Artist Rooms: Bourgeois, Chadwick, Mapplethorpe, Edinburgh review: 'confusing'

Artist Rooms: Bourgeois, Chadwick, Mapplethorpe, National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One, Edinburgh ★★★

With major summer exhibitions underway at the RSA and Modern Two, National Galleries of Scotland’s modern art flagship has had to make do with a rehang of its permanent collection, focused around three bodies of work from the Artist Rooms collection by Louise Bourgeois, Robert Mapplethorpe and Helen Chadwick.

When NGS opens its store cupboard, there are always surprises, and Artist Rooms, created from the collection of art dealer Anthony d’Offay in 2008 and jointly managed by NGS and Tate, contains great riches, but this show is rather confusing. Even trying to describe why it’s confusing is confusing, but I’ll do my best.

It feels like there are several exhibitions happening at once. The first you encounter is Face to Face, a group of diverse self portraits from the NGS collection which extends along the corridors of both wings of Modern One. It’s a busy hang, with a broad mix of styles, time periods and media, but self portraits are always interesting, and these are no exception.

Some are one-offs, from artists best known for other things: Anne Redpath, Barbara Rae, Alison Watt. Others are by artists for whom self portraiture was a key part of their practice: Robert Colquhoun, Andy Warhol, Francesca Woodman.

Still others have been made with a particular concept in mind, like Douglas Gordon’s 1996 Self Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe, which demonstrates to us how lazily we read images, and Sarah Lucas’ Divine, where she challenges gender norms before it became fashionable. There are glorious things like Munch’s solemn, almost priestly, lithograph, Kokoschka’s colourfully defiant Self Portrait as a Degenerate Artist from 1937 and Paul Neagu’s drawing in which he gradually transforms a cross section of the human head into geometrical boxes.

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The rooms to the left of the main corridor show groups of themed figurative works. The first, Connection, features Norah Neilson Gray from the 1920s, Caroline Walker’s monumental painting of the operating theatre at University College London Hospital after a Caesarian section, Lucian Freud’s Two Men, and Turner Prize-winner Jasleen Kaur’s family photographs set in orange resin.

The next, Rhythm, has just two large works, a wonderful portrait by Victoria Morton of pioneering composer Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop, and a large painting by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage, showing a group of traditional Tanzanian dancers in a composition influenced by Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon.

The last room, Grief, begins, chronologically, with Picasso’s Weeping Woman and takes in Bill Viola, Everlyn Nicodemus and Pat Douthwaite. Don McCullin’s A Palestinian mother in her destroyed house, Sabra Camp, 1982, is quietly devastating.

Then, there is Pause, a kind of chillout space lined with pale abstracts by Agnes Martin and Shirazeh Houshiary. It’s good to be encouraged to slow down and look, but do we really need a rest-space in which the work is thematically unconnected to anything else, particularly when we haven’t yet seen a single work by the three artists who have been advertised?

Happily, after that, we arrive at a room of Mapplethorpe, featuring six self-portraits made between 1975 and 1988. We see him as a beautiful young man, bare torso-ed with one arm outstretched, like something Caravaggio would have painted, then, 13 short years later, ravaged by Aids, regarding us steadily while one hand rests on a death’s head cane.

In between, he poses in different guises, with devil horns, an assassin’s blade, a James Dean cigarette-with-attitude. One is aware that Mapplethorpe was always precise and deliberate, even when he was being playful, and this exacting quality is part of what makes him one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.

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There’s a similarly uncompromising quality to the work of Louise Bourgeois, although there are only a handful of pieces here to represent a career of some six decades. A symbolist self-portrait from the 1940s is assured and intriguing; her mouth is open as she flies through the air, while a group of three figures (perhaps her husband and children?) cluster on top of a tower. There is a suite of etchings of hand gestures which celebrate her working relationship with her studio assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, who was with her for the last 30 years of her life.

Untitled, 1996, made when she was 85, is a kind of portrait, an assemblage of clothes, pieces of bone and body-partish objects made from rubber. It’s intimate and fragile, and somehow contains the passing of time. The giant spider gets a room of its own at the end - a marvellous thing, so complete in itself, in its utter spidery-ness, as well as holding a host of metaphorical references to motherhood, nurture, making, and a kind of fierce strength.

These works are impressive, but would benefit from the context of a larger body of work. A much larger iteration of the Louise Bourgeois Artist Room was loaned to Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum last year, and the collection allegedly has one of the largest and best groups of Mapplethorpes around. I’m at a loss to explain why the representation here is so small.

Helen Chadwick gets a little more space than the others. Her work is less easy to grasp. Early on, she used elements of her own story and her own body, though this gradually morphed into a broader interest in physicality: raw meat, bodily fluids, decaying organic matter.

Centrally positioned in the largest room of the show are her Piss Flowers, made with David Notarius in the early 1990s on a residency in Canada, during which both urinated into mounds of compacted snow then cast the forms in bronze. They’re intriguing, like bits of fantastical landscape, but can never be completely separated from the school-kid-prankiness of how they were made.

She, too, has a work called Self Portrait, a photograph of her two hands cupping a human brain. It’s strange and unsettling, the hands so clearly alive, and the brain long separated form the life it once piloted. Ruin is also a kind of self-portrait, a body, perhaps the artist’s own, posed like a classical sculpture, her hand resting on a skull. Later works, like Meat Abstract, and Loop My Loop, a photograph of long hair interwoven baroquishly with pigs’ intestines, lose the particularity of a human self.

It’s hard to be clear about the themes of this diverse show, or cluster of shows. There are through lines about the self, identity and inner life, but this feels too broad to be of much use (would it not encompass much of modern art?). With Chadwick, in particular, this strategy seems to run aground, bringing little to help us appreciate what we see.

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