Robert Colquhoun
For a time, Kilmarnock-born artist Robert Colquhoun (1914 - 1962) was able to enjoy due recognition for his work but he was to die in relative obscurity in London. Whilst the people and landscape of Ayrshire remained an inspiration for his art throughout his career he chose to live in London, cutting himself off from his former life in pursuit of his art. As an excellent draughtsman and a prolific painter and printer of haunting and unsettling images, his contribution to post war art was on an international level
Robert Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock in 1914. He
attended Kilmarnock Academy where he did well in all subjects but
particularly so in art. When he was 15 financial pressures led his
parents to withdraw him from school and enrol him on an
apprenticeship. Fortunately however, his art teacher had recognised
his remarkable talent and when he discovered that Colquhoun would
not be returning to his classes, he determined not to let such
talent go to waste. He set about organising financial support and
so managed to persuade Colquhoun's parents to allow him to return
to school.
In 1933 Colquhoun embarked on training at Glasgow School of
Art. It was here that he met Robert MacBryde, another young artist
from Ayrshire. The 'two Roberts', as they were known, there
established a lifelong romantic relationship and professional
collaboration, living and working together for almost
30 years. Colquhoun and MacBryde were never explicit about the
nature of their relationship, but neither did they attempt to hide
it. With the decriminalisation of homosexuality only coming into
law in 1967 in England, and 1981 in Scotland, this was a brave
move.
Colquhoun and MacBryde relocated frequently, but settled in
the bohemian urban centre of London 1941, where they became
associated with other queer artists such as Keith Vaughan, Francis
Bacon, and Lucian Freud. In London, the two artists also came into
contact with the Neo-Romantics - a group of artists painting
visionary and imaginative landscapes peopled with heroic figures.
These paintings tended to have a sombre tone reflecting the mood
during and following the two world wars. For a time, Colquhoun
experimented with similar landscapes but by 1943 he had returned
his attention to a focus on the figure.
It was around this time that he made the acquaintance of
Wyndham Lewis and Jankel Adler. Their influence is evident in the
angular style with which he began to paint his figures. Adler
encouraged him to do away with models and to paint from his
imagination and memory, freeing him to experiment with expressive
ways of representing the figure.
In 1945 Colquhoun visited an exhibition of Picasso's work at
the Victoria and Albert and this inspired him to experiment with
the kind of distortions and fragmentations typical in Picasso's
work.
The people Colquhoun painted are not happy people. They have
a despairing and desolate look and appear isolated in some kind of
personal suffering. The angular, distorted style he had developed
gives his figures a sense of restriction and emotional detachment.
Sometimes he painted faces to look like masks in a similar way to
Picasso, with the effect of de-humanising the figures bringing a
menacing element into his work. On occasions he included sinister
looking or caged animals to represent some aspect of the human
condition.
These paintings were very much about Colquhoun's emotional
and subjective response to the world and his subjects. He was a
sensitive character and was deeply affected by the suffering of
those he came into contact with, those affected by the poverty of
the 1930s and the post war years. But his work also represents the
general feeling of these years, he was amongst many artists who
were striving to give voice to the prevailing sense of guilt and
pessimism and a nihilistic view of the world.
Colquhoun apparently expressed this feeling well, people
seem to have connected with his work and he enjoyed a period of
considerable popularity in Europe as well as Britain during the
1940s. In 1943 he was given a one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery
in London, his first of several. In 1946 he spent several weeks
painting in Ireland and in 1948 he paid another visit to Italy. It
was around this time he began producing monotype
prints.
Throughout this successful period the two Roberts were based
in London and here they made quite a reputation for themselves as
bohemian, nationalistic Scots with their frequent heavy drinking
sessions leading to raucous behaviour. As the decade drew to a
close their success began to wane. Interest in Colquhoun's work
began to decline leading to financial difficulties. Under the
strain this brought, their drinking habits seem to have worsened,
with the inevitable negative impact on the quality and volume of
work they produced.
Eventually they were forced to leave their London flat and
for the next few years they moved around the South of England
staying with friends. They sold little work during this time and so
a commission to design costumes and scenery for a new Scottish
Ballet "Donald of the Burthens" to be shown at Covent Garden in
1951 was very welcome. Colquhoun later worked alone on designs for
a production of "King Lear".
In 1958 the Whitechapel Gallery offered Colquhoun a
retrospective exhibition and he set to work producing a number of
new paintings for the show. It was fairly well received but after
this time he was to produce very few more paintings. Instead he
focused on monotypes and drawing and seems to have found some new
inspiration in this. He was working towards an exhibition of his
prints at the Museum Street Gallery when he collapsed and died of a
heart attack in 1962, aged just 47.
For some years after his death the international
significance of Colquhoun artistic achievements went unacknowledged
in his hometown of Kilmarnock but in 1972 the town council opened
the Colquhoun Memorial Art Gallery at the Palace complex on Green
Street. The Colquhoun Art Prize was also established, awarded on an
annual basis open to artists throughout Britain. The competition
ceased in the early 1980s.
