Ian Hamilton Finlay
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
★★★★

THIS centenary exhibition of works by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) isn’t extensive, but succeeds in giving a good overview of his works and their development.

The gallery blurb describes him as a “sculptor, poet, printmaker, gardener and provocateur,” but he had no sculpting or printmaking skills. It’s true he dug out the ponds for the garden at Stonypath in the hills south of Edinburgh that made his name when he filled it with sculptural objects, but the garden was planted and tended by his wife Sue, and the objects made by artists and craftsmen, to Finlay’s more or less detailed written instructions.

That leaves poet and provocateur.

One of his skills as a poet was to find a place for himself in the art world, which amplified the effects of his poems far more than would have been the case had he published his work conventionally. In this sense he is similar to Leonard Cohen, another poet who opted not to publish books but, in his case, to enter the world of music.

Finlay’s early works are interesting but formally straightforward short stories, plays and poems. His discovery of Concrete Poetry in 1962 (via his friend Edwin Morgan) soon led him to think about poems as objects, and he started working with designers and printers to realise his ideas as books, cards and posters, but then also as sculptures in stone, wood and glass. He could be an exacting commissioner: in a letter from 1968, he writes, “DEAR LORD, PLEASE FIND ME A GOOD TYPOGRAPHER OF DELIGHTFUL TEMPERAMENT” (his caps).

Poverty, increasing agoraphobia and the needs of his young family led him to move in 1966 to a remote farm cottage in the hills south of Edinburgh, on land owned by his wife Sue’s parents. In that unlikely and inhospitable setting they developed a garden which soon featured poem-sculptures, designed to be seen amid the shifting light of the garden setting. These feature short, often witty texts, with references taking in fishing-boat names, the classical world and the French Revolution. They were far from the expansive confessionalism of the poetry of many of his peers. But they brought their own problems: another letter complains that “every day a poem is blown down, or shows signs of cracking, or needs oiled, or withers, and what is needed is a full-time Poem-Engineer.”

Despite his fascination for 1789, he shows no interest in 1917, but the moniker “Poem-Engineer” does sound like a figure from the early years of the Soviet Union.

By the 1980s the garden had become known internationally, and Finlay started receiving commissions to make work for public and private institutions in Britain and abroad. But that decade also brought two self-styled “wars” which, while prompting some of his best work, also brought new kinds of stress and uncertainty.

The first “war” was with Strathclyde Regional Council. Its assessors concluded that an outbuilding used to show artworks was a gallery, and thus liable for commercial rates. Finlay disputed this, declaring it to be a “garden temple,” a religious building exempt from rates. The dispute escalated. Finlay formed a band of supporters he named the “Saint-Just Vigilantes,” after the young revolutionary guillotined with Robespierre. Among other actions, they fly-postered Edinburgh institutions, including the Scottish Arts Council and National Galleries, with sheets decrying the perceived lack of support for his cause; the beautifully typeset texts (framed versions of which are exhibited here) were in Latin. It was at this time that Finlay renamed Stonypath “Little Sparta,” a riposte to Edinburgh’s claim to be the “Athens of the North.”

The second, more serious “war” was a legal case taken against the French government, which awarded, then revoked, a commission for the bicentenary of the French Revolution. There are echoes of contemporary “cancel culture.” A group of French critics declared Finlay to be a fascist based on the use of swastikas in some of his works (his fascination for neoclassicism encompassed the Nazis’ liking for the style). Finlay won the court case, but the judge awarded him a token 1 franc in damages. While he could “guillotine” his critics (their decapitated plaster heads can still be seen in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum), the battle and ultimately the war was lost.

By then he was well into his sixties, and he lived more quietly for the rest of his life, remaining productive but and no less provocative. His late work Five Finials, currently part of the Ingleby Gallery’s “Fragments” exhibition, is a sequence of small stone carvings which wouldn’t look out of place on a country house gatepost, but which reveal the violence inherent in civilisation. Starting with a sphere, they become more elaborate — acorn, pineapple — before culminating in a hand-grenade. This, he suggests, is where our idylls lead.

I was involved in staging a Finlay exhibition in the early 1990s, and a repeated criticism from visitors was that he wasn’t a “proper” artist because he didn’t “make things himself.” To that romantic notion of the artist as solitary genius-craftsman-hero, Finlay acts as a useful counterweight. He worked with collaborators (who were always credited); his works are still best seen in the context of Little Sparta, not as isolated, self-contained artefacts; and while his revolutionary ideals never went further than Rousseau and Robespierre, he believed fervently in culture as a social and communal asset to be prized, valued and, ultimately, worth actively fighting for when it came under threat.

Ian Hamilton Finlay runs until May 26, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, admission free. For more information see: nationalgalleries.org.

Fragments runs until June 14, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, admission free. For more information see: inglebygallery.com.