Press

It’s fashionable to call the 73-year-old Alasdair Gray a Renaissance man, meaning, I suppose, he is a kind of polymath, a man who – as novelist, artist, illustrator, muralist and poet – can turn his hand to many of the arts. But looking a the compact selection of some of his print works, just opened at Glasgow Print Studio, shows that he is indeed a man of the Renaissance, absolutely steeped in the art of Michelangelo and Raphael and in the poetry of Dante.

On the other hand we might call him a great Victorian, with an engineer’s vision of his city and the intimate recesses of the human body as parallel exercises in plumbing or piping. Or maybe he’s a medievalist steeped in archaic symbolism and emblem books, and a view of the world he described in a talk last week at the Frieze Art Fair as a “cosmic casserole”. In the same talk, he went some way to explaining this plethora of references and influences as part of a human desire to be admired. “I want each thing I make to show everything I know”. It is also, he admits, a kind of megalomania.

Gray’s prints, like his writing, are an interwoven combination of the real lived life, closely observed, tangible and pungent and a fantastical view from afar complex and sometimes dystopian. The children’s books that he has cited as key influences, among them an edition of the Harmsworth Encyclopedia from the 1930s, were full of this clash of the inside and outside perspective: the sun as it might be viewed from the planet Mercury, say, set near an image of the interior of the human body as machine.

A “pious atheist”, Gray grew up in a house without a bible, but many commentators have seen the parallel between his works and the masterpieces of Christian art: illuminated manuscripts and medieval psalters. He draws on dozens of visual traditions: ancient mythology, folklore and fairytales sit alongside more modern ways of visualizing the world.

In fiction his trick is to have lived and written remarkably in the present moment – a communist in the 1950s, a comic and melancholic observer of the changing personal mores of the 1960s and 1970s, a bleak and acerbic commentator on the psychological costs of the ravages of Thatcherism in the 1980s – but to have filtered these times through the more heroic literary traditions such as the epic.

In art he has combined the languid sexuality of Beardsley with the hellish moral lessons of Bosch and Blake. His work in both is a series of cosmologies: his home town reimagined as the centre of the universe and a universe in itself.

Some key works are included here, such as the magnificent Frontispiece and Title pages for books 1-4 of his landmark novel Lanark, as well as some weaker more recent works such as Inside The Box of Bone. Gray’s prints are a constant working and reworking of ideas and images that flow between the different areas of his art: portraiture, the murals, autonomous art works and books. Thus the two-hander Domestic Conversation began life as a double portrait of friends and ended up a bleak conceptual joke at the close of Unlikely Stories Mostly.

Gray is much loved by generations of younger artists – Lucy McKenzie, a major art star in Europe, for example, is about to nip back to Glasgow to help with a spot of marbling for his ongoing mural at Glasgow’s Oran Mor – but his legacy as a visual artist has seemed fragile till recently. While the National Library of Scotland has been lucky enough to acquire many of his literary manuscripts, much of his art work has been scattered in private collections, his public art works lost by demolition or development.

This show is just a tiny taster. Glasgow art dealer Sorcha Dallas has set herself the task of bringing order to the chaos. It’s all beginning to bear fruit, with a show last April of once lost paintings. Dallas and Gray are now working together to establish a foundation, to be announced in the spring, which will be responsible for his archive and for placing his work both physically and intellectually in context. In 2010 Canongate will publish a visual monograph and there will be a major retrospective exhibition.

Like Lanark, the art work is both a clearly delineated map of the known world and an utterly bemusing labyrinthine universe of illusions and transformations. “I found it perfectly possible to distinguish between what is real and is imagined,” he said last week of his childhood inspirations. “But there were a lot of real things that looked as weird, as if they had been imagined”.