‘William Gillies: Modernism and Nation’ is showing at Kirkcudbright, the last stop on its tour of Scotland. The tour has encompassed nine galleries starting on the 8 December 2023 in Haddington and Edinburgh, and including North Uist, Inverness and The Pier Arts Centre in the Orkneys. There are also various spin off events such as a Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) lecture, and a current exhibition at The Gracefield Centre Dumfries.
Rethinking William Gillies
A book by Andrew McPherson William Gillies: Modernism and Nation in British Art accompanies the exhibition; it is the product of many years of research. McPherson tells us in the RSA Lecture (2024) that a narrative of Gillies as an innocent countryman and a traditionalist took hold in the 1950s. A sentimental idea of someone rooted in landscape and disinterested in modernity. Because of this, it was supposed that Gillies had no place in modern Scottish art. However, Gillies’ exponents believed it was because of his connection to the Scottish landscape that he was not associated with modernity. McPherson rejects the ‘countryman narrative’. He recasts Gillies as outward looking, influenced by European art and Modernism. He also believes that Gillies’ experience of trauma is vital to understanding his art.
The experience of trauma
Gillies fought in the trenches. The muddy, cold conditions, fears of ‘trench foot’, gangrene, gas and shelling are well documented. It typically took years for a service man to process such experiences. At that time, understanding of post-traumatic stress was in its infancy. Gillies’ wartime sketch books are displayed in the exhibition, but McPherson suggests that it was not until years later that Gillies could face his war experiences.
Gillies returned to live with his father, mother and two sisters. His home was also deeply entrenched in trauma. Following a stroke in 1905, when Gillies was seven, his father had become paranoid and violent and he abused his daughter Emma, who developed an intense fear of men. His mother both worked and lived in Haddington psychiatric institution and left there only to go to a blighted marriage.
Gillies’ sister Emma
Emma, who attended the Royal College of Art, was admitted to a London psychiatric institution because of the stress precipitated from her father and thought to be reactivated by the sexual harassment of an art tutor. She was wrongly diagnosed as a ‘hysteric’. His two sisters both had hereditary thyroid conditions and Emma died suddenly in Edinburgh in 1936. Gillies himself lived with the threat of the thyroid disorder.
The portraits display Gillies’ psychological insight. In the naturalistic Portrait of Emma (1921) she has a far-away fragile look. It is not a portrait of someone subsumed by mental disorder, but it conveys a sense of her emotional foundations having been severely undermined. However, its mood is not plainly sad.
The exhibition tells us, it was painted when Emma’s father lay upstairs dying, and one might speculate that Emma felt relief at her father’s impending death. A later less naturalistic painting: Sisters Emma and Janet (c1931) convey his sisters’ respective characters: the grounded self-possessed Janet and the distant Emma.
Fragmentation and Modernism
Modernism was an apt channel for Gillies’ trauma. The Modernist movement is widely considered to have been amplified by the upheaval and destruction of WW1. For those who lived through the war, deep-rooted assumptions about the nature of the world would have been upended. Modernism is characterised by fragmentated forms and an interest in breaking down compositions and remaking them. It foregrounded individual consciousness and the nature of perception.
The exhibition text to Rocks and the Sea (c1935) says:
“These works of the mid 1930’s engaged with a core concern of modernism. The instability and sources of meaning itself. Gillies explores how we perceive rocks and sea by breaking things down into shapes and ciphers…”
It may also recall the trenches, with its mud-like colours, impasto texture of paint, upwards looking viewpoint and swirling forms.
Outside and inside
Like many of his contemporaries Gillies had studied in Paris and he was deeply influenced by the Edvard Munch Exhibition in Edinburgh 1931. From the 1930s onwards, his style is thought to have advanced. The Interior (1938), described as his modernist masterpiece, is influenced by the metaphysical concerns explored by Velasquez in Las Meninas (1656). Both feature a room with an artist, a mirror and improbable reflections.
The exhibition text tells us that The Interior is an illusion of family realities and identities in time and space. Gillies’s is shown in a mirror, but his position is impossible in relation to what he sees. Janet looks 20 years younger than she would have been in 1938. It is not only the interior of a room, but an interior of Gillies’ mind. This echoes modernist concerns with the importance of the individual’s subjectivity and the blurring of artistic boundaries between the psyche and the external world.
Symbolism
Gillies uses symbolism in many of his later works and starts to confront his war time memories, for example poppies and the deaths in WW1. The black vase appears whenever there is a death in his life. Gillies experienced many deaths both at war and at home. Three of his peers killed themselves and he is preoccupied by the death of Emma. McPherson said that the black vase appears at least 29 times in his work.
One of his last paintings Still Life on a Dark Ground (1973) was found on his easel when he died. Although it is ostensibly a still life, the dark rear edge of the table looks like the horizon line of a landscape. One might view this painting as a final playful excursion into perception, and a summary of his work.
The British nation and the Scottish Renaissance
One of the questions I had before visiting the exhibition was the meaning of the word ‘nation’ to Gillies. In the exhibition film Still Life with Honesty (1970), Gillies describes WW1 as “a waste of time”. The operative word is probably ‘waste’; it suggests his cynicism and lack of engagement with British patriotism and ideas of king and country.
During the 1920s to the 1950s, the Scottish Renaissance took place. Figures such as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and some artists including William Johnstone were very engaged with the idea of home rule for Scotland. Johnstone was not one of Gillies’ close circle, but he taught at Edinburgh College of Art where Gillies also taught after 1925. It is inconceivable therefore that Gillies would not have thought about ‘The Home Rule Movement’. However, McPherson suggests that after the war Gillies was distrustful of all big ideas and he had no interest in any party-political type of nationalism. This is similar to his attitude towards British patriotism.
Gillies and Scotland
Nonetheless, throughout Gillies’ art there is an intimate engagement with Scotland and its landscape, and he asserts Scottish art, identity and its place in the world. In the RSA lecture (2024), Sandy Moffat (RSA) cites an interview of 1961 where Gillies says that there is no need for artists to go to London. Everything they needed was in Scotland, including a sense of the locality and the indigenous culture. This is not so very different from the ‘countryman narrative’, but the difference seems to be, that it is more quietly forceful and shaped by a cosmopolitan outlook.
Indeed, the sense of place is strong in Gillies’ work. His lovely watercolours such as Resipol (c1936) convey the essence of a scene, the light of Scotland and the rocky shores. He nearly always gives his landscape paintings place names, as if he is plotting where he has been, mapping memories.
The achievement of the Kirkcudbright exhibition is to reframe Gillies as an outward looking complex artist. The exhibition paintings, texts and film help us understand his life and his relationship to Modernism. But I think we need to turn to McPherson’s research and the RSA lectures to fully understand where the concept of ‘nation’ fits in.
However, this quibble need not stop enjoyment of the art itself, and one may speculate this is what Gillies would have wanted.
More information about Kirckcudbright Galleries.
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