Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art revives the work of Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

The forgotten men of British Modernism? The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art celebrates the work of the two Roberts; Colquhoun and MacBryde

“Gay and bohemian with as many dips and turns in their careers as a rollercoaster”. Patrick Elliott’s lively description of the short lifespans of the two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, is a neat résumé of the lives of two tragic and forgotten figures of mid-century British art.

Elliott has curated the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s major new exhibition on the pair, who he casts as “two of Scotland’s finest 20th century artists”.

But theirs was a shared artistic trajectory that began as feted young painters and lovers at Glasgow School of Art in the 1930s and ended in alcoholism and death during the early 1960s.

During the 1930s, however, their shared futures looked impossibly bright. After traveling together through Italy and France on a scholarship, they settled in London, sharing a studio and for a time lived in a house with the painter John Minton. The two Roberts were soon acclaimed as brilliant young painters.

With the advent of war, MacBryde was classified unfit for service, but Colquhoun volunteered as an ambulance driver in the Royal Army Medical Corps, returning to London in 1941, after being injured. From here the two young guns settled down to an intense routine of painting and socialising.

This remained the pattern for much of the 1940s with a supporting cast of characters that included painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Ayrton and the poets Dylan Thomas and George Barker.

They lived a seemingly itinerant and carefree lifestyle, in which they managed to combine carousing in the bars of Soho with the production of some of the most distinctive paintings of the period.

Like many of the so called neo-Romantic painters who ebbed and flowed through London’s Fitzrovia during the war years and after, the pair initially produced abstract landscapes such as MacBryde's Farmhouse 1941 and Colquhoun's The Lock Gate 1942. And for a time, these positioned them alongside artists such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper.

But MacBryde was drawn to abstract still life and Cubism and Colquhoun preferred figurative and abstract printing - works that were full of the tensions of the post-war period. As was customary for any painter worth their salt at this time, the pair also produced set designs for a series of stage productions ranging from the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Royal Ballet.

With its 60 paintings, 70 drawings and monotypes the exhibition offers a valuable insight into these activities, their distinctive styles and the way they developed. There is also a vast array of photographs and archival material, which places them and their work into context.

Click below to launch a gallery of artworks from the exhibition.

The fates were, however, against the two dishevelled bohemians and the success they enjoyed in the 1940s was dealt a blow by the death of their champion at London's Lefevre Gallery, Duncan MacDonald.

Despite producing set designs for the Royal Opera House, in 1951 they were obliged to move out of their studio in London, an event which set in train a pattern of rootlessness and lack of direction which plagued them for the remainder of their short lives.

Colquhoun, in particular, became demoralised and depressed, and neither artist painted much during the mid-1950s. By the end of the decade both painters, whose stock in trade was now highly austere and uneasy paintings, were begging friends for money and sleeping on sofas.

A film shown in the exhibition, Scottish Painters, made by Ken Russell in 1959 as part of his Monitor series of documentaries for the BBC, finds the pair holed up in a studio in Suffolk. Amid the interviews, interspersed with languid shots of their artwork, there emerges a real sense of the poverty and drabness they had slipped into.

Colquhoun died in 1962, at the age of 47, in MacBryde’s arms. MacBryde died four years later, aged 53, knocked down by a car while dancing outside a Dublin pub after closing time.

“Had he been alive MacBryde would be 100 years old, and Colquhoun would be 100 in a month’s time,” says Elliott. “So it’s an appropriate time to be celebrating their work.

"But more especially, it’s appropriate because they were brilliant artists and incredible characters, whose work has been forgotten.”

In a sense, Colquhoun and MacBryde’s art has been eclipsed by their tragic, yet colourful story. But, says Elliott, quite apart from having "a list of friends and acquaintances that could fill a book" they remain “the perfect subject for an exhibition".

"Above all they were tremendous artists,” he adds. “The strange thing is that they ever fell out of fashion.”

The two Roberts have yet to enjoy the renaissance in interest afforded to their contemporaries John Craxton, John Minton, Graham Sutherland and Keith Vaughan. Perhaps this is the moment for them to step into the limelight?

• The Two Roberts: Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until May 14 2015.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//art/painting-and-drawing/art507500-gallery-of-modern-art-revives-the-work-of-robert-macbryde-and-robert-colquhoun