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The art of Edward Gage: an
appreciation
JACK FIRTH
THE words which follow are a response to the
thoughtful
reflection by the writer of Edward Gage’s obituary,
published in
The Scotsman on 6 March, that the services to art for
which
he was honoured in 1992 might merit an account in their
own
right. This is therefore a corollary to the obituary,
suggested
by some of Teddy’s artist friends and admirers.
Gage’s career in art was distinguished from the
start and
extended over half a century of continuous industry,
creative
development and achievement. His Diploma Course at
Edinburgh College of Art was rewarded by a Post Graduate
Year and a Travelling Scholarship which he chose to spend
–
somewhat in the fashion of James Cumming before him –
away
from the major centres of museum study and galleries.
In 1950 he and his new bride, Valerie, a fellow student,
took
up temporary residence on the island of Majorca at a
remote
mountain village called Deja. That he went there not to
paint
the landscape alone but with his mind full of ancient myth
and
legend is apparent from the titles of his earliest paintings
–
Icarus, The Man in the Rock, The Goddess and the
Painter,
Queens with a Dead Bouquet and Queen of Bird.
Birds in fact played a large part in his art as symbols
of the
freedom of sky and sea and a romantic attitude to nature
which was not only how he chose to think but was very
much
in the prevailing mood of British painting in the post-war
years.
The period has been labelled Neo Romanticism and from it
emerged many of the big names of the day. There were
Blakean undertones and the ghost of Paul Nash hovered,
while
artists such as Sutherland, Minton, Craxton, Piper,
Ayrton,
Vaughan and Burra became well-known public figures,
appearing in the articles and anthologies of the time
from
Picture Post to Penguin Modern Painters.
Gage was a natural but unsung example of this kind of
painting, but Scottish artists of the Fifties and Sixties
seldom
turned up in London galleries, so his painting
reputation
remained north of the Border.
Trying desperately to make a living for his growing
family
through a part-time teaching post at Fettes College,
supplemented by some stage-set design for the Gateway
Theatre, he had an opportunity to contribute drawings to
Radio Times, then the acknowledged centre of excellence
for
graphic artists and illustrators in Britain. In
pre-television days
the journal catered for the unseen world of the airwaves,
and
pioneered a style of striking and evocative illustration,
usually
on a necessarily small scale, to bring to graphic life the
rich
offerings of drama then broadcast.
Gage plunged enthusiastically into this endeavour and
with his
fertile pictorial imagination and exquisite
black-and-white
draughtsmanship quickly became one of the elite among
Radio
Times artists.
Gage developed a distinctive and personal graphic idiom
which
kept him in demand until times and the direction of the
journal
changed. Television broadcasting had different needs in
graphic art. Among many miniature masterpieces (Radio
Times
drawings were only three or four inches at the most)
Gage’s
illustrations for A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle with
a
stunning portrait in pen of Hugh MacDiarmid done at the
same
time (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), for Ivan
Gontcharov’s Oblomov, for Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, for
Bridie’s
Gog and Magog and for Shakespeare’s Henry IV can take
their
place in any company.
As a painter he was a prolific exhibitor from 1953
onwards,
when he showed at the Society of Scottish Artists and
the
Royal Scottish Academy. He was elected a professional
member of the SSA in 1955, served on its council and in
1962
was elected its president, succeeding David Michie. He
served
in this capacity until demitting office in 1966. In 1960
he
showed with the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in
Watercolours, was elected to its membership in 1964,
served
on its council several times and was vice president in
1975
when William Baillie was in the presidential chair.
Gage exhibited concurrently with the Academy throughout
his
career and in all these exhibiting bodies his unusual and
highly
individual imagery enlivened the walls of the RSA
Galleries
almost every year until his death, usually with several
works in
each exhibition.
Despite his debilitating illness in 1986, he battled
against the
odds to regain much of his former ability, his mental
vision
unimpaired, his imagination as fruitful as ever, and he
continued to paint until a second stroke occurred in
1997.
Edward Gage became art critic for The Scotsman in 1966.
He
wrote with the same distinction that he painted and
brought
to a task which he found wholly engrossing a very
perceptive
eye, a huge awareness of what painting is about,
profound
knowledge of the craft itself and boundless enthusiasm,
filling
his Monday spot in the paper with reviews large and small
as
he made the rounds of Edinburgh’s growing
gallery-land.
Always, he tried to pass on his enthusiasm, to persuade
the
reader that a visit would be rewarding.
Among Scottish painters he was held in affectionate
respect
for his views and his integrity. Douglas Hall has described
him
as a benign critic, which is true in that he preferred to
find
merit where it lay rather than find fault and he did not
imagine
that his words were on tablets of stone, but he was
never
sycophantic. Privately, his remarks about painters could
be
acerbic, humorously pointed or occasionally hilarious.
In 1977, Collins published The Eye in the Wind:
Scottish
Painting since 1945 in which Gage demonstrated the depth
of
talent in Scottish painting and in which he went out on a
limb
in identifying important younger artists. It was very much
a
labour of the love affair he had had with painting
throughout
his life and immediately became a standard work of
reference.
He was an excellent teacher – at Fettes, at
Edinburgh College
of Art, where he had been a part-time instructor, and as
an
informed and articulate speaker on art. He was a senior
lecturer at Napier College, Edinburgh, from 1968 to 1986.
On
top of all this activity, together with his commitment
to
participation in the major annual exhibitions of the SSA,
RSW
and RSA, he managed to amass a total of ten solo
exhibitions,
six at The Scottish Gallery, two at Peter Potter’s in
Haddington
and two at the Macaulay Gallery in Stenton.
There is always curiosity about what makes an artist,
what
"influences" shape the destiny, which household gods
were
worshipped, who were the cherished exemplars. Such
forensic
examination never answers all the questions about an artist
as
committed, as complex and as brilliantly talented as
Edward
Gage, because art challenges definition and sets traps for
the
ready labeller. This writer happens to know that John
Maxwell
was enshrined in Gage’s memory among all his own tutors
and
all the artists he knew, and looking at Gage’s
iconography, at
his early friendship with Robert Graves in Majorca and his
ready
identification with the whole archaeological and
cultural
inheritance of the Mediterranean in his pictures, it would
seem
that his most powerful motivation lay in making modern
the
age-old mythologies. His mind, however, was also
concerned
with the Arthurian legend, with the
Celtic-Cornish-Breton
romances. It is no surprise that he wrote poetry and was
deeply religious. In terms of imagination, perhaps David
Jones
is an earlier counterpart.
Teddy had a delightful, sometimes theatrical, sense of
humour.
When he was congratulated by the president during a
general
meeting of the RSW in the Library of the Academy on
having
been made an MBE that year, there was a spontaneous and
warm response in the applause of the members present. A
moment of silence followed; then, from the depths of the
room
where Teddy was seated in his wheelchair, came his
reply:
"They wouldn’t have given it to me if I hadn’t
deserved it." He
was so right.
