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Sir Robin Philipson(1916-1992)7 - 30 May 2012The Scottish Gallery16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZTel 0131 558 1200Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.ukwww.scottish-gallery.co.ukFront cover: Cockfight oil and vinyl toluene on canvas 122 x 122 cmsLeft: Abstract Pink and Blue watercolour 73.5 x 50.5 cms

Self Portrait in a Straw Hat 1983 oil on canvas 92 x 61 cms

ForewordTwenty years have passed since the death of Robin Philipson and he remainsone of Scotland’s most enigmatic artists, his reputation secure but his place inpost-War Scottish art somehow unfixed. He was of enormous importance toThe Scottish Gallery where we held nine exhibitions in his lifetime and was themost high-profile Scottish artist of his generation earning countless honoursincluding a knighthood in 1976. He was a man of enormous energy and capacity,devoted to his senior role at Edinburgh College of Art and stewardship of TheRoyal Scottish Academy, where his Presidency can be seen as a golden age. Asa painter his energy was matched by his ambition; his desire to engage withgreat human themes: sex, war, redemption and sacrifice often corralled into anexistential narrative on a truly monumental scale. His artistic personality wasformed at The College where there were many examples of painters’ love ofthe plastic possibility of their medium and of strong colour, although after WarService when he returned to Edinburgh it was the work of Oscar Kokoschkawhich held him in direct thrall. At this point he might have gone in the samedirection as his friend and contemporary Alan Davie, towards the abstractwhich became the dominant characteristic of International painting in the fifties.Instead his journey is more akin to that of Joan Eardley: all three painters owesomething to Nicolas de Stael and the School of Paris but Philipson, like Eardley,cannot abandon his motif and his work retains its thematic badge over the nextforty years.Tom Elder Dickson wrote a piece for the Scottish Art Review in 1961 which showsgreat insight into the forty-four year old painter by then ‘…original without beingpretentious, forceful without being crass, advanced without being outré… At hisbest he is a supreme painter possessed by a mood of peculiar sensitiveness.I can think of no artist today whose understanding and feeling for the qualitiesof paint are so perfectly matched to his lyrical purpose; he takes the paint intohis very imagination and makes it speak with (an) eloquence and fervour.’By then some of the themes: the cockfight and rose windows were well developedand for his Edinburgh Festival Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery four years laterthemes of Golgotha, execution and The Great War had been added. Douglas Hallwriting the introduction sums up. ’Philipson is far from the detachment of thematière painter. He seems compelled to live in as well as with his paintings andit is this which distinguishes him from some Scottish contemporaries who standwell back, figuratively speaking, from their creations and whose object seemssometimes to minimise the effort and pain of giving them birth. In rejecting thisanalgesic attitude, Philipson is being true to the expressionist tradition to whichmany Scottish painters should naturally belong, but to which he almost alonehas given his allegiance.’

Like a good modernist Philipson was never tempted to provide his own analysisof the iconography of his painting; he preferred it to remain enigmatic or to allowthe viewer to respond without didacticism. At the same time he is fearless inencountering the dark side in the human psyche and its endless manifestationsof violence and cruelty, as well as beauty without taking a moral stance; hedepends, as Hall wrote ‘… on a precarious balance between imagery that isreadable to the spectator and the private forms that provide the painters’ ownguidelines to success in any work.’ In 1960 his first wife Brenda Mark died of abrain tumour. This was a traumatic loss, but not the first. Philipson had been onthe edge of a breakdown at the end of the War, isolated from his family in Burma,frequently ill and his younger brother having died in 1943; pain and loss werepowerful creative drivers. He launched himself into work; in 1960 he had the firstof nine one-person exhibitions with Roland Browse and Delbanco in London, thenext year became Head of Painting at The College and within another year waselected a RSA and had remarried, to the painter Thora Clyne.Painting for a Venetian Frame II oil on board 8 x 6 cmsOpposite: Sir Robin Philipson

Together they worked in Boulder, Colorado for ten weeks in the summer of 1963and the paintings inspired by the primitive churches he saw in the border countyrenewed a favourite theme. By the end of the decade he tackled the Crucifixionagain, inspired by a visit to Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece but was also in themidst of new subjects he titled Humankind and Threnody. In 1972, on his way toGreece, on a sabbatical from The College, he became ill and was operated onfor cancer in Boulogne. Though he was to live for another twenty years he wasin remission rather than free from illness. New themes appear such as WomenObserved and animalist subjects inspired by the zebras, baboons and lions hesaw on a trip to South Africa in 1975. In the eighties he divested himself of officialduties and his family arrived: he married Diana Pollock in 1976 and they adoptedtwo children before the arrival of their son Anthony in 1987. Themes of the sea,still life, studio interior and sumptuous poppy pictures dominate this last phaseand are painted with the same energy and technical mastery as the work of theseventies but violence has often been replaced with a sense of celebration.In 1989 he worked with Colin Thomson, previously Director at the NationalGalleries of Scotland on a huge retrospective which was mounted in the summerat the College of Art. Then in 1999 Philip Long curated a Philipson show forthe Gallery of Modern Art, the final of six reviews of the principal figures ofthe Edinburgh School. These exhibitions and the two we have mounted sincedemonstrate clearly that Philipson is an artist of international stature.

Mesdemoiselles I 1965 oil on hardboard 19 x 19 cms

Mesdemoiselles II 1965 oil on hardboard 19 x 19 cms

Sleeping oil on leather 16.5 x 16.5 cms

Morning oil on canvas board 16 x 14.5 cms

“The Cockfight theme has been with him for more than twenty years. In 1960,which was the beginning of a period of great personal stress for him, the themewas taken up (with other then subsidiary themes) with an almost unabated fury.Keyed in reds, oranges, greens, violets, purples, cock fights, crow, tear, tremble,skirmish in terrible yet splendid mortal turmoil. A second outburst of paintingson this subject occurred in 1967.“Robin Philipson, a compassionate man, has found in the cruel beauty of thecockfight an almost perfect vehicle for the expression and the releasing of adeep tension.”William Buchanan, 1970Cockfight oil and vinyl toluene on canvas 122 x 122 cms

Above: Men Observed watercolour 22 x 38 cmsLeft: Women Talking pastel 27 x 22 cms

“They appear to be women who are far from being ina state of grace; they are more likely fallen women,or perhaps they are the three aspects of Eve whocontain the seeds of damnation, not only herself butof the whole human race.“We have a forceful analogy with Degas in his brothelor bathroom scenes with his expressed desire tolook at women ‘as if through the keyhole’, catchingthem unawares.”Mary Rose Beaumont, 1983Women Observed oil on canvas 66 x 66 cms

Nude in the Mirror gouache 24 x 24 cms

Women Observed V oil on canvas 64 x 64 cms

Nevermind II oil on canvas 91.5 x 123 cms

“From time to time I find that I am compelled toconcentrate upon a series of images that centrearound man’s predicament and place in the world –the war pictures; the cathedral interiors; the womenwho are observed and more recently women whoare companions and simply enjoying this state.”Robin Philipson, 1985

Gethsemane oil on vinyl 215 x 425 cms

“What excited me the most about them was their space, something you can’treally convey in representational painting… That vast space is so beautifully lit,roundels, lancets and slits and sudden shafts of daylight, and seemingly endlessshadows. I had this great desire to recreate all the visual aspects of theseinteriors simultaneously, blending the inspired and intricate rhythms of all theseshapes and the richly saturated colour.”Robin PhilipsonByzantine Interior oil on canvas 71 x 71 cms

Blue Window oil on board 25 x 45 cms

“Philipson’s circle windows are often painted floating in space, complete andtranquil. Add to this the ideas of sanctuary and peace which are associatedwith cathedrals, and the beginnings of a case emerge to suggest that the RoseWindow may be, partly at least, an image of serenity. The circle windows areopen to many interpretations. Their brilliant gem colours and myriad linessuggest, especially when the circle void is read as a solid, that they might bestrange and distant planets.”William Buchanan, 1970

Rainbow and Rose Window oil on canvas 41 x 41 cms

Rose Window and Crucifixion oil on canvas 55 x 55 cms

Palette watercolour and ink 90 x 90 cms

“He is a magician of the brush; in his hands oil paint is a thing of delight, colourappeals directly to the senses, and before his work is an almost tangible senseof physical well being.”Terence Mullaly, quoted in Philipson by W Gordon Smith, Atelier Books, 1995

Above: King and Queen oil on board 27 x 17 cmsTop left clockwise:Christmas Card X colour print 26.5 x 22 cmsChristmas Card IX colour print 27 x 21.5 cmsChristmas Card V colour print 26.5 x 17.5 cmsChristmas Card VII colour print 27 x 22 cms

Basket of Pears III 1986 oil on board with Japanese paper 61 x 51 cms

Published by The Scottish Galleryto coincide with their exhibitionRobin Philipson7 – 30 May 2012Exhibition can be viewed online atwww.scottish-gallery.co.uk/robinphilipsonISBN 978-1-905146-65-9Printed by J Thomson Colour PrintersAll rights reserved. No part of this catalogue maybe reproduced in any form by print, photocopy orby any other means, without the permission of thecopyright holders and of the publishers.16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZTel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.ukWeb www.scottish-gallery.co.uk