Facing the Nation:

The Portraiture of Alexander Moffat

Bill Hare

(Luath Press, £25)

Review by Alan Taylor

Alexander Moffat is best known for his group portrait Poets’ Pub, which hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, a short stroll from the artist’s Edinburgh home.

Painted in the early 1980s, it captures a moment in time, when poets rather than, say, novelists, were still in the ascendant and, in general, revered by the reading public. That none was female was an accurate if deplorable reflection of an era slowly coming to an end.

Holding centre stage is Hugh MacDiarmid, red scarf – the colour is significant – draped round his shoulders, pipe in his right hand, who by the time of the painting’s unveiling had died. Like Christ at the Last Supper, he is surrounded by his adoring disciples: George Mackay Brown, holding on to a pint as if it were a lifeline, Sydney Goodsir Smith, fag elegantly poised, and a bespectacled Iain Crichton Smith who appears to be hanging on the seer of Brownsbank’s every syllable.

The other poets, however, are positioned by Moffat to reflect a distance between them and MacDiarmid. Lamppost-tall Norman MacCaig, for example, who was personally closer to MacDiarmid than any of the others in the painting, is portrayed looking away from his great buddy and into a distance and future that leads to an inevitable end. Edwin Morgan is similarly disengaged, as indeed are Robert Garioch and, topping the pyramid, Sorley MacLean, the Gaelic bard. At the painting’s foot is Alan Bold, MacDiarmid’s biographer and by far the youngest member of the entourage.

It is a colourful gathering. A Martian, happening upon Poets’ Pub in the gallery, might think the men were part of an avant garde jazz band waiting to take to the stage. Bill Hare, in this illuminating, lavishly illustrated and long overdue retrospective of Moffat’s work, notes that while “the subject content of the scene is fairly conventional...the spatial composition of the picture is fractured by the use of a number of different viewpoints, causing the viewer to experience at second-hand the effects of alcoholic disorientation”.

This is not, however, how I “read” the painting. None of the group, for instance, looks the worse for wear and there is no sense of bacchanalia. Rather, those portrayed are placed in a subtle poetical hierarchy with MacDiarmid at its centre, like a sun with its satellites, in recognition perhaps of his formative influence in the middle decades of the 20th century on Scottish culture and politics and general and Scottish literature in particular.

Hare tells us that Moffat – who was born in 1943 in Dunfermline where both his parents were teachers and who was a student with John Bellany at Edinburgh School of Art – was drawn to writers “as inspiring mentors” after witnessing the flyting between MacDiarmid and Alexander Trocchi “over the literary soul of Scotland” at the 1962 Edinburgh Writers Conference. In that febrile decade Moffat, in tow with Bellany and Bold, haunted the Rose Street pubs where the poets invariably hung out. In those far-off days, and for a while thereafter, Edinburgh really did feel like a city of literature.

The Poets’ Pub is Moffat’s greatest achievement but it is by no means his only one. Like Bellany, he had a youthful flirtation with experimental abstraction but, emboldened by an Oskar Kokoschka exhibition at the Tate in London, he turned to portraiture, especially portraits of single individuals. Indeed, as he tells Hare, it was seeing Kokoschka’s portraits of Adolf Loos, the modernist architect, and Herwarth Walden, the Expressionist painter, that convinced him “that painting portraits was consistent with my desire to be a modern artist”.

Among the many surprises in Facing the Nation are a number of portraits of women, including a saucy pair featuring Susie Raeburn, in one of which – The Ringmaster – the QC is depicted wearing yellow tights, black boots and a bowler hat and wielding a long whip. Hare remarks: “It is all good light-hearted fun, allowing Susie to dress up to delight and entertain her audience, as though she had just stepped out of a Seurat circus painting.” My interpretation is less coy and more suggestive. When QCs start brandishing whips, surely one is being led in the direction of dominatrixes, sado-masochism and sex.

There are many portraits here which show what a fine and fascinating and original artist Moffat is. A relatively recent portrait of Alasdair Gray – seated in a reclining armchair, hands on head – is especially moving. But it is hard to look beyond the stunning painting Moffat did of Muriel Spark in 1984. She always said that she didn’t like it but, then, that is often the response of sitters who do not care to see themselves as others see them. Spark, like MacDiarmid, wears a red scarf but in her case this is not a comment on her political stance but an expression of herself and her surname. It is a spark of colour in an otherwise sombre outfit. Painting her, reflects Moffat, was a quite different experience from painting the male writers he did a couple of years earlier. “When I asked if she wanted me to include additional imagery in the background, ‘No, no, I only want me,’ was her reply.”