Visual art review: Philip Reeves, Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow By DUNCAN MACMILLAN Published on Thursday 31 May 2012 05:04 WITH six decades of fine work under his belt, Philip Reeves is not only a fine artist but also a founding father of Scottish printmaking. So why do our national galleries and festivals perennially snub him? Writing a couple of weeks ago, I remarked that this is the centenary of collage; that it was in 1912 that Braque and Picasso started to stick things onto their paintings, a small step with momentous consequences. The artist I was writing about, Tony Swain, though interesting, is not really of the stature to mark that centenary. Philip Reeves, on the other hand, now showing at Cyril Gerber, really is an old master of collage. He came to Scotland in 1954 to teach printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. He has been here ever since. Printmaking was a humble appendage to graphic design at the time, but by his determination he developed it both within the School of Art and outside. He was a prime mover in the creation first of Edinburgh Printmakers and then of Glasgow Print Studios and so, as well as being a distinguished artist, he is a founding father of modern Scottish printmaking. This exhibition is not a complete retrospective. We still await such public recognition. It is shaming, but if he had stayed in England, I am sure he would have had a retrospective at the Tate by now. The show does range across 60 fertile years, however. A beautiful early pastel is the view out of his bedroom window in Cheltenham. Furniture and patterned curtains frame the view beyond. In a curious effect, this foreground, drawn straightforwardly, is in soft focus while buildings in the distance are contrastingly sharp and abstract. It is as though he was seeing his future subject matter out of the window, for although he seems at times to be almost minimal, his art always has a starting point in something seen and actual. His use of collage is an expression of that link. As it did for Braque and Picasso in 1912, it brings the outside world into the picture and so, however far it may stray from the original observation, or indeed become a compound of several quite different observations, that link to the concrete is still there. There is a pronounced sense of pattern, reminiscent of Vuillard or Bonnard, in his early work. Indeed a lithograph of a woman standing in a bathroom is a direct homage to Bonnard. The same interest in pattern is seen in Sunset, Alghero, done in the 1950s where the shapes of the stones of an old pier are echoed in the pink clouds of the sunset. A beautiful early landscape of the Cotswolds is a little different, however. Stands of trees on the hills are reminiscent of Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious and, as landscape has remained such an important inspiration to him, perhaps it is in that English tradition that his origins principally lie. He could be compared at times, too, to Victor Pasmore and Ben Nicholson, although his early etchings and drawings also show an interest in social realism. When he first came to Scotland, Reeves painted landscapes of Glasgow, the Canal near Maryhill, for instance, and watercolours of the West Coast, like a sombre view of Poolewe. By the 60s he had moved into collage, but there was no break. He was still looking for patterns, like those he finds in the collage North West Landscape, for instance. In Landscape South Downs from 1973-4, the complex surfaces and torn edges of the paper suggest the interlocking fields and hills, but without describing them. Sometimes the paper is painted and then cut up, like Matisse in his papiers collées, but Reeves also works directly onto the surface. The effect of this as it is seen in a recent works such as Vehicles in Line, or The Shore, is not only to achieve brilliant colour, but also to add another kind of surface, creating an overall richness in a simple composition. Shore Plinth, for instance, has only three elements, two blue rectangles and a black one, but they are varied with infinite subtlety and modified by little additional touches, too. The effect is balanced, but the balance is always precarious. Door Ajar is a beautiful example. Its main element is a cardboard picture mount, a dark rectangle framing white. Another long white vertical echoes it, suggesting light beyond, but wherever symmetry might take over, it is disrupted by little variations of alignment, tone, colour, or texture. The effect is to present us, not with the simple concept of a door ajar, but a sense of the complexity of the intricate space and light of the actual thing. His use of collage grew out of his printmaking. "There was a crossover," he says, "[in my prints] I had been using fragments of bits of metal and turned to using fragments of bits of material, card, paper, what have you in painting." He still does this kind of thing. Thaw, for instance, is an etching printed from bits of broken etching plate that read like jagged ice. The main element of an etching titled Riddle is just that, an impression taken from the wire grid of a garden riddle. A big print called Annexe, done early in his time at GSA, is a superb demonstration of the skills he brought to Glasgow, but it also shows the wit which is a quiet constant in his work. Three classical statues from the School's cast collection stand against a dark, deeply textured ground. The figures are all female and more or less fragmentary, but nevertheless they manage to look rather coquettish. Philip Reeves was one of the first people to show with Cyril Gerber when he opened his gallery more than 50 years ago. He and his daughter Jill Gerber, who now runs the gallery, have supported Scottish art and artists unstintingly, both directly and through their support for Compass with which they now share premises. I was saddened, but not at all surprised to learn that their proposal to the recent GI Festival was rejected as unsuitable. Cyril Gerber, now 95, should rather have been honoured by the Festival, not rejected, but the prejudices that shaped that event are too entrenched and the organisers too lacking in imagination for that to happen. It is because of the same prejudice, the same feeble dependence on spurious endorsement from outside Scotland, that Philip Reeves is only represented in the national collection by a handful of prints bought 30 or 40 years ago. He is not alone. Some of his most distinguished contemporaries have equally been ignored. To name just three, Frances Walker, George Wyllie and John Houston are, according to the published record at least, either not represented at all, or so trivially as to make it almost worse. Our national gallery should be the reference collection for such people, but even Elizabeth Blackadder is only represented by minor works, two of them recent bequests. Long ago when I raised this, I was told that the work of such artists would come by bequest. Personnel has changed; attitudes, it seems, have not. That view ignores the importance to our artists of the endorsement of purchase by the national collection, but, further, examine the logic of it. If pictures are bequeathed, it means someone liked them enough to buy them. Correspondingly it follows that the National Gallery doesn't need to bother about pictures people do like, as those will come anyway. The gallery can save its money to spend on art people don't like, and so we end up without Frances Walker, but with Cathy Wilkes and Karla Black, without George Wyllie, or Philip Reeves, but with Martin Boyce and Richard Wright. Endorsing the dubious judgments of the Turner Prize, precious resources are expended on nonentities, soon to be forgotten, in place of distinguished artists like Philip Reeves whose contribution to Scottish art has been profound and will endure. Until 14 June