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PHOTOGRAPHY LEE MILLER AND PICASSO Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 6 Sep
When Lee Miller met Pablo Picasso in 1937, it was a meeting of minds that lasted more than three decades up until Picasso’s death in 1973. Somewhere along the line, the pair became mutual muses, with Miller photographing Picasso more than a thousand times, while Lee was painted by Pablo on numerous occasions. The bond between these two major artists is made clear
in Lee Miller and Picasso, a major new exhibition in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s Robert Mapplethorpe Gallery, and which forms part of the gallery’s 2015 Season of Photography. More than 100 images and objects selected from the Lee Miller Archive highlight the pair’s friendship during turbulent times, and will include the wedding photograph of Miller and English surrealist Roland Penrose.
‘Miller and Picasso’s legacy is still very much with
us,’ explains the show’s curator Annie Lyden. ‘And their enduring friendship shows what it was like to be around at that time in history through these very intimate photographs. There are lots of images taken of Picasso and his friends and colleagues, but very few of Miller and him together.’ The two of these that stand out for Lyden show off how
Miller and Picasso’s friendship was sustained despite long periods apart. ‘One is from 1944 when Lee was working with the armed forces during the liberation of Paris, and realises she’s just round the corner from Picasso’s studio so she goes and sees him,’ says Lyden. ‘There’s a very tender look between them, and you can see the joy and relief of them finding one another again. The second is from 1970, and there’s this look that’s shared; after everything they’ve been through, you can see the passing of time.’ (Neil Cooper)
PABLO PICASSO AND LEE MILLER AFTER THE LIBERATION OF PARIS, RUE DE GRAND AUGUSTINS, PARIS, FRANCE, 1944. PHOTOGRAPHER: LEE MILLER
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COMPILATION SCOTTISH ART: PEOPLE, PLACES, IDEAS City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until Sun 27 Sep INSTALLATION ANNE HARDY: TWIN FIELDS The Common Guild, Glasgow, Sat 6 Jun–Sun 9 Aug
VIDEO LUCY CLOUT & MARIANNA SIMNETT: WHAT WILL THEY SEE OF ME? CCA, Glasgow, until Sun 12 Jul
The art collection held by the City Art Centre is one of Edinburgh’s better kept secrets. As well as hosting exhibitions by visiting artists, the council-run building has, in recent years, been looking for ways to showcase its treasure trove of Scottish art.
This summer’s show, which displays work in four classic genre categories (portraiture, landscape, still life and abstraction), might seem like a predictable way of doing things. But with the finest of ingredients, who needs a fancy recipe? There is nothing dull about the portraits of Ramsay and Raeburn, Joan Eardley’s Glasgow street kids, or landscapes by Nasmyth or the Glasgow Boys.
Nor is there anything predictable about the
20th-century Scottish artists who have taken those genres in new directions, from William Gillies to Victoria Crowe, the abstracts of American-born Jon Schueler who settled on the Sound of Sleat, or Elizabeth Blackadder’s Japanese-influenced still lifes. If they sound like crowd-pleasers, that might be because they are popular, and rightly so. But there is nothing to lose and everything to be gained from seeing some of the masterworks of Scottish art being taken out of the vaults and allowed to shine for audiences old and new. (Susan Mansfield)
With its multiple grand Victorian domestic interiors, The Common Guild in Glasgow's West End will provide interesting possibilities for artist Anne Hardy’s work, which is often receptive to its surroundings. The artist best known for her photographs made in response to staged environments will build a bespoke installation made in situ for Twin Fields. ‘The work will be specific to the architecture of this
gallery,’ says Hardy. ‘The stacking of one exhibition space over another, and the way one space may host or hide other realities inside it.’ This is Hardy’s first exhibition in Scotland and will be her most ambitious project to date in the UK. Twin Fields is a development of two other sculptural installations: ‘Two Joined Fields’ and ‘Fieldworks’ made in 2013 and 2014 respectively. According to The Common Guild curator Kitty
Anderson, these titles come from Hardy’s interest in the idea of a ‘field’ as a zone of interest, a terrain or an open-ended psychological space. ‘The exhibition relates to Anne’s photographic work through the construction of physical and psychological spaces that conjure images in the mind’s eye.’ (Laura Campbell)
This exhibition sees the culmination of an ambitious year-long project by the winners of the Jerwood / FVU Awards 2015. Lucy Clout and Marianna Simnett were each awarded £20,000 to develop their very different moving-image works in response to this award brief: ‘What Will They See of Me?’ Winning the award has allowed the artists
to explore the boundaries of their practices. ‘I took risks which would have been impossible to achieve alone,’ Simnett explains. Her new work ‘Blood’ is set in the Albanian highlands with main protagonist Isabel, a young girl who must navigate the difficulties of childhood. ‘It’s my most ambitious work to date and develops my interest in working with non-actors and warping existing realities.’
Clout’s video is also fantastical, with some
ambiguity about what is real / performed. Set in homogenous-looking hotel rooms, the protagonists are writers, bloggers and other media figures. Of her work, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, Clout says: ‘During an interview, the interviewer and subject play the roles of performer and audience at various times within the exchange, and this power dynamic interests me.’ (Laura Campbell)
4 Jun–3 Sep 2015 THE LIST 99
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