From Salvador Dali to Jack Vettriano, the paintings that scandalised Scotland

With the average UK house costing just £1800, you can see why the money was an issue. Even students at the art school complained, raising a petition in protest at the use of funds they thought better deployed supporting local artists and providing much needed studio space.

And the critics? They didn’t like the work on the grounds of quality, deeming it too conventional or (worse) too gimmicky. Those of a pious disposition, meanwhile, took the opposite view, some finding the painting too unconventional thanks to its vertigo-inducing use of perspective and great slabs of gloomy black.

Beryl Cook

In the week of its public unveiling, much of the correspondence to The Herald on the subject turned on the fact that the crucified figure’s face was not visible. No holy visage for the viewer’s gaze to dwell on, no holy eyes cast balefully to Heaven as in Rembrandt’s Christ On The Cross.

But Honeyman, whose other accomplishments include co-founding the Citizens Theatre and securing for Glasgow the treasures of Sir William Burrell’s art collection, was steadfast and resolute.

By the beginning of October he felt confident enough about the purchase to write to Dali at the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona and tell of “a glorious summer with your picture. Visitors and discussions still continue and I have come triumphantly through several battles, enjoying all of them.”

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No such battles today, of course. Glasgow’s Dali now has pride of place in the city’s art collection and would grace any retrospective of 20th century art. It formed the centrepiece of the National Galleries of Scotland’s 2016 blockbuster show Surreal Encounters, was loaned to London’s Royal Academy the following year and just last week another loan was announced. On July 7 the painting will go on display for six months at the Auckland Project, an exhibition in Bishop Auckland.

A 2005 poll in The Herald handed Christ Of Saint John Of The Cross the number one spot in a list of Scotland’s favourite paintings. But the truth is Glasgow had come to an enthusiastic accommodation with the work years earlier, and long before Dali’s death in 1989.

As early as September 1965, Glasgow Corporation’s museums and art galleries committee met to discuss a request for a loan of the work. It came from one Huntington Hartford, heir to an American supermarket fortune and at the time one of the world’s richest men.

He wanted the painting for a Dali exhibition he was mounting in the museum he had built a year earlier in New York – the extraordinary-looking (and grandly named) Gallery Of Modern Art, nine storeys of marble clad modern architecture sited in Columbus Circle on the edge of Central Park. He planned to open the show just three months later, on December 17.

Hartford, a philanthropist playboy whose residence in the Caribbean was called Paradise Island, had founded and financed an artists’ colony in the Los Angeles district of Pacific Palisades in the 1940s before moving his interests to New York. But he had very particular tastes and not everything met with his approval.

The Three Graces

He thought Tennessee Williams, TS Eliot and painter William de Kooning “evil”, and once likened abstract expressionism, de Kooning’s preferred style, to an artistic “ice age”.

He didn’t like Beatniks, Existentialists or the “do-nothing philosophy” of Zen Buddhism either, viewing it as the result of an “abuse of liberty and freedom”. Even Pablo Picasso he described as “a mountebank.”

Dali he did like, however. So could he borrow the painting please?

The committee’s sub-convener Bailie Patrick Trainer thought it a fantastic opportunity to show to the people of New York what The Herald’s report of the meeting called “one of Glasgow’s outstanding art treasures.” He added that since the painting’s purchase 13 years earlier it had paid for itself three times over, thanks mainly to the sale of reproductions (and to Honeyman’s canny decision to acquire image rights as a condition of sale, a continuing source of profit for the city).

The request was accepted by a majority vote, though two voices were raised in opposition. One complainant thought the length of the loan would deprive the citizens of the opportunity to view the work for too long. The other worried about the danger of damage. He was mindful, perhaps, of a 1961 incident in which a 22-year-old man with mental health problems attacked the painting with a rock and sliced open the canvas. “Bearded man is held for inquiry” was the headline on that occasion. Bailie Trainer added that a requirement of the loan would be the taking out of a special insurance policy.

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So within a decade of its noisy arrival, the painting which had divided a city had, in one way, united it. Today, Dali’s work is one of the jewel’s in Glasgow’s cultural crown – and a very valuable one at that.

But the Dali debacle isn’t unique in the story of Scotland’s relationship with art. There are other artists and other works – some by Scots or people based in Scotland, some residing in Scottish galleries and museums – which have been similarly argued over, their value openly questioned, their cost baulked at when the time has come for hands to dip into pockets. Some of these works have settled into a similar accommodation with critics and public. Some still have not. Others have acquired a degree of infamy as issues such as colonialism and racism force curators to reappraise the provenance of their collections.

Yet more resonate with modern gallerygoers in a way the artist never considered, and divide them accordingly. The sands are ever shifting, the contextualising labels regularly needing an update.

Monarch of the Glen

Wander down to Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) this month, for instance, and you can enjoy Taste!, an exhibition drawn from the city’s collection of art treasures. Among them is work by Beryl Cook, a self-taught English artist whose paintings of (often) plus-sized women having a riotous time were controversial when the city acquired four of them in the 1990s during the tenure of another populist museums director, Julian Spalding.

Favourites in the Glasgow collection include Hen Party II. It shows a group of five Glasgow women on a night out (one has a cardboard box on her head decorated with white balloon). Another is By The Clyde, a painting commissioned by the city showing a woman resplendent in a leopard skin coat walking her dog by the river. Behind her is a bridge, a passing bus (resplendent with an advert for Dunkin Donuts) and a boulder on which is sprayed graffiti containing a racial epithet. Years later, Spalding recalled that Cook’s husband had cautioned against the graffiti. “John said she could not possibly put that in because the City Council would not like it. I said it was up to her – she was the artist. Art is not reality; it is like a magical sphere in which the artist can conjure up the reflections of anything they like in the world.”

Cook’s work is witty and easy on the eye, ready-made for calendars, postcards and stamps, all of which it has graced at some point. But art mavens hated her, and one in particular: Brian Sewell. “She has developed a very successful formula which a lot of fools are prepared to buy, but which is anti-art in my view,” the outspoken critic once said. “It doesn’t have the intellectual honesty of an inn sign for the Pig and Whistle. It has a kind of vulgar streak which has nothing to do with art.” Doubtless some visitors to GoMA agree with him.

Fife-born Jack Vettriano is another self-taught painter whose work is divisive. He has been called the Jeffrey Archer of art and the world he depicts as “a crass male fantasy that might have come straight out of Money by Martin Amis”.

His work has been described variously as “brainless”, “dim erotica”, “empty”, “badly conceived soft porn”, and his style decried as colouring in more than painting. But others have sprung to his defence, calling out what they see as art world snobbery and noting that similar complaints were once made about the work of the French Impressionists.

Jack Vettriano

As with Cook, Vettriano has had the last laugh. His best known painting is The Singing Butler, an enigmatic work showing a couple in 1920s dress dancing on a windswept beach while a maid and a butler hold umbrellas. It is nearly 20 years since it was bought at auction by a mystery bidder for £744,800, then a record for a Scottish painting and nearly four times the expected price. Today, it’s the UK’s most popular print and in 2017 was voted the UK’s third-favourite work of art, behind John Constable’s The Hay Wain and graffiti artist Banksy’s Balloon Girl.

Boosters of artists such as Vettriano and Cook contrast their ability to cut through and communicate with the rather more esoteric effect of conceptual artists. Tracey Emin became notorious when her unmade bed was nominated for the Turner Prize but in Scotland there has been equal head-scratching (and worse) over the work of artist such as Ellie Harrison and Martin Creed.

Harrison, you may recall, was awarded a £15,000 grant by Creative Scotland in 2016 for The Glasgow Effect, a “durational performance” which involved just not leaving Glasgow for a year. The idea was to highlight issues of sustainability and various inequalities. Fair enough. But the London-born, Glasgow-based artist was quickly accused of wasting public money on a middle-class “poverty safari”, while social media reaction was less measured and far more, er, strident.

Creed, meanwhile, was Turner Prize shortlisted in 2001. For the Turner exhibition at London’s Tate, he submitted Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, an installation in which, well, the lights go on and off. Now valued at over £100,000 and housed permanently at the Tate, it remains one of Scottish art’s most notorious pieces, a by-word either for Creed’s genius – or for the preposterousness of conceptual art and the hauteur of those elite gallerists and curators who encourage, promote, facilitate and defend it.

Other works of art are divisive not for what they depict or how it is depicted, but for what the image has come to represent against the wider historical context. Enter Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1851 painting Monarch Of The Glen. An iconic representation of nobility and a testament to Scotland’s wild uplands and redoubtable fauna? Or an over-used image which smacks of kailyardism and speaks to the commercialisation of the Highlands as a playground for wealthy, tweed-clad, shotgun-wielding Victorians? It doesn’t help that Landseer was an Englishman and Queen Victoria’s favourite painter. Or does that matter? Answers on a postcard please (your choice of image on the obverse).

In 2016 Monarch Of The Glen’s owner, drinks multinational Diageo, announced that it was be auctioned. Some may have breathed a sigh of relief at the news but others were appalled and a campaign was launched to save it – for the nation, as the saying goes (translation: the arbiters of artistic taste in conjunction with those who count the tourist dollars think this work needs to stay in the cultural portfolio).

There are stories of people sending fivers through the post and it’s true that a public campaign raised a whopping £266,000. But the bulk of the £4 million which finally bought off the sale in 2017 came from the Heritage Lottery Fund and from private foundations. Writing in the wake of the successful appeal, artist and broadcaster Lachlan Goudie acknowledged the tensions surrounding the work but added: “This is not merely a superficial image, it’s a painting that has been layered with significance and meaning; a complex backstory that is part of our DNA and cannot simply be airbrushed from Scotland’s past.”

Nearly a quarter of a century earlier almost twice the amount spent on Monarch Of The Glen was required to “save” The Three Graces, a sculpture of the three daughters of Zeus by the Italian artist Antonio Canova.

Commissioned from the Italian by the 6th Duke of Bedford in 1814, it was delivered to him in 1819 and installed in his stately pile at Woburn Abbey. And there it stayed until 1984, when the 14th Duke offered it for sale to the UK government. They declined so he sold it instead to a shadowy, Caymans Island-registered company. In 1989 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles agreed to buy it for $12.3 million but was stymied by the British government’s refusal to grant an export licence, so as to give a British museum time to match the asking price. To drum up support the statue was placed on display in London in 1990 – probably the first time the public had ever seen it and probably why the attendant fund-raising campaign raised only a measly amount. Still, five years later, can kicked several more times down the road, then-Culture Secretary Stephen Dorrell felt able to describe The Three Graces as having “a place at the heart of our national heritage.”

Today, of course, the massive sculpture has a place at the heart of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh – literally. Saved for the nation in 1994 at a cost to the taxpayer of £7.6 million in a joint bit with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the smooth marble buttocks of Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia are one of the first things you see when you walk through the doors into the gallery’s plush, carpeted halls. Worth the money? You might not think so if you object to reminders of aristocratic privilege, or are troubled by explicit examples of the male gaze, or worry about where the millions ended up. On the other hand if all you see is a sublime work of art, six feet high and effortlessly numinous, you’ll be delighted that the Graces are here to stay.

Of course it’s an artist’s job to ask questions, and when questions are posed, the answers given can be varied. More than that, they need to be: Scotland would be a poorer nation if it did not have artists producing work which is divisive, which pulls at threads, pokes at beliefs, engages with viewers in whichever way it finds that makes a connection.

Dali’s Christ, poised in space like that for 70 years now, looks down on a world of endless meanings and infinite possibilities. Which is exactly how it should be.