Ian Hamilton Finlay's Neoclassicism
By Kasia Middleton
A polished white vase sits on a stone podium, illuminated by bright gallery lights [Fig. 1]. Its base and neck pull inwards, supported by coiling, decorative handles. Against its white body, gold lettering stands out. It proclaims:
“quibus ipsa procul discordibus armis fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus”
A Classical vase if ever there was one. The forms of the Greek amphora and the bold Latin script prompt the viewer to think no other way. At first glance it would not be unreasonable to think this was a nineteenth century Neo-classical decoration for some bourgeois home.
Figure 1: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Vase (after Karl Friedrich Schinkel), 2004. Porcelain. 70 x 35 x 35 cm. Photo courtesy of Galerie Judin.
There is no shame in this presumption, wrong though it may be. The artist has conspired to trick his audience, modelling his vase on works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a Prussian artist who did indeed work in the nineteenth century. The responsible party is in fact Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who made the Neo-classical vase in 2004, two years before his death. It was shown posthumously in 2008 at an exhibition called (Neo)Classicism – A Noble Arrow, which paid homage to the Neo-classicist themes running through much of Finlay’s œuvre.
What prompted a Scottish artist in the twentieth century to engage with a Classical corpus that had fallen out of fashion in the world of modern art? Perhaps we can look to the Latin inscription to assist us in this vein. It is taken from Virgil’s Georgics (Book 2, Lines 459-60), which was effectively a first-century BCE farming manual. Once more we are confounded. This seems like an esoteric choice for Finlay to have made. But Virgil’s Georgics, much like Finlay’s vase, are not what they first seem. They were written in around 29 BCE against a background of civil war at Rome, following the assassination of Julius Caesar and the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony. In this time of civil unrest, Virgil’s farming manual constituted a thinly veiled political proclamation of the horrors of war and the peace which he hoped might follow. Fittingly, Finlay’s chosen quotation is translated thus in the Loeb edition:
For them [farmers], far from the clash of arms, most righteous Earth, unbidden, pours forth from her soil an easy sustenance.
Like Virgil, Finlay had lived and suffered in times of war. He was conscripted during the Second World War, as well as experiencing first-hand the Glasgow Blitz of 1941. War is a consistent theme across many of his artworks as a result, and figures into many of his Neo-classical works, not least the vase above.
Finlay was not just a visual artist. He wrote many letters and poems, published in several collections across his life. He drew inspiration from his childhood, the war, and the time which he spent living in remote areas of Scotland, perhaps most notably his work as a shepherd following the Second World War. Incidentally, St Andrews locals may be intrigued to read a reflection on a trip to our cinema to watch Captains Courageous with his auntie Arabella Pettigrew when he was around nine years old in the 1930s (Cinema-Going, 1998). He describes the projector being powered by the engine of a fishing boat, and mentions little of the film. It is characteristic of Finlay’s work to take an interest in small details such as this, which create a powerful sense of what he considered important – the nostalgic detail of how locals supported a space in which memories could be created, as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters.
But I digress. His written works take inspiration from all the above, but Neo-classicism is another consistent thread which runs through them. In 1986, he wrote and published Some (Short) Thoughts on Neo-Classicism, in which he describes the contrasts of the movement with Classicism. He writes:
“Neo-classicism is classicism doing its military service.
Neo-classicism emulates the classical while at the same time withholding itself.
Classicism aims at Beauty, neo-classicism at Virtue.
Classicism walks; neo-classicism marches.
[…]
Neo-classicism: the marble arrow!”
It is clear from these philosophical lines that Neo-classicism fulfils Finlay’s interest in the traditional whilst also having the pace and radicalism necessary to reflect his views on life, poetry, and war. He understood the divorcing of Classical concepts from their original contexts throughout history, the use of the Classics to imagine some kind of whitewashed purity within which everyone and everything conforms to ideals of morality, intelligence, and beauty, and had witnessed the evil this principal had allowed the Nazi party to wield during the Second World War. It can come as no surprise that Finlay avoided the “Beauty” of Classicism and aimed for the “Virtue” of Neo-classicism, marching firmly away from the prejudices of the perversion of Greek and Roman culture.
Figure 2: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Temple of Apollo, c. 1984. Stone, paint, gilding. Little Sparta. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
To return to the work that started this all, his Vase (2004), we now see with informed eyes that it is intended to be ridiculous in its purity. It is a charged canvas on which Finlay can, through Virgil, make his intended statement. After the war, his retreat into pastoral solitude must have been inspired by the peace he could find far from the guns and artillery of the battlefield. Neo-classicism here is a true understanding of Virgil’s words, which hoped for peace and were full of pathetic envy for those that had it. Classical allusions to the work of Virgil tended to reach for his later, patriotic tome, the Aeneid, written carefully under the watchful eye of the new emperor to function as a piece of propaganda. An example of one such twentieth century reference is Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech. Finlay refused such purist and prejudiced interpretations of the Classical, and refigures the Greek amphora as a vessel through which he can communicate his desire for peace.
The vase is one example amongst countless. The artwork for which Finlay is perhaps most well-known, his garden Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, is Neo-classical in style, even named after a Classical city (a tongue-in-cheek reference to Edinburgh as the “Athens of the North”). Begun in 1967, many assumed it was a place for the agoraphobic Finlay to retreat into. He maintained, however, that “certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.” No other artwork contained within the garden sums this up better, in my opinion, than the Temple of Apollo (c. 1984) [Fig. 2]. A simple byre has had Corinthian columns and gold inscriptions added onto its façade, and reads “To Apollo, his music, his missiles, and his Muses.” Apollo, Classical god of music, archery, and poetry, is a figure to whom Finlay looks to convey his intentions within the realm of the Neo-classical, his “marble arrow”. To him it is a style which allows him not to look back, but to look forward, using the very poetry and art which Apollo stood for. Apollo was also responsible for the control of mice – perhaps an apt and up-to-date allusion for an inscription on an old byre! Finlay’s inclination towards a hybrid future and opposition to a purified past is conveyed through the amalgamated façade of the temple.
A tendency towards the pastoral protest can also be seen in Finlay’s 1976 work, Et in Arcadia Ego [Fig. 3]. This refers to Nicolas Poussin’s 1638 painting of the same name, which Finlay is keen to make clear, as he literally carves his accreditation into the stone his sculpture is made from. The Latin phrase Et in Arcadia Ego, meaning “And I am also in Arcadia”, is to be heard in the voice of Death. In the pastoral idylls which Poussin painted, and which Finlay created in the form of Little Sparta, death and destruction are still present. In Finlay’s sculpture, this is in the form of a tank which trawls through the countryside, its blocky form a total visual opposite to the undulating hills of the landscape. Of course Finlay’s gardens and artworks were attacks as opposed to retreats, since they functioned as a defence against war and hatred invading his spaces of pastoralism, harmony, and poetry. His retreat to the countryside after the Second World War is figured into his art.
Figure 3: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1976. Hopton wood stone. 28.10 x 28 x 7.60 cm, National Galleries Scotland. Photo courtesy of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay and John Andrew, and National Galleries Scotland.
It would be impossible to list the myriad Neo-classical artworks and allusions Finlay made throughout his life in just one article, and by no means is this a comprehensive survey of his works. Such a wide-ranging œuvre, both in terms of subject matter and time, cannot be simplified in such a way. However, this small insight into Finlay’s interest in the Neo-classical as a forward-facing, positive movement, which could be used radically rather than just traditionally, provides a fascinating window through which we see constant reworking of themes and ideas which go back to the very beginnings of the Western artistic tradition.
Bibliography
Eyres, Patrick. “Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Cultural Politics of Neo-Classical Gardening.” Garden History 28, no. 1 (2000): 152–66.
Hamilton Finlay, Ian. Selections. Edited and with an introduction by Alec Finlay. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
Sheeler, Jessie. Little Sparta: A Guide to the Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2015.
Virgil. Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1-6. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.