Richard Demarco on Edinburgh festivals past, present, future

It did, of course. And how.

Walter received a five-minute standing ovation on the night. But history was being made in another way too because among the audience members on their feet applauding was a young Scots-Italian boy with a talent for drawing and an incipient thirst for culture. His name was Richard Demarco.

“I’m the only human being alive who has been to every single Edinburgh festival,” the legendary gallerist and impresario tells me when we meet just days ahead of his 93rd birthday. “I’m very lucky, very fortunate that I’m still on my feet and I’m able to speak not about my memories of the last 20 years of the festival or the last 10 years, but my memories of the whole bloody thing. And I worry that when I go there’ll be nobody to replace me. I can’t think there’s anybody else foolish enough to have spent maybe four or five years of their life experiencing the Edinburgh festival. Three weeks multiplied 75 times is quite a lot.

Demarco has a music teacher to thank for being taken to that first Edinburgh festival. That he has attended the event every year since is entirely his own doing, a result of that thirst and of a deep desire to honour the feeling it stirred in him.

“The Edinburgh festival was the blessing of my life, and I grasped hold of what Edinburgh became for three weeks,” he says. “But I also became obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t endure the 49 weeks that existed without the festival. It was like the circus leaving town. I was like a child waving: ‘Don’t leave, come back, I need you’. You’re facing winter, you’re facing gloom, darkness. You’re also facing the Scottishness of Scotland. And suddenly the contrast was like night and day. It was light and darkness. It was hope and despair.”

And so he chose light and hope. He chose to become a participant, a facilitator, a mover and shaker. He used his energy and vision to bring his own interests and beliefs to the table – he is a fiercely proud Internationalist – and, through persuasion and demonstration of his abilities, to give the “grey, sad” capital a shot of truth in the form of both high art and avant-garde culture. That he often did it with no or little financial backing is also part of the story.

“Everybody was being educated to get a job in the Empire,” he says of the Edinburgh of his youth. “They were the ideal servants of Empire. Well, I didn’t want to be a servant, and I realised by some kind of strange instinct that the language I was interested in was the language of the Edinburgh festival, which was the language of poetry, great music, the language which is completely international and timeless and beyond politics.”

We’re talking over coffee and (an incongruous addition) buttered gingerbread in a large room at Summerhall, the rambling Edinburgh arts venue in which the Demarco European Art Foundation is currently based. Every so often he stops talking to photograph me on a camera he keeps slung around his neck.

Demarco has his office here and it’s where most of the thousands of objects he has amassed over the decades are housed. Just don’t call it an archive.

“I have not spent my whole life creating an archive,” he says sternly when I use the A-word. “This is not an archive. This is an experience of art. I don’t put things in boxes. I don’t neatly turn everything into an archive. The general public don’t want to see archives, they want to see a painting or a sculpture or a film or whatever.”

He has plenty of those. There are paintings, drawings and framed prints displayed and propped up everywhere. He points to a nearby wall: a portrait by Sandy Moffat of teacher-turned-artist Mary MacIver. Above it is a 1986 work by MacIver herself titled Polish Funeral In A Snowy Landscape. Another wall contains two massive portraits of Demarco by the Scottish artist David Mach. “One is the mask of comedy, one is the mask of tragedy,” he says. “That’s what I look at every day to remind me.”

Displayed on the opposite wall are three signed photographs of large-scaled works by Christo, best known for wrapping landmarks such as buildings and bridges in fabrics. None of it is insured, a fact he is reminded of every time he raises his eyes to the ceiling and sees the water damage from the leaking roof. But I suppose an acceptance of risk has always been an important part of his psychological make-up.

So if Richard Demarco didn’t exist, you couldn’t make him up – or if you tried, he wouldn’t be plausible. That he does exist just makes his tale all the more remarkable. Here is a man whose life and art are intertwined with the entire span of the world’s greatest arts festival, an event which is itself now an integral part of the DNA of our capital city with all that means in terms of economics, soft power and (whisper it in his presence) brand awareness.

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These days, mind you, he has as much criticism as praise for that city. Edinburgh University? “Barbarian”. The buildings around George Square, near to where Demarco birthed the idea for The Traverse Theatre in an underground bookshop in the late 1950s? “Inhuman, horrible”. The massive Haymarket development opposite his childhood home on Grosvenor Street? “Monstrous … Edinburgh has desecrated the original idea of architecture, and the buildings that are now being built are cheap glass and steel rubbish.”

And so it goes, broadside after broadside, interwoven with reminiscences of a life spent working with artists such as Joseph Beuys, of promoting the artistic vision of singular imaginations from across Europe, of championing people like Jimmy Boyle – and always of hustling, organising, and irritating the powers-that-be.

Richard Demarco in 1993 in his Edinburgh studio space, with 'Paper Dart' by Tim Jones behind (Image: Mike Wilkinson)

He was born on July 9, 1930, into a family which, by Scots-Italian standards, was relatively well off.

The Demarcos were Romans, had arrived in Edinburgh following a sojourn in Paris, and their main business was Maison Demarco, a café on the Promenade at Portobello. It has long since been demolished but a drawing of its splendid art deco interior remains, an early work by the aspiring artist in the family.

Racism and anti-Catholic prejudice were a way of life, however, especially during the Second World War.

“I realised I was an un-touchable, I wasn’t to be trusted, I couldn’t be given a job,” he tells me of his experience of childhood discrimination. “There were only four Roman Catholics at the Edinburgh College of Art when I entered, and there were certainly no Italians.”

There’s a beer now named for Eduardo Paolozzi, six years Demarco’s senior at Holy Cross Academy in Leith. But the teenage Paolozzi was interned for three months in Saughton Prison in 1940, after Italy came into the war on the side of Germany. He did make it to Edinburgh College of Art three years later, but didn’t stay long. “He had an instinct to know that being in Edinburgh was a bad idea at that time.”

Demarco did stay of course. Does he feel Scottish? “I’m one hundred percent European,” he says. Later he expands a little: “I’ve never ever operated with my mindset thinking I’m in Scotland. I’ve always wanted Scotland to be where it has always been – in Europe. We are using a language, even if it’s Scots, which is Scandinavian, Dutch, French, Italian, Latin. We’re nothing to do with that bloody rubbish across the Atlantic which is falling apart because it doesn’t understand what democracy is.”

By “that bloody rubbish” he means America, another one of his bugbears. We should face east, he thinks, not west. He is damning of the Putin regime but like any lover of the arts he is in thrall to the cultural achievements of what he terms “the Russian spirit”.

It would take a book to run through every aspect of Demarco’s life as it relates to culture in Scotland and Europe over the last 50 years. Happily he has just co-authored one with writer Roddy Martine. Titled Demarco’s Edinburgh, it will be published by Luath Press next month.

But a rundown of the highlights of that life must first include his friendship with American provocateur Jim Haynes, with whom he helped found the Traverse Theatre in 1963 having established a gallery in Haynes’s ground-breaking radical bookshop on Charles Street (also now demolished, though there’s a fine bronze rhino head poking out of a wall to mark the spot).

Second would be the Richard Demarco Gallery itself and the visual art strand Demarco ran within the EIF from 1967 until 1991, a position offered by then Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) director Peter Diamond – as long as Demarco paid for it.

“Guess how much money I had to raise over a period of 25 years? I raised £7 million. I became a patron of the festival. I was unpaid, I didn’t get any staff, I ran the whole thing on my own.”

It was this sinecure which birthed the ground-breaking (and palandromically titled) Strategy: Get Arts exhibition, a 1970 showcase for 35 German artists centred around Dusseldorf. Among them were some who would go on to become household names: Beuys, of course, but also Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo.

Demarco with German artist Joseph Beuys, and his ever present camera (Image: Newsquest)

Demarco at the 2016 exhibition Richard Demarco And Joseph Beuys A Unique Partnership at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Image: Getty Images)

Third – who can forget it? – is the outdoor production of Macbeth Demarco staged in a 12th century abbey on Inchcolm Island in 1989. Audiences were transported offshore on The Maid Of The Forth and harangued all the way by the actresses playing the three weird sisters.

Fourth, fifth, sixth and onwards would be the many more Fringe shows he has helped to stage or produce. For the thousands of audience members willing to take a risk on, say, late-night performance art ‘happenings’ performed by troupes of anarchic Yugoslavians, these are memories which go to the heart of the Edinburgh festival experience and have done for decades. The proper Edinburgh festival experience, that is, not the one Demarco despises as being concerned entirely with commerce. Not the one he sees around him today.

“The fact is we’re not living in a truly civilized city,” he states. “Now the tail wags the dog. The crowds queuing up to go into the Assembly Hall on the Mound are not people going to see A Satire Of The Three Estates or the world’s greatest theatre companies. They are going to get a dose of stand-up comedy.”

And is that process irreversible? It is. Today it’s all about the “price tag”, as he puts it. Art is a commodity and much of it isn’t even art, it’s what he terms “entertainment on a very large scale.”

“I’m now living in a city which has completely forgotten why the Edinburgh festival came into being,” he says. “It was created by people who needed to heal, to begin the process of healing the pain, the suffering, the grieving.”

His voice rises to the point where he is almost shouting.

“Practically every family had lost a father, a brother, an uncle [in the war]. The pain was intolerable. There was no future. And the only language that could being the process of healing the wounds – mental more than physical – is the arts. It’s the language of healing.”

Edinburgh’s festivals have not been blessed with an over-abundance of care or respect on the part of the city authorities. As for the festivals themselves, each has its own archive, but they may as well be stored in the computing ‘cloud’ for all the presence they have. Indeed it’s a complaint of the Fringe Society that there is no landmark building identified with it, nowhere with enough space to tell the story of the Fringe despite their being an appetite for it. There isn’t even anywhere to mount a display of posters.

Richard Demarco’s archives – or whatever he wants to call them – are at least gathered in one place and more or less available to view. And, ushering me down the passage to his office, he indicates his framed EIF posters and makes the point that this is the only place you can currently see them.

But archives are one thing. Living history is another and that’s what Demarco represents. More than that he’s a living link to the forces which begat and shaped the Edinburgh festival, and a walking, talking, conscience-pricking, gingerbread-eating reminder of the values it was created to foster, share and uphold.

“My job is to try to help artists survive, to escape the horror of the world of entertainment,” he says at one point. “Everything [these days] has a price tag. And as soon as it is possessed of a price tag it’s not a gift. Art is a gift. Art is the one thing we need lovingly given.”

Wise words from a wise old head, the like of which we will never see again.