Craigie Aitchison

Butterflies in a Landscape was painted two years after Craigie Aitchison moved to London in 1962. It is one of three or so highly distinguished paintings which Aitchison made in a distinctive mode, all of which use the motif of butterflies in a landscape. Horizontal bands of contrasting colours provide a compositional structure. More than this, they establish spatial relationships – hot earth in the foreground receding to the shimmering distance. Some eight years before Butterflies in a Landscape, Aitchison painted another work of the same title shortly after his return from Italy in 1956 (fig. 1). It was shown in the exhibition ‘Three Romantic Painters’ at Gallery One in 1956. Describing this and two other Italian works, a reviewer for The Times wrote,

They are so simplified that it would be tempting to compare them to abstract works, were it not that they are conceived entirely as attempts to represent a certain aspect of reality, and not as formal compositions. In one of them [Butterflies in a Landscape, 1956] the contrasting belts of blue, red and mauve are so vivid that they call up an effect of intense shimmering heat, reinforced by a group of butterflies, a detail all the more significant for being the only one.

Given the great artistic and critical success of the earlier painting, it seems likely that Butterflies in a Landscape (1964) was made self-consciously as a complementary sequel. A third work, Butterfly in a Purple Landscape (fig. 2), was painted a few years later in 1968. It used the same elementary, highly effective pictorial devices and subject-matter.

Dazzling colour is central to much of Aitchison’s work. Subjects are often arranged against an unmodulated ground of crackling, saturated colour. In most cases, this generates an illusion of depth with the subject appearing to jump forwards from the canvas and hover in front of it. In these three butterfly paintings, colour is used both as representation and as a literal, formal presence. In Butterflies in a Landscape (1964), three bands of colour – burnt orange, pale blue, geranium red – substitute for the foreground, midground and background. So sparse is the composition and so luxuriant is the colour, however, that the colour gains a tangible presence, catalysing and assuming a role similar to colour fields in contemporaneous works by Mark Rothko.

In 1969, Butterflies in a Landscape was the subject of a minor controversy. The painting was then owned by Alan Ross, man of letters and editor of the London Magazine. For the July/August issue that year, Ross decided to reproduce the painting on the magazine’s front cover. Aitchison’s friend Susan Campbell has described the consternation this caused the artist.

There was also an incident in 1969, which almost ended in court, when The London Magazine used his painting Butterflies in a Landscape for the cover. The fact that this painting was owned by the editor, Alan Ross, did not help; the image had been cropped to fit the shape of the magazine and was covered with type. Craigie was outraged and threatened to sue the editor (‘an ig-nor-a-mus!’). Totally bemused by the fuss, Ross settled the matter with a grudging apology.

Aitchison occasionally had strong, irrational responses to the most unexpected things. He was a character, with a legal background; he often threated to sue. In this case, the apology was barely sufficient to settle the matter and, if he had his way, Aitchison would have liked to see the magazine reprinted without text obscuring his painting. This was not to be. In any case, the published issue had one of the most distinctive front covers of any London Magazine to appear in the 1960s (fig. 3).