Bellany at Sixty

It's a hard thing to live down, coming back from the dead. And a hard act to follow. John Bellany's resurrection in 1988, after a perilous liver operation - itself precipitated by his life-in-death struggle with alcoholism, bereavement and gloom - has become the thing about him we all know, the irrefutable fact which would appear to explain the mystery of his work to us. Narratively, it has sometimes seemed to explain him to himself, as though this was the big event always waiting to happen. And biographically, for those who find art unsatisfactory until it is enlivened by footnotes of the artist's life, it rounds the picture, accounting for new directions, changes in outlook and ambition, why this new stillness, why that new vibrancy of colour. There is pre-op Bellany and post-op Bellany, and because the biographically-minded are temperamentally inclined towards optimism, it is assumed that the post-op Bellany sails upon clear light-drenched waters now, savouring his happy ending in bright canvasses peopled with images of contentment and assurance.
The imposition of such spiritual simplicities upon your work, and then the scorn of those other critics who would refute them, is of course the risk you run if you are unafraid of seeing your own journey as an epic pilgrimage, and do not scruple to make art out of yourself - which is not the same as making art about yourself. The distinction is important. Suppose we knew absolutely everything there was to know about John Bellany the man - his upbringing in a Scottish fishing community, fired by superstition and Calvinism, his swinging belligerently south to take on the metropolis, his domestic upheavals, his liver transplant, his vigorous productiveness to this day - suppose we knew about his every friendship and his every enmity (let alone his every influence) and yet had never seen a single one of his paintings - what would we be able to deduce of their composition, their colours, their bewildering imagery, or their voluptuousness? The answer is nothing. I am of the opinion that biography, as we normally understand it, tells us precious little about the man, let alone the artist. We live, emotionally, somewhere else from our events - not unaffected or indifferent, unless we're sainted or deranged, but in some other realm. When you consider that art is another realm again removed from that, you see what little bearing the incidentalities of a life have on its accomplishment.
I do not say this to put distance between Bellany's paintings and the passions that move us. Quite the opposite. No painter could be less aloof. But it is one thing to tell the story of your life, and it is another to tell the story of what it is to live a life. Though apparently a subjective artist, and indubitably an expressionist, John Bellany's ambitions are of that second, less solipsistic, more extravagantly universalizing sort.
Thus, Bonjour Professor Calne, the monumental painting of his operation, showing himself (or some part of him) hovering slither-eyed like an interloper between two worlds, watched over by the doctors who fought to save him, might look like a chronicle of an event, but it is not. Professor Calne was Bellany's surgeon in real life right enough, but on the canvass he goes about his own mental business. Impenetrable, the sideways gaze of Professor Calne. If we don't know where the soul of Bellany has been throughout the ordeal of transplant, we find the spiritual whereabouts of Professor Calne no less a mystery. But of one thing we can be sure, he is no bit-part player in some one else's tale. This is one of Bellany's great gifts: he paints the absolute separateness of other lives. Those figures who people his paintings - 'characters' I am inclined to call them, for that's how they strike me - are not mere cyphers for his moods; they are forever a challenge to him, indomitably themselves whether they are the weatherbeaten fishermen of his earliest work, inured to their element and indifferent to our gaze, or those baffling creatures which loom up as though out of reverie or delirium in his later paintings.
I like never knowing for dead sure what this or that Bellany is about. I like not being able to get to the bottom of it, whatever clues are provided by the sometimes appearance of the painter himself, in one or other of his extremities. 'A book lives as long as it is unfathomed,' D.H.Lawrence wrote. 'Once it is fathomed, it dies at once.' And it is the same of a painting. Once you've got it, it's over. As allegorists go, Bellany is wonderfully unimportunate. 'Enjoy the look of us,' his superstition-laden fish and lasciviously-beaked birds of ill-omen seem to say. 'We are inventions of obsession but we are not private to the painter who has conjured us. You know more about us than you think you do. You too have kept company with the likes of us. But if not, not. Enjoy anyway.'
This is another way of understanding how the seemingly autobiographical elements in Bellany are able to transform themselves into shared experience. He wears his private nightmares lightly, taking it as read that there is nothing peculiar or unavailable about them. The disturbed, disruptive imagery with which they teem goes back to Bosch and beyond - common property. We are all aware of psychoanalysis. If we were alive at all in the twentieth century, we were alive to its horrors. In other words, he takes our educatedness for granted. So it is with the painters who have inspired him. Their unfolding presence is part of the history of his painting. It doesn't surprise me that he grows exasperated with constant references to Beckmann, not because they are inapt but because they are limiting. You are meant to feel a stronger suck of influence, and breathe in grander sweeps of time, than that.
Bellany is not a painter of wanton scenes, for all the phallic suggestiveness of his stiff-necked birds and lighthouses and other sundry perpendiculars, but his yellows do lurch erotically from desire to bilious distaste and back again, suggesting the great sea-heave which is sexual activity, now exhilarating, now queasy. And in this I am reminded of the Germans, Dix no less than Beckmann, where carnality is as much a matter of consciousness as of flesh. Those demonic figures which appear in the corners of so many of Bellany's paintings are surely ectoplasmic, bred in the mind, and specifically in the minds of Calvinists at that. So, although we do not think of Bellany as a painter of nudes, the bodies of women with jutting breasts and stark triangles of fuzz do preponderate, the more upsetting - or do I mean the more desirable? - for not being disposed as nudes, but rendered semi-naked as a sort of act of the will, naked in public places, naked where they shouldn't be, naked while still clothed - maybe naked to the painter only - half-garbed fetishistically in corsets and stockings of the Berlin cabaret, and all the while their gazes fixed not sensually at all, as though lost in thoughts of other things. I am not sure I know how to express the voluptuousness of this nagging at the nakedness of even the most serious-faced and otherwise-preoccupied women; but that Bellany acknowledges its indecency is attested to, I think, by the presence, when the women are at their most gratuitously undressed, by the lewdness (sometimes comic in its excess) of his periscopic parrots. It might be that biography is in the way again, and that no child of John Knox will ever be granted the status of voluptuary. You have to be Spanish born for that. But at his most sexually refulgent, there is a touch of Picasso in John Bellany.
The tendency of art practice over the last forty years has been to avoid embarrassing confusions of the biographical, or indeed of the sexual sort, by withdrawing fastidiously into irony. In order to circumvent the aesthetic mishaps contingent on heat, artists opted for cold. Which is like a writer choosing to avoid the pitfalls of language by refusing to use words. John Bellany is a hero to me, as he is to others, because in cold times he has remained one of the hot ones. 'We're not just messing about,' he declared famously when he was young. 'We're taking on the world.' A statement of intent which most post-Warholian artists would find altogether too muscular. 'Taking on the world, us? No, we're just messing about.'
Well, there's play and play. And I am of that school that believes you have to be fundamentally serious to play to any effect. Which makes John Knox a good teacher. The lightness of which Bellany is capable - see Woman of Tzintzuntzan, thronged by almost unbearable urgencies of life, or The Blue Boat or the exquisite The Bride of Lammermoor - is the lightness of an artist who has never messed about.
And is it not also the lightness of maturity, of a man who has come through? I am turned full circle now and admit myself prone, in softer moments, to that biographical sentimentality I began by parodying. This is partly D.H.Lawrence's fault - that great comer-through. There is much in Bellany that reminds me of Lawrence: the naked no less than the crucified self, the consciousness of pilgrimage (through art as much as through life), the boundless energy for reinvigoration and refreshment. And by chance, or maybe not, Lawrence wrote a story, though not one of his best, entitled The Man Who Died.

"The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black and orange cock or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring, glowing with desire and with assertion. They came like crests of foam, out of the blue flood of the invisible desire, out of the vast invisible sea of strength, and they came coloured and tangible, evanescent, yet deathless in their coming..."

The only thing wrong with which, as a description of the world as seen by John Bellany post his resurrection, is that he saw it with no less desire and resolution even before he bore another man's healthy liver, when all about him was troubled and the vast invisible sea might have drowned a lesser artist.

Howard Jacobson Feb 2002

Selected Bibliography

1942 Born in Port Seton, Scotland
1960-65 Edinburgh College of Art. Studied painting under Sir Robin Philipson
1965 68 Royal College of Art, London. Studied under Carel Weight and Peter de Francia
1967 Official cultural visit to East Germany with Alan Bold and Alexander Moffat: visited Dresden, Halle,, Weimar,, East Berlin and the
Concentration Camp of Buchenwald
1968 Lecturer in Painting, Brighton College of Art
1969-73 Lecturer in Painting, Winchester College of Art . Visiting Lecturer at Royal College of Art, London and Goldsmiths College of Art, London
1978-84 Lecturer in Painting, Goldsmiths College of Art, London
1983 Artist in Residence, Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne
1988 Elected Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge
1994 Awarded CBE by Her Majesty The Queen
1996 Awarded Honorary Doctorate, University of Edinburgh
1998 Honorary D Lit, Heriot Watt, University of Edinburgh
Honorary Senior Fellow, Royal College of Art, London

Awards, commissions and prizes

1962 Andrew Grant Scholarship; travelled to Paris
1965 Postgraduate Travelling Scholarship;
travelled to Holland and Belgium
Commissioned by Ministry of Agriculture
and Fisheries to paint murals for Chesser House,
Edinburgh
1965 Burston Award at Royal College of Art, London
1980 John Moores Prize Winner
1981 Major Arts Council Award
1985 Athena International Art Award
(joint first-prize winner)
1987 Wollaston Award, Royal Academy, London
1991 Commissioned to paint Lord Renfrew and Sir Roy Caine
by the National Portrait Gallery, London
1992 British Council visit to Central Europe; Prague;
Vienna; Budapest
1993 Korn/Ferry Picture of the Year, Royal Academy, London

Public collections

Aberdeen Art Gallery
Arts Council of Great Britain
Belfast Polytechnic
British Council
British Museum, London
Chesser House, Edinburgh
Contemporary Art Society
Dundee Central Museum and Art Gallery
Edinburgh Corporation
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums
Government Art Collection
Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
J. F. Kennedy Library, Boston
Kassa Kasser Museum, New York
Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery
Leeds City Art Gallery
Leicester Museum and Art Gallery
Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Middlesbrough Art Gallery
Museum of Boca Raton, Florida
Museum of London
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Gdansk
National Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin
National Gallery of Poland, Warsaw
National Library of Congress, Washington
National Portrait Gallery, London
New York Public Library
Perth Museum and Art Gallery
Royal College of Art, London
Scottish Arts Council
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
Sheffield City Art Gallery
Southampton City Art Gallery
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery
Tate Gallery, London
University of Western Australia, Perth
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Wolverhampton Municipal Art Gallery and Museum
Zuider Zee Museum, Holland
Solo exhibitions
1965
Dromidaris Gallery, Holland
1968
Edinburgh College of Art
1969
Winchester School of Art
1970
Drian Gallery, London
Hendricks Gallery, Dublin
1971
New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh
Printmakers Workshop, Edinburgh
Drian Gallery, London
1972
Royal College of Art, London
1973
Triad Arts Centre, Bishop's Stortford
Edinburgh City Arts Centre
Drian Gallery, London
1974
Drian Gallery, London
1975
Aberdeen City Art Gallery
1977
Acme Gallery, London
1978
Glasgow Print Studio Gallery
Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Edinburgh
Printmakers Workshop Gallery, Edinburgh
Crawford Arts Centre Gallery, St. Andrews
1979
Glasgow Print Studio Gallery
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
Southampton City Art Gallery
Newcastle Polytechnic Art Gallery
Glasgow Print Studio Gallery
1980
Acme Gallery, London
Moira Kelly Fine Art, London
1981
Goldsmiths College Gallery, London
1982
Rosa Esman Gallery, New York
1983
Paintings 1971-1982, touring exhibition to:
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
Rochdale Art Gallery, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon Tyne
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Rosa Esman Gallery, New York
Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne
1984
Dusseldorf Gallery, Perth
Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney
Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney
Mercury Gallery, Edinburgh
Rosa Esman Gallery, New York
1986
National Portrait Gallery, London
Fischer Fine Art, London
Galerie Krikhaar, Amsterdam
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh,
and Serpentine Gallery, London (retrospective)
Inaugural Exhibition for opening of Henry Moore Gallery,
Royal College of Art, London
1987
Peacock Gallery, Aberdeen
Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London
"The Old Man and the Sea": Paintings and Prints',
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
Greenhill Galleries, Perth
Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney
Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle, Ireland
Hendricks Gallery, Dublin
Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
'Recent Acquisitions', National Portrait Gallery, London
1988
Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York
'Bellany as Printmaker 1965-85',
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
Printmakers Workshop Gallery, Edinburgh
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Beaux Arts, Bath
1988-89
Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (retrospective)
1989
"The Renaissance of John Bellany",
Watercolours painted in Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge'
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Fischer Fine Art, London
1989
'John Bellany "A Renaissance"
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Beaux Arts, Bath
1990
Raab Gallery, Berlin
Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
1991
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Fischer Fine Art, London
1992
'John Bellany "A Long Night's Journey into Day Paintings
1972-92", Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
1992
Flowers East Gallery, London
1993
Flowers East Gallery, London
Berkeley Square Gallery, London
1994
Beaux Arts, Bath
1995
Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York
Edinburgh Festival Exhibition
Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh
Strathclyde University Gallery, Glasgow
1996
Peacock Gallery, Aberdeen
MacGeary Gallery, Brussels
Galeria Kin, Mexico
1997
'John Bellany "A toast to Mexico", Beaux Arts, London
1998
'John Bellany "a Scottish odyssey", Beaux Arts, London
1998-99
Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida
2000
Beaux Arts, London
Solomon Gallery, Dublin
Selected group exhibitions
1963
Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, hung on railings, Castle Terrace
(with Alexander Moffat)
1967
'John Moores Exhibition 6', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1968
London Group
1971
'Scottish Realism', (Scottish Arts Council Touring Exhibition)
'10 Scottish Printmakers', Sussex University
1972
'British Figurative Art', Nova London Gallery, Copen hagen
1973
'Fanfare for Europe', Drian Gallery, London
'Figures in the Landscape', (Arts Council Touring Exhibition)
'London Group', Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
1974
'A Choice Selection', Scottish Arts Council Galiery, Edinburgh
'British Painting'74', Hayward Gallery, London
'British Art '74', Germany (British Council Touring Exhibition)
'John Moores Exhibition 9', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1976
'John Moores Exhibition 10', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1977
'25 Years of British Painting', Royal Academy, London
'Expressionism and Scottish Painting', (Scottish Arts Council
touring exhibition)
'London Group', Royal College of Art, London
'Scottish Painting', Edinburgh College of Art
'British Painting', Nottingham Castle
1979
'Scottish Artists', Amos Anderson Gallery, Helsinki
'Tate '79', Tate Gallery, London
'Independent Irish Artists Exhibition', Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin (with Bacon, Crozier and Freud representing Britain)
'British Painting', Oxford University
'The British Art Show' Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield,
(and touring exhibition)
1980
'John Moores Exhibition 12', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
(Prize Winner)
'British Art 1940-1980: The Arts Council
Collection', Hayward Gallery, London
1981
National Portrait Gallery, London
'13 British Artists', (British Council exhibition touring) Germany
'Art and the Sea', (touring exhibition)
lan Birksted Gallery, London
1982
'The Subjective Eye', (touring exhibition)
'John Moores Exhibition 13', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
'Contemporary Choice', Serpentine Gallery, London
'Inner Worlds', (Arts Council touring exhibition)
'Drawing Towards Prints', Printmakers' Workshop, Edinburgh
1983
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin
'Self-Portraits', (Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition)
1984
'Scottish Expressionism', Warwick Arts Trust, London
'The Hard-Won Image', Tate Gallery, London
'The British Art Show', (touring exhibition)
1985
'Athena International Awards', Mall Galleries London
(joint first-prize)
'British Painting', Manchester City Art Galleries;
Fine Art Society, Edinburgh
1986
'Man and Animals', (Arts Council exhibition), Nottingham Castle
'Celtic Vision', touring exhibition opened in Madrid
1987
'Scottish Painting 1954-87', 369 Gallery, Edinburgh:
Warwick Arts Trust, London
Awarded George Walliston Prize for best work in
Royal Academy, London
Represented Britain: 'Ljubljana Print Biennale',
Yugoslavia, '2nd Triennale of European
Engraving', Grada, Italy
'The Self Portrait', selected by Edward Lucie-Smith
and Sean Kelly, Artsite Gallery, Bath;
Fischer Fine Art, London
'The Scottish Bestiary'(portfolio of prints touring
exhibition), The Banqueting House, London
1988
'British Romantic Painting', touring exhibition opened in Madrid
'The Royal College of Art Print Portfolio Exhibition',
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
1989
'El Greco', National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (guest artist)
'Eros in Albion' (House of Massaccio) Italy,
(British Council Exhibition)
'British Figurative Painting', selected by Norbert Lynton
'Every Picture Tells a Story', (British Council touring exhibition),
Hong Kong; Singapore; Africa
'Scottish Paintings since 1900', Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art, Edinburgh; Barbican Art Gallery, London
1990
'Glasgow's Great British Art Show', McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
'The Compass Contribution', Tramway, Glasgow
'8 Scottish Printmakers', (British Council touring exhibition),
Singapore; Glasgow
'Turning the Century; The New Scottish Painting'
(touring show), Raab Gallery, London; Milan, Berlin; USA
'Bellany, Howson, McFadyen', Auchencloss Gallery, New York
'Scotland Creates', McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
1992
'New British Art', Denmark, (British Council Exhibition)
1993
'Scottish Painting', Flowers East, London
'Contemporary Trends in British Art', Hayward Gallery, London
'John Moores Exhibition 18', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1994
'The Bigger Picture', McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
1995
'Contemporary British Artists',
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1996
'Contemporary European Figurative Painting',
Walter Gropius Gallery, Berlin
National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
'Contemporary Scottish Painting', Edinburgh City Art Centre
'An American Passion' - The Susan Kasen Summer
and Robert D. Summer collection of contemporary
British Painting, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow;
Royal College of Art, London
Inaugural exhibition of the collection, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
'A Scottish Renaissance', Hong Kong Gallery
(British Council Exhibition)
1997
'Contemporary Scottish Portraits',
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
'British Art from the Arts Council Collection',
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
1998
'Religious Images', National Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney
Edinburgh Festival Group, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
25 Years of the Kilkenny Castle Guest Artists Project, Kilkenny
1999
Rehang with Max Beckmann and Stanley Spencer,
Tate Gallery, London
'Scottish Artists', Solomon Gallery, Dublin
'Scottish Art Now', Festival Exhibition, Edinburgh City Art Centre