When John McLean writes that“ thought” goes into his art“ in the same way it does in singing and dancing”, he conjures up a Western way of thinking that goes back as far as Plato 1. But such a conviction also connects the artist more specifically to cultural arguments forged at the beginning of the 20th century when abstract art emerged across Europe. The sense that music was the most valuable art form is there in the writings of the late 19th-century English critic Walter Pater, who claimed that“ all art constantly aspires to the condition of music”, as he attempted to carve out a space for the arts beyond the utilitarian. Perhaps more immediately relevant to John McLean was the attempt by early 20th-century painters such as the Russian Kandinsky and the Dutch Mondrian to find in other arts, and especially music and dance, analogues for their own practice. Kandinsky wrote of seeking“ to apply the methods of music to his own art”, and Mondrian named paintings after music and dance, whether Fox Trot A or Broadway Boogie Woogie 2.
The briefest glance at the titles of the paintings of John McLean shows his interest in music and dance (titles such as Sword Dance, Capellmeister and Dance, for example) – something the paintings themselves confirm. As several critics have pointed out, in a McLean painting the shapes and colours are orchestrated (to use a musical analogy) or, in a painting like Reach, it is as if the canvas is a stage on which the marks are dancers, the drama a matter of their relationship one with another.
But this way of approaching John McLean only points in general terms towards the character of his art – what song is he singing, what is the nature of the dance? John McLean’s own view is that to understand his work, the viewer only needs to look. But looking at art is no simple matter (any more than is making art: as the British-German painter Frank Auerbach says: “Painting is a cultured activity – it is not like spitting, one can’t kid oneself.”) 3. To understand John McLean’s art we need to understand his own history as part of a wider one.
(i)
In 1960 John Mclean, who was a student in Scotland, looked at the catalogue for a London show entitled Situation4– an exhibition of contemporary British abstract art influenced by the American abstract expressionist painters who had been shown in Tate in 1959, in The New American Painting exhibition. What distinguished the work in Situation, and this was clear in the catalogue, was the painters’ hostility to the English St Ives painters, who had made modestly-sized, landscape-influenced abstract work. Instead the Situation artists wanted to make large-scale abstract work whose canvases had the character of an event rather than a painting. They embraced the ambition of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.
What did John McLean see in the catalogue? Why was he so taken with the work, even though the reproductions were in black and white? One suggestion might be that McLean is Scottish, not English, and that this was critical to his ability to embrace different ways of thinking. The great poet and cultural critic TS Eliot claimed that Scotland was no more than a provincial culture and needed to stay close to the metropolitan culture of England to remain vibrant. But a glance at history suggests otherwise. There are good arguments for saying that Scotland has had a profoundly outward-looking culture: it was one of the seedbeds of the European Enlightenment in the late 18th century, and was and is connected in its own way to America and Canada (where McLean would spend summers at an artists’ retreat which had welcomed figures such as John Cage and Barnett Newman). It may well be that since Scotland was not the metropolitan cultural power that England was, this enabled Scottish artists to be more promiscuous in their interests and loyalties, less settled in their own identity 5.
(ii)
That is certainly the case with John McLean. He himself was raised in the north-east of Scotland, and was inevitably influenced not only by his family – his father was an artist – but by the surrounding culture. It was marked by Scottish Presbyterianism, Calvinism – a kind of Christianity that separated the elect from the damned – was suspicious of the pleasures of the body and of sensual life, and it gave birth to some of the great achievements of Scottish culture, such as RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), that seminal story of a divided self. Although John McLean was brought up in an atheist household, it is noteworthy that the family did not celebrate Christmas – as was the case with Calvinists, who saw it as a pagan celebration. It may well be that John McLean’s embrace of art from southern Europe – including Miró and Matisse – and not least his absorption in the sensuousness of colour, is in part his response to the Calvinism that marks so much of Scots culture. This was not something achieved overnight, and one way of looking at the art John McLean has made is to see how it“ loosened up”, not only formally but emotionally, with the joyous and colour-lush but delicate “brushstroke paintings” of the late Seventies and Eighties a key moment.
Colour is the return of the repressed, to quote Freud, and McLean is one of a long line of important artists from Scotland who have looked beyond Scotland and London to forge his art. Think of the Scottish Colourists, who lived in the late 19th century and took their cue from Paris – one of them, JD Fergusson, said“: Something new had started and I was very much intrigued. But there was no language for it that made sense in Edinburgh and London.” 6 It was to Paris he looked.
The briefest glance at John McLean’s history will make clear how promiscuous has been his gaze but also how much division has marked him: the student in Scotland looking to American colour-field painters such as Morris Louis; the London-based painter looking south to Europe and later to Asia (his friend and artist-tutor John Golding introduced him to Korean ceramics, with their distinctive use of brushstrokes); the Scot living outside Scotland whose painting titles often refer to Scottish places.
(iii)
John McLean has said of his own art“: Everything works only in relationship to everything else in the painting. If you mull over a part at a time, you still take in the rest peripherally.” 7 Now, at one level, this is how all art works – the part only works in relationship to the whole painting. But John McLean has made the relationship between elements in the painting the very subject of his art (compare Miró’s Blue tryptych which McLean admires). For a painter so“ decentred” as McLean is, this should not surprise us. Look at a painting such as Shoal (1992), where each of the triangular shapes is choreographed, dance-like, in relationship to every other shape; each colour dramatically engaged with each other one. The black and blue triangles are pushed to the margin of the painting, unable to penetrate the family of colours that are the red/orange/yellow shapes; the red and orange at the top of the painting almost touch, while the black and blue shapes point (one is tempted to say aggressively) at one another. It is impossible not to see psychological tensions implicit in the disposition of shapes on the canvas.
Yet of course John McLean is not unique in making his canvas a stage on which“ elements” perform. Here is Mark Rothko in 1947“: I think of my pictures as dramas: the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.” 8 Like Rothko, John McLean’s shapes – circles, lines, swirls, crowns, triangles – have a human and figurative quality. But unlike Rothko, McLean’s paintings – and here I think lies part of his distinctiveness – are not monumental or heroic: their nature is non-heroic and non-monumental. Indeed there is often something witty about McLean’s paintings. Even if one was not guided by the title Acrobat, it is perfectly clear that in the painting with that title, each of the shapes is off-balance (acrobats are concerned with balance), slightly“ drunk”; the tension is generated by the long yellow line descending from the top of the canvas which separates the two spheres, and by the interference of the brown stripe with the yellow stripe over which is overlaid at one point. The eye searches for a point at which to rest, wants to find symmetry – but cannot do so. There are two spheres but one is only half a sphere; the green line at the top of the painting slopes either up or down. All the shapes seem on their way to other places. In a McLean painting, the relation between the ground and the shape is often a matter of ambiguity. Does the yellow shape in Shoal sit above the ground or is it a space within the ground? Or perhaps there is no ground because the grey ground itself seems made up a variety of shapes of different hues, their position provisional. This is what makes the paintings so distinctive, so contemporary.
The“ monuments of unageing intellect” of Abstract Expressionism and of Rothko have been replaced in the work of John McLean by a constellation of elements whose position might well have been and become different. And this is why singing and dancing are so important to his works. Singing and dancing work in time, weave together past, present and future – are always in movement. TS Eliot may have been wrong about the nature of Scottish culture but his words in his great poem Four Quartets speak to the deceptively complex art of John McLean:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
1 Foreword“: Like Singing and Dancing” in John McLean, by Ian Collins (Lund Humphries, 2009), p. 7.
2 See Walter Pater“, The School of Giorgione”, The Renaissance, quoted in Art in Theory, 1815- 1900, ed. Charles Harrison et al (Blackwell, 1998), p 833; Wassily Kandinsky“, The Pyramid”, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, translated MTH Sadler (Dover, 1977), p 19.
3 The artist Frank Auerbach, quoted in Louisa Buck and Philip Dodd, Relative Values: What’s art worth? (BBC book, 1991), p 10.
4 Situation was an exhibition at RBA Galleries, London. Twenty artists exhibited including William Turnbull, John Hoyland and Gillian Ayres, who became a close friend of John McLean.
5 TS Eliot“, Was there a Scottish Literature”, The Athenaeum, 1919; on Scotland and the Enlightenment see Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ invention of the modern world (Fourth Estate, 2003); on Scotland and North America, TM Devine, Scotland’s Empire and the shaping of Americas, 1600-1815, (Penguin Allen Lane, 2003)
6 JD Fergusson“, Chapter for an Autobiography”, Saltire Review, 1860, quoted in Margaret Morris, The Art of JD Fergusson: A Biased Biography (Blackie Academic and Professional, 1974).
7 Foreword, Collins, op. cit.
Philip Dodd has curated many exhibitions, in London, New York, Moscow and Beijing, with artists and architects as various as Yoko Ono and Zaha Hadid. Most recently he has curated a series of exhibitions in China by Sean Scully. He is former Director of London’s ICA and has published numerous books on art, film and culture.
