FROM THE GUARDIAN
The Last Bohemians by Roger BristowF
rances Spalding finds much to enjoy in a biography of a bohemian couple who lived the artistic life to its extremes
The Last Bohemians: The Two Roberts - Colquhoun and MacBryde
by Roger Bristow
416pp,Sansom & Co,£29.95
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 two Scottish painters met as art students. A seduction scene took place in a field in Kilmarnock. 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.
Frances Spalding's John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art is published by Oxford.
The Last Bohemians by Roger BristowF
rances Spalding finds much to enjoy in a biography of a bohemian couple who lived the artistic life to its extremes
The Last Bohemians: The Two Roberts - Colquhoun and MacBryde
by Roger Bristow
416pp,Sansom & Co,£29.95
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 two Scottish painters met as art students. A seduction scene took place in a field in Kilmarnock. 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.
Frances Spalding's John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art is published by Oxford.
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