Nine international exhibitions will celebrate the centenary of the creator who was revered for his rebellious nature but had a gentler soul at heart
He was the greatest Scottish artist of the postwar era — and amongst the least well-known. This year marks the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay, poet and rebel, who created the most important single artwork in Scotland — Little Sparta. The masterpiece is the name of a garden he and his wife Sue carved out of the Pentland Hills, southwest of Edinburgh.
Across the world no fewer than nine international exhibitions will celebrate Finlay’s creative genius, with shows in London, New York, Germany, Italy, Austria and Switzerland. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) in Edinburgh is also to stage one of them, but to this day there has been no prominent retrospective show of Finlay’s work in Britain.
Yet, when he died in 2006, critics were lavish in their praise. Writing in The Independent Tom Lubbock remembered him as “our greatest living artist” and called him “a wonder of our time, and I would think for a long time to come”. The then head of the Tate Gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota, credited Little Sparta with making “a unique contribution to the art of our time”, the art historian Sir Roy Strong described Little Sparta as “the only really original garden created in this country since 1945” and when Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, was asked to name his favourite Scottish artwork, he chose Finlay’s stone relief Et in Arcadia Ego, which he called “a great thing”.
Why, then, outside the circle of art connoisseurs and garden lovers, does Finlay’s reputation not stand higher?
Part of the answer lies in the difficulty of classifying his work — Finlay cannot easily be pigeonholed. Much of his art is carved in stone and contains ideas about nature, the sea, classical antiquity, revolution, warfare and modern life, which are meant to challenge the onlooker and provoke the imagination.
Kirstie Meehan, who has curated the show in Edinburgh, says Finlay himself rejected attempts to be categorised. “I think it’s an asset for an artist to refuse to be labelled in that way,” she says. “You can see that throughout his career. He starts as a poet, goes into concrete poetry, moves into sculpture, moves into publications, then into gardening. There’s a sort of freedom there, which I think most artists don’t have.”
Another explanation, however, lies in the way Finlay saw himself as a disruptor, someone who challenged the establishment and picked quarrels with it, whenever he felt its power was being misused.
He famously declared war on the pre-existing Strathclyde regional council which wanted to designate his Temple of Apollo as a commercial building, leading to “the First Battle of Little Sparta” when he defied the council’s sheriff officer in front of television cameras. He fell out with the Scottish Arts Council and forcibly removed some of his works from an exhibition. He also sued the French government when they cancelled an installation he had planned to mount in Paris to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.
Little Sparta got its name by challenging Edinburgh and its claim to be “the Athens of the North”; in Greek history the Spartans were usually at war with Athens, and this was Finlay’s way of declaring his independence from the cloying hand of cultural imperialism.
He was often cold-shouldered by the critics and may not have helped his cause by challenging them head-on whenever they failed to understand his work. Here he is writing to the then art critic of the Guardian, Waldemar Januszczak, who once described him as “an aggressive Scots loony”. Finlay penned a vituperative letter in 1986, branding Januszczak a “cheap, over-fed, over-tolerated, affluent bastard” and added: “To your stupidity, your ignorance, your arrogance, your fashionableness, your cringing ambitiousness, you can from now on add one more problem — me.”
To the arts establishment, then, Finlay often came across as “a problem”. His standards were high, and, as an archive of his correspondence, held in the SNGMA, reveals, he was critical of much of modern culture which he saw as bland, conformist and shoddy.
He therefore embraced ideas that challenged convention. “We need a revolution,” he wrote. “So I looked to see what revolutions there had been.” The one he lighted on was the French Revolution when blood spilled from the guillotine, and the heads of the aristocracy rolled.
Some were disturbed by the status he gave to revolutionary leaders like Robespierre, Danton and St Just, others pointed to the way he adopted the Nazi SS symbol as a lightning strike, and accused him of fascism — a charge he angrily dismissed. But when, in 1989, a French critic repeated it, the government in Paris ran scared and cancelled a commission it had given him to create a mammoth installation at Versailles to commemorate the revolution.
The cancellation enraged Finlay, and he turned it into art — portraying the head of his critic lying in a basket beneath the guillotine, and quoting one of the revolutionaries as saying: “Freedom of Speech is not Freedom to Speak, it is Freedom to Discuss.”
Professor Stephen Bann, an early collaborator who has written extensively about Finlay, says his views hardened as the fame of Little Sparta grew. “The difficulty of ensuring appropriately high standards of workmanship persuaded him that nothing less than a ‘revolution’ in culture was needed,” he said.
If that suggests all of Finlay’s work is violent, nothing could be further from the truth. There are pastoral themes to be found at Little Sparta, and tributes to the peaceful traditions of the English garden, as well as the power of nature. One simple quotation from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin reads: “Calmly before his cottage in the shade/ The plowman sits; smoke rises from his modest hearth./ Hospitably, the evening bells are chiming/ To the wanderer in the peaceful village.”
Meehan, who has been through the Finlay archive held by the National Galleries Scotland, picked out the letters he wrote to one of his collaborators, Pamela Campion: “They’re so gentle,” she said. “They’re very respectful of her skills and her craft. He was a complex person, but at his core, there is consideration and kindness and gentleness in the way that he dealt personally one on one.”
As chairman of the Little Sparta Trust for more than 20 years, I have had the privilege of working with Finlay, and helping to conserve this most remarkable of creations. For all his combative style, the picture of him I remember best is of his gentler side — the man in gumboots, leaning on the garden gate at the entrance to Little Sparta, welcoming visitors, happy to discuss the weather, the best way of controlling willow-herb and Scotland’s prospects for the next world cup.
He even created an artwork with the aphorism: “A World Cup without Scotland is like a Pastoral without Sheep.”
Ian Hamilton Finlay is at Modern Two, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, from March 8to May 26. Ian Hamilton Finlay/Fragments is at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, from May 3 to June 14. International exhibitions include: Kewenig Gallery, Palma de Mallorca; Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia; Victoria Miro, London; David Nolan Gallery, New York; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg; Stampa, Basel; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna.
