artists should lack a clear sense of direction or should seem insecure in their relationship to the world outside. It was not surprising also that the question of identity should assume new urgency. In literature under the leadership of the radical poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, it became a vital issue with a clear political dimension reinvigorating once again the old traditions. It was more difficult for painting to derive strength from this source. It is an international language and does not lend itself readily to overt national expression. Indeed, especially in the 1940s and ‘50s the feeling that painting had to have a specifically Scottish character, that it had to constitute a national school, was actually a disadvantage. It was based in insecurity and so made criticism unpatriotic and encouraged insularity.
The old traditions were upheld verbally but were too easily lost sight of in practise. Painting was marked by loose thinking, self-indulgent use of colour, and uneasy borrowings from abroad, especially the post-war School of Paris, all in the name of being Scottish. As a result, some of the most important artists of the post-war generation in Scotland, in order to be true to the older traditions of Scottish art, have developed independently of events in their home country. Men like Edouardo Paolozzi, the first major Scottish sculptor and a figure of European importance, or Alan Davie, one of the few European painters to parallel rather than follow American painting of the fifties, and almost the only one to perceive the difference between its brutal directness and the abstract elegance of the School of Paris, have pursued their careers away from Scotland.
For whatever reason, however, over the last decade or so a change seems to have been beginning in Scotland. The growth of political nationalism has not caused but reflects a return of confidence in the national identity. The decline of England as a world power has undoubtedly made it easier for Scotland to see herself in an international perspective. It has also provided the encouraging spectacle of other former imperial fiefs among the small nations of the world claiming their birthright. The discovery of North Sea oil has encouraged the belief, however illusory it may be, in the possibility of an end to generations of economic depression. Whatever the outcome of the present political debate over nationalism the Scots will not again allow themselves to suffer as they have in the last half-century.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Gallery Photo 5, Robert Callender works to left of arch, Derek Roberts works to right of arch; sculpture by Ainslie Yule (photo: PF-Studion, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
This new confidence seems to be reflected in the best art of the younger generation of Scots. Once again they seem able to look critically and with confidence both at their own traditions and at art in the outside world wherever it is best. Often, though not invariably, they have turned to America. Their new security enables them to make their own what they have learnt without having to insist stridently on their identity. This kind of change depends only in part on psychology however. It would not have been possible without some purely practical developments. The creation of a separate Scottish Arts Council about fifteen years ago has had some far-reaching consequences for the visual arts especially. Until that time the opportunities for an artist had scarcely changed in a century. There were two major exhibition spaces, one in Edinburgh and one in Glasgow, three exhibiting bodies, and a tiny handful of dealers.
The Scottish Arts Council has not only added to that its own galleries and exhibition programme, it has also supported a wide range of independent galleries like that of Richard Demarco, who has struggled heroically for nearly twenty years, and at the beginning almost single-handed, to bring art into Scotland and to encourage young artists. The increased activity too has made it possible for a gallery like that of Graeme Murray, who has worked to keep Scotland in touch with the avant garde in Europe and America, to flourish independently of the Scottish Arts Council.
There are too important galleries in Glasgow such as the Third Eye Centre, and many of the smaller towns now have exhibiting galleries where they never existed before. The Arts Council itself even runs a travelling art gallery in a converted bus.
This development together with the provision of financial support for artists has made it possible for them to break away from the limitations of what is commercially viable. It was inevitable in previous years when the home market was so small that artists who wished their art to be seen either had to make it saleable or take it elsewhere where they could look for less conventional support. A locally-based system of support for artists and galleries has thus made it possible for artists to stay in Scotland and yet produce art in experimental and unconventional forms, though nobody would maintain that the present system is ideal. It is not a happy situation in which no artist can make a proper living by his art and only a small number of those in this show even endeavour to do so. All of the others teach whole or part time. It is right that artists should teach, but not that they should be compelled to do so in order to live. It gives powerful unseen patronage to the government and to the four art schools that are its agents.
Whatever the difficulties, the situation now is healthier and more lively than it has been for many years. I hope the work in this exhibition shows that today’s artists are not unworthy of their history, and that they too understand the visual integrity, the intellectual discipline, and the open-mindedness to international developments with which the greatest of their predecessors succeeded in overcoming the disadvantages of belonging to a small remote nation with an embattled identity.
Duncan Macmillan.
MODERN SCOTTISH ART: THE FINNISH COMMENT
Here, we re-print excerpts from four press reports offering instant reaction to the exhibition. The texts were translated by the museum staff at the time, and art-scot have edited slightly, where required for understanding.
1.A.I.Routie / Uusi Suomi, 26.11.1978
Scotsmen, as well as Finns, have got identity problems. Yet the Scottish artists solve – if we can draw a conclusion from the exhibition which is on at the Amos Anderson Art Museum – their problems another way than their Finnish colleagues. If they in Finland concentrate on studies of native nature and neighbourhood, they in Scotland dive without hesitation into international figures of styles, mainly perhaps into those developed beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
Time will tell which choice gives a richer yield from the point of view of culture. Art is a tough game in the field of internationalisms, only a few can succeed. Eduardo Paolozzi and Alan Davie, both Scotsmen, have managed to do it. Maybe some of the artists within this exhibition will succeed too – although there is probably not much help in Finland and Finnish reactions in building an international career.
Feathers, loathing, minimal art
Eileen Lawrence paints feathers with amazing skill and she is very fond of her subject, cultivating it in forms of both Japanese kakemono and valuable book scrolls. If I only were a bird I would certainly understand. Even if I was not I am fascinated by the puzzling combination of surrealism and ancient cultures.
Francis Bacon and his deformed, neurotic human beings seem to vibrate the sensitive strings in the Scottish soul. Sir Robin Philipson, an elderly man, born in 1916, amongst this generation of younger middle age, is illustrating his subject of observed women in this mixed light of irony, oppression and detestation.
Not very far from these tunings are bird-headed monsters or ruins by John Bellany; the representatives of human race portrayed cynically and grotesquely in the prints of Robert Shaw, their nature might be clarified by comparison to Mattas or Grosz [presumably Ake Mattas and George Grosz - ed].
Minimal art is also one of the starting points. Gavin Scobie cuts and bends steel into irregular ‘piles’ which are as far from constructive as from plastical. Ainslie Yule serves memories in a wooden box or in some metal construction. Michael Docherty seems to have a plan to build a shelf but never gets it finished.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Gallery Photo 6, John Bellany works on the wall; sculpture by Gerald Laing (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
All kinds of things happen
Glen Onwin is studying stages of decay from nightly voyage, and I think that this boat is on its way from America, too. The results of investigations are shown both in photographs and in works including vegetable, minerals and wax. Beautiful colours and no smell. Robert Callender illustrates with scarce colours stones, water and beach. Elizabeth Ogilvie draws waves rolling to the beach with skill and objectivity related to that of Ulla Rantanen.
All kinds of things happen in John Mooney’s prints and elsewhere too. The lighthouse gets too tired to stand up and bows, under wrapping there exposes a stone obelisk in Monumorphosis; a fish is reaching a worm and turns into a monument. The method is strictly to the point, good stories must be told without smile.
The colour is almost plain, only the brush stroke is rough in Ken Dingwall’s paintings. Gerald Laing carves figures which are decorative in a hard way and which cover their heads under hoods; perhaps there are sensible reasons for that. Donald Mackenzie illustrates in his prints everyday life and carnivals with impartial irony, yet not without sympathy. Derek Roberts traces Informalist picture surfaces with the means of collage and painting, cultivating beautiful shades of grey. Fred Stiven builds collages of things behind glass and somehow I had the impression that there is a drop of old Scottish legend in them but perhaps I am mistaken.
In a Scottish way, but which kind of way?
Duncan MacMillan describes, in the preface of the catalogue, differences in Scottish and English mentality and also those in art appreciation, and he points out that expression, in other fields as well as in art, differs from the English one, amongst others, in that it is based in direct observation and real feeling while the form language is objective without ceremony.
The definition does not quite fit with the art of present-day Scotland but Duncan Macmillan says:
“Today’s artists are not unworthy of their history… they too understand the visual integrity, the intellectual discipline, and the open-mindedness to international developments with which the greatest of their predecessors succeeded in overcoming the disadvantages of belonging to a small remote nation with an embattled identity.”
It is beautifully said. When we also belong to that kind of a nation, one has to consider, would there be something to learn?
Skill and courage to apply international styles is a great thing, but those previously flourishing Scottish virtues have their advantages too.
In Robbie Burns’ way, perhaps
There is a limit with riding on styles. The share of isms in the market is still big, but the time of big and sovereign inventors is almost over; commercial mechanisms flatten everything down, and even Pablo went away in good time.
The new which must be learned is perhaps not a new technique at all, but a new attitude, a new courage to meet the reality (not the audience). The former armament is once again too heavy to reach the new inner and outer reality.
Direct observation, immediate insight and fresh, honest interpretation instead might, once again, reach the point. It is not a question of technique: it is a question of how to get rid of the belief in the technique and in the aesthetic mechanisms which do not work in the changed situation. How to meet and reach the subject in a way where the used and ready technique does not act as a barrier? How to get to making pictures as Robbie Burns wrote poems, past the isms?
An old story, something wrong in the head
The problem is ancient, naturally. The troubles are created in us by the almost inborn western attitudes and mechanisms of thinking. The cave painters of the Stone Age maybe started from the direct observation and visual insight; but in the tradition of the western culture the materialized picture has always won the immaterial intellectual prize. The art industrial concept of the picture as a product and as a technical performance has won over the direct observation and insight that is the essence of experience in art – as well as in other human fields. Artists do not see, they think.
This we can find out in the Amos Anderson Art Museum and in many other art museums as well.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Gallery Photo 7, Robert Shaw works on the wall; sculpture by Gerald Laing (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
2. Dan Sundell, Hufvudstadsbladet, 29.11.1978
EARTHBOUND SCOTTISH ART
Judged by the works of art exhibited at the Amos Anderson Art Museum, the Scottish artists seem to be more orientated towards a tangible reality, towards the surrounding milieu and its tangible elements.
The difference between Scottish and Finnish art is the approach to the technical procedures and its stylistic expression. In this the Scots are far more broadminded and less prejudiced than our artists. This is most probably due to the different cultural heritage and traditions. Our fine art is only about 150 years old whereas the Scottish cultural tradition goes back to the dim and distant past.
Scotland, which once was independent, has been since the 1700s governed by the English. In Finland the development has been the opposite: from dependence to independence. Despite this the Golden Age of Finnish art was during Russian rule at the turn of the century. The outer dependence made Finns assert themselves in other ways and this resulted in cultural prosperity, the likes of which we have not seen since. Maybe the Scots are today in a similar situation, a situation in which they have to prove their identity and to give it force. Therefore it is tempting to point at features in Scottish art which consciously or unconsciously show a national profile.
A growing art
Only a month ago there was in Helsinki an exhibition of eight British artists. As a general criticism one can say that the British exhibition was quite impersonal and more intellectually reasoning in the form of conceptual art than the Scottish one seems to be. The Scots are more closely bound to earth. They paint and draw landscapes and in using natural element as a basis they make more intricate compositions. Maybe it isn’t just pure chance that the only British artist who made an emotional and earthbound impression was Mark Boyle with his compositions of cobblestones and other real things. Boyle was born in Glasgow, in Scotland.
The fact that the Scots, in a very tangible way, are concerned about their surroundings shows that they have strong feelings toward their country – their own plot of land. They are aware of the beauty and visual riches that the landscape offers, of its capacity to impress the individual, as well as to give him his identity. The British have looked upon Scottish culture as something grown wild, massive and original. The Scots have a reputation of being big and strong men, often introvert and quiet, sometimes coarse. The step from this to the old idea of the Finns is not great.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Gallery Photo 8, Robin Philipson works on the wall (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
Magnificent and unruly
Understandably the old Scottish clan culture has left no marks on the art of today. Here are neither non-figurative paintings with tartan motifs nor historical pictures of fights between the MacDonalds and Campbells. But instead, the Scottish exhibition can with pride show monumental marine drawings by a young artist, Elizabeth Ogilvie. Elizabeth Ogilvie has, in her big drawings, studied the sea; through the big size she has wanted to catch the sea in all its force and majesty, and because of the size the viewer can almost feel themselves being embraced by the enormous landscape. The biggest drawing, which covers one of the walls in the museum, measures 2.5m x 5m. Despite this, Ogilvie doesn’t portray a sea in turmoil, but a quietly resting landscape, where the swells slowly move towards the shore. On the big drawing the difference between closeness and distance can be experienced very strongly. The bottom edge of the drawing is so close to the viewer that we seem to be walking in the water, whereas the top edge shows the horizon where the sky and the sea meet. This is not nature lyrics but poetry: Scottish nature epic poetry that lives.
The other female artist, Eileen Lawrence, is no less modest in her work. She combines old Japanese watercolour painting with the high bird mountains of the Scottish country, i.e. she paints feathers and birds’ eggs with a meticulously detailed painting technique. The feathers almost seem to be glued on to the Japanese, and sometimes even home-made, paper, which is framed in rolls in the oriental fashion. Lawrence’s works are both universal and national; her paintings don’t follow any certain style or school, but are, like Ogilvie’s drawings, unprejudiced and belong to the category of individualistic creativity. I think that this kind of art would not have much chance of thriving in our much too limited cultural climate.
Soft cliffs, decaying plants
For Robert Callender the sea and coast are also central motifs. In his big paintings he shows some delicate close-ups of cliffs, of the meeting of sea and land. Callender is interested in the soft organic formations of the water and stones, the water which reflects the sky. On the big canvas, ‘Ebb’, he has painted a shallow beach where the tide has gone out. This is a meditatively desolate, but at the same time, soft view; which has a certain character due to the toned-down earthy colours. In his beach series, which consist of eight smaller drawings, he has studied the round and compact formations of cliffs.
Glen Onwin also has two series concerned with sea and land. The series are called “Degrees of decay from a nightly sea journey” [literal translation], which consists partly of decaying plants which have been fitted on to sixteen small squares, and partly of decaying mineral substances. Onwin uses a technique which is fairly unknown to the Finnish public. It seems to be a documentation and conservation of nature and of the impressions the artist gathers during a nightly sea journey.
Kenneth Dingwall mainly works in the USA. His big and often one-coloured canvases should not be primarily regarded as monochromatics but as a form of landscape. The paintings are called, for example, ‘Blue Edinburgh’ or ‘Drawings from Minneapolis’, and offer reminisces in colour, worked into the canvas with several layers on top of each other. A Scottish reviewer has very aptly spoken of Dingwall’s national character when he wrote the following inspiring lines: ‘Their greyness is not the dead greyness of much minimal English painting. It is the grey which is the essence of Edinburgh as a city.’
Crawling sculptures
Two of the sculptors at the exhibition, Gavin Scobie and Ainslie Yule, show sculptures of steel and wood which have given in to the force of gravity and spread out horizontally rather than vertically. Scobie’s ingeniously cut formations in rusty steel seem to live with the earth and so not play the traditional role of a sculpture but rather become part of the landscape. Yule’s sculptures go even further in their antithetic form and show something between painting and sculpture. Here the traditional pattern is broken, a new freedom achieved, a freedom that has not yet found itself in its new element.
More traditional, although highly enjoyable, sculpture is shown in Gerald Laing’s works. He participates with some figures which at least made a very strong impression on me. The two central works are two bronze female torsos with their heads covered. One just simply has a piece of cloth over her head, which falls in natural folds. The other one gives you the impression that the model was just struggling out of a jumper so that both arms and head are invisible. In each piece of sculpture the head – the seat of individuality and intellectual capacity – is covered in quite a demonstrative way.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Museum, Gallery Photo 9, Eileen Lawrence works on the wall to the left of the arch; Glen Onwin works to the right of the arch (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
Laing has complete mastery over the art of classical sculpture but he has gone one step further towards trying to map out man’s inner proportions. You don’t only see the harmonic proportions and aesthetics but something more which tries to free itself. The painter, John Bellany, has several brilliant canvases which are distinguished by a demonic force and which are anything but clear and understandable. He makes me think of our own painter, Carl-Gustaf Lilius. The graphic artist, Robert Shaw, has a very similar temperament to that of Bellany, but he is maybe more literary in his mania. He tells of relations between people, of what happens in the conscious and subconscious. Donald Mackenzie tells how life is lived in the city, in small shops and in cafes. Here is probably nothing characteristically Scottish but there is a good feeling for the everyday and for the bizarre in life.
One should not make a generalisation about this Scottish exhibition. The participants are not mainly Scots but individual artists who are fulfilling themselves in Scotland. One should note that this is the largest exhibition of Scottish art which has been shown in another country.
3. Marja-Terttu Kivirinta, Helsingin Sanomat, 24.11.78
SCOTTISH ART ON THE HELSINKI HORIZON
Scottish art is fairly unknown in Finland. Amos Anderson Art Museum has set about filling this gap by bringing to Finland, in co-operation with the Scottish Arts Council, an exhibition consisting of works by 16 modern Scottish artists.
The exhibits have been chosen particularly in view of the Finnish audience. Therefore, when the same exhibition is shown in Edinburgh, it will probably have the name ‘Scots in Finland’.
The exhibition is important to the Scots. It is seldom that Scottish artists have been represented as an independent group beyond the borders of Great Britain. It is probably very usual that a Scottish exhibitor is introduced to the public as a London artist, as in the case of Mark Boyle, who represented Britain this year in the Biennale of Venice and whose exhibition is displayed in Stockholm at the moment.
Some of the artists of this exhibition do live in London. However, all of them have studied either at the art schools of Glasgow or Edinburgh and the majority of the artists have been able to stay and work in their school towns. This is true especially in the case of Edinburgh.
The Scottish Arts Council was founded in the 60s to organise and to be responsible for the exhibition network of the area. Its work has made the practical organisation of this exhibition possible.
When one compares this exhibition with the recent British Art exhibition that was seen in Helsinki a month ago, one notices how comprehensive the scope of British art is. But this very carefully made cross-section of the works of Scottish artists, most of whom were born in the 40s, probably aims at showing the Finnish audience that the Scots aim at combining something from their own country and its traditions with the international streams of modernism.
Although the Scottish search for identity and social themes combines with an ever more intense visual experimentation and studies of artistic methods; these are not merely ancient things in the developing Scottish art. A tradition given to romanticism and symbolism kindles in Scottish art. The solutions of expressionism and Dadaism of this century which have also become traditions, have added freshness to this tradition. Ideas have also been adopted from constructive experiments.
On Kenneth Dingwall’s canvases all of the colours of the spectrum glisten through the covering grey. Someone might perceive a piece of the surface of the sea glistening in the light, someone else might experience a feeling pervaded by a theory of colour vision: the optimism of the blue; and the pain, joy, or tenderness shielded by grey.
Fred Stiven digs out the value of a used object like Schwitters. He composes box reliefs of wooden and metallic parts. A further comment on tradition: a forefather of this designer specialised in making snuff boxes.
In Ainslie Yule’s sculptures the vision is made up of coincidences that are typical of sculptures on the one hand, and typical of paintings on the other; of wooden, steel and plaster elements and painted marks. Because these constructions, like Michael Docherty’s working plans and Derek Roberts’ collages, can be interpreted in many ways they may puzzle the viewer if he does not succeed in blowing the required conceptual life into the existing settings. Yule is interested in bulks and structures. These are also studied by Gavin Scobie who works in steel, and the elements of his sculptures, such as the interrelationships of the form, posture and light, probably give refreshing impulses to deliberation of the visual environment.
Glen Onwin wants to separate the macrocosm from the microcosm; an ecological approach that might be close to those organic stages of spoilage which have been reproduced in wax.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Gallery Photo 9, sculptures by Gavin Scobie (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
Gerald Laing’s bronze torsos have plasticism. It is a pity that it disappears under a hood.
In the relief called ‘Panic’ there is movement and intensity of feeling. By the way, when have Finnish sculptors last had the opportunity to design a frieze for a building, interpreting the ancient subject in such a fresh way?
The “grand old man” of the exhibition is Sir Robin Philipson. He has found the roots for his art from expressionism, from Roualt’s and Kokoschka’s colour which shakes with internal energy, and has searched out the meaning from life which abounds with brutality.
John Bellany describes the victims of brutality and the users of violence in the way of the Irishman, Bacon. Bellany ranks grotesque people in the same category with wild animals and with slashing strikes of the brush he reveals the characters of the figures that hide behind totems.
Robert Shaw is an able graphic artist. In his etchings, clumsy on purpose, he follows quietly the footsteps of George Grosz. The things he describes are not yet just monuments reflecting the past.
Also Donald Mackenzie lurks for his victims in the streets, cafes and in the bustle of cities. His pictures convey everyday subjects which Finnish sculpturers seldom have the courage to seize.
John Mooney has specialized in monuments. Mooney, who shows technical variety, is a visitor of high standard even if we evaluate the exhibition in terms of graphics only.
When the viewer seeks something typically Scottish from the exhibition they find the scenery: Lowlands, Highlands, rocks rolling down the mountains, the sea…
Robert Callender and Elizabeth Ogilvie go to work in the distant sceneries of Northern Scotland. They are fascinated by the wide coasts and the pebbles that have been smoothed according to the rhythm of the ebb and flow.
In Callender’s black pools and tides one sees some symbolism. One can see it as being a longing for mystery which has the breath of the same kind as Sir Walter Scott’s interpretation of historic events. The Finnish viewer notices that in his pictures there is always present the rude strength of the sea. Before it, man stops and asks where he has come from.
In Elizabeth Ogilvie’s graphite works waving is a movement that has been stopped. The sea floats quietly to the sky. The drawings look like reliefs, the purpose of which is to remind of upward and downward movement on a flat surface.
When interpreting the works of Eileen Lawrence, the viewer collides with symbolism: a white sea ghost flying inland to meet a crow, or listen, can you hear the beat of the eagle’s wing strong against the wind?. Lawrence has painted the poems with watercolours on Chinese, Japanese and hand-made papers. Feathers and bird’s eggs; they are more than ornithological pictures. We can hear the swish of the wings and see the seabirds on their way, towards their destiny, perhaps?
The exhibition of modern Scottish art is a happening worth visiting by the Finnish public. For those who are looking for mere aesthetic pleasures there is much that could be excluded from the exhibition but for many viewers (whose knowledge of Scotland is based only on rumours) the exhibition is a call that invites viewers to deepen acquaintance.
Modern Scottish Art Exhibition, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Gallery Photo 9, Glen Onwin works on the wall to the left of the arch; Michael Docherty works to the right of the arch; Ken Dingwall works on far right wall (photo: PF-Studio, courtesy of Amos Rex/archive)
Ahti Susiluoto, Kansan Uutiset, 6.12.78
IT IS WINDY ON HEATHS
The exhibition of modern Scottish art succeeds because of good planning and installation. In principle there are found in the exhibition those general themes that typify successive stylistic waves; for example, in contrast to the experimental conception of art there is a search for disappearing national feelings. The question of national culture is a large and difficult one concerning this exhibition, because it is not easy to understand certain characteristics in it. The introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition gives a good amount of information about the big names in the history of culture in Scotland (with Robert Burns and Walter Scott in literature and Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn in art) and reference to the huge sources of strength in a small country; but concerning modern art the explanations are scarce. Duncan Macmillan’s Introduction ends where the exhibition begins.
And then we should speak about the profound cross-influence of European and American modernism in whose hands the crisis of the culture of the world is as real as the crisis of the economy. This generalisation does not aim by any means to belittle Scottish art or its goals but to give a hint to an all-covering reflection process whose ‘victims’ are also the artists and their society.
Certainly, also the purpose of this description is to collect themes and to present separate artists but what is this threshold of national identity so widely spoke of?
Words!
If one begins the exhibition from the best part of it, one right away runs into two sculptors: Gerald Laing and Gavin Scobie. The former is an over-realistic realist, whose classical torsos tell of a certain closed horror and commitment. The stage of the self is described precisely and ‘facelessly’ in the works of Laing. Scobie is an explorer: in his abstract works the treatment of the surface and the effect of the knowledge of material have got a dimension beyond realism. It is a kind of timelessness which is floating separately from the objects and assemblages; like the smell of rusting iron, something very old and utmost. In Scobie’s works, there is something in common with the raking machines left to disintegrate in the yards of farms. They have been worked with and their time is over. Sad and poignant. But the thing itself is still beautiful in the snow: delicate and light as a piece of ice bending a twig in winter.
The origin of this kind of idea reveals something about interpreting art: it is a lonely task to do.
There aroused a strange feeling when looking at Eileen Lawrence’s extremely big watercolours: I could not believe my eyes because so skilfully detailed were the ‘legends’ where feathers and different kinds of light objects were described. They rose up from the surface of the paper as if to float to the front of the viewer. With this effort one could do anything else as well.
In the many-sided picture gallery of modernism, one can find the most general points of contact. Glen Onwin, for example, creates big series which are summarised as stages of decay. The definition of the method is the following: “Stages of decay from a nightly voyage, 1978, vegetable, mineral and wax.” The determinative thing in Onwin’s case is his interest in biological observations which he almost directly combines into pieces of art. There is something similar in the method as in the stump sculptures by Tapper. Some years ago they caused a dispute about the boundaries of art. There is a question about at which point a stump or an algae on board ‘is’ art, or when one has to consider it as art.
Quiet modernism, a kind of warmed new realism, is represented in the shore series by Robert Callender. An opposite to him is Kenneth Dingwall who strives, with plain colour and its transition, to reveal events in nature. A magnificent colourist is Sir Robin Philipson, in whose works figures glimpse from between brightly flaming colour.
I have not written about the graphic artists in this review. I was not convinced of their descriptive grasp and conventionality to handle subjects.
The Scottish Arts Council deserves the credit for an interesting exhibition to come true. The representativeness of the exhibition is still a minor point. The main thing is to learn to see and to understand problems which are common to small countries, to their collaboration and achievements in the field of culture.
HELSINKI 1978: ARTISTS’ RECOLLECTIONS
art-scot’s Roger Spence got in touch with some of the artists who made the trip to Helsinki 1978, Their memories and thoughts are presented below.
1. Eileen Lawrence
The artists we visited were very welcoming; inviting us into their homes and opening up their studios. The studios varied enormously, as did their work, from the grand state-provided studio of Kain Tapper in Helsinki to the strangely stockaded studio of another artist who had a morgue as part of his studio complex in the rather remote countryside.
Several of the artists were collecting free food from the land, foraging from nature.
There was also a visit to a group of Arts and Crafts houses and studios that had once been the homes of late 19th and early 20th century artists who had formed a commune. Interestingly Charles Rennie Mackintosh had been a guest there. This was now a museum where we were served a meal of venison and cloudberries.
The weather was that perfect dry cold. The ground deeply frozen. And the central heating I had difficulty in getting used to.
2. Glen Onwin
Some of the studios that people had were fantastic. One in particular which was probably the most communal series of spaces. It was quite some distance from Helsinki, in the countryside, on the edge of a huge lake, or possibly the sea. It was quite contemporary I seem to remember, I remember seeing these huge iced smooth boulders on the lake edge. It just looked absolutely stunning.
It was a different kind of lifestyle… maybe our group didn’t realise that they were funded. We just thought they were super-rich
There were two other experiences with artists that made a strong impression:
A lot of Finnish artists didn’t drink, possibly because they were recovering alcoholics. Kain Tapper was, for instance, and they all went to their fridges and got these blocks of ice wrapped around their Schnapps, and they loved people drinking. You were drinking for them, because they didn’t.
There was a strange guy living in the forest. Has anybody told you about him? John Mooney was absolutely terrified. He had a house and studio built around by a stockade of old doors, in a big circle. There were lugers and other guns and ammunition just lying around in his house. I recall there were lots of paintings with bullet holes in them. He was most terrifying to us… he was a well-known artist, they were all well-known. They were the most important Finnish artists of that era.
Most of the buildings had three layers of windows. In the gallery, hanging the show was just exhausting because it was so hot. We tried to open the windows, but people said ‘you can’t do that…’
Bengt von Bonsdorff came to Scotland to choose the artists and choose the work. Can you remember him coming to see you?
Yes. We didn’t live in our current home. We lived in Haddington Place. We just treated him (like many others) routinely… at that time we kind of knew all of the artists. We didn’t know much about the show. It just seemed to be quite normal.
In hindsight, this trip doesn’t seem very normal - sixteen Scottish artists were presented in a foreign country and invited to go to a foreign country for a week, to support... As far as I can understand it, I don’t think that ever happened before and I don’t think it’s happened since.
A wide-ranging discussion followed in which Glen (and Eileen Lawrence) indicated that perhaps it seemed “normal” because at the time the Scottish Arts Council and the British Council were quite active in making connections for Scottish artists. They had both exhibited in Paris and Berlin, for example. The Scottish Arts Council Gallery offered opportunities for Scottish artists and for international connections, putting Scotland on the international map. There was a sense, perhaps for the first time, that young Scottish artists didn’t need to leave Scotland to further international careers.
Bob Callender in front of his painting, Ebb (oil on canvas) 230 x 116cm, Modern Scottish Art, Amos Anderson Art Museum, 1978 (pic: Elizabeth Ogilvie)
3. Elizabeth Ogilvie:
I’m very influenced by architecture anyway so it was a wonderful trip. We visited a concert in a beautiful church in Helsinki; we went to Finlandia, that’s Alvar Aalto; then Saaronen, Eero Saaronen’s house. Wonderful, absolutely fantastic, but just in passing there was so much interesting architecture whether by well-known architects or not… And the Museums were also so impressive… Being taken to artists’ studios, that was really inspiring. I can remember very well the last night we were there we were invited to Kain Tapper’s amazing studio… Beautiful work, beautiful sculpture… It was inspirational as well as engaging. I can recollect all the food as well, the wonderful meals we were taken to, the carp and reindeer… I remember in particular going to dine in Tampere.
I got on well with Ainslie Yule (I already knew the other Scottish artists). I remember we were waxing lyrical about the meals we were eating and chatting around the table… food, yes… I remember him being utterly shocked because we came to dessert and they came round and dropped things on our plates and they were frozen berries, I guess cloudberries, and then they put hot sauce on it, but we were a bit shocked… how are we going to eat these?
We wanted to explore, settle in, meet people… While we were there, there was a Finnish lawyer who befriended us because his wife came from Dundee, so he invited us to stay in his home, which was shared by an auntie. It was a big wooden house, very Ibsen-like, on an island just off Helsinki… He took us there. We drove across the ice to this wonderful place. We only stayed one night and there was ‘Auntie’ lurking in the shadows of this huge place. Met the lovely wife, had some superb food, then a sauna, outside on to the ice, the usual treatment you get in Finland, and then back again to join the others.
Elizabeth Ogilvie was already committed to the idea of the north. She’d been to the Faeroes with her parents as a child, and she and Bob Callender were already spending summers in a bothy on the west coast of Sutherland. But the trip to Finland cemented it:
My passion for the north… wanting to explore more… meet the people, see how they lived… learning from the inhabitants, food (I still use recipes from Finland a lot)… the architecture, beautiful use of timber, the hospitality… We learned so much…
Elizabeth Ogilvie, Andreas Alariesto, unknown translator, Rovaniemi, Finland, 1978(pic: Robert Callender, courtesy of Elizabeth Ogilvie)
We decided, Bob and I, that we would have a couple of nights in Rovaniemi in the Arctic, so we took a wee plane up, and, of course, in November it was extremely cold. In travelling around we had seen these postcards of paintings by a Lapp (Andreas Alariesto) who lived up there in Lapland and lo and behold there was an exhibition on. His work is fascinating… and we managed to find a translator when we actually met him. When we walked into the Museum, here he was with his work, this wonderful work, so that was absolutely terrific. It was just a couple of nights visit.
The entire Finnish experience was very special, but we weren’t thinking: “Oh! We’re pioneers”. It was the impressive hospitality and the way we were treated… lovely people, very interesting and interested. Our friend up north was very intrigued by what we did and wanted to know more. I think when they have visitors…it’s a bit like this village (Kinghorn, where Ogilvie has her studio), visitors will be walking around and locals will say “Where do you come from?” and “How are you?” That’s all curiosity.
They were proud of their own culture as well. They wanted us to experience their wonderful architects and musicians…we all went to a concert; Bob and I went to yet another concert…
It was a proper interchange between one culture and another. Glen Onwin told me that visiting Kain Tapper’s studio was a pretty extraordinary event.
It was because of the scale of the studio. We were inspired. I didn’t know I was going to end up here recycling this building. We thought: “Wow! This is how artists live”. Wonderful artist. His work was very powerful, large scale…
Did you come away with the impression that Finnish artists were in a better state than Scottish artists at the time?
Yes, I think to have foreign groups of artists coming round their studio, they were respected, they wanted to show off their culture and their cultural identity, who they are…
The trip’s inspiration came partly from meeting the new culture, but partly down to the idea that artists could be treated in different ways.
Yes. And I’m afraid that in Britain that’s still the case.
You think that if a 30-35 year-old artist went to Finland right now, they would find the same difference?
Yes, every time I show elsewhere, you’re given the utmost priority, and they want you to share their culture and understand it, their psyche, their lives. They want you to embrace their culture, all the arts… people are so enthusiastic. It’s just a different way of thinking… there’s more awareness of how important culture is for a psyche… how important it is for our national identity.
Robert Shaw, Queen’s Pawn, etching and aquatint, 32.5 x 32.5cm, exhibited Modern Scottish Art, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, 1978
4. Robert Shaw
Being selected as one of the artists to show work in what was a major exhibition of Scottish art in the Amos Anderson Art Museum was both a privilege and an important stage in my progress as a printmaker and artist.
The whole event, I understood, followed a visit to Scotland by the director of the museum. He viewed some of my work at Edinburgh Printmakers, then in Market Street. The Scottish Arts Council, then based in Charlotte Square, generously framed all my works. Lindsay Gordon, Chief Arts Officer at the SAC, played a prominent role in ensuring the success of the visit.
A number of the artists involved were already known to each other but the trip provided us all with a great opportunity to meet and socialise with other Scottish, as well as Finnish, artists. We were taken to visit artists in their studios both in Helsinki and in the wider country around, introducing us to the contemporary visual culture and some fascinating characters.
The hospitality and generosity of the Amos Anderson Museum and of individual Finnish artists was terrific. Outside Helsinki, visits to artists’ studios was by way of a bus equipped with its own refrigerated supply of beer. It was also my first experience of a sauna.
I can say that my being part of this major exhibition event was personally beneficial. My election as a professional member of the SSA followed, as did my selection by the British Council as a UK artist to exhibit in the 14th Graphic International Biennale in Yugoslavia, alongside Norman Ackroyd, Christopher Orr and other renowned artists.
Robert Shaw, Last Homage, etching and aquatint, 33 x 33cm, exhibited Modern Scottish Art, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, 1978
Note 1: The Museum Director, Bengt von Bonsdorff, came to Scotland to curate the Exhibition, and worked in partnership with Lindsay Gordon from the Scottish Arts Council, who travelled to Finland with the party of artists. Bengt von Bonsdorff (1936-2005) was Director of Amos Anderson Art Museum from 1963-2001.
Amos Rex continues the legacy of Amos Anderson Art Museum. They are different museums; the Amos Anderson Art Museum was closed in 2017 and Amos Rex opened in 2018 in a different location. It is an extraordinary building with an exciting collection and exhibition programme. You can find out more by going to the museum website: https://amosrex.fi/en/
Today, the building that used to house Amos Anderson Art Museum is a home museum, “Amos Andersons Hem”, devoted to the personal history of Amos Anderson (https://amoshem.fi/).
Note 2: The exhibiting artists were as follows (bold denotes that they participated in the Finnish visit):
John Bellany, Robert Callender, Kenneth Dingwall, Michael Docherty, Gerald Laing, Eileen Lawrence, Donald Mackenzie, John Mooney, Liz Ogilvie, Glen Onwin, Robin Philipson, Derek Roberts, Gavin Scobie, Robert Shaw, Fred Stiven, Ainslie Yule.
Acknowledgements:
This article has been made possible through the generous support of Amos Rex Art Gallery and Museum and especially their Archivist and Librarian, Anna-Maria Wilskman. We should also thank all of her predecessors who have made and kept records in such good condition since 1978.
Without journalist and writer Eeva Simola’s tireless energy and enthusiasm in researching and translating, we would never have been able to make all the right connections.
Many thanks, of course, to Duncan Macmillan; and to the artists who generously gave their time to answering art-scot’s many questions.
Further reading:
We can recommend Duncan Macmillan’s keynote presentation to the Scottish Society for Art History’s annual conference, 2024, in which Duncan contextualised the Helsinki Exhibition within a personal view of the last forty years of Scottish Art History. You can read it here: