THE CROWD gathered in the Mackintosh Gallery at Glasgow School of Art could rarely have experienced such intensely mixed emotions at an exhibition opening.
This long-planned show of new work by the Scottish painter Steven Campbell was unveiled on August 15, the first anniversary of his death from a ruptured appendix at the age of 54. The place was packed but the atmosphere at first hesitant. Were we at a celebration or a memorial? Was the correct emotion joy or grief? Could we actually talk about the work, and if we did what could we say?
The paintings on show were previously unseen, with that sense of new-minted freshness one gets with artworks that have come straight from the studio. It was undeniably odd that the artist alone was absent. Campbell's family, his mother, wife and children, and his close friends set the tone. They had turned out in force and were determined to mark the occasion.
There was a gaggle of well-groomed small children in party dresses. Against the hubbub of conversation, the sounds of Mark Sheridan's jazz ensemble played a new piece dedicated to the artist: The Campbell Variations. In the corner, with a thick shock of red blonde hair instantly reminiscent of his grandfather, Campbell's young grandson Nathan was busily absorbed in making some drawings.
When New York performance poet Barry Yourgrau, an old friend of Campbell's, addressed the gathering it gave everyone permission to laugh and those who were personally close to Campbell the freedom to cry. "When a poet pal of mine read my review of Steven's first show, he said to me, 'Gee, he must have paid you a lot of money!'" joked Yourgrau.
Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven is a remarkable show, but not solely because of the sad loss of its creator. Campbell was one of the finest artists of his generation, a man who made it from a steelyard apprenticeship in Cambuslang to a Fulbright scholarship to New York city on the strength of an astonishing work ethic welded to an unfettered visual imagination.
After a triumphant return to Scotland there was a subsequent period of private immersion and public hesitancy in his work. But he had begun to fully find his painterly voice again, with a series of shows that showed a gathering strength and resolve.
These new works, with an exhibition title culled from Monteverdi's Orfeo, turn out to contain a handful or remarkable and confident paintings. Set between the Glasgow School of Art, where he trained, and the Glasgow Print Studio, which supported him in his later work, the exhibition includes 11 new canvases, dozens of sketches and a series of his prints.
It feels not like the end of things, but a new beginning, a rededication to the business of art that had consumed his adult life since, as a young man, his grandmother gave him a book on Toulouse Lautrec.
In Jean-Pierre Leaud, a 2004 show at the Glasgow Print Studio, Campbell had played a kind of extended riff on the notion of apprenticeship, an artist learning from and paying tribute to his masters. 'Wretched Stars' is an exhibition in which he playfully consumes and spits out the artists he admires yet somehow states the artistic values of dedication to craft over the thrill of novelty. It favours tradition over modernity while at the same time being cheerfully iconoclastic and intensely refreshing.
On opening night there was a sudden lurch when it became apparent that the work seemed again and again to focus on the subject of death. But with Campbell it had always been about death, from his student performances to his obsession with Hitchcock, the tradition of the detective novel or with film noir. The suburban stereotype of the serial killer behind lace curtains had been one of the strengths but also one of the occasional weaknesses of his work.
In these paintings the notion of death lies in a complex play on the way that painting has been condemned to perpetually extinguish and then renew and reinvent itself. The most exciting work in the show, Self-portrait As Lytton Strachey Being Both Thor And Madame Butterfly, tackles this question of reinvention head on.
It is a landscape with figures. There is a Breton peasant in traditional headdress who might come from the work of Gauguin or Van Gogh, a woman tending the soil who might have come from Millet. But the artist, in Victorian disguise of tweed and brogues, is trampling carelessly through the vegetable patch.
His own person, a maelstrom of Picasso harlequin patterns and post-impressionist dots, seems to dissolve into the painting itself. In the background the naked Norse god Thor has a body that seems ruptured by lightning. His contours have become a series of ledges in which birds of prey, and a solitary kingfisher, have made their nests. The background is a purple-tinged mountain, perhaps the southern landscape that so obsessed Cezanne.
Birds weave their way through much of these works, carrying off dismembered corpses, tugging at the paintings' protagonists. There are familiar heroes and villains. Campbell has revived one of his favourites, the murderer Violette Nozière, a French poisoner who featured in his legendary performance Poised Murder.
We see Nozière first as painted by Campbell back in the Eighties, in what might be prison garb of brown and black. Nozière led a double life as dutiful daughter and young prostitute. In a series of new paintings her story is fused with Catherine Deneuve's dualistic characters from the films Belle De Jour and Repulsion. These feel like transitional paintings in which Campbell is reaching back to rediscover the essence of his interests, but not quite achieving them.
Far more successful are the works that pursue one of his late motifs, the Paisley pattern. On the occasion of Campbell's Soup, the Glasgow exhibition curated by Neil Mulholland that celebrated Campbell's influence on subsequent generations, Campbell made a wonderful painting in tribute to two key figures in Scottish art, Alasdair Gray and John Byrne. The Paisley pattern has spilled from that work to these new paintings, invading it like a virus spilling from the painted figures, coating the furniture and the carpets in a sinister shifting mass.
There are dozens of other recurring Campbell motifs: the chair, which, as in the work of Van Gogh might often be a stand-in for the artist himself. There are skulls and skeletons, furniture made from bones, a notable interest in footwear. A series of works feature men who seem made from trees and trees which might equally be men. Above all, these paintings speak of a relentlessly shifting landscape of curiosity and inventiveness that seems with the benefit of hindsight to have been far more consistent in its interests than the scatter-gun intellect it often felt at the time.
When I spoke to Carol Campbell earlier this year, on what would have been her husband's 55th birthday, she spoke of her desire to see his work contextualised, his place in the international scheme of things assessed and asserted. It's a real pleasure to see these new paintings are so strong. A full-blown retrospective bringing together the full spectrum of his work and a substantial monograph are now due. I do hope the National Galleries of Scotland are listening.
Whatever place history accords Steven Campbell, the sense of doubles and disguises that characterised this important show will live on after his death. As a student he won the marvellously named Bram Stoker medal for his "imaginative" artwork. His family have bequeathed a new prize for current students at Glasgow School of Art. It will be called the Hunt medal, named not for Campbell himself but for the mysterious and at times hapless alter-ego who stumbled through many of his paintings.
• Until September 28
www.gsa.ac.uk,
www.gpsart.co.ukThe full article contains 1339 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
