Joan Eardley Centenary,
★★★★★
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

ALTHOUGH she died at the age of 42 in 1963, Joan Eardley is a central figure in British 20th-century art, whose work in the 1950s and ’60s reinvents the language of social realism to make a vision of the urban poor, and also puts up a uniquely British and figurative response to the Abstract Expressionist school of America. It is a single-minded achievement that defines the best of post-war British art.

The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh has been showing her work since 1957, and gave her a first solo show in 1961. This celebration of the centenary of her birth is the fruit of remarkable loyalty and careful curatorship. Although it limits itself to small-scale works, it displays hitherto unknown paintings and drawings that mark the key movements of Eardley’s career. If anything, the show profits from a reduced scale to render the overall shape of her achievement even more accessible.

From the perspective of another millennium Eardley emerges as a pivotal figure, who reaches back into the 19th-century tradition of realism, and also forward towards a new vision of landscape. As a creative woman in post-war Britain she resembles her exact contemporary Sylvia Plath for the unique lyricism, empathy and daring formalism of her best work.

Her roots are to be found in French Realism – the artists who were determined to make ordinary working people the subject of art and whose greatest exponent is Van Gogh. In one early sketch, Woman Knitting (1948) this influence is tangible, in both the knotty fingers and the “Japanese print” composition of flat patterned areas. Eardley’s unique mission was to develop this empathetic language to explore poverty in post-war Glasgow.

The images of children for which she is famous remain deeply disturbing. The doll-like outline of a face, set amid newsprint and graffiti, challenge the viewer to look into the mess and to recognise both a child, and a child’s needs. Girl with a Poke of Chips (1960 – 63) is a thrilling example of Eardley at her ambiguous and unsettling best. She has invented a way of seeing in which the child is embedded in the environment of poverty, a brilliant and necessary invention that comes in advance of the insights of sociology. She invents her own perspective for “informed compassion” in a visual language that anticipates the gaze of the social worker.

The painting is accompanied by sketches that demonstrate the sheer difficulty that Eardley mastered when she opened her studio door to gangs of restless and fidgety urchins. The work is lightning quick and playful, like banter in a dialogue, and these quick lines – is this all it takes to recognise a child? – define the question addressed by her art to the awakening conscience of the welfare state.

The question is as relevant today as it was half a century ago, and it remains disturbing to see such images for sale in a commercial gallery. The Scottish Gallery has ridden this paradox for more than 60 years.

Eardley knew she had developed a powerful language of compassion for the working class poor, and she worked to strip the idiom of sentimentality. But she also knew that she must test the limits of figurative representation if her art was to stay on the frontier of the new.

She found one subject in the inner city of the west, and the other among the poor fishing communities of the east. Given these two locations her career has a remarkable self-discipline in pursuit of two complimentary subjects: on one hand, a new language for empathetic realism, and on the other the many moods of elemental abstraction.

Away from the city, the physical presence of the world reduces itself to a visionary and symbolic language amid the colour-fields of Catterline: shacks, beehives, grasses, moon and sea. It is striking how much this symbolic language aligns with that of Plath.

Seascape (1961) is a miniature rendition of the kind of image she could also make on the scale of a Pollock or a Rothko. It bears comparison with such contemporaries as much as with Turner, and it is a woman’s art that is a welcome and gutsy alternative to the graphic anxieties of Georgia O’Keefe, or the minimalism of Agnes Martin.

Seeking to transpose the discoveries of Nicholas de Stael from the south of France to the north-east of Scotland, this is a reckless inquiry into the expressive possibilities of paint. It harnesses the violence of the weather to produce images that are thrillingly expressive, whether soft and mystical or moody and violent.

She describes making Grey Beach and Sky (1962) on a “perfect” day “not as regards the climate (I had to wear a fur coat for the first time) but for beauty quite perfect, a big sea with lovely light and strong wind.”

This landmark exhibition and its handsome catalogue celebrate the heroic and short life of a great painter who transformed the languages of the past, and who dared incoherence to advance the language of the present. It is a unique achievement that continues to dominate Scottish art.

But this retrospective also raises questions. For someone with such mastery of the medium, and power of empathy, where is her image of adulthood? A lesbian, emotionally sustained by her relationship with the artist Lil Neilson, she also seems trapped in her time, unable to overstep its prohibitions about sexuality, and ultimately, lonely as a poet.

The show concludes with another discovery, Jar of Summer Flowers (1962), painted as she was dying of breast cancer. It is her valedictory statement that remains both restless and exact, both spontaneous, intuitive and whole.

Unmissable.

Until August 28, scottish-gallery.co.uk