Alexander “Sandy” Moffat (b.1943) has produced some of the most iconic images in twentieth century Scottish art. A significant exhibition in 1973 sealed his reputation as a serious portraitist, although the works on show were fraught with a sense of enigma. Douglas Erskine introduces the paintings which marked a milestone in Moffat’s artistic career, exploring the mood of the times to throw light on the intrigue of the long stares and compelling, mask-like faces.

Sandy Moffat, once called the most important Scottish portraitist since Wilkie, believes that everything is “there in the face” [1]. From his student days at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1960s, through a rich creative life which has addressed and indeed shaped much of Scotland’s postwar culture, the subject of the portrait has held special significance for this human-centred figurative painter. Moffat is perhaps most widely known for the images which bring the greats of twentieth century Scottish literature to the walls of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery: his portrait of Muriel Spark is one of the Gallery’s prized possessions, and the generation of writers which include Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and George Mackay Brown, congregating around Hugh MacDiarmid, are immortalised in the iconic Poet’s Pub [2]. Moffat is also notable for his role as a highly influential tutor at the Glasgow School of Art, later Head of the Painting Department, where he played a crucial role in encouraging emerging talent from 1979 until his retirement in 2005 [3].

But before Moffat came to occupy this central position in the Scottish art scene, long before his election to the Royal Scottish Academy, and even before he came to work in the clear and considered manner which has characterised much of his mature work, he was painting portraits which stand up as some of the most compelling images in Scottish painting of the mid-century. His portraits of the 1960s generally depict his friends, but without any measure of camaraderie or youthful joie de vivre: his figures often appear isolated in dingy interiors, seemingly lost in gloomy introspection. He summons a presence with a painterly and tactile touch, but for all the “body” of his paintings, the figures remain strangely elusive. This text considers the spirit of the postwar world in which these images were created, throwing light on the intrigue and existential charge of Moffat’s portraits with an eye on the mood of the times.

In 1973, at the age of 30, Moffat was awarded a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It was a strikingly forward-thinking move for the Gallery, which had until then shown no work by “young, untried” artists [4]. Moffat was indeed that: as Gallery staff wrote in the exhibition catalogue, the artist was then “little known and there is no great demand for his portraits” [5]. Moffat had no more than a modest artistic reputation in Edinburgh, perhaps as much of a “weel-kent face” and the man partly-responsible for the highly-publicised open-air exhibitions of the 1960s as a serious artist in his own right. His livelihood relied mainly on day jobs in an Abbeyhill factory and the Edinburgh Central Library, as well as the occasional commission, and he valued the freedom to advance his work with serious intent on his own terms (free of a teaching job, for example) [6]. In Moffat’s paintings of the period, the friends and contemporaries who made up the creative milieu of 1960s Edinburgh loom large.

Duncan Thomson, the Gallery’s Deputy Keeper, came to regard these portraits as a very significant body of work. For him, Moffat’s painting reflected a mature engagement with the central problem of the modern portrait. His images strove to lift the much-maligned genre from the dismal position it had held since at least the turn of the century by depicting friends, unglamourised and unknown to the exhibition-going public. By adopting this position, like modern artists such as Cezanne and Van Gogh who had also depicted their own friends, Moffat demonstrated that the state of modern portraiture need not be dictated by the funds of wealthy committees, out to commission a likeness of a retiring colleague: in Scotland as elsewhere, the painted portrait could successfully represent the character and experience of real, ordinary people [7]. Thomson hung 42 such images in the Portrait Gallery, only a stone’s throw from the boardrooms of George Street and the drawing rooms of the New Town, but a world away from prevailing artistic taste in Edinburgh [8]. The exhibition, A View of the Portrait, was unquestionably a major milestone in the young painter’s career.

If it appears quite unusual that the Portrait Gallery of the early 1970s gave such support to a young artist, their invitation is especially striking given the nature of Moffat’s work; to mount a show depicting one’s own friends was one thing – a modern statement indeed – but to fly in the face of Edinburgh’s belle peinture tradition so defiantly was quite another. In many of the canvases from c.1967-9, Moffat summons his subjects within dark interior spaces, using a cheerless palette of brown, beige, black, blue and grey, suggesting the haze of an encounter mediated through cigarette smoke, or the unsavoury atmosphere of a late-night drinking club. His portraits are not without strong colour, used to stunning effect around the year 1970, but there is none of the lightness and gaiety of his old teachers’ work. In Moffat’s paintings, there are no open windows onto the North Berwick beach, no vases of pink peonies, and certainly none of the considered serenity of his own later work. His handling is direct and gestural but never sumptuous: in his portrait of John Bellany, his great friend, the red trousers are painted with rapid, raw vertical marks from a brush which has only gently licked the palette; no long, languorous strokes from a loaded brush. The legacy of modern German and Scandinavian art is manifest in this portrait, which recalls the work of masters like Munch, Grosz and particularly Beckmann in its rather monstrous evocation of this larger-than-life figure: Bellany is a huge, menacing presence, his square shoulders almost echoing the upper angle of the canvas. Yet his expression, like that of many sitters, is curiously forlorn, vulnerable and – try as we might to study it – quite impenetrable. Underneath Moffat’s vigorous, full-bodied, painterly approach, there is elusiveness.

Such paintings, presented before the citizens of Edinburgh – and in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, no less – were bound to raise a few eyebrows. Moffat’s portraits were a far cry indeed from those hanging in the City Chambers. A comment in the Gallery’s catalogue essay reads almost as a reassurance: “his work may appear to visitors as rather harsh and raw, but he achieves the basic ends of portraiture: a likeness and a personal interpretation of character” [9]. This may be true, but there is a further, deeper element which lies behind the essential enigma of Moffat’s 1960s portraits.

Moffat, born in 1943, belongs to a generation who grew up in the long shadow of the Second World War. The Allies might have trampled the Nazis, but the devastating economic and cultural effects of total war – not to mention the death toll – coloured the formative experiences of this generation of Scots. Oblivious as young Sandy was to the moral and philosophical debates of his immediate postwar youth, the triumph of the West in 1945, among the intelligentsia at least, did not last long. Victory was overshadowed by a sudden sense of moral emptiness, as news of the Holocaust broke and the developing tensions of the Atomic Age threatened the sort of nuclear annihilation unimaginable before Hiroshima and Nagasaki [10]. In this climate of anxiety and disorientation, existentialism exerted a powerful influence. A broad intellectual movement, invigorated by French philosophers Sarte and Camus in the postwar years, existentialism stressed freedom above all else in a human being’s individual striving for meaning and identity. At a time when, as Moffat’s future sitter Muriel Spark put it, “everyone began to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things”, the values of existentialism – wide-ranging though they were – offered a means of navigating a strange new world [11].

The far-reaching influence of existentialism in the postwar years had less to do with the activity of its main proponents and more to do with the way its broad message melded with the problems of the post-Holocaust/Cold War era and reached an enormous audience on a popular level. Existentialism, which is not a pessimistic philosophy by nature, appealed to the widespread sense of postwar disenchantment and its message about individual freedom came to be associated with feelings of personal isolation, alienation and anguish. Impure, watered-down existentialism had a marked effect on the popular culture of the era, in the sort of films – for example – which those of Moffat’s generation would have watched during adolescence. The spirit of existentialism, the flavour of the period, was there in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, certainly, but also in Rebel Without a Cause, in which alienated youth found an icon in James Dean, and in thrillers like Wages of Fear, in which human life balances on a knife-edge throughout (a parable for life under nuclear threat). The allure of this cultural phenomenon seduced many youngsters. In late 1950s Glasgow, the coffee shops around the university and the art school became haunts for “would-be existentialists”, smoking Gauloises and coolly catastrophising [12].

As a young man, Moffat was no existentialist. Like his friend Alasdair Gray, the Glasgow polymath, he identified with the optimism of the Left. Both Moffat and Gray have stressed the positive changes which followed the War, such as the democratisation of the higher education system which allowed talented working-class students into art schools [13]. However, as Gray wrote in the 1950s, in reference to the revelations of wartime atrocities, “these things have had their effect on our attitude. We who were born since 1930, we know that human life can be treated like garbage” [14]. For this generation, much of the mood of the times was coloured by truly dark events. It is clear to see, firstly, how the message of existentialism was shaped by the spirit of the times; but it is also clear that the spirit of the times was shaped by existentialism. Its influence was pervasive and for young, culturally sensitive creatives of this generation, existentialism as a force was impossible to ignore.

In 1967, at the age of 24, Moffat came face-to-face with the hard truth which ultimately underpinned this broad climate and the chatter of the would-be existentialists. He, Bellany and their close friend Alan Bold, the poet, visited Buchenwald in East Germany, the infamous concentration camp where around 56,000 people had been killed during the Holocaust. There, as Moffat himself put it, they “came face to face with the history of the Holocaust, and worse. No longer could we make smug predications or be certain that the world was on course to be a better place” [15]. Their estimation of the human condition took a severe blow. For Bellany, it vindicated his Calvinist belief in the essential sin of human beings and found expression in some of the most troubling paintings of the postwar era: raw-boned and grotesque-looking figures in striped uniforms, broken by physical and emotional trauma, recur time and again. No such figures exist in Moffat’s work. In their place, I would suggest, are the blank, impassive stares of those who appear in the portraits which Moffat took up immediately upon his return to Scotland.

Modern portraiture, from the time of Courbet and Manet, has explored the relationship between an individual’s outward, physical characteristics and their internal, intangible character. Modernists have gone further than the creation of a superficial likeness; in interrogating the physiognomy of a human being, they have sought to express something of their subject’s inner world [16]. In Moffat’s work of the later 1960s, he achieves a clear likeness, but drastically abbreviates the sort of visual information which might allow the viewer to grasp a real measure of the man or woman. We cannot trace creases in the skin, spot hairs on the face or digest the quirks and blemishes which are the outward indications of a real human presence. Moffat’s bold, painterly treatment is at its broadest in portraits like that of Claire Murray, in which his friend’s face is given a curiously mask-like appearance. Here, we sense a barrier which is almost physical; the notion of a “mask” presents such a clear impediment to our understanding of another person’s inner world that, we sense, the artist himself is as mystified by the sitter as we are. In Moffat’s image, there is no trace of the personal intimacy which goes hand-in-hand with a close friendship. Claire Murray is as remote and unfamiliar to us, the viewers, as she is to her friend, the painter.

It is striking that Moffat painted his then-wife Susan in this same manner, establishing before the viewer a clear and uncomfortable gulf. In this work from 1970, the bright colours do little to lighten the weight of Susan’s even stare, which distances the subject from the painter to the point of mutual isolation. There is little sympathy in her expression, but nor is there obvious animosity: simply evidence of an inexplicable and impassable rift between the two lovers. It is possible that this portrait is a personal statement about the nature of the Moffats’ relationship. The sight of a Vuillard poster over Susan’s shoulder carries ironic significance, given that the cosy domestic interiors of the great intimiste master stand in stark contrast to this remarkably cool, passionless image of married life. The poster appears to show the 1893 painting The Suitor, which records a moment in the courtship between Vuillard’s sister and a fellow painter which was doomed to end in a troubled marriage. The symbolism in the wider composition is clear and very melancholic, yet Susan’s expression gives nothing away.

This same sense of distance is even more evident in Moffat’s double portraits of the period. Here, Moffat shines an unsparing light on the space between two individuals, always lovers. His 1968 portrait of Ian and Patsy Croal, for example, shows each half of the young married couple in a state of lonely disaffection, their faces washed of warmth. Ian stares absently into space and Patsy, rigid with apprehension, grasps her knee in a gesture of barely-concealed tension. The claustrophobic picture space, the upper portion of which appears to literally weigh heavy on their heads, might force the pair together within the confines of a bedsit, but, really, the newlyweds are miles apart. They are absorbed in their own individual worlds and haunted, perhaps, by the knowledge that their private thoughts are theirs alone; they would seem to be resigned to a union which is merely contractual, not psychological.

Taken together, Moffat’s portraits of the period reflect a central problem. These images show the struggle to broach a great gulf; the mask-like faces and blank stares reveal the painter’s inability to tap into the inner life of a sitter. But more than this, Moffat’s double portraits reveal that the sitters themselves share in this agony. The distance in Moffat’s portrait of Susan might not simply address a personal rift; we find he is articulating a universal problem which haunts Ian and Patsy Croal, too. Moffat is painting the human condition; or at least an understanding of the human condition born of the postwar world.

One of the central concerns of existentialism is the journey of the individual. It is the responsibility of the individual human being to strive towards an understanding of meaning and identity. For the existentialist, the futility of life can be challenged – but never overcome – by the dignity of this lonely journey [17]. In the popular consciousness, this overarching notion fuelled a concept which came to be held as a core existential principal, one which embraced those currents of isolation and alienation and which was strengthened by interpretations of Sartre’s pronouncement that “Hell is other people”: that is, the belief that the essential aloneness of human beings forbids one from ever truly knowing another [18]. The popular culture of the era took this specific notion to heart; it found expression in the cinema of the postwar years, for example. In On the Waterfront, Edie asks Marlon Brando’s character, Terry, “isn’t everybody a part of everybody else?”; his response – “and you really believe that drool?” – is typical of the estrangement which characterised popular existential thought, and which coloured a popular understanding of the human condition in a troubled era.

Whether Moffat was conscious of this existential concern, or whether he absorbed something of its message as if by osmosis, its significance is borne out in relation to his portraiture of the 1960s. Here, we find Moffat rejecting the belle peinture of the Edinburgh School, breaking from tradition as if to confront peculiarly modern issues. He consciously shies away from a mimetic likeness in his painting and even makes capital of devices which obscure rather than reveal his subject’s character. It would appear that in going against the grain in this way, Moffat is seeking out an artistic expression for the forces which exerted a profound influence on his generation, and which surely appeared much more pressing after his visit to Buchenwald. Moffat’s figures are not as anonymous and grotesque as Bellany’s, but in their dispassionate stares, he might as well be casting his friends as the imagined survivors of the Nazi regime, lodged in a new era but shaken into silence. His portraits can be read as powerful comments on the essential loneliness which popular existentialism held to be at the core of the human condition. It would appear so incredibly close to home, a concern so pertinent to his generation, that his friends have it wrought all over their mask-like faces. As Moffat himself said, “everything is there in the face”.

The works exhibited in A View of the Portrait established Moffat as a serious portraitist capable of creating an affecting human likeness. The show demonstrates his early identification as a human-centric, modernist figurative painter and anticipates a lifelong concern with the human presence. But the images of the 1960s, which stand in stark contrast to the works which followed, in all of their elusiveness, appear so singularly different as to merit serious exploration on their own terms. However, an existential reading of these works must not be the final word. They are not, after all, bloodless philosophical essays in the existential feeling of the time. They are rich human documents which can be mined to reveal – alongside much else – something about the world from which they came and about the ideas of the human condition which held sway in the era. Moffat’s work might be charged with a certain angst, but the consummate skill showcased in this exhibition reveals an underlying, unwavering concern with our shared humanity. It is laid bare in this brilliantly compelling body of work.

Douglas Erskine

Notes

1: Bill Hare, Alexander Moffat: Facing the Nation (Edinburgh, 2018), p.13; Hare, Facing the Nation, p.89

2: Poet’s Pub, painted in 1980, was reproduced on the cover of the first edition of Murdo Macdonald’s Scottish Art (London, 2000), a standard text on the subject.

3: See Hare, Facing the Nation, pp.175-181, for further details of Moffat’s biography.

4: Duncan Thomson, “Introduction”, in Hare, Facing the Nation, p.8

5: R.E. Hutchison, “Introduction”, in Scottish National Portrait Gallery, A View of the Portrait: Portraits by Alexander Moffat (Edinburgh, 1973), p.6

6: Hare, Facing the Nation, pp.175-6

7: Ibid. See Hare’s text for an in-depth discussion of the subject.

8: See Scottish National Portrait Gallery, A View of the Portrait (Edinburgh, 1973) for more details.

9: Hutchison, “Introduction”, in Scottish National Portrait Gallery, A View of the Portrait, p.6

10: Bill Hare, Scottish Artists in an Age of Radical Change (Edinburgh, 2019), pp.50-51

11: Ibid.

12: William Hardie, Gallery: A Life in Art (Glasgow, 2017), p.20

13: Personal email correspondence with the artist, 3/8/24; Gray has written extensively on his support for the postwar welfare state. See Alasdair Gray, A Life in Pictures (Edinburgh, 2010), chapters four and five, for a discussion of his feelings.

14: Alasdair Gray, diary entry dated Friday 25 May (1956) in Acc.9417/25A; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

15: Alexander Moffat, “Our Apprenticeship Years”, in National Galleries of Scotland, John Bellany (Edinburgh, 2012), p.23

16: Joanna Woodall, “Introduction”, in Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester, 1997), p.7

17: Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post-war: In Search of the Absolute”, in Frances Morris, Paris Post-War: Art and Existentialism, 1945-55 (London, 1994), p.25. Wilson writes briefly on this existential concern, which is widespread in literature.

18: Sartre’s comment comes from his 1944 play Huis Clos (No Exit), in which three characters are locked in a small room for eternity. His comment has been interpreted in many different ways, but it may suggest that “Hell”, for Sartre, is the ontological struggle to see oneself as others see one; in this sense, Sartre comments on the gulf which is notable in Moffat’s portraits.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Sandy Moffat for his generous help and support in the preparation of this text, particularly for loaning a wealth of articles and other material and for providing the images which illustrate this text. All images courtesy of the artist.