Methil’s ‘forgotten’ master remembered

In the centenary year of his birth, this detailed and carefully curated show of more than 100 paintings, prints and drawings, accompanied by a lavish new publication by Andrew Lambirth, does great justice to William Gear, the painter who was born in Fife.

The show’s title suggests that Gear fell into obscurity and it is only now that his work is gaining the recognition it deserves. This is partly true. His work has always been held in high esteem, if not by a wide public, then certainly in the art world.

Although Gear was born in the coastal mining town of Methil, and trained at Edinburgh College of Art, he spent most of his career in England. He taught and worked as a curator, between 1958 and 1964, at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, East Sussex, which is jointly responsible for organising this show.

At Edinburgh, Gear was one of the generation of students (including Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Alan Davie and Margaret Mellis) who were taught by William Gillies, Johnny Maxwell, William MacTaggart and Samuel Peploe.

The show, divided into sections in the capacious upper gallery of the City Art Centre, charts the stages in Gear’s stylistic development, from representation through to the large painted abstractions and prints that defined the latter part of his career.

One sequence of work is particularly telling. It consists of a series of paintings and a pen and ink drawing composed during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. (As a major in the Royal Corps of Signals, Gear was one of the original “Monuments Men” whose job it was to record and preserve the postwar cultural heritage of Europe).

Palestine Landscape (1943), an oil painting on board, shows a single tree and its forlorn shadow. Despite the apparent warmth of its colours it is stark, desolate and in a style and palette Gear did not revisit. It contains grains of desert sand, which link it inextricably to the place and mood of its composition.

Two other works, both completed in 1944, show the ruins of war. One, Città Distrutta, although a composite work, is more conventionally representational, a fixed narrative; the other, Composizione, has transcended the act of pure record and is almost wholly abstracted. The ruins are no longer stones, mortar, wood, fire and bodies but a series of shapes, forms and tones which, taken together, suggest rather than represent the scene of pointless destruction.

Before the war, and after his Edinburgh years, Gear had worked in Paris in the studio of the Cubist painter Fernand Léger. Such an apprenticeship, at such a high level, has enabled Gear to combine the solid academicism of his conventional Scottish training with the avant-gardism of the Parisian scene. This allowed him to straddle the gulf between representation and abstraction, embracing the two worlds with ease and conviction.

Later, in the intellectual and social shake-up of postwar Europe, Gear became associated with the CoBrA group of artists — named after Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam where the main exponents of the movement lived. Gear was one of these elite avant-garde painters (including Asger Jorn and Karel Appel), who used colour, immediacy, abstraction and wild vigour. His alignment with a European avant-garde perhaps accounts for the fact that his work is less well known in his own country than it should be.

Despite his prolific output and his bold, daring and successful attempts to break out of the constraints of the Scottish art world, Gear’s importance has never been fully recognised, or celebrated, until now.

Until February 14. A companion exhibition, Jagged Generation: William Gear’s Contemporaries and Influences is at the City Art Centre until February 7.