DOUBTLESS, this week’s subject would rather be deemed a European Icon. As an Italian Scot, he’s always been an enthusiastic internationalist.
Enthusiastic: mot juste for Richard Demarco, one of art’s most influential figures, and one of its most tireless. Impresario, writer, philosopher, mover, shaker, he still works 12-hour days at the age of 94.
He has presented thousands of exhibitions, plays, musical performances, conferences, and multi-media events involving artists from 60-odd countries.
His own watercolours are held in several international collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain, the Government Collection, and the National Gallery of Lithuania. Other works featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale where, in 2013, he also organised an Italo-Scottish pavilion.
Following his exhibition Scotland In Europe: Europe In Scotland In Brussels, he was named European Citizen of the Year in 2013. You’ll have seen him on the front page of The Herald this week, at the opening of the Edinburgh Book Festival, the least evil of the three that afflict the city at this time of year.
A scion of the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe, he’s been critical of them in recent years, particularly the latter for its commercialism and dominance by comedy. But that’s Ricky, born controversialist. Actually, he was born Ricardo Demarco at Grosvenor Street, Edinburgh, on July 9, 1930, the son of Carmino Demarco and Elizabeth Valentina Fusco.
On the day Mussolini came to power, his father said he’d now be known as Richard or Rikki, a less suspect moniker in such febrile times.
His family’s heritage lay in the Italian municipality of Picinisco, ancestral home of many Italian Scots. He has described the Di Marcos as “literally the personification of the peasant world of Europe”, with “their wonderful dress and their marvellous folk songs and stories and tales”.
Marine core
He remembers his father as “intensely Italian” but, when the family moved to Edinburgh, the Maison Demarco’s Marine Cafe on Portobello promenade was a Parisienne-style establishment, all French cigar smoke, fresh coffee smells, Art Nouveau stained glass, marble tables, waitresses in frilly aprons, silver trays, and a little orchestra playing.
The business, which also catered to the stately Caledonian and North British hotels at either end of Princes Street, was run by his aunt, a “terrifying personality” whom he has called “the Godmother”.
But Richard’s family was also part-Irish.
His grandmother Elizabeth Magennis was born in Dublin around 1840.
His mother, born in Bangor, Northern Ireland, was “stunning like a film star. So elegantly dressed. Aquiline nose”.
Growing up in Portobello, one evening on the beach nine-year-old Ricardo saw a burning German plane pursued by a bullet-firing Spitfire.
A dangerous scenario, but fortunately the boy survived to attend, some years later, a concert led by the great German-born, Jewish conductor Bruno Walter. It was 1947, year of the first Edinburgh International Festival. Richard was 17. Enthralled, he joined the five-minute standing ovation, and has attended every Edinburgh Festival since.
In 1947, two years after war’s end, “Edinburgh was a spiritually and culturally dark place”, he has said, adding: “I couldn’t endure the 49 weeks that existed without the Festival … You’re facing winter, you’re facing gloom, darkness. You’re also facing the Scottishness of Scotland … [The] contrast was like night and day. It was light and darkness. It was hope and despair.”
In his youth, he suffered from a conflict between Latin background and Scottish environment, longing for a southern way of life until at last he came to feel “completely at home in a city whose character is so essentially northern”.
After Holy Cross Academy, Richard attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1949 to 1953, studying book illustration, typography, printmaking and mural painting. As secretary of the Sketch Club, he gained his first experience of organising exhibitions.
Special Bond
AT art college, he met Sean Connery, then an artists’ model who became a lifelong friend. “He told me he wanted to be an actor. I knew a director who needed two men over six feet to play soldiers in a play. I encouraged Sean to audition. I said he’d earn twice the money a model was paid and he’d be warmer too. He got the role.”
Demarco trained as a teacher at Edinburgh’s Moray House College and, after national service in the Royal Army Educational Corps, was appointed art master at Duns Scotus Academy, Edinburgh, where he taught from 1957 until 1967.
In 1962, he held his first one-person exhibition at the Douglas and Foulis Gallery in Edinburgh and, the following year, co-founded the city’s Traverse Theatre and Gallery. Three years later, he and other organisers of the gallery space left to establish what became the Richard Demarco Gallery.
That gallery promoted cultural links with Eastern Europe, organising exhibitions of contemporary Polish, Romanian and Yugoslav art.
During the Cold War, Demarco crossed the Iron Curtain 100 times.
In 1970, he presented the groundbreaking Strategy: Get Arts (get that palindrome!), exhibiting multi-media works by 35 artists associated with Dusseldorf and bringing Joseph Beuys to Britain for the first time.
In 1980, the gallery’s association with Beuys’ hunger strike in support of convicted murderer-turned-artist Jimmy Boyle led to the Scottish Arts Council withdrawing funding, on the grounds that “I had brought dishonour on my gallery, on the Edinburgh Festival and on art itself”.
Undaunted, Demarco pursued his own vision, criss-crossing Europe, building bridges made of art. He even took the Fringe out of Edinburgh, staging Shakespeare’s Macbeth on Inchcolm Island in the Firth of Forth in 1989.
Frown on the Fringe
APPOINTED CBE in 2006, he remains a true original spirit, one who sees today’s Edinburgh Festival experience as being concerned overwhelmingly with commerce.
“The fact is we’re not living in a truly civilised city,” he has said, telling The Herald last year that “I’m now living in a city which has completely forgotten why the Edinburgh festival came into being”, i.e. to heal anguish, at that time caused by war, through art. Today, Demarco contends, punters aren’t queuing to see great theatre companies but stand-up comedy.
Still, at least the Book Festival is still largely about books. Speaking of which, last year Demarco’s Edinburgh, written with Roddy Martine, explored the Festival’s original vision and how it used to be “a much more accessible village”.
In 12 days’ time, Demarco’s Scotland will be published, exploring the country’s identity, history, art, and tradition. Scotland – all the better for having Demarco in it.
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