HOWSON’S INFERNO
by
GREG THOMAS

What cast of work is this, we might say of Peter Howson’s new show at Edinburgh City Art Centre. He gives us a lot of matter to grapple with and a lot of things to ponder over. This is the first major retrospective of Howson’s work with over 100 paintings over four floors. Arresting and compelling says Greg Thomas in review, and also grim and dark. Get along and make your own mind up is best.

Peter Howson’s retrospective at the City Arts Centre in Edinburgh offers viewers a trip to hell and back. Not everyone will like what they find there.

“Too much of art today is an intellectual game,” announces Peter Howson in a statement accompanying his current show at Edinburgh’s City Arts Centre, which traces his passage from painter of Scotland’s social underbelly to Bosnian War artist, Christian convert, and grizzled documentarist of our present global crises. Putting aside the question of why successful artists feel the need to couch their work in such defensively combative terms, the Ayrshire-raised, Glasgow-trained painter goes on to describe art as “an open window into the wonder and mystery of existence.” But this show seems as concerned with rubbing our noses in the visceral horrors of reality as with unfolding any possibility of insight or revelation—and why not, you might say.

There is much about Howson’s work that is arresting, if not exactly edifying to behold. He is a compelling conjurer of flesh and bone, of huge contorted limbs and big, bull-like skulls. Human forms often seem be mutating before our eyes on his canvases, as if under the influence of some Jekyll-and-Hyde potion. There is an influence here from the emotive distortions of expressionism, particularly in its seedier, Weimar-Germany formulations—Max Beckmann or Otto Dix, as one caption suggests. Other reference-points might include John Byrne’s big bouncy boys and girls, and Stanley Spencer’s fleshy Port-Glasgow workers. But Howson’s figures are grimmer, musclier, and yoked to a darker vision. His approach to scene-setting, meanwhile, is unmistakeably Breughel-esque. Landscapes teem with bodies, often completely blocking out ground and sky and engaged in various sordid and profane activities. At times, it seems to approach a Chapman Brothers-style titillating masochism.

Why? The artist’s thematic concerns have shifted to a greater degree than his unquenchable appetite for grim allegorical spectacle might imply. Much of his early output was informed by a brief and traumatic experience in the army. The horrific Regimental Bath (1985) shows a forced wash in which a recruit is choked and defecated on. The deprivations and snatched pleasures of working-class life in urban Scotland are another concern, with 1991’s Blind Leading Blind series – the title referencing Breughel and the Bible – exploring the lot of the poor in a class-riven society. The figure of the boxer recurs across early pieces, an archetype of the kind of (male) psychology and body Howson is drawn to: wounded, ugly, battered, fighting on.

An annex with content warning contains works depicting the one-time soldier’s life-altering experiences as an official war artist during the Bosnian genocide of 1992-95. Mutilated bodies abound; women (amongst the few in the exhibition) harvest fields of corpses; in the atrocious Serb and Muslim we see a sexual assault on a bare-chested female. That Howson experienced terrible things is clear. That these images should appear in the context of a show whose curatorial narrative is about his own suffering and subsequent redemption through Christian epiphany – a strange kind of epiphany to have, one might argue, after witnessing Christians massacring Muslims – could seem problematic. So too could graphic depictions of the rapes the artist heard stories of during his time in the Balkans. Artists are free to provoke, and to offend. But the question of who ought to feel entitled to present scenes like these lingers in the air.

Spoiler delivered, let’s travel to floor two, where the painter finds God after a period of substance abuse and existential angst induced partly by his experiences in eastern Europe. The works in these galleries, according to the exhibition copy, “are among Howson’s most radical,” presumably because they depict scenes from the Bible and most contemporary artists are craven secularists. There are some affecting pieces, including some of the little paintings showing the face of Christ during the stations of the cross. And there are some fairly gaudy ones, like Transfiguration (2013), whose colour-scheme is almost graffiti-ish. New Testament Christianity is an easier sell to modern audiences than the older stuff, and representations of Abraham and Job, whose loyalty is tested in ways that make God seem like some monstrous cult leader, also beg the question of what cast of faith Howson has embraced.

That said, Christianity seems primarily to offer a modulation of the artist’s career-long concern with the lot of the poor and oppressed – Jesus and his disciples usually appear like bruise-faced drifters and grifters – and in the selection of recent works on the final floor there is a strong sense of polemic and, at times, moral urgency. A recent turn to pen and ink brings lurid clarity to some of Howson’s horror-scapes, engaging with themes like Covid-19 and the Ukraine War. The 2023 character scene Wagner, referencing the Putin-backed militia, places familiar shaven-headed, medieval-looking yokels in a new and arresting setting.

This is a show that will divide opinion, and which is presumably expected to. Art should, various caveats aside, be able to do this. What side, or shade, of the divide you find yourself on is another question, and may not reflect a willingness (or otherwise) to let go of conceptualist snobberies so much as the particularities of experience and identity that you bring to your encounter with Howson’s horrors.

This review is an extended version of a piece that originally appeared inThe List in June 2023