The Andy Goldsworthy exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy (if indeed that is the one at the foot of the Mound in Edinburgh) has been on for over three months now and closes this coming Sunday. I’ve not seen it, but the RSA has extended its opening hours until 9pm for the final three days, so there is additional time for me to miss it yet.

Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice, and this is his largest ever indoor exhibition. The Scotsman described it as 'A portal to a wider place...', The Guardian suggested that it '... plunges viewers into the beauty of rural life.' One of my friends described it as ‘Amazing’, another said that ‘It was good.’ (Unlike me, both of my friends had actually coughed up the £19 entrance fee and viewed the exhibition.) Truth is a fluid concept, impossible to pin down, demonstrably so in the world of art, where ultimately it lies in the eyes of the beholder. I suspect my truth of the Goldsworthy exhibition would be somewhere at the lower end of the ‘good’ to ‘amazing’ spectrum. But here I’m straying into the territory of Pierre Bayard’s 2007 Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? Not read that either.

The friend who described the Goldsworthy exhibition as ‘good’ also commented that the gallery was very busy. That is just the way it goes these days and has been for many years. I do have memories years ago of rainy Saturday afternoons, wandering round the old National Gallery (the one not quite at the foot of the Mound), long, long before they built the extension underneath, and it was empty. But it also wasn’t very interesting. The paintings never seemed to be swapped round with ones held in storage, as they are now, and - might have misremembered this - I don’t recall any major exhibitions being staged. I mean, I do love Lady Agnew of Lochnaw but there’s only so many times you can gawp at her. Blockbuster exhibitions - Rembrandt in 2018, Grayson Perry in 2023 - mean blockbuster crowds. But I’ve yet to come across a gallery where you can’t find a haven of tranquillity, an escape from the crowds.

In Paris, a couple of years back, I visited the Musée de l’Orangerie, permanent home for almost 100 years to a unique set of the Water Lilies cycle by Claude Monet. The artist painted these in his property in Giverny, Normandy from 1916 until his death in 1926. The paintings - on a spectacular scale, ranging in length from 6 to 17 metres - are displayed in two specially designed galleries on the ground floor of the Orangerie. No surprise that these two galleries were packed, and the invitation to ‘discover this work in a quiet environment’ ignored by almost everyone. Definitely worth seeing (‘A portal to wider place stuffed full of water lilies’) but downstairs a different world, and while not exactly devoid of visitors, an oasis of calm compared to the Instagram orgy on the floor above.

Paul Guillaume (1891 - 1934) started life as a mechanic in Montmartre. According to Wikipedia, his metamorphosis into an art dealer came about by chance when he found some African sculptures in a delivery of rubber for tires. That sounds like something out of an episode of Cash in the Attic and isn’t mentioned in Philip Hook’s excellent history of art dealers Rogues’ Gallery (2017):

Quite what [Guillaume] did is not clear: changing tires? Tinkering with carburettors? Actually selling the machines? Perhaps this wasn’t as odd as it seems, in the context of the time. The automobile symbolised something innovative, exciting, even futuristic; and perhaps it wasn’t such an outlandish jump to go from that to dealing in innovative and exciting modern art - not when you opened your first gallery in that year of all years for Modernism, 1914.

Guillaume’s early exhibitions led to his meeting with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who introduced him into avant-garde art circles and guided his choices when he opened that first gallery.

Paul Guillaume went on to amass a considerable collection of modern and figurative art between the wars including Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Maurice Utrillo, Pablo Picasso. Well, anyone who was anyone in Paris in the 1920s had a Picasso kicking about. I have to say the Picassos that Paul Guillaume picked up are, in my humble opinion, disappointing: they pre-date when Picasso painted everything in straight lines, these are proper representations of people, correct number of limbs and eyes, etc., but a Picasso is a Picasso. That aside though, the Walter-Guillaume Collection now housed in the lower floor of the Orangerie is tip-top and reflects a specific moment in the modern art movement in Paris.

When I visited the Walter-Guillaume Collection that Sunday morning, my initial concern was only to find a seat to rest my weary legs for a while. Which, amazingly I did. Bang in front of a small painting of a country road, lined with trees, and, in the distance, a village. There was a stunning blue cloudless sky and although the sun wasn’t visible, sunlight was shining from the right, causing the trees to cast a shadow across the road. It reminded me of the approach to St Jean du Gard in the Cévennes, a town where I had spent many holidays. At the same time, I was also keenly aware that it looked nothing like St Jean du Gard and that it was only the road / trees / village / sky / sunlight that triggered the memory. It was definitely France though.

This is the La Route by André Derain (1880 - 1954) and the village is Eygalières, Provence, 100km south west of St Jean du Gard. To my considerable shame, I had never heard of Derain until I saw that painting, but I started to make up for that by staring at it for 10 minutes solid that morning. In the early 1900s, together with Henri Matisse, Derain was part of the Fauvist movement, painting characterized by wild brush work and strident colours. But La Route dates from 1932 and is a return to a more classical technique.

Old school, I bought a postcard of La Route from the Orangerie gift shop and have it on my desk. Along with Lady Agnew, it is one of my favourite paintings. There’s a calmness about it which I find very relaxing. Someone more knowledgeable than I might be able to work out what time of day it is from the length of the shadows, but I like to think of it as being early evening, and imagine myself heading back towards the village after a day walking in the hills, having set out in the morning with a baguette, some cheese and a bottle of wine.

La Route by André Derain 'plunges me into the beauty of rural life.' That’s my truth, no one can tell me different.

Searching for the Truth in Art

Those First Impressions (Remix)