This is the first major ex­hib­i­tion of Joan Eardley’s work in twenty years, and curator Fiona Peason makes plain in her catalogue essay that the show is intended to bolster the current critical and com­mer­ci­al ree­valu­a­tion of the artist’s status. Pearson also wonders where Eardley, whose life was cut short by breast cancer in 1963, should be placed amongst her con­tem­por­ar­ies - was she a one-woman branch of the Kitchen Sink School, kin to the Cobra artists in Europe, or aligned with America’s abstract ex­pres­sion­ists? The answer, as this ex­hib­i­tion makes clear, is that Eardley was all of these things and more.

The first clues to Eardley’s ability to work con­fid­ently in disparate styles come with the selection of early work that opens the exhibit. We see the young artist finding her feet. A Pot of Potatoes is very obviously in debt to Van Gogh, while works made during a tour of Italy are suffused with the frescoes of Giotto and Fra Angelico she studied. And, more sig­n­i­fic­antly, the Italian paintings show the first signs of Eardley’s fas­cin­a­tion with street life - she ignores the grand ar­chi­tec­ture of Venice in favour of painting a trio of beggars, and it is the elderly woman praying in St. Mark’s, not the cathedral itself, that catches her eye.

Back in Glasgow, Eardley has found her own style (or, rather, one of them) and her subject: the children of the city’s streets. The best of these are truly re­mark­able, rich with striking detail - the con­cen­tra­tion on the face of Andrew With a Comic, the pro­tect­ive hand of the older boy on the young girl’s wrist in Brother and Sister, the bored, tired eyes in Glasgow Children. Eardley’s eye for com­pos­i­tion is gripping, too, whether she is capturing life in the angled tangle of bodies in Glasgow Back Street with Children Playing, or the strict division between leering boys and sulking girls in Children, Port Glasgow.

There is something curiously apol­it­ic­al about these paintings of children, though. These scamps aren’t tri­um­ph­ing over adversity, because Eardley has, all too often, excised it. She adopts aes­thet­ic­ally pleasing aspects of street squalor - making wonderful use of scrappy chalk graffiti in par­t­ic­u­lar - but there is a strong sense of pree­m­pt­ive romantic nostalgia about these street scenes, as if the brilliant sandstone reds that feature so often are the result of rose-tinted spec­tacles.

Of course, it can be argued that cam­paig­n­ing social doc­u­ment­ary was not Eardley’s concern, and that she mastered her true theme - the re­la­tion­ships between her young subjects, and their re­la­tion­ship to her - com­p­letely. It still seems that there is something missing in these works, however, and so, while the paintings of children are Eardley’s best known and best loved works, they are not her best.

No, the strongest work here are the land­s­capes and seascapes painted at Cat­ter­line, an isolated fishing village just south of Stone­haven, and the portraits of Eardley’s friend and fellow artist Angus Neil.

The former are breath­tak­ing. Eardley does not so much observe nature as translate it, edging close to pure ab­strac­tion while always main­tain­ing a re­p­res­ent­a­tion­al edge. The Sea is an angry swell of texture surging from the surface of the painting, the surface of Foam and Blue Sky is a flurry of finnicky marks and broad strokes that coalesce into something essential, un­den­i­ably of the sea. It is as if Eardley had the ability to maintain a direct con­nec­tion with what she saw before her, holding an unbroken line from eye to mind to hand to brush. At times, Eardley’s treatment of nature stands up to com­par­is­ons with Turner, for all that her dribbles and drips call to mind Pollock.

The portraits of Young could not be more different in style and at­mo­sphere, but they share the intense immediacy of the landscape works. In The Table, Young is seated, his head bowed, his sour mood matched by the drab palette of grim greys and browns, which is repeated in A Glasgow Lodging - truly em­path­et­ic portraits, with a strength far beyond that seen in the paintings of children. It is the mes­mer­ising Sleeping Nude, though, that steals the show. Young is shown, emaciated, cold and pale, stretched out on a bed, the flash of a yellow rug in the bottom right corner a cruel coun­ter­point to the op­press­ive sense of something more than ennui, ap­proach­ing dread.

And so Eardley proves herself a mistress of diverse styles, no longer flitting from mode to mode as she did in student days, but able to work in parallel as a con­sum­mate painter of nature, a fine por­trait­ist, and a flawed doc­u­ment­ar­i­an. That real­isa­tion is a sad one - had Eardley’s life not been cut short by breast cancer, it seems certain that she would have continued to explore, soaking up new movements in art, and finding her place in them.

This review was first published in The Herald on November 9th, 2007.