Art reviews: Unmasked: Exploring Scottish Portraiture | Avigdor Arikha | George Macpherson

Unmasked: Exploring Scottish Portraiture, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Avigdor Arikha: From Life, The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

George Macpherson: Ceòl na Tìr-dhàimh | The Music of Home, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★

Portraits tend to offer a dual source of interest to the viewer: the work of the artist, and the story of the subject. Unmasked, a show of portraits spanning some 400 years, from Edinburgh’s own city art collection, adds a third by exploring the varied aspects of portraiture itself.

A portrait, it seems, is rarely just a straight depiction of the sitter. The Scottish masters of the genre, Ramsay and Raeburn, for example, are usually doing something else too. Raeburn’s portrait of Sir James Stirling, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, for example, is a splendid working of the contrasts between the man’s luxurious black coat and his red velvet chair. That said, if this show has a fault, it might be one too many provosts.

The earliest work here is by George Jamesone, commissioned to paint a series of the kings of Scotland for the arrival of Charles I in Edinburgh. His portrait of 10th-century king Kenneth II must be from imagination, yet it is full of life.

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There are well-known paintings here, like Scottish Colourist FCB Cadell’s The Black Hat, less known for its sitter (Bethia Hamilton Don Wauchope), or even for being a portrait at all, than for its chic styling and beautifully free handling of paint. There are artists who might be new to us, like German emigré Milein Cosman, who studied at the Slade and was sent to Edinburgh in 1947 to sketch key players at the first Edinburgh Festival. And there are others who are gradually attaining the recognition they deserve, like the wonderful Bessie MacNicol.

The show mixes styles and chronology, ensuring a surprise around every corner: Pat Douthwaite’s Final Instructions Before Take-Off, for example, a flamboyant, expressive tribute to solo pilot Amy Johnson, about whom she made a whole exhibition in 1977, or a watercolour by Barbara Balmer of a striking woman she spotted in a Paris hotel lobby.

There are thoughtful portraits by artists who have sought out subjects who interest them, like Joyce Gunn Cairns’ drawing of Tessa Ransford, and Victoria Crowe’s portrait of pioneering psychoanalyst Winifred Rushforth, which is a psychological study in itself.

Some have a political story to tell, like the miniature of Bonnie Prince Charlie painted by Jacobite sympathiser Charles Dickson in the 1740s, designed to be hidden in a pocket. And Dorothy Johnstone’s Rest Time in the Life Class, from 1923, depicts a key a moment in the education of women artists, when Edinburgh College of Art had its own all-female life room.

Photography is well represented, too, with Robin Gillanders’ poignant portrait of musician Karine Polwart, and David Eustace’s portrait of Robbie Coltrane, entirely recognisable even with his back to us.

The wonderful Maud Sulter was among the first artists to use the language of portraiture to explore the representation (or lack thereof) of women of colour, in her Zabat series of photographs. And a generation later, Zimbabwean-Scottish artist Sekai Machache explores subtle themes of colonialism in her Hint of Blue series, depicting herself amid sumptuous domestic tableaux.

Writing an obituary for Avigdor Arikha in 2010, Ann Wroe described the Romanian-French artist as “perhaps the best painter from life in the last decades of the 20th century”. This foists a heavy burden of expectation on any show of his work, such as the current one at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh. Perhaps he doesn’t quite reach these heights, but is nonetheless well worth seeing.

Arikha was born in Romania in 1929 to a German-speaking Jewish family and survived a concentration camp as a teenager largely thanks to the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the International Red Cross.

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He trained as an artist in Jerusalem and later moved to Paris where he planned to work as an abstract painter. However, an encounter with works by Caravaggio and a friendship with the sculptor Giacometti helped bring an about-turn in the 1960s in which he committed to a rigorously representational style, making every work from life, with natural light, in a single sitting. He drew and painted what was around him: a coat; a pencil sharpener; a corner of his studio where there was a crack in the wall; himself; his wife, the American poet Anne Atik.

This is a show mainly of pastels, drawings and prints, all of which he excelled at. The attention he invested in, for example, a simple manila envelope, is arresting. He was a friend of Samuel Beckett, and drew and painted the writer a number of times; his Memento SB from 1991 is quietly elegiac. His self portraits have a particular energy: he stares at us, mouth half-open, as if he has just surprised himself. There’s humour, too, in the way he depicts himself emerging nude from behind a blue sheet, a folded towel draped over his face.

The challenge seeing his work today is that it can feel ephemeral. What makes a crack in the wall, a pair of shoes or a pencil sharpener important enough to paint or draw? Perhaps that’s the point. There’s casualness about his spontaneity, his investment of skill in the depiction of ordinary things. But there’s nothing casual about the skill itself.

It’s easy for an artist to slip from view in an art world always hungry for the new, and the RSA does valuable work in bringing back to mind artists like George Macpherson, who taught drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art for three decades until his retirement in 1990. Ceòl na Tìr-dhàimh | The Music of Home comes largely from the works left behind in his studio when he died in 2018.

Macpherson’s work is predominantly abstract, though he was a very fine draughtsman, evidenced by a series of life studies which he kept on his studio wall. He was born in Invershin, and there is a sense of Highland landscape in much of his work, even when he wasn’t depicting it directly.

There is also a musical sensibility, his talent as an artist having developed in tandem with his skill as an accordion player. However, his artistic style was also forged at a time when abstract expressionism was the unignorable force in the art world, and his admiration of Jackson Pollock is evident too, particularly in colourful, layered paintings which appear to have been made on a flat surface.

He liked to work in layers, sanding back and adding, building up surfaces with other materials, or incising into thick layers of paint. Sometimes he built up constructions of wood and paint. Untitled, 1992 uses a big shard of slate and coils of wire. Even paintings with a relatively flat surface have multiple layers of colour, finished with dancing symbols which might be ancient runes, modern graffiti tags or musical notation.

It’s difficult work to arrive at cold; one needs a bit of time, and some background information, to appreciate it. In one way, his work reflects its era, however, in another it’s testament to an energetic and free-spirited creativity which Macpherson passed on to subsequent generations of artists.

Unmasked: Exploring Scottish Portraiture until 31 May; Avigdor Arikha: From Life until 1 November; George Macpherson: Ceòl na Tìr-dhàimh | The Music of Home until 12 October

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