Bruce McLean’s Gardens: a letter
Dear Bruce: I have been asked at very short notice (email address confusion) to write a short piece for your Lemon Street catalogue. I am delighted that the show looks to be exclusively devoted to garden paintings, prints and pots: the first, I think, ever. It’s a very good idea.
I suspect that even as I write you are enjoying an early evening drink on the terrace of Son Caragol, your house in Menorca, while you contemplate the spring delights – palms, flowers, shrubs, lemon trees, blossoming plums and apples, wild tortoises − of the stone-walled garden, once a small vegetable plot like those that surround it, no bigger than a good-sized allotment. I think of Hafez-e Shirāzi, most admired of Persian poets: ‘The garden is breathing out the air of Paradise today/ Towards me, a friend with a sweet nature and this wine… This plot is composing a tale of a spring day in May.’ Cheers.
As you will know, I’ve enjoyed your many works, over several years, on the theme of the garden, and it has always intrigued me that you should find it so absorbing − even compulsive − a subject. The art public have always tended to think of you as an exponent of a conceptually challenging art − a maker of paintings, prints, photo-works, ceramics, books, poses and live works − with a decided political or satirical-comical twist, often at the expense of the vanities of metropolitan art and culture. You have a name, also, as a visual and performative thinker − through drawings, designs and polemical interventions − on the nature of architecture and the social behaviours determined by it. Urban, provocative, subversive, witty in a deadpan way, surprising, angry: these are terms most commonly used in definition of your approach to your work.
So, why, it might be asked, this persistent lyrical return, over the last ten years or so, to the brilliant flowers, trees, shrubs, pathways, garden seats and deep skies of this horticultural theme? To a kind of painting (and printmaking and ceramics) that seeks, it seems, to pleasure the eye, to present a vision of natural beauty without irony? (I remember of course, your first essay in this direction, when you won the John Moore’s painting prize with your spectacular Oriental Garden, Kyoto in 1982.) Such an art, of course, needs no justification: like Caliban’s ‘sounds and sweet airs’ on Prospero’s island ‘it gives delight and hurts not.’ And there is indeed something deeply musical about these paintings: they have melody, rhythm and interval, tonal and chromatic variation; and, as it was for Caliban, they have the sharp definition of a glimpse recalled from a dream, so beautiful, that when ‘he waked, he cried to dream again’. But I am aware, as I know you are, that there is a history to garden paintings, that goes beyond the sheer delight they give, and takes us into deeper waters.
Firstly, of course, all gardens might remind us of paradise, a word whose derivation from the Persian phrase for ‘a walled garden’ permits us to think of any garden as an image for a place of retreat, peace, pleasure, as an enclosed heaven (hortus conclusus) on earth. Eden was such a garden, a place of flowers, leaves and grasses, pomegranate, orange, lemon and apple trees. Every picture of a garden thus reminds us of that first garden, and ineluctably, therefore, of the Expulsion: that which is wonderful in this world, and any condition of earthly (or, as we say, heavenly) bliss, can be irrecoverably lost. In the Song of Songs we read: ‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’ The garden thus conceived is also an image of the enduring female, an emblem of fruitful feminine beauty. All this is given, Bruce; it’s part of the received culture.
All those enthralling Impressionist gardens, so full of flowers and sunlit happiness, fall into this tradition: this was known to Renoir, to Pissarro, to Monet: above all, to Monet. And if – as it seems to me – the two great artists behind these paintings of yours, Bruce, are Bonnard and Matisse, then there is a direct connection to those powerful predecessors. For Bonnard several times in the early twenties visited Monet in his garden at Giverny, while the old master worked on the Nympheas, and took what he realised he needed as a painter − a multi-dimensional lateral and recessive space created of shimmering colour − from the example of those stupendous paintings. At the marvellous Bonnard exhibition a few weeks ago at Tate Modern I found myself dumbfounded in front of the fabulous Le Jardin of 1936: here indeed was that complex simultaneity of colour surface and tonal depth; a sonorous vision of a garden-paradise, a symphonic passage, with a deep-pink pathway through flowers and grasses into an infinity of fruit and leaf. Bruce! You should have seen it! I saw in it every garden painting you have made.
As for Matisse, the poet Louis Aragon – ex-communist, ex-surrealist, realist – writing in 1950, seeing in the late cut-outs a visionary evocation of ‘a great garden à la français’, a post-war vision necessary to the restoration of clarity and joy to a ravaged Europe, declared of their significance: ‘A time will come when that which seems remotest from this painter’s garden, this isle of happiness, will be made brighter for other men by the light of Matisse’s painting, more perhaps than by any other light.’
Aragon, no sentimentalist, went on: ‘… I sometimes get drunk on the flowers in the garden. And I see ugly things, even if Matisse will not believe in them. But any man who has sung a love-song in prison, who has laid flowers on a grave, who has dreamed of the sun in midwinter, who has seen, in the desert, the blue mirage of spring, who knows how to forget in order better to remember, who has the heart to laugh amid a storm or to love in the world of today, cannot but understand me. I will take such men by the hand and lead them through Matisse’s gardens. They will breathe that scent of happiness that is luxury, they will learn … to love more intensely whatever sings, be it only a colour.’
Your celebrations of the garden, Bruce, have something of the spirit of which Aragon writes so fervently. Their complexity of effects – the massing of scintillating colour-light that identifies a flower bed or a tree or a flowering shrub, the depth of crepuscular blue air, the sense of a receding space defining a pathway through flowers, or the vivid glimpse of a distant prospect (a pond, the sea?) beyond the optical immediate and the middle-distant blossom or shadow, or the up-close complicated intricacies of overlapping flowers, leaves and grasses – are an inheritance from Bonnard.
The sharply differentiated, abstract shapes of a scatter of brilliant petals, pink, purple, blue, the green profiles of individual leaves, the long spears of reeds and of palm leaves, the cut-out silhouettes of trees and their branches: these are the outcome of passionate optical perambulations ‘through Matisse’s gardens.’ These works in their different media are not pictures of gardens; they are more in the nature of magical simulations, glimpsed recollections, sharp memories of a moment’s sensation: a moment of vision that at once apprehended evanescent colour, space, light. And darkness.
These are some of my thoughts, Bruce, somewhat hurried, perhaps, but an indication of some of the considerations that seem to me important about these brilliant works. Best, Mel
Mel Gooding 2019