Obituary - Bill Buchanan, former art director of the Scottish Arts Council, and head of fine art at Glasgow School of Art

Died: September 4, 2018

BILL Buchanan, who has died aged 85, was a former art director of the Scottish Arts Council, and head of fine art at Glasgow School of Art who was for more than a quarter of a century a powerful and influential champion of the visual arts in Scotland. A mere list of his outputs as an arts administrator – the exhibitions he curated, the books and articles he published, the essays he contributed to scholarly catalogues – would itself fill a substantial catalogue.

Born in Trinidad in 1932, William Menzies Buchanan studied at Glasgow School of Art and taught in Glasgow schools for five years. In 1961 he joined the Scottish office of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which became the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) six years later. At this time the over-arching power of the Royal Scottish Academy was already in decline, and the newly formed and independent SAC rapidly assumed the leading role, offering grants to artists and financial support across the entire spectrum of art practices in Scotland.

It was at the SAC, first as exhibitions officer and later as art director, that Mr Buchanan began to demonstrate the qualities that were to characterise his professional life – a sympathetic understanding of those he worked with, originality of thinking, a willingness to take risks in support of his well-informed convictions – all carried off with a disarming modesty and understatement. He organised many significant and ground-breaking exhibitions, most of them accompanied by rigorously researched and informative publications. Among these were New Painting in Glasgow 1940-46 in 1968; Robert Adam and Scotland – the Picturesque Drawings in 1972; and Mr Henry and Mr Hornel Visit Japan in 1978. His monograph on Joan Eardley was published in 1976.

Many artists and art organisations owe the assistance they received from the SAC to Bill Buchanan’s ability to spot the people and agencies that would most benefit from support. He presided over an astonishing period of development of the visual arts in Scotland, overseeing an entire raft of new schemes and funding possibilities.

Unique to Scotland was the revival of printmaking, which saw the opening of the first Printmakers’ Workshop in Edinburgh in 1967, followed in the seventies by sister organisations in Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. Many major new galleries were opened at this time, including the SAC’s own exhibition space in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, the Fruitmarket Gallery (also in Edinburgh) and the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow.

In 1975, when the New 57 Gallery and the Edinburgh Printmakers’ Workshop needed to find new premises, Bill Buchanan proposed that both move into the top floor of the Fruitmarket and succeeded in persuading the Gulbenkian Foundation to finance the move. He supported the setting up of WASPS (Workshop and Studio Provision Scotland) in 1977. Most of this remarkable visual art infrastructure still flourishes.

It would be foolish, however, to give the impression that Bill Buchanan’s job was an easy one, or that all was sweetness and light. The SAC’s art department had recruited several new members of staff, all eager to make their mark as exhibition organisers, and this often produced tension.

It was Mr Buchanan’s task to find ways to accommodate their sometimes over-ambitious projects. But then culture wars were very much a part of the Scottish art world at that time. For many, the SAC had become an all-powerful establishment, and the disbursement of funds was scrutinised and argued over as never before. The RSA was a continuing thorn in the flesh, and a major battle ensued with the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.

A particular bone of contention was the withdrawal of funding for the Ceramic Workshop in Edinburgh in 1975, and the furious, unsuccessful battle that ensued in trying to reverse that decision led to the formation of the Federation of Scottish Artists. Its mission was to confront the SAC to seek changes in its policies and priorities.

In dealing with all of these issues and crises Bill Buchanan was scrupulously fair in his communications with all of the parties involved, especially with the Federation of Scottish Artists, arranging many meetings and ensuring the development of a constructive and practical dialogue. Indeed, his way of working with both individual artists and artist’s organisations was exemplary. He was always prepared to listen, never issuing orders from above. His wise council enabled a positive approach to the solving of problems that had initially appeared insurmountable.

On a personal level, Bill Buchanan had other great passions that throughout his life absorbed his energies and demonstrated his capacity for innovative thinking, such as the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the history of Scottish photography. In 1970, with Katherine Michaelson of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, he organised the revelatory exhibition of the calotypes of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. For this, he managed to persuade the Free Church of Scotland to lend Hill’s mammoth Disruption painting, something no one had achieved before.

As well as contributing to numerous magazines and other photographic publications, he was chairman of Stills Gallery from 1987 to 1992. He was also the prime mover behind a major conference that was staged at the GFT in Glasgow in March 1983 entitled Scottish Contributions to Photography. Nowadays, such an event might not attract a huge amount of attention, but this was acknowledged at the time as a truly mould-breaking event, and in its three days reached well beyond Scotland, as the list of the participants demonstrated. There was what amounted to a roster of the most important photo-historians of the time, including Mike Weaver from Oxford and Larry Schaaf from Baltimore. Bill Buchanan himself gave a talk on a favourite subject, the ‘most versatile and artistic’ James Craig Annan, whose work he went on to showcase in a major exhibition and monograph in 1992.

Nor was that the only important spin-off from the conference, the legacy of which is still with us today. In his room in the now devastated Glasgow School of Art, Bill Buchanan hatched the idea of creating a permanent forum for study and promotion of photography in all its forms in Scotland. Thirty-five years later, the Scottish Society for the History of Photography is still a thriving organisation with its own distinctive and widely respected journal.

In the mid-sixties, Mr Buchanan created the conditions for Andrew McLaren Young's extensive and illuminating research into the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to be finally presented to the public, and the centenary exhibition that came about as a result was the smash hit of the 1968 Edinburgh International Festival. When it transferred to the V&A, and then onto five cities on the Continent, including Darmstadt and Vienna, the ‘risorgimento’ of CRM had finally begun. He commissioned an accompanying film on Mackintosh, in the process propelling its director, Murray Grigor, into a distinguished career in filmmaking on architecture.

In 1977 he returned to Glasgow School of Art, first as head of fine art and later as deputy head and then acting head of the school itself. When asked what the difference was between working at the SAC and working at GSA he jokingly replied: "At the SAC they stabbed you in the back; at the art school they stab you in the front."

As head of fine art, he brought to bear his core conviction in the power of art as a life-affirming force and his powerful, empathetic understanding of the creative process. These convictions were deployed in his negotiations with the then Scottish Education Department (SED) on his plans for the development of fine art at GSA, always presenting a logical and irrefutable case. His vision, honesty and integrity won the trust of the SED.

He engineered the founding of three new departments in fine art. The first, in 1983, was fine art photography, recognising that photography was now accepted as a fine art practice in its own right. In 1985 he established the department of environmental art, which responded to the growing understanding of art as something that could be made and exhibited, not only for galleries and museums, but also in other more public locations.

Finally, in 1988 he spearheaded the establishment of a two-year, full-time master of fine art postgraduate course, an achievement that demonstrated not only his managerial skills but also his political astuteness. Getting wind that the Margaret Thatcher government was intending to block the creation of any new two-year, full-time postgraduate courses he, along with the heads of the fine art departments, wrote a course and got it approved just before the axe fell. In increasing the portfolio of courses that the school offered he added a breadth and richness to the School of Fine Art, and, with the fine-tuning and strengthening the existing disciplines of painting, printmaking and sculpture, set the school on its course to the wide international reputation it enjoys today.

Nor should it be forgotten that Bill Buchanan was passionate about the Art School building itself. It is said that when he began working at the school he insisted that only the flowers that Mackintosh had favoured in his designs should be used in his office. Again he deployed his persuasive skills in negotiating with St Andrew’s House for a major investment in the Mackintosh heritage. His own contribution to that heritage was as the editor of and chief contributor to the book Mackintosh’s Masterwork, which was published in 1989, and remains the standard work on the building.

Mr Buchanan served as acting director and then deputy director of GSA from 1989 until his early retirement in December 1991. He and his wife Alison then went to live at Allan Water eight miles south of Hawick. There, he delighted in every phenomenon of the countryside and recorded what he saw in haikus in a classical Japanese format which he exhibited as large prints. They were happy years, tragically cut short by Alison’s untimely death from breast cancer. Bill could not stand the place without her and moved to Edinburgh. Meanwhile, the children of his first marriage to Elspeth - Andy, Aji, Gavin and Janie - were away from Scotland. After a few lonely years he and Ann got together in a partnership that lasted until his death.

DAVID HARDING, RAY MCKENZIE AND ALEXANDER MOFFAT.

With additional material from David Bruce and Tony Jones.

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