SCOTTISH WOMEN ARTISTS: TRANSFORMING TRADITION

Agnes Miller Parker, The Uncilvilised Cat, 1930. The Fleming Collection. Ⓒ The Copyright Holder. Image courtesy The Fine Art Society. Photography by John McKenzie.

This highly acclaimed exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, featuring Mod Brit greats such as Wilhemina Barns-Graham, Joan Eardley and Margot Sandeman, as well as contemporary stars like Caroline Walker, Charlotte Prodger and Alberta Whittle, has been extended till September 4.

The exhibition draws upon the Fleming Collection’s extensive archive of paintings, drawings, assemblages and photographs by Scottish women artists, from the 1920s to the present day, ‘aspiring to serve as a curatorial corrective to the historic absence of women artists in the academic narratives and artistic institutions’. A new post-extension addition to the show is The Bathers, a 1988 work by Alison Watt. 

The background is fascinating: at the beginning of the twentieth century, radical new co-educational programmes offered by Scottish institutions (such as the Glasgow School of Art) presented may female artists with the opportunity to develop their skills, and they were represented in artists’ colonies in Scotland (Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway; Catterline in Aberdeenshire) and beyond (St Ives in Cornwall).

From 1968 to its sale in 2000, the investment bank Robert Fleming & Co started collecting Scottish works of art to hang in its worldwide offices. After that sale, a collection of over 600 pieces was vested in the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation, which has been spreading the word about the excellence of twentieth-century Scottish art ever since. 

All this in the splendid Sainsbury Centre, at the University of East Anglia, starchitect Norman Foster’s first public building.

The image above, ‘The Uncivilised Cat’ (1930) is by Agnes Miller Parker. The (black) cat is clawing at the pagers of Marie Stopes’ feminist tome ‘Love’s Creation’. Symbols abound, including a pound note, an upturned vase of lilies, a getaway car and a toppled statuette of Venus. Read into those what you will: it appears that her marriage with William McCance was in trouble at the time.