Southbank Bristol Arts

This is a book I've awaited eagerly for most of my life without really being aware of it. This is a short review, but you can see the whole thing in my blog, http://hanleyexpress.blogspot.com

THE LAST BOHEMIANS
The Two Roberts-
Colquhoun and MacBryde

Roger Bristow

The two largely forgotten giants of Scottish art, known to pre-‘cutting-edge’ art students, particularly in Glasgow, and a few art lovers and collectors, as The Two Roberts, have left a substantial influence, regardless.
But Colquhoun and MacBryde burnt out too young to capitalise on their youthful success, which went up like a firework and hardly survived longer. Until now, the world has had to make do with the myths that surrounded these two lovers; some of the myths being their own inventions (like the one about stealing the Stone of Scone while drunk, really popular with succeeding generations of art students and many nationalists) and others just growing to fill the spaces.

Armed with diplomas from Glasgow School of Art, they suffered a period of serious penury and ill-health after 'doing' Europe just as war was about to break out again, and coping badly with conscription life until MacBryde's fortunate meeting with art critic John Tonge led to London and fame.
Down south, their euro-modernist painting and homosexuality helped give them entré to patrons and collectors. Their personas as exotic, mad, Scotsmen contributed to the spread of their fame as much as their work did, and they became the Golden Boys of Bond Street.
Before the slow fall from grace, their regular studio soireés attracted Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton,and Dylan Thomas.

Roger Bristow has devoted nearly twenty years to hunting down the surviving contemporaries of the Roberts. And fortunately the kinds of people who inhabit bohemia write letters, and keep them.
This may not be the lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, but there are more than enough reproductions to keep the afficionado happy and to wise-up the uninitiated. This is, with its exhaustive catalogue raisonné and index, The Book.

Sansom & Company £29.95