The Modern Scot

Modernism and Nationalism in Scottish Art, 1928-1955

Tom Normand

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138728462
• eBook ISBN: 9781351749329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: An investigation of Scottish art between 1928 and 1955 to bring into focus the multifaceted project that was Scottish modernism. At the core of this work lies the contention that Scottish modernism was underpinned by a desire to express a national consciousness. It was this ambition which became the defining feature of radical Scottish art, setting the parameters of its relationship with the idea of a coherent and international modern movement. With the foundation of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, Scottish intellectuals began to consider the nature of national identity and the characteristics of a national art. The "Scottish Renaissance Movement", under the voluble leadership of Hugh MacDiarmid, set out to articulate these interests, developing a vernacular poetry and literature. For Scottish artists, the way forward was harder to identify, as they fought to reconcile the demands for a Scottish national art with the stylistic revolution of international modernism. Tom Normand examines the competing claims of nationalism and modernism as they affected Scottish art. This in-depth analysis of a dynamic episode in Scottish visual culture looks at the work of, among others, William Johnstone, William McCance and John Duncan Fergusson.

1

Windows in Thrums

During 1928 two events occurred which signalled the renewal of a nationalist momentum in Scotland. The one was the formation, by a small group of students and intellectuals, of the National Party of Scotland. This was not exactly a renewal of nationalism, for national sentiment in its various guises had been a feature of Scottish life at least from the early eighteenth century. However, this foundation marks the point from which nationalist politics was to play a significant role in the collective life of the country. The second event, less momentous but equally intriguing, was the completion of a painting entitled From Another Window in Thrums (Fig. 3) by the expatriate artist William McCance.

McCance’s image belongs to the sensibility of proto-Surrealism. This emerging avant-garde was only just becoming known among London-based art groups, largely through the influence of the Italian ‘metaphysical’ painter Georgio de Chirico who was in exhibition at Tooth’s Gallery during 1928. Besides this, several of the more dynamic English painters, most notably Paul Nash, had begun to show some interest in a primitive Surrealist style.¹ Characteristically Wyndham Lewis, McCance’s first important muse and mentor, was amongst the earliest critics of the Surrealist style, deploring its extreme subjectivity and ‘academic’ manner.² McCance, however, clearly saw a method which would give full expression to the dream world of Scottish culture, and, in doing so, explore its horizons while simultaneously exploding its taboos. Consequently From Another Window in Thrums was an inventive, subtle, ironic, and sceptical critique of the received vision of Scotland and Scottish culture. It marked a watershed in the visual tradition, presenting an image which embodied satire and subversion, revelation and renewal.

Some of the import of McCance’s painting was to highlight the ways in which two related concerns came to dominate Scottish culture during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Amongst a small group of the cultural avant-garde there was a desire to formulate a thoroughgoing and systematic critique of the reduced and reductivist view of Scotland and Scottish art. Complementing this there was the twin longing for a modern Scottish renaissance in the arts. It is not an exaggeration to say that these were the dominant issues of the time, and described the trajectory for Scottish cultural life through the next three decades. However, for a brief period, in the late 1920s, these ambitious programmes became focused upon a singular work of Victorian fiction, J. M. Barrie’s ‘Kailyard’ classic, A Window in Thrums. This novel gave rise to not one, but two, epic feats of creativity and critique, McCance’s painting, and the declamatory ‘music-hall’ poem by Hugh Mac-Diarmid aptly titled ‘Frae Anither Window in Thrums’. In exploring the development of the Scottish renaissance in the visual arts and in cultural life, it is as well to recall this genesis, for it is a reminder of what exactly the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s was reacting against, and of how much they remained in debt to the complicated indigenous tradition.

3 Willmia McCance, From Another Window in Thrums, oli on canvas, 60 × 46 cm (23.6 × 18.1 inches), 1928

In recent times Barrie’s novel has lain, unvisited, in the basement of most libraries. However, at the time of its publication, in 1889, and for the first few decades of the twentieth century, it was extremely popular. It sold in enormous quantities not only in Scotland, but in Britain generally, in North America, Canada and in what were then the British colonies. This was largely due to the comforting view of Scotland it afforded colonialists and émigrés, for it is, like the Kailyard genre it helped establish, an affectionate, escapist and sentimental fiction.³

The subject of A Window in Thrums is village life in rural Scotland, Thrums being the fictional name Barrie gave to his childhood home town of Kirriemuir. In the middle and late nineteenth century Kirriemuir was a rural market town surrounded by the agricultural landscape of the county of Angus. The principal industry of the town which Barrie recollects was the cottage-based activity of handloom weaving, an industry subject to the vicissitudes of economic recession and destined to be overtaken by new technologies. The figures who people the novel, then, were both extremely poor and, in industrialized Scotland, something of an anachronism. In the manner of Kailyard fiction, Barrie describes a rural Scotland peopled by worthy characters whose provincialism is regarded as a virtue, and whose propensity for acts of harmless malice is always tempered by subservience to the moral authority of the family, the church and the community. The occasional prodigal son, who might reject these authorities, invariably falls into a despairing isolation or madness usually associated with exile in the city. But generally the Kailyard novels paint pictures of saintly acts and virtuous dispositions balanced against small intrigues and indiscretions, and highlighted by comic interludes and some heavy-handed tragedy.

Typically, Barrie’s novel is narrated by a dominie, or teacher, who lodges with the family of the central character, the saintly matriarch Jess. She is disabled and her greatest sorrow is that this prevents her attending the Kirk. It also means that she participates in local life principally as a voyeur. In essence the novel consists of a series of vignettes on rural life and character offered as Jess’s view from her window, her ‘Window in Thrums’. These stories centre upon Jess, her family and her immediate neighbours. The details of these episodes in rural life, though entertaining, are unimportant. What is significant is the way Barrie concludes his novel by heaping together mountains of misfortune which descend on the central characters. Jess’s son leaves for London where he is victim to an unhappy love affair. Her dutiful daughter, Libby, falls victim to an incurable illness. Following Libby’s death, Jess’s husband dies, in solid Protestant fashion, while working at his loom. Jess is left alone, sick and saddened, though ever mindful of the blessings life has allowed her. Following her death the prodigal son returns and is driven mad by the fate of his family and the realization of his own failures. In every sense, then, the work is a calamitous novel.

In respect of its view of Scottish life and culture, several points are note-worthy. Even when it was first published, in 1889, A Window in Thrums was a retreatist novel. The rural community it examined had long since ceased to be central to Scottish life, indeed the society Barrie described was essentially feudal. Importantly, the nostalgic and sentimental aspects of the novel quite deliberately masked the real social relations of rural existence, substituting a righteous domesticity for the rigours of subsistence economics. The use of a rural subject matter also ignored the most crucial developments in nineteenth-century Scottish history, the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization, those social changes which, more than any other, had given shape to life in modern Scotland.

Most fundamentally, however, the novel, at least as viewed by the intellectuals of the Scottish Renaissance movement, was patronizing. It presented an image of Scotland that was provincial, primitive and naive. It was not merely the childish activities of the simple people of Thrums that outlined this condition, but the nature of the text itself. Barrie allowed his characters to speak a variation of a native Scots dialect in the quaint passages of dialogue, but offered the lead narrative in standard English. The authoritative voice within the text, the all-seeing omnipotent observer, speaks in a language which simultaneously explains and subtly condemns the actions of those observed. This was certainly the characteristic which the artists and intellectuals of the Scottish Renaissance were hostile to in Barrie’s work, touching, as it did, upon the crucial language issue.⁴ Barrie, it was argued, had turned the Scots into a nation of Peter Pans, intellectually, socially, culturally, and in all other ways, immature. The near-criminal aspect of this cultural stereotype was that it came to predominate both abroad and at home. It became, as it were, a crucial reference point for a Scottish selfimage, a kind of vocabulary of ‘Scottishness’. Scottish artists and cultural figures (especially those in the tradition of popular culture) consistently presented images of a Scotland robbed of any vital and dynamic culture, while rejoicing in a mythologized, homely and rural past. In doing so they accepted and reproduced a reductive vision of their own culture, not only sentimental and quaint, but to all intents infantile and retarded.

For the writers, artists and poets of the Scottish Renaissance movement in the 1920s, it was precisely this degraded culture which required revaluation and deconstruction. In this respect the dominant figure of the poet and polemicist Hugh MacDiarmid⁵ was unremitting in his desire to create a cultural dynamic which would not only offer a critique of established cultural practices in Scotland, but would be their antithesis. The fascinating (perhaps actually terrifying and debilitating) aspect of MacDiarmid’s position was that he saw the culture of Scotland as intimately linked to Scotland’s political position, and, for MacDiarmid, the key co-ordinate of the politics of Scotland was the issue of English hegemony.⁶ The reaction to this situation, most particularly from MacDiarmid, was twofold. Firstly there was the political reaction in the form of a dual commitment to nationalism on the one hand, and to communism on the other. MacDiarmid reconciled these hostile positions in his belief in the desirability of an independent Scotland within the broader community of nations. Secondly there was the cultural reaction, in which artists attempted to re-establish, or perhaps more properly to author, an indigenous, modern, and authentic Scottish art. MacDiarmid’s principal contribution was to create a poetry of international stature written in a version of the Scottish tongue, but he also encouraged Scottish artists to explore distinctively Scottish themes, and this included in the case of William McCance a critique of the cultural characteristics represented in Barrie’s A Window in Thrums.

MacDiarmid himself had offered a critique of Barrie’s vision in a poem entitled ‘Frae Anither Window in Thrums’ which was part of his volume of poetry To Circumjack Cencrastus published in 1930. This collection, in fact one long poem, was first begun in 1926, the year in which he published the seminal A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle. The two key dynamics of To Circumjack Cencrastus present, on the one hand, an attempt to recover the ‘Gaelic Idea’, that is to say the underlying paradigm of a distinctly Scottish consciousness, and, on the other, an ongoing critique of Scottish sentimentalists and that counterfeit culture which was viewed as an intellectual and psychological burden to the Scot.⁷ Consequently long sections of the poem offer an alternative vision through the Thrums window, while countless asides attack, in a mixture of vitriol and irony, the representatives of a degraded Scottish culture. In a stanza which parodies the music-hall imagery it re-presents MacDiarmid writes:

I wish I was Harry Lauder,

Will Fyffe or J. J. Bell,

– Or Lauchlan Maclean Watt

For the maitter o’ that!

Dae I Hell!

O its hokum, hokum, hokum

And this is as near as I’ll get.

The nearest I’ve got yet.

Losh but it’s unco like it,

– That sine qua non, a soupcon,

O’ precious hokum-pokum!⁸

This is hardly MacDiarmid’s greatest poetry, but it does signal his commitment to a complete revaluation of the Scottish cultural paradigm.

For the Scottish Renaissance movement the attack on Barrie, and artists of like persuasion, was viewed as a necessary step in the restoration of an authentic indigenous and modern culture. Moreover, it was an affiliate to the equally necessary political revaluation. In a letter of 1924 MacDiarmid was to write, ‘a Scottish Literary Renaissance in full depends upon the restoration of Scottish Independence’,⁹ while in 1934 he was to reaffirm this political necessity in terms which define the Scottish revival attitude:

The future of Scotland … depends upon the revealing and setting forth of the quintessential Scotsman … the programme for Scotland is 1) to recover and ensure the essence of its own genius … 2) to reduce England from its Ascendancy internally, imperially and internationally … 3) to reaffiliate with Europe.¹⁰

The confluence here of political and intellectual renaissance was the measure of the aspirations of the emerging avant-garde, while the critical assessment of the reduced culture of Scotland became the mark at which revival might begin.

In terms of the visual culture, these ideas promoted an artistic revival, in the 1920s and beyond, which focused attention on the actual, the material, aspects of modern Scottish life and Scottish landscape, while concentrating also on the relevant dimensions of the native psyche. The artist who was undoubtedly closest to MacDiarmid during this period, in intellectual terms, was William McCance, and it was he who was to complete the critical analysis of Barrie’s vision in his painting of 1928, From Another Window in Thrums.

William McCance’s ‘Window in Thrums’

Early in 1925, MacDiarmid was to comment that ‘William and Agnes (Miller Parker) McCance … are unquestionably the most promising phenomena of contemporary Scotland in regard to art’.¹¹ By 1930 he was to suggest that McCance’s From Another Window in Thrums was ‘the most characteristic product of the Scottish Renaissance movement in painting’,¹² and was to add:

It is calculated to give Sir J. M. Barrie a succession of shivers down the spine. It is a very different Window in Thrums, indeed, and symbolises a Kirriemuir that has not only ceased to be Kailyardy and Kirky, [but has] become thoroughly conscious of the machine age.¹³

This hint at a modern, dynamic and radical consciousness, replete with suggestions of fundamental national revaluation and ambitious aspirations to internationalism, is the key to MacDiarmid’s sponsorship of McCance’s work. Indeed, he clearly saw the painter as a potential apostle for his own mission.

Importantly, McCance’s From Another Window in Thrums is an eclectic painting, influenced, in part, by early Surrealist experiments almost certainly derived from Giorgio de Chirico. However, it also shows some evidence of both Cubist and neo-Cubist techniques. McCance, who had lived in London from 1920, was familiar with developments in Continental painting, and was happy to exploit these in his experimental work. At least some of his avantgarde radicalism was gleaned from his close reading of Wyndham Lewis’s post-Vorticist experiments in the period after the First World War. Indeed it is clear that McCance favoured Lew...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Scotland, nationalism and modernism
• 1 Windows in Thrums
• 2 The Modern Scot
• 3 William McCance and Scottish modernism
• 4 J. D. Fergusson and Celtic nationalism
• 5 The discourse on Scottish art
• Conclusion: nationalism, modernism and art
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index