Response to Grousebeater
‘Gray was an author and illustrator. I doubt he had had ambition to be a painter exhibited in major museums of art internationally.’
In a world of specialisms and low expectation, it is sometimes difficult for people to appreciate and acknowledge that others might be talented in more than one area. The desire to classify and categorise in order tocomprehend often results in the misjudgement of Alasdair Gray’s abilities. As to his ambition, in 1965 he wrote:
‘I get a satisfaction from painting which nothing else gives. And cannot stop painting for two or three months without feeling guilty and cheap. This mental condition has made me give up teaching several times since I graduated from art school five years ago’.
Asking himself the question ‘What use is art?’, he answers:
‘No use at all. It won’t help you earn money or get a job or make friends and influence people, but if you enjoy it, you have an extra pleasure in life, a pleasure as strong as religion and almost as strong as money-making or drink. And unlike drink, there’s no hangover after’. (From The Mean City, 1962, NLS Acc 9247/37)
It is worth noting that his painting The Fall of the Star Wormwood (1960) which sold at Lyon and Turnbull this week for £42,700 was oil on canvas and measured 71 x34 inches. It was painted for Artists Against the Bombexhibition. Gray made no money from it as he never confused the intrinsic value of art with the vagaries of the art market where the price of everything and the value of nothing is known. He would be pleased that the person who curated the work for him these past 40 years has had this windfall.
Gray was an illustrator, like Giotto and Mantegna before him.
‘King’s description of him makes him sound as if his daily life was in constant disarray, a clutter of his own mind.’
Sorry, I think you have misread and misunderstood. I worked with Alasdair Gray. He was focussed, well-organised and breath-takingly productive when in 1993 he painted his Tree of History on the ceiling of the long gallery in Abbot House, Dunfermline. His paints, pens and brushes were meticulously maintained and though the commission was framed in terms of ceiling decoration, he produced a schematical summation of Scottish history with Dunfermline’s place at the heart of it.The additional 75 head and shoulders portraits of historical figures and towns people gave Dunfermline its own portrait gallery.
‘I’ve never heard anybody describe Gray as an artist first and foremost.’
You have now. When he left the People’s Palace to take up a writing post in Glasgow University, it came as a surprise to us. Alasdair Gray believed in the power of public art to enrich, inform, and change lives, and his art was painted for a better nation: a nation which could employ artists like it employs electricians and where art would not be commodified and manipulated as it is today.
Gray believed that ‘an artist’s persona adds nothing to the true enjoyment of his art’. For that reason, the Huw Weldon Monitor film on Gray’s work (BBC, 1964) presented Gray, the artist, as dead – until the last frames of the film, which revealed him as alive, and 27 years old. It was said that as the credits rolled, the sound of cheque books being put away could be heard all over Scotland.
‘The late John Byrne was never given a major exhibition by a national gallery’.
Point of interest: Byrne was also not best appreciated as an artist by Glasgow. The People’s Palace collected his two-part 8×8 feet portrait of Billy Connolly in 1974 but it was not ‘a real painting’ so only half of the work – the portrait half – was photographed. Last displayed in full in 1990, the banjo half of it was discarded on removal to storage, after I left Glasgow Museums in 1991. The artist graciously re-painted the discarded half before his Kelvingrove exhibition in 2022.
‘Months before his death he left the SNP and rejoined the Labour party.’
I know that the dead have no rights in law, but I think you should substantiate this statement. I’ve never seen proof that Alasdair Gray was in the Labour Party. Giving a one-off sympathy vote to Jeremy Corbyn and holding a Labour Party card are quite separate things.
Alasdair Gray cared deeply about his art and the well-being of all artists. In a treatment for a TV documentary on New Town art in 1974, he identified the plight of artists in Scotland:
‘When the prosperity sailed south in the 1930s it left Scottish painters clinging to their art schools like drowning seamen to so many rafts. The art schools were unimportant to an earlier generation… Now the committee of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute are almost all painting teachers…The force which turns artists into dominies or hermits is the force which shut the shipyards that developed the hovercraft.’
A better nation will perhaps pay closer attention to his life, art and writing in future.
MY COMMENTS
One of the purposes of Yours for Scotland is to generate debate and discussion in a polite and constructive format always respecting different opinions. This debate is a good example of this.
I am, as always
Yours for Scotland
YOURS FOR SCOTLAND 
Thank you, Elspeth, for correcting the many opinions masquerading as fact by Grousebeater. I don’t mind at all what he thinks, but the rather aggressive and patronising claims he makes about Gray merely amplify the kinds of prejudice, disdain and misunderstanding Gray was subject to and battled agains all his life. How odd that in this day and age an artist, in the broadest sense of the word, ie one who can command more than one medium, and do very successfully, should be held to an arbitrary standard of taste which forces him into the kind of box he joyfully refused to be restricted to. Restricting him to being a ‘writer’ and thus denigrating his prolific and very Scottish sense of line and composition, not to mention his wonderfully idiosyncratic and creative merging of text and image, does him a severe disservice, and for what point? None at all, save the foregrounding of a cantankerous opinion which belittles his work and character. As i said, I don’t mind opinion, we all have them, but deplore them being fielded as if they were unarguable defining statements about a much revered cultural figure such as AG.
Gray, most of all, would either laugh at, or scorn, any attempt at being ‘mansplained’ to the general public (as GB is doing to you) – like indeed the great John Byrne whose work spoke to people through the media of art and writing, to anyone exposed to it – no interpretation or intervention necessary. Just an open mind and a delight in encountering an original, passionate, body of work that illuminates our lives.
I appreciate you sharing your personal experiences with Alisdair, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
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‘rather aggressive and patronising’. Quite an interesting assessment!
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Museums are awesome.
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My appreciation of Gray was and remains based only on what I have seen and read of his work. I need only like what I see or read to appreciate the artist’s work. There are many fine critics out there, but most have a limited readership-spread thus little public influence, which would suggest that it is the work itself which touches some people and not others i.e. we either like something or we don’t, with critical analysis as a further option. You can throw money at anything without any guarantee of its public popularity.That I attended the same school as John Byrne and Gerry Rafferty never influenced my appreciation of their artistic output, I simply saw, heard and liked something in their work that resonated with me. None of which is to argue that individual-taste even exists or is the final arbiter in anything. Simplistic and mercurial categories like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ just don’t behave as we demand them to in order to make definitive sense of anything in the world. Is it not then a supreme arrogance, being the irrational creatures that we are, to presume that we can meaningfully elevate or deelevate vis-a-vis all artistic works? With all the money and manufactured hype surrounding Poor Things, the movie, its box-office success is assured. My only (both antediluvian and futile) objection to the current glitzkrieg surrounding the movie is that Gray’s own unique voice, his mither-tongue has been unceremoniously ripped from its geographical context. Above all, perhaps, that’s for the want of a truly international Scottish film industry; which is only something that might be expected in a colonial economy. Thankfully, change happens, whether we want it too or not, and in many unforeseeable ways. So, with that-in-mind I’ll say: bring-on the multi-million, Scottish-pound production of Lanark, set in Paisley or even Riddrie.
On Sat, Jan 13, 2024 at 7:55 PM YOURS FOR SCOTLAND < comment-reply@wordpress.com> wrote:
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I must admit I missed the spat in a tea cup that is Grouse Beater’s reply to the earlier blog so am thankful to read the reply by Elspeth. I have since gone back for a read of the great man’s comments and am none the wiser what he is wittering on about or his point other than his opinion of a man differs from Elspeth. My reply would be to get over it. Having been on the receiving end of one of his rants which he thought better of and later deleted I am not surprised but just find it sad. Well done Lawson for publishing the reply or can I call you Iain?
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Endorsement on reverse of my French copy of Alasdair Gray’s LANARK:
“Il était temps que l’Écosse produise un roman puissant dans une langue moderne”. (Anthony Burgess, ‘Les 99 meilleurs romans anglais depuis 1945’)
Éditions Métailié, Paris, 2000. Traduit de l’anglais (Écosse) par Céline Schwaller
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I thank you Elspeth for contributing your first hand experience and knowledge.
I personally appreciate that these fragments of our cultural history are worth recounting, repeating and preserving.
Personaly, I knew very little of AG beyond his written work.
Imagine my surprise when I once asked my father about The Author, and he told me a bit about the man, because he had known him for a few years, before he was ‘famous’.
Small world Scotland. Isn’t it.
😉
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