WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981)
DARK BORDERS LANDSCAPE -1925
Signed and dated to canvas verso, oil on canvas
63.5cm x 76cm (25in x 30in)
If you have had the pleasure of visiting the long-anticipated, newly re-opened Scottish Art wing at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (re-opened 2023), the first painting you are likely to have set eyes on is the monumental masterpiece ‘A Point in Time’ (1921/37) by William Johnstone. The huge canvas is a formidable sight; with abstract twists of black, blues and greens creating fathomless caverns. It is hung against a bold, blood-red wall immediately facing the entrance. In this phenomenal artwork the curators of the National Galleries found the key visual within the collection to challenge tired perceptions. The re-hang’s opening statement could not be clearer: 20th century Scottish art was seriously accomplished, outward-looking and Modern with a capital ‘M’. This curatorial choice also elevates Johnstone himself emphatically and with purpose; literally centralising his significance within the story of Scottish art – not to say international modernism - as never before. Born in the Borders in 1897 to a farming background, Johnstone, a powerful personality, mixed with other radical thinkers in the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1920s. Alongside the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Johnstone was pivotal within the conception of the “Scottish Renaissance”. This was a cultural movement spanning art and literature that looked to move away from the perceived stagnancy of the centralised British cultural self-view, advocating instead a modernisation - and independence - of Scottish political and cultural values. Though Johnstone’s origins were immutably tied to the Scottish landscape, his burgeoning career soon took a decisively international direction. In 1925 he was awarded a Carnegie Travelling Scholarship which enabled him to study in Paris with André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, as well as the Atelier Colarossi. In 1926 he travelled further afield to Spain, Italy and North Africa, accompanied by Max Bernd-Cohen, an American lawyer-turned-artist who become a lifelong friend. His circle of acquaintances in Paris at that time included the artists Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, and the eminent collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1927, Johnstone married the American sculptor Flora MacDonald, spending subsequent years in America and Scotland. They settled in London in the 1930s, with intermittent teaching commitments enabling him to return to America sporadically for the next twenty years. Indeed, it was teaching that became his major life’s work and he was no less innovative within this field than within his art practice. He held the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In this capacity he is credited with evolving the ideologies of each school, bringing them more in line with Continental art and design principles akin to the Bauhaus and creating teaching opportunities for exciting young avant-garde artists including Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Alan Davie and Eduardo Paolozzi. His services to education within the arts earned him an O.B.E. Sojourns teaching in America included positions as Fulbright Lecturer and Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre Summer School. He also lectured at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin, Wisconsin, in 1949 and 1950. Johnstone’s friend and colleague, the artist and theorist Anton Ehrenzweig, identified three stylistic phases in Johnstone’s painting career. Firstly, a surrealist phase of the 1930s, a cubist phase of the 1940s and finally his calligraphic or tachist phase of the 1950s. ‘Dark Borders Landscape’, dated 1925, can be read as a psychological take on the Scottish landscape; a brooding, abstract suggestion of elemental forces, mood and place. His Borders landscapes are often executed in the darkest of tones, as here. Art historian Beth Williamson has suggested a psychological interpretation of the tumultuous dreichness inherent within these early Scottish landscapes; perceiving a troubled relationship with the soil he and his kin sprang from and laboured over so tirelessly, but which offered only the scantest living in return. She also notes the sense of alienation Johnstone felt upon his return to his home farm after having been conscripted in World War I. Despite fortunately never seeing active duty, the distress caused by the exposure to traumatised front-line soldiers, paired with the sense of his own fate hanging perilously in the balance while waiting for the call up, forever changed the young artist. Even as early as the 1920s, Johnstone had developed an innovative and unique paint application that embraced expressive, totally intuitive brushwork. This expressionistic take on abstraction - “dripping” his paint as early as the 1920s - latterly saw his work referred to in the context of American Abstract Expressionism (the so-called “action painters”). Johnstone’s work in fact pre-figures this school of artists and his approach has, as Ehrenzweig indicated, much more in common with the ‘automatic drawing’ techniques of the Parisian Surrealist school in Paris: psychological forces made tangible in paint. The goal of Johnstone’s art practice was to assimilate his interests and fields of influence to totally unique effect, evolving an entirely personal style. His reference points were diverse but always drawn to that which is distilled and instinctual over pre-meditated: from the Pictish carving of his Scottish homeland to the New Mexico school, and from Asian calligraphy to Primitivism and the artwork of children. At the heart of his paintings, whatever the period, you will always find expressive, intuitive mark-making.This creative belief-system was extrapolated to its extreme in the plaster relief series he created in 1970, as an elderly man. In these works, from one of the most celebrated decades of his artistic career, the physical and metaphysical combine to create extraordinary sculptural objects that read as simultaneously ancient and futuristic. “The earth has been a very great creative mother for the artist, the poet, the composer; but the material of the soil can produce its own art. With these thoughts I made my plaster reliefs in order to find confirmation of my conviction that the medium of plaster would itself reveal its own miracle. I knew that in myself I must produce a condition, relaxed and free from thought or deliberation; that which would be produced through my hands would then be from my inner self and be completely unconscious. I throw the lump of crude, wet plaster on the smooth polished surface; a gesture pf creation... and the plaster sets.” – William Johnstone, in the catalogue introduction for ‘Genesis’, ten plaster reliefs exhibited by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1973.