The 57 and New 57 Gallery: 40 years Gone

By Neil Cooper, 17.07.2024

The New 57 Gallery image courtesy of Alexander Moffat

It was autumn 1968 when a twentysomething Edinburgh College of Art graduate called Alexander Moffat (b.1943) received a telephone call from one of his former tutors. Moffat was told he had to go on to the committee of what by now had become The New 57 Gallery. The artist-run Edinburgh space had been going for 11 years by this time, having been set up by a group of artists wanting to present the sort work that wasn’t being shown in staid institutions adorned with landscape paintings.

Founded ‘by artists for artists’, and with architect Patrick Nutgens (1930–2004) as chair, The 57 was originally set up on a subscription-based model, taking up residence at 53 George Street in the second-floor studio of sculptor Daphne Dyce Sharp (1924–2010). Moffat had visited the gallery as a schoolboy and been inspired by what he saw. The spirit of innovation continued after the gallery moved to a shopfront space at 105 Rose Street in 1961, becoming The New 57 en route. It was the Rose Street New 57 that Moffat stepped into in 1968, quickly becoming chair.

‘I think I was seen as a safe pair of hands,’ says Moffat, who quickly revitalised the committee. ‘The first thing was to get a bunch of like-minded artists, good guys who could take on responsibilities for the running of the place. Then we had to decide what sort of exhibitions to put on and gradually pulled a programme together.’

An annual craft-based Christmas exhibition was introduced, while bigger group shows were put together to run during Edinburgh’s August festival season in offsite locations that included the University of Edinburgh’s William Robertson Building on George Square. As Moffat wrote in his introduction to The New 57’s 15th anniversary that took place there in 1972, it was ‘the only gallery in Scotland which has consistently and defiantly exhibited young and mostly unknown artists’.

In his intro, Moffat went on to highlight the success of this policy, pointing out how ‘many of the “young unknowns” of a decade ago have become important, and in some cases, major talents’. The presence in the exhibition of the likes of John Bellany (1942–2013), Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021), Joan Eardley (1921–1963), Will Maclean (b. 1941) and many others proved Moffat’s point, as did his own success as an artist.

‘Edinburgh was a very conservative city,’ Moffat remembers. ‘When you look at the list of the artists who we actually discovered, they were very different from the mainstream of Scottish colourism and tackling very different things.’

For Will Maclean, who presented a solo exhibition of paintings at Rose Street in 1968, and another in tandem with Ian McLeod in 1972, The New 57 played an important part in his life as an artist. ‘As a recent graduate from Aberdeen, unknown in the central belt, I was given my first opportunity to show my work when none of the established commercial galleries were interested. However, Richard Demarco did visit the exhibition and gave me an exhibition at his gallery in Melville Crescent.’ Maclean adds: ‘What was important for me also was the fact that The 57 was an artist-led gallery, so you were selected by your peers. I think Gordon Bryce was chair at that time. And receiving first reviews from the leading art critics at the time was another important event.’

John Bellany was another significant contributor to the gallery. ‘He had an exhibition at The 57 in 1971,’ Moffat remembers. ‘He probably didn’t sell anything at all, but now these things are selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds.’

The 57 and New 57’s openness reached beyond Edinburgh, with artists from elsewhere showing work during the gallery’s annual group show. One of these was London- based abstract painter Albert Irvin (1922–2015), who, championed by artist and 57 committee member Alexander McNeish (1932– 2000) while both men were attending a seminar in Salzburg, had his first-ever exhibition at The 57. ‘He never forgot that,’ says Moffat of Irvin.

There were many other artists who came up through The 57 who were just as successful, but who today perhaps remain lesser-sung. John Kirkwood (b.1947), for instance, had solo shows of his Dada-inspired industrial-based work at The New 57 in 1972 and 1976, before going on to greater successes. Moffat describes Kirkwood as ‘one of the forgotten men of Scottish art. Everyone should know about him’.

In 1974, The New 57 moved again, this time taking over the top floor of an abandoned fruit market at 29 Market Street. For the next decade, The New 57 shared the top floor of the building with Edinburgh Printmakers, and a gallery run by Scotland’s then arts funding body, the Scottish Arts Council, at ground level. The SAC dubbed their space the Fruit Market.

The Fruit Market’s first show – 11Da: Eleven Dutch Artists – opened in August 1974. Its first exhibition to feature Scottish artists came the following March with A Choice Selection, a group show selected by painter Jack Knox (1936–2015), and featuring Bellany, Maclean, Kirkwood, John Byrne and others.

In his catalogue introduction to A Choice Selection, SAC exhibitions officer Rob Breen wrote of the new space ‘that the gallery, with The New 57 Gallery and the Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop upstairs, has been opened at all is a modest tribute to the energy of those artists, groups and individuals who have always believed the work of Scottish artists worthy of respect.’

This might have been a response to what Moffat remembers as ‘a lot of flak due to the absence of Scottish artists in the early days of the Fruit Market. The 57 responded by introducing an annual open exhibition, which worked wonders.’

Also appearing in A Choice Selection was work by Glen Onwin (b.1947). The Edinburgh-born painter, sculptor and former professor at Edinburgh College of Art, showed his environmental-based works in several exhibitions at the Fruit Market, and in major shows across the UK.

‘I was on The New 57 committee when it moved into the Fruit Market,’ recalls Onwin. ‘I don’t remember ever being invited to get involved. I think I was just taken along to a show. They were looking for people who were interested, basically. There weren’t mass numbers of people coming out of art schools in the way there is now, and we’d been doing a very academic course. Even in our final year, we had to do life drawing, still life and life painting for our diplomas.

‘Parallel to that, we were doing work that had nothing to do with the college, where you could do your own work and explore what you wanted to do. The 57 came out of that, I suppose. It was already in Rose Street by the time I was first taken there, and I suppose it became our place.’

Onwin highlights the significance, as well, of women artists working within The 57; not just in the early shows by Blackadder, Eardley and others, but in helping shape the programme. ‘Eileen Lawrence (b.1946) served on the committee for many years, was in group shows, and had her first solo exhibition in The 57 in 1969. She was also instrumental at the end when the transition into the larger Fruit Market took place. She also introduced that new generation of artists who emerged out of Glasgow School of Art to The 57, such as Steven Campbell who she selected for an exhibition. It wasn’t just a bunch of lads. The 57 was more open than that for sure.’

By the early 1980s, the ambitions of The 57 saw them staging important Edinburgh Festival shows by the likes of German Neue Wilde artist Jörg Immemdorf (1945–2007), and Romanian artist Avigdor Arikha (1929–2010). There were retrospectives too of older Scottish artists, including David Evans (1942–2020) and Philip Reeves (1931–2017), the later of whom had in 1967 founded The New 57’s fellow Market Street tenants, Edinburgh Printmakers.

‘Many of those involved in The New 57 argued for a new kind of gallery for Edinburgh, based on the Whitechapel model,’ Moffat remembers. ‘After consultations with the SAC, it was agreed to set up a new gallery. A new company was formed and a new board put together, including several members of The 57’s board.’

With Edinburgh Printmakers moving on, and The New 57 calling time on operations, the Market Street premises was now occupied in its entirety by the newly established Fruitmarket Gallery.

‘In some ways it was quite a biter ending,’ Moffat reflects on The New 57’s demise. ‘Some people were quite violently opposed to The 57 used as a way of becoming the Fruitmarket. I was still on the committee at that stage, and we were all getting a little bit older, and wanting to do something a little bit different. Not everyone agreed, and of course, the Collective came out of that,’ Moffat points out, highlighting what a group of New 57 dissenters did next.

As the Fruitmarket celebrates the 50th anniversary of its beginnings, it is essential The New 57’s crucial role in Edinburgh and Scotland’s artistic history, underground or otherwise, isn’t lost. Not only would the Fruitmarket and Collective galleries not exist without it, the roll call of major contemporary Scottish artists who The New 57 helped foster is also cause for celebration. Arguably even more significant is the gallery’s place as a vital umbilical link in the chain of artist-run spaces that followed.

As mainstream arts institutions fell prey to increasing bureaucracy and the irresistible rise of careerist-led curatorial culture on the one hand, on the other, The 57 and New 57 set the template for the likes of Transmission in Glasgow, The Embassy in Edinburgh, and Generator in Dundee. All of these committee- run spaces adopted what ECA’s Chair of Contemporary Art Practice and Theory, Professor Neil Mulholland, referred to as ‘a DIY doxa’ in his book, The Cultural Devolution: Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century (2016).

Despite The 57 and New 57’s significance, compared to other Edinburgh artistic catalysts such as the Richard Demarco Gallery and the Traverse Theatre, its history remains largely under the radar. Also, for everything The 57 and New 57 opened up, the gentrification of the art world that exists now beyond DIY spaces probably isn’t something its committee of old could have foreseen. ‘I think the model we set up still has potential,’ Moffat says, ‘but I don’t see as much interconnection today. I think it’s become much more career path-based. Everything’s kind of professionalised now.’

Nevertheless, the waves of DIY artistic activity that have existed over recent years are a direct continuum of The 57. As Moffat puts it, ‘I think Edinburgh’s a lot more interesting than it is given credit for.’