Three Pigs in Renfrew Street - architectural report

The recent students' degree show at Glasgow School of Art was an opportunity to see the new building over the road from the original School, for real; after its online and telly  airing following the opening. I have to admit that most of what I said at the time holds true. The space between the old and new buildings is a neat shape but that's as far as I can go with the positive. In an ideal world, the new building would have had walls of stone, to tie-in with the Mackintosh building. Failing that, even brick could have done; and it would have aged and settled in, in time. But the new block's exterior is about as far as it is  possible to get from the Arts-and-Crafts ethos that inspired CRM. Instead of being a functional element of the structure, it is nothing more than cladding panels stuck on to the interior skeleton. Whatever these panels are made of, two are already damaged, badly dunted, by no more than the wind blowing up Scott Street apparently - bent inwards and shattered. Any dreams of them ageing well may be defenestrated. Will they keep the inside safe from Nature's ravages? Time will tell. 

So long, Jack

goingthruvinyl.com

Jack Bruce, from Bishopbriggs Glasgow, has died at 71. He studied composition at the  Royal Scottish Academy of Music and left the academy and Scotland at the age of 16, making his way to London where he became a member of the seminal Alexis Korner's Blues Inc, where Charlie Watts was on drums. Watts left to join the Rolling Stones and Ginger Baker took over, beginning the long love/hate relationship - or hate/hate relationship, that found its expression in Cream's roaring, racing backdrop to Eric Clapton's extended solos. Immediately after the breakup of Cream he got back into jazz, with the release of the album 'Things we like', and went on to work with such luminaries as John McLaughlin and Frank Zappa, playing a central role in arguably jazz's first supergroup, Lifetime. He left a legacy of songs and compositions as well as just enough recordings to establish his great width of abilities.

Scotland: reasons to be yessing

A major reason to vote 'Yes' in the Scottish referendum must be the promise of disassociation from Britain's infamous role as warmonger through hosting nuclear submarines, allowing US bombers to use the UK as 'airstrip one' and otherwise backing the US wars of self-interest -particularly as a manufacturing base, from napalm for Vietnam to fighter planes for Gaza, but there is more, well summed-up by John McGrath's great play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb3qbFcLYZc  The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil.

GSA has a sister

copyright: GSA

Glasgow School of Art, which has always been rebuilding itself before, during and after the growth of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's world-famous main building, has at last got something which is both functional and complementary to the old alma mater. While the School has been colonising other parts of its hill (including the old army building in Hill Street, St Aloysius' School and of course the Cottage, half-way along to Charing Cross), this was something needed, and the new building appears to give that stretch of Renfrew Street more of a 'campus' feel than it ever had with the piece-meal collection left over from the 'sixties and before that, the mix of old, almost  vernacular -shaped stone buildings with a couple of modern add-ons. In reproduction and video, the new block looks a little too clean and as if "faced" rather than solidly built - although if the facing is something like stone, a little ageing could only improve this. For the moment, the space created between the two parts is definitely pleasing.
http://www.gsa.ac.uk/about-gsa/history-and-future/our-future/campus-redevelopment/

Margo MacDonald

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Margo MacDonald, having struggled with Parkinson's Disease, died today. She became the Face of Scottish Nationalism when she won the Govan by-election for the SNP in 1973, but always being very much a woman of her own priciples, fell out with the party leadership and left politics for journalism, returning to play a role in the SNP - short-lived, as she was not with the party's drift towards a more 'liberal' stance. Despite this she remains, in the public eye, that Face.

To quote BBC News:

Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont, said: "Margo's passing sees a bright light, and one of the biggest personalities and characters of Scottish modern political life, go out.
"Her sense of humour, passion, integrity and unflinching desire to speak truth to power, meant she came as close to a political treasure in Scotland as I think it is possible to be."
'Force of nature'
Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, added: "Margo was a force of nature in Scottish life."

Why does 'referendum' smell funny?

The universal fuss our news media are making about the forthcoming Scottish Independence referendum is bemusing; even baffling. So many scribes and hacks revealing the gaps in their long-term memories, and never one mention of the last referendum, which was fiddled by Jim Gallaghan's Labour government, losing Labour that weight-shifting traditional Scottish vote in the subsequent election and ushering in the Thatcher years. Ultimately an own-goal for Labour.
We who do remember find the current air of excitement irritating, as if it hadn't already been that way back in the 'seventies. But Labour insisted that the yes vote must be, not a majority of the actual voters, but (just to complicate it) rather 40% out of the total number of those entitled to vote. And even before we got that far, the ballot paper question was not the expected, "Do you want independence?" but "Do you want devolution?"
"Do we want whaat?"

Devolution had not been debated or even publically mooted, and for too many of us it was a blank neologism. I guessed (correctly) that it could mean anything and nothing. To make matters worse, American avant-garde pop group Devo was currently riding high in the charts with a single and album ironically celebrating 'devolution' by which they meant the dumbing-down of western culture. Having supported nationalism (and nothing but) ever since I came to voting age, I voted no.

Syria

When Alex Salmond, the lone voice of sanity, condemned the proposed bombing of Bosnia towards the end of the Yugoslav civil war, as "an act of unparalleled folly", he was almost right. In the days before D-Day, the Allies carried out bombing raids all over the northern  coast of France, the intention being to 'soften up' the enemy, but in reality killing lots of the French people who were up for liberation. The damage was still easily visible when I visited and looked in the 'fifties. The USA repeatedly followed a similar routine in Vietnam later on, bombing villages each time they were taken over by the Vietcong.



Sahara Complex, near Damascus

Some of us are capable of learning from history, if our politicians cannot. Do we want to follow the same incoherent behaviour again, with the long-suffering people of Syria as victims this time? The answer must be no.

The Two Roberts

　

THE LAST BOHEMIANS
Roger Bristow
Published by Sansom & Company

“They came in one day and I was mesmerised by them. They were dressed in black from top to toe... I thought - Christ, these are real Bohemians!” Ken Russell

The two largely forgotten giants of Scottish art, known to pre-‘cutting-edge’ art students, particularly in Glasgow, and not that many art lovers and collectors, as The Two Roberts, have influenced countless younger artists through their followers. Joan Eardley, who created her own brand of expressionism, picked up their 'virus' in her earlier work, and successive generations have picked up and disseminated their influence. Many young artists will be employing elements of their vision without even having heard of the two 'R's.

But the Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, burnt out too young to capitalise on their youthful success, which went up like a firework and hardly survived longer. Their story is of talent versus human frailty. A timeless kind of saga, but it has never been told yet, so the world has made do with the myths that surrounded these two lovers; some of the myths being their own inventions and others just growing to fill the spaces. One of their own making was the one about their having stolen the Stone of Scone while drunk, eagerly believed by several following generations of art students. And like John Byrne’s modernist play of 1992 produced at the Royal Court Theatre London, which had them sleeping rough out in Cork Street to force a gallery to give them a show, an excellent story, but typically not true - they didn’t have to struggle for the gallery. They doubtlessly camped, but not in a tent.

Roger Bristow has devoted nearly twenty years to hunting down the surviving contemporaries of the Roberts. In many cases he was just in time. Those he spoke to include Prunella Clough, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Ken Russell, George Barker, Jon Craxton and Daniel Farson. Fortunately the kinds of people who inhabit bohemia write letters, and keep them; so correspondence has added dialogue to the tale.

Colquhoun and MacBryde were both born to hard-working families in Ayrshire and grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. Colquhoun had the luck to be supported by his art teacher, who convinced two local patrons of the arts, one in the Church and one in the whisky industry, to provide grants allowing him to remain at school until he applied for a place at Glasgow School of Art, instead of becoming an apprentice as his father wanted. And in that, he was already the embodiment of the Scottish antisyzygy.

MacBride, as he was named until leaving art school, showed an early talent for singing, dancing and entertaining as well as drawing. But despite his artistic skills being encouraged at home and at school, unlike Colquhoun he had to slog through a succession of menial jobs before making it up Scott Street to the then recently-built Charles Rennie Mackintosh building.

Their budding friendship as fellow Ayrshiremen on the daily train-in became mutual devotion when they began sharing a flat near the School. Years later, Colquhoun’s mother, in this precious quote, summed it up ‘defiantly’:

“Bobby met Robert MacBryde on the first day he attended Glasgow Art School. They became such close friends, what could I do about it? And where would Bobby be without MacBryde? Robert MacBryde did a lot for Bobby.”

It was in the pressurised atmosphere of student life that the two, recognised for their precocious talents as much as for their reputation as loners, became known as ‘The Two Roberts’ - or just ‘The Roberts’ - a composite person. If any of their friends or lecturers suspected that their relationship was intimately physical, they would either have ignored the signs or have been unable to believe them. Scotland, socially and legally weighed down by the presence of the Presbyterian Church well into the 1980s, would have been the last place to openly admit to being homosexual, and the Roberts were so successful in keeping themselves to themselves that one close friend and one-time tutor, Ian Fleming, went to his grave convinced that they were ‘definitely not homosexual... certainly not while they were in Scotland.’

Fleming’s double portrait of the boys, while not being ‘great painting’, speaks volumes about them and about their relationship. I found myself referring back to it while I read the book. Colquhoun is moody, unstable and looking outwards while MacBryde plays The Wife, sitting behind, enigmatically smiling towards his friend and very much in charge. Despite MacBryde’s laid-back appearance in the portrait, he was the one who would tend to break into song or dance at the slightest opportunity, while the dangerous-looking Colquhoun was in fact the more withdrawn and introspective of the two, and both attractive to and attracted by women.

When their art school life came to an end with diplomas in drawing and painting for the two, Colquhoun won the Travelling Scholarship for 1938. This posed a problem for the two, as they would be forced to function for a time as separate halfs - two shells with no oyster. Even the School governors and staff were aware of this. But the Chairman of the Board came to the rescue with a personal donation to MacBryde.

And so the two set off on the Grand Tour, doing Europe: including Paris, Amsterdam, Florence and of course Rome, where they were arrested, in the current amosphere of antipathy, by a policeman who mistook them for Frenchmen . They were forced to return quickly as war broke out across Europe again, and held an exhibition of drawings from the journey, in Kilmarnock. This and other student shows were the only times their work was exhibited for sale in Scotland during their lives.

On their return to Scotland though, they eventually had to contend with the effects of the war. Colquhoun was conscripted; the experience led to serious deterioration in his physical and mental health, and MacBryde, partly out of concern for his partner, decided to drop his conscientious objections to soldiering and sign on. He, too, was found to be unwell, enough to be rejected by the army. A long-established problem with his lungs had left him open to tuberculosis while living in poverty after the European tour.

It was in the midst of this despairing scenario that MacBryde met John Tonge, journalist and art critic, in Waverley Station. A slim chance that reversed the Roberts' fortunes. Tonge was the fast-track connection to London, and this was followed by Colquhoun's discharge from the army.

The two moved south, their painting styles coincidentally maturing into a kind of Euro-modernism; happily in tune with society's reaction against the drab inter-war years. Being homosexual also helped give them entré to patrons and collectors. Their personas as exotic, mad, Scotsmen contributed to the spread of their fame as much as their work did, and they became the Golden Boys of Bond Street. They inevitably had their decriers, being accused of posing as professional Scots (they tended to wear kilts; this may have been an affectation they only took up in London) but on the other hand had to defend their heritage from people like Michael Ayrton, who carelessly included Colquhoun in a radio programme about English art.

In London with its webs of intrigue, the power games, the triumphs and disasters, the account begins to read a little like a thriller. Despite that, there are so many players and so many galleries, publications, new homes and pubs that it could add up to a dry catalogue of facts, and with the added look at painting techniques at best a scholarly exegesis, but Roger Bristow is able to keep it moving along. The Roberts' fame was such that in 1949 The New Statesman could run a clerihew competition about them:

‘There’s a trick we haven’t tried, MacBryde.’
‘We will soon, Colquhoun.’

Before the slow fall from grace, their regular studio soireés attracted Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton,and Dylan Thomas among many.

MacBryde lived on, incredibly, well into the Swinging Sixties, convincingly sporting a Beatle jacket; a man from another world - his lonely vigil ended by a hit and run driver.

This may not be the lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, but there are more than enough reproductions to keep the afficionado happy and to wise-up the uninitiated, and while there are no smoky shots of the Coach and Horses or the French House, the photos add flesh to the text. This is, with its exhaustive catalogue raisonné and fastidiously compiled index, The Book.

Yet more, by Frances Spalding, at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/24/last-bohemians-roger-bristow-review