Arts
Edinburgh, Vienna-style
John McEwen
Thisis John Drummond's last Festival as T tO Director and, as before, he has chosen give it an underlying theme: Vienna at the turn of the century. The musical pro- gramme makes a special feature of Schoenberg and Mahler and the visual arts Provide a cross-referential centrepiece in the form of Vienna 1900 (National Museum of Antiquities,Queen Street, till 25 September). The main problem with the exhibition as such a centrepiece is that the Museum of Antiquities is a smallish place over a hill in house New Town. Small windowless rooms ruse a book in exhibition form, the age 'trig evoked in the round by a generous use ° I captions and documentary photographs. The notion of the exhibition as a 'book' will Particularly come to the minds of those who know the organiser Peter Vergo's popular r'haidon volume Art in Vienna 1898-1918, in relation to which this is a gutted version. The other problem is the familiarity of the contents. This may be the first exhibition cover the entire progress of the arts in Vienna from the late 1890s to the outbreak of war, there may not have been quite as been books on the subject as there have ueen on Bloomsbury, but there have never- theless been surely enough prints in restaurants, magazine articles, commercial gallery showings, auctions, architectural conferences and Portobello Road bargains exemplifying one or other aspect of the rather seedy visual art of this period, to last Libost of us a lifetime. In terms of Vergo's book, for instance, the only new feature is the inclusion of some paintings by Arnold Schoenberg, which prove of documentary more than pictorial interest. Also, for the :11,°,trie crowd, the exhibition subtitle — v lelma, Scotland and the European Avent- Garde' — hints at a special Scottish rela- tionship which is revealed not to have ex- tended much beyond Mackintosh. Mackin- tosh had an imitator or two, particularly his he wife, but gave rise to no emulation; ne is of single Scottish significance — and was rejected in Scotland accordingly ,...avirig more in common with Morris, ueardsley and others south of the border. A visit to the Fine Art Society, 12 Great King Street (till 25 September) — where there is an interesting reconstruction of the Scottish it_90m for the Eighth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession — bears this out. On leaving Vienna 1900 it is well worth Crossing Queen Street and visiting Action ortraits, a selection of Scottish press Photographs at the Scottish National Por- trait Gallery (till 9 October). There is nothing like the frozen frame for catching people making asses of themselves, and when the people thus lampooned are well- known MPs, dignitaries of the kirk, foot- ball managers, town hall toadies and the rest (royalty is spared, quite rightly), the result is the funniest exhibition of the year — of years, as far as this reviewer is con- cerned.
Elsewhere there are two exhibitions par- ticularly worth seeing: the paintings of San- dro Chia (Fruit Market Gallery [Scottish Arts Council], 29 Market Street, till 17 September) and the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, 1970-1983 (Stills, The Scot- tish Photography Group Gallery, 105 High Street, till 17 September). Sandro Chia, an Italian currently resident in New York, is one of the most promoted of Eighties painters. His first exhibition in this country was at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Lon- don, in 1981, and fell far short of its publicity; but moving to New York has done his painting good, making it less parochial in style, less defensively joky and much bolder in scale and colour. In the best paintings elephantine figures are rhythmically deployed against a blitz of col- our, form or both. Such huge canvases, such a square footage of laboured paint, cannot fail to have impact if it is done with any swagger at all, and Chia's impact in Edinburgh is all the greater for its isolation. The Tate's forthcoming mixed show of trendy painting will put it to a fairer test.
Mapplethorpe's photographs also pack a lot of New York punch. He was once a sculptor and shows some sculptures in the form of plastic stars and crosses, their banality oddly at variance with his shocking originality as a photographer. Sex, violence and, often, the two in conjunction are his subjects, each image immaculately printed in black and white. Mapplethorpe's style is Voguishly smooth, his subjects, most notoriously, rough homosexual trade, though flowers and (too many) celebrities are almost equally in evidence. His most ob- vious master is Edward Weston. Weston made 'nudes' out of fruit, Mapplethorpe makes 'fruit' out of nudes — he is a more menacing, but no less seductive, eroticist. This exhibition has been arranged by the ICA in London and will be viewable there, 4 November to 18 December.
Scottish art is most interestingly represented by Master Class: Robert Scott Lauder and his pupils (National Gallery of Scotland till 2 October). As Director of the Trustees' Academy in the middle of the 19th century Lauder was a free-thinker ahead of his time. Not a particularly distinguished painter himself on the evidence of this exhibition, he nevertheless instilled a love of the Venetians, Rubens and Wilkie in his pupils and made them respect light and colour as of intrinsic im- portance in themselves and not just decorative matters in the service of some Greek ideal. Modern Scottish painting has most prided itself on its colourists, and this interest in colour stems, it would seem, ultimately from the influence of Lauder. The first so-called school of Scottish pain- ting was made up of his ex-pupils and it is their works that we see. Orchardson, very much a follower of Wilkie, is probably the most generally popular today largely, sure- ly, because of the amusing nature of his novel scene subjects. But in Scotland Mclaggart senior is still revered, and right- ly so, as a seeker after innovation. He is well represented, not least by 'The Wave', frowned upon at the time for its Whistlerian lack of a story. There are also two Highland scenes by Peter Graham, who painted one masterpiece 'A Spate in the Highlands' in 1866 at the age of 30, and never managed another, for all his efforts, till the day he died in 1921. Two of his later attempts are here, one a gaudy sunset 'O'er moor and moss. "When in the crimson cloud of eve the lingering light decays" ' which at least fails magnificently.
Of other shows, Man and Music (Royal Scottish Museum till 15 January 1984), a musical sample of the permanent collec- tion, rates highest recommendation; it has accompanying concerts only during the Festival.
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