Robert Colquhoun's artistic talents

I'm in the process of researching my family history and understand that my grandfather's twin brother JAMES LYLE, 8 Wallace Street, Kilmarnock was a one time Principal Art teacher at the Academy. He died on 28th February 1955, so his tenure would be prior to this. James Lyle was apparently instrumental in the development of Robert Colquhoun's artistic talents. (I note he is one of your famous former pupils). Any additional history you may have regarding James Lyle - even some form of obituary - would be of great interest, and ultimately any photographs of James Lyle would be the icing on the cake.

Best Regards, John Lyle.

DR DICKSON'S REPLY 
 

Dear John Lyle,

Many thanks for your email. Yes, James Lyle was indeed a very influential art teacher at KA in the first half of the twentieth century. It was he who designed the school coat of arms in the 1940s and in
 addition he wrote and illustrated the manuscript roll of honour for those former pupils who were killed in WW2. The fine brush work on the latter is very beautiful (it can be viewed in the school - but an image of it is also on our website under WW2 pupil obituaries). He taught in the Old Technical building which had a handsome set of art rooms, and recently when the building was being converted into residential flats a mural that James Lyle painted on the wall to illustrate fresco technique came to light. There was some correspondence in the Kilmarnock Standard about it and the mural was reproduced. I believe his daughter is still alive and living in the town, for she took part in the correspondence. I know she also had some of his original art work of his, for the Dick Institute,
.the local library and museum, had his design for the school badge on display in 1998 which had been loaned by her.

I am copying this email to our school librarian and archivist as he may be able to find more about James Lyle in the Goldberry, the former school magazine. There may well have been an obituary and photograph when he died in 1955. We certainly have staff photographs from the period in which he will feature. The other individual who may know more about him is our retired principal art teacher, Jim Wylie, who can be contacted through his website, http://jimwylie-artist.co.uk/ The Dick Institute also has a card index (now computerised I think) of the Standard, and it may supply more information. He was well-known in the town due to his long service at the Academy.

I trust this of some interest.

Neil Dickson

I set out to make statements, in visual terms, concerning the things I see, and to make clear the order that exists between objects which sometimes seem opposed. I do this because it is the painter’s function, generally speaking, to explore and demonstrate in his work the interdependency of forms. This leads me beneath the surface appearance of things, so that I paint the permanent reality behind the passing incident, the skeleton which is the basic support of the flesh. In doing this I perceive a ‘pictorial logic’ which dictates that, if a certain line or colour exists in a painting, there must be certain other lines and colours which allow the completed painting to be an organic whole.
Each painting is a kind of discovery, a discovery of new forms, colour relation; or balance in composition. With every painting completed, the artist may change his viewpoint to suit the discoveries made, making his vision many-sided.
Figures and objects in many modern paintings may appear distorted. They will be so to those who seek a factual resemblance, or a mirror-like reflection. The special forms, evolved from the relation of colour masses, line and composition, to express the painter’s reaction to objects, will be the reason for a painting’s existence.
Robert Colquhoun (20 December 1914 – 20 September 1962) was a Scottish painter, printmaker and theatre set designer.
Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock and was educated at Kilmarnock Academy. He won a scholarship to study at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met Robert MacBryde with whom he established a lifelong  relationship and professional collaboration, the pair becoming known as "the two Roberts". He joined MacBryde on a travelling scholarship to France and Italy from 1937 to 1939, before serving as an ambulance driver in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War. After being injured, he returned to London in 1941 where he shared studio space with MacBryde. The pair shared a house with John Minton and, from 1943, Jankel Adler.
Colquhoun's early works of agricultural labourers and workmen were strongly influenced by the colours and light of rural Ayrshire. His work developed into a more austere, Expressionist style, heavily influenced by Picasso, and concentrated on the theme of the isolated, agonised figure. From the mid 1940s to the early 1950s he was considered one of the leading artists of his generation. He was also a prolific printmaker, producing a large number of lithographs and monotypes throughout his career.

During and after the Second World War he worked with MacBryde on several set designs. These included sets for Gielgud's Macbeth, King Lear at Stratford and Massine's Scottish ballet Donald of the Burthens, produced by the Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1951.
Robert Colquhoun died, an alcoholic, in relative obscurity in London in 1962. MacBryde moved to Dublin, where he was killed in a traffic accident in 1966. Their friend Anthony Cronin describes them with respect and affection in his memoir Dead as Doornails.
Famous in the 1940s, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde are today almost forgotten figures. Much of their art in public collections is hidden from view. But the legend they created lives on. Roger Bristow brings factual accuracy and nuanced understanding to this first full account of their lives and work. But it nevertheless remains a tale about an intense relationship, shot through with humour, brutality, tragedy and farce.

The Unmade Bed (Scotland, 1933)

1. The Last Bohemians: The Two Roberts - Colquhoun and MacBryde
2. by Roger Bristow

The two Scottish painters met as art students. A seduction scene took place in a field in Kilmarnock.shilton
 Thereafter, they remained inseparable. Colquhoun was tall, lean and sullen, ruggedly handsome and famed for his contempt. MacBryde was smaller, more clown-like, with rounded features beneath dark eyebrows, chatty and gregarious. Both came from working-class backgrounds: Colquhoun's father was an engineering fitter in Kilmarnock; MacBryde was the son of a Maybole tanner. They quickly became known as 'the two Roberts', or 'the Roberts'. At Glasgow School of Art, it was understood that one could not do without the other. When Colquhoun won a travelling scholarship, money had immediately to be found by the chairman of governors, so that MacBryde could travel Europe with Colquhoun, on an equal footing.
Together they upheld the view that modern art needed to be cosmopolitan. When they moved to London in 1941, they came convinced that, as Scottish artists, they had a contribution to make to European culture. Wary of indifference on the part of the English, they initially sported tartan kilts, claimed they were Scottish Nationalists and adopted an effusively Gaelic stance. But the Nationalist vein soon disappeared, as did the kilts, and the Roberts, who never returned to live in their native country, became professional Scots in England.
Few artists have imposed themselves on their surroundings as these two did. Almost every memoir of Soho in the 1940s, its pubs and drinking clubs, mentions their glowering presence. Fearless and outspoken, they hated anything false, pretentious or sham. Such was their charisma that, for a short period, others in their circle felt that where the two Roberts were, there London was.
Their Notting Hill studio in Bedford Gardens became a magnet for artists, poets and passing folk. Their famous Sunday evenings often began nearby, at the Windsor Castle in Campden Hill, the smallest of its three bars collecting their friends. Among those who joined the crush were Lucian Freud, John Minton, Dylan Thomas and WS Graham. Another poet, George Barker, never forgot being introduced to MacBryde. The Scotsman came towards him saying, "I've been longing to meet you," and crushed the glass he was holding into Barker's outstretched hand. It was no less dangerous back in the studio: both hosts had beguiling charm, but also a capacity for blistering rudeness. Poetry readings alternated with ham acting or merciless teasing, food and more alcohol. Colquhoun recited chunks of Robert Burns by heart; MacBryde sang Scottish folk songs, or danced in a manner entirely his own.
They did not flaunt their homosexuality (then illegal, and complicated by Colquhoun's attractiveness to women) but they were perceived to be a couple. "Where would Bobby be without MacBryde?" Colquhoun's mother asked. Needing no reply, she added: "Robert MacBryde did a lot for Bobby." At a practical level, this was obvious. It was MacBryde who took charge of domestic matters, cooked delicious stews, was seen ironing Colquhoun's trousers with a heated teaspoon and approached dealers on his behalf. But his contribution went deeper than this. He had a gift for intimacy. According to the Irish writer Anthony Cronin, MacBryde's "feeling for the physical reached out to embrace the most trivial things", with the result that even a cup of tea could be turned into a feast.
Wyndham Lewis thought MacBryde the wittiest man in town. His letters, however, ramble and his talk could turn morose and repetitive. Neither he nor Colquhoun ever modified their thick accents. But when Julian Maclaren-Ross asked a fellow writer, Fred Urquhart, who had a gift for phonetics, if he could put the Roberts' way of speech into a short story, he received the reply: "Ah well, you know Julian, it's not so simple to do Colquhoun and MacBryde. They may look easy but they're difficult to do."
Something of this difficulty infiltrates this long-awaited biography. It is not their words or tone of voice that are the problem, for these come across with a bruising directness. (Typical is the welcome one young woman received on her first visit to Bedford Gardens. "That piss is nae guid. Hae some whisky!") More troubling is the way that the Roberts hid their vulnerabilities behind an embattled stance and their quick resort to verbal abuse. Bristow does not rid us of the feeling that the mask they put up obscures more interesting tensions.
Yet by weaving together oral history with documentary evidence, he unfolds a poignant narrative. He usefully logs the exhibition history of these two artists, but is too respectful of the lengthy travel report which the Roberts were obliged to write up after their European tour. Despite its occasional repetitions, this book offers a worthy monument to the reputation of these two artists and friends. Bristow writes well about the impact of the Blitz on sexual behaviour, is good on the significance to the Roberts of the Polish artist Jankel Adler, and he movingly uncovers the emotional destitution implicit in the restrained, frozen figures that inhabit Colquhoun's art.
With hindsight, the eviction of the Roberts from the Bedford Gardens studio – followed by two van-loads of empty bottles – appears to have been the turning point. Thereafter they became nomads. Colquhoun's good looks deteriorated, his work – always more in demand than MacBryde's – lessened in intensity, and ugly, sometimes violent rows set in between the two men. Both suspected that sections of the art world were now avoiding them. They settled briefly in Lewes, as dependents of two sisters who ran a gallery and encouraged their use of lithography. Then followed the notorious episode at Tilty Mill, in Essex. Elizabeth Smart, in the wake of her separation from George Barker, invited the Roberts to share it with her, in the expectation that they would act as housekeeper and nanny to her children on the days she worked in London. After this arrangement ended, the two men stayed on, until the original lease holder, the writer Ruthven Todd, returned to reclaim the house. He found it looking "blind", for all the windows had been smashed.
Not long after this, Colquhoun died, aged 47, in MacBryde's arms. Thereafter pathos dogged MacBryde, and a few years later he died in a road accident. Bristow remains coolly observant at moments of high drama, yet there emerges from his narrative a sense of something noble and inviolate. Forget the swaggering aggression, psychological brutality, alcoholic abuse and artistic decline. What remains to the fore is the Roberts' fierce and unremitting independence, their insistence on authenticity, and the loyalty, troubled and tested though it was, that bonded them until death and beyond.

The popular illustrated magazine Picture Post for March 12 1949 ran a four page feature titled “Seven Artists Tell Why They Paint”, with brief quotes from Leonard Rosoman, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, Prunella Clough, Keith Vaughan, John Minton and Patrick Heron, with photos by Felix H Man. A fairly close knit selection, with Heron maybe more towards the margins, and Rosoman, in my humble opinion, the weakest link. The Two Roberts occupied a full centre page, and each provided for the occasion, unusually, a tolerably coherent and extended statement of artistic intent. Colquhoun’s is described by Malcolm Yorke, in The Spirit of Place, as “the only interview he gave” – outside the much later Ken Russell film of the duo, that is. And Yorke ought to know.

Their statements don’t go much beyond Clive Bell’s by then commonplace notions of “significant form”, but even so they throw a little light on how the Roberts thought about their work. MacBryde, a frequent still life painter, talks of objects, but neither mentions people as subjects, nor do they say anything to illuminate the folksiness of their characters, a theme well represented by the small accompanying images of MacBryde’s Performing Clown (Tate collection, but annoyingly no online image) and Colquhoun’s The Whistle-seller, both marvellous choices.

Man’s joint photo of the pair posing jauntily at their easels has been reproduced here and there, but doesn’t seem to be readily accessible online. So here it is, with the related text. Roger Bristow, in his fine biography, identifies the setting as their Bedford Gardens studios, originally shared with John Minton, though the Roberts had left that location abruptly some two years before, in 1947. Maybe the feature had been a while in the making.Wyndham Lewis on the two Roberts

I approached Colquhoun. He was stooping over a book in an untidy book-tray. I said “Hallo,what book?” He turned with some shyness towards me. “I was looking at a guide book. It is out of date.” Colquhoun is not at all himself: I feel that he stagnates, there is something the matter. I know him very slightly and can only guess at what is adversely affecting him. He has been excluded from the Festival of Britain, he has not been invited to send a picture and he feels very bitterly this strange slight. Of the Hillworthies who are creative I place him first. I passed on and saw a kilt. This was MacBryde, wittiest of Hillmen, swinging his kilt along, without consciousness of the anomaly. He had an apprehensive eye upon Colquhoun whom he had seen handling a book. A few nights before MacBryde and his inseparable companion had been sitting at a table in a public house. The kilt was not visible so I gathered, and his rich Scottish idiom was to be heard as he told Colquhoun a story of a trip to Wigtown. “The marn went aroond the heel, and then came back wuth eet,” is the kind of way he talks. Several men at the bar hearing this strange music cocked a Britannic ear, one more especially. This latter eyed MacBryde with undisguised xenophobia. “The bloody Irish are bloody well everywhere.” But the man he was addressing had caught sight of the kilt beneath the table. “They’re Jocks, Harry, they’re no bloody Irish.” “So they are. Good old Jocks,” he vociferated, the minstrelsy of Harry Lauder warming his Brixton heart. But the popularity of this kilt had little effect upon MacBryde, who said to the first man: “If you have anything you wish to say, why do you say it to heem, why not to me!” What happened afterwards I was not told: but I reflected that a kilt might be a safeguard, among people whose dislike of all foreigners grows, though the kilt seems to dispel their mistrust.