Death to Strathclyde Regional Council!

A new exhibition remembers Ian Hamilton Finlay, 100 years after his birth

The Medium Is The Message, 1987. Credit: The Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Regular readers of The Jaggy Thistle will be aware of my soft spot for Ian Hamilton Finlay, the poet, sculptor, gardener and iconoclast. In 2023 I wrote about Little Sparta, his artwork-spotted garden on a lonely Scottish hillside. That piece, which you can treat as a concise introduction to the man and his work, can be read here.

A visit to Little Sparta should be on any art lover’s bucket list. But you no longer have to travel to the wilds of rural Lanarkshire to see Finlay’s best work. This year is the centenary of his birth and to mark the occasion National Galleries Scotland have staged a small but punchy exhibition in the gallery they insist on calling Modern 2, better known to you and me as The Dean Gallery.

In that previous Jaggy Thistle post on Finlay I quoted at length from the eulogy given at his funeral by his son Alec, which I found very moving. The son’s tribute to a lost father made no attempt to play down how difficult, how contrary, how exasperating a man Finlay could be, while still being a filial act of love.

Here is a small extract:

Having gained this safe haven, this garden, he needed to test it; to bring his little world into conflict with the greater world. Or did the greater world turn against his? Who can say, except to recognise that my father was like a lightning rod calling down storm upon storm … And so there came into our lives events that are part-myth, part-truth, when our day-to-day was dominated by his flytings. Some were brave battles of principle, others were foolish and wasteful, descending into mutual vendettas. My family knows the true cost of those years of conflict. We also recognise that there is no way to resolve the paradox of the poet who made a paradise and then ended up at war. Apollonian. Contradictory. Impossible. Stubborn. Delightful. Inspiring.

Much of this warfare was directed at Strathclyde Regional Council, the now-abolished local authority that then covered Finlay’s hillside sanctuary. The council thought Little Sparta was a commercial art gallery, and as such should pay business rates. Finlay demurred. Little Sparta, he said, was a temple, so it should receive the same rates relief as kirks, chapels, mosques and so on.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, photographed by Robin Gillanders. Credit: National Portrait Gallery

Ephemera from this war of attrition is one of the joys of this new exhibition. Letters, pamphlets and artworks connected to the dispute are displayed in vitrines. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. Can you imagine the stushie if a prominent Scottish artist in 2025 issued pamphlets with the symbol of a guillotine blade and the words: “Death to Creative Scotland!” Police Scotland would soon be chapping on their door. And yet such provocations were a staple of Finlay’s output for decades.

My fellow Times journalist Magnus Linklater, chairman of the Little Sparta Trust for 20 years, recently wrote a preview of the Modern 2 exhibition that contains this wonderful example of Finlay’s talent for making enemies:

[Finlay] was often cold-shouldered by the critics and may not have helped his cause by challenging them head-on whenever they failed to understand his work. Here he is writing to the then art critic of the Guardian, Waldemar Januszczak, who once described him as “an aggressive Scots loony”. Finlay penned a vituperative letter in 1986, branding Januszczak a “cheap, over-fed, over-tolerated, affluent bastard” and added: “To your stupidity, your ignorance, your arrogance, your fashionableness, your cringing ambitiousness, you can from now on add one more problem — me.”