William Gillies: Modernism and Nation in British Art

by Andrew McPherson

Overview

Providing new evidence on the life and times of this Scottish painter, Andrew McPherson shows Gillies to be a modernist thinker. Including paintings never seen before, he reappraises his creative output, including the relationship of portraiture to still life, placing him firmly within not only a Scottish context but a British and European one too.
Andrew McPherson has been researching the life, times and works of William Gillies for over twenty years. He has rethought the formative influence of his art of two World Wars, gender inequalities and the modernist crisis of meaning and belief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399518352
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	8.66(w) x 9.45(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andrew McPherson is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He has been researching the life, times and works of William Gillies for over twenty years. He is the author of (with Raab) Governing Education, Edinburgh UniversityPress, 1988, and William Gillies: Modernism and Nation in British Art (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2023).

Table of Contents

Foreword & Preview

Life and Death, Violence, Irony, Sanity and Sex

The Countryman: Political Context

Kailyard and Kin

The Theatre of War

College

A Charter of Liberty: Early Years

Bohemian Edinburgh

Portraits

Still Lifes of the 1930s

Landscapes of the 1930s

Nie Wieder Krieg: Wartime Landscapes

Still Lifes 1939 - c1960

Oil Landscapes

Last Years

Politics, Patronage and later Landscapes on Paper

Editorial Reviews

Published to celebrate both the 125th anniversary of his birth and the 50th of his death, this is a revelatory account of the life and art of the Scottish painter William George Gillies (1898-1973). Until now he has been considered a ruralist, a Neo-romantic and a traditionalist. This detailed biography dispels the myth of such interpretation and instead places his art in the modernist canon.
Andrew McPherson analyses the tight relationship between Gillies’s art and his personal experience from the trauma of family history to the ‘theatre’ of war. He reveals how Gillies’s grief at the early death of his artist sister Emma became formalised and central to his art. A thorough and skilful analysis of selected art works identifies many signifiers of remembrance across time.
This is a compelling book which reconsiders a modest and sensitive artist and so illuminates the nature of Scottish art in the central decades of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Cumming

Andrew McPherson’s innovative research introduces us, with great empathy, to a new understanding of the life and work of the artist William Gillies. His approach reveals a hidden and complex family background, which nonetheless supported Gillies as he came to the fore of a largely unrecognised European modernism in Scotland, one that motivated the young Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Margaret Mellis and William Gear. Gillies’ work developed at a time when the general public were little exposed or disposed to modernism. McPherson’s generously illustrated book vividly describes the tensions of the social and creative climate Gillies worked within.

Kenneth Dingwall

The received wisdom around Sir William Gillies as retiring and semi-reclusive, quietly absorbed in the business of creating genteel landscapes is forcefully challenged...dismantles the common perception of Gillies as a countryman painter, proposing instead that his work was deeply influenced by existential concerns and modernist ideas.

The Times - Giles Sutherland

A deeply researched book that presents a radically fresh perspective on Gillies.

The Art Newspaper - Beth Williamson

A new William Gillies, man and artist, is revealed at the turn of every page.

Curator and Art Historian Alice Strang

Brilliant…reveals a radical and unfamiliar Gillies who has been hiding in plain sight … Andrew McPherson’s reassessment is wholly convincing.

Scotsman - Duncan Macmillan

Andrew McPherson…demonstrates, for the first time, the depth and importance of [Gillies’] engagement with modernism.

Scottish Art News - Susan Mansfield