Women in revolt, Bikini Kill and discovering Degas

In Glasgow, The Burrell Collection is currently hosting Discovering Degas, a large solo survey of the work of French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. It’s over 50 years since there has been anything comparable in Scotland. Among the very many paintings on loan is one from the venerable Musée d’Orsay, a gargantuan Beaux-Arts building on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris. Do visit if you’re ever in the City Of Light.

The museum’s contribution is an 1875 oil painting originally titled Au Café, then re-christened L’Absinthe, and presented in Glasgow as In A Café (L’Absinthe).

The canvas shows a disconsolate-looking couple in a Parisian café, she with a glass of absinthe in front of her, he with a rum and cold coffee concoction known as mazagran and used mostly as a hangover cure (or cheveux du chien, as they probably don’t say in France).

The venue is the Café de la Nouvelle Athenes in Montmartre’s Place Pigalle, a regular meeting place for Degas and fellow painters Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh. It was also frequented by Erik Satie (who doubled as house pianist) and a 15-year-old aspiring composer named Maurice Ravel, and later became a striptease club much favoured by the occupying Nazis. It burned down in 2004, but not before it had spent several more decades as first a lesbian cabaret and then a rock venue called New Moon.

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As for the painting, its subject matter proved controversial. The presumption at the time was that the woman was a sex worker, the man either a client or a pimp. As a result it had a rather chequered sales history. British collector Henry Hill bought it in 1876 and held onto it until he died. When his art collection was auctioned posthumously in 1892, some people in the saleroom actually hissed when it came under the hammer.

Undeterred, noted Scottish dealer Alexander Reid bought it and sold it on to one Arthur Kay, a fellow Scot. Kay kept it for a month before returning it to Reid. Then bought it back two days later. Then sold it again when it was displayed in London and caused even more of a stushie. The painting went back to Paris and in Paris it stayed, the French being less bothered by all that sort of thing.

Across the M8 at Edinburgh’s Modern Two you’ll find Women In Revolt!, a survey of feminist art and activism between 1970 and 1990. The most celebrated inclusion is probably Turner Prize-nominated Helen Chadwick, who died shockingly young in 1996 and whose Piss Flowers are represented in the national collection (kids love them: Chadwick urinated in deep snow then made casts from the holes left by her steamy stream). On show here is In The Kitchen, a series of 12 photographs in which a naked Chadwick is encased – imprisoned, basically – inside great floppy white goods. A fridge, a cooker. You get the idea.

But my favourite of the exhibits is the case of newsletters and zines in the first room – typewritten, hand-drawn or photocopied publications produced by Women’s Liberation organisations in Aberdeen, Tayside, Glasgow and Edinburgh. “Meetings start at 8pm and we usually go to the pub at around 9.30pm,” says one from the early 1970s. And the subject of its next meeting? A discussion about rape.

If ever you needed a demonstration for how art can act as an agent of social change, look no further than this show.

Bikini lines

The face on the poster for Women In Revolt! is that of artist Gina Birch. It’s a still from her 1977 experimental film 3 Minute Scream, in which she screams into the camera for three minutes. But like several of the other women featured in the exhibition – among them X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene and Cosey Fanni Tutti of art-rock outliers Throbbing Gristle – Birch was also a musician, having founded influential all-female post-punk band The Raincoats in 1977.

Fast forward a decade and a half and in the city of Olympia in America’s Pacific north-west a woman called Kathleen Hanna and a band called Bikini Kill have picked up the feminist punk baton laid down by The Raincoats and launched the Riot Grrrl movement. Hanna’s band blazes briefly but brightly (and loudly) but folded by 1997.

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Two decades on again and Bikini Kill, now almost as iconic as the band of Hanna’s friend, Kurt Cobain, are persuaded to come together again for one night only to perform at a book launch in New York – a book by journalist Jenn Pelly about The Raincoats. Birch was present, and a reunited Raincoats line-up also played.

Something clicked that night and since then Bikini Kill have continued to tour. They pitch up in Glasgow on June 14 for a gig at the O2 Academy, in what must be one of the year’s most hotly-anticipated gigs. Ahead of that Gabriel McKay spoke to bassist Kathi Wilcox. Read the interview here.

And finally

The Perth Festival of the Arts opened last week and Herald critic Keith Bruce headed up to the Fair City for a concert in St John’s Kirk by the Hebrides Ensemble.

In what was (incredibly) the septet’s festival debut they performed work by Maurice Ravel (he of Café de la Nouvelle Athenes fame), Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen. Balancing the programme – and because the concert was a celebration of the Auld Alliance – were works by three Scottish composers, including Sally Beamish, whose 1997 piece Between Earth And Sea was given a welcome outing.

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Elsewhere dance critic Mary Brennan visited Glasgow’s Theatre Royal to see an adaptation of Tim Burton’s cult 1990 Gothic romance, Edward Scissorhands, staged by Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures company.