As we have said from time to time, one reason we retired and moved to Europe was to be able to take advantage of last minute events and exhibitions.

Back in June a little notice floated across our ‘feed’ and we immediately took notice. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, July 26 through November 2 at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. As a bonus, it coincided with a week when a new friend from the States was going to visit Edinburgh. After 30 seconds of making sure we had time on our calendar, we bought tickets (we didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come, we just got her a ticket). After seeing one of the best exhibits of our lives, we are so glad.

Hailed as a genius, Goldsworthy’s art is ephemeral, site-specific, and transient. He works with leaves, reeds, trees, stones, flowers, and water both flowing and frozen. He is internationally renowned for building, weaving, floating and folding natural materials from leaf to fern, snow to sand and then walking away, letting the installations dissolve back into the land they were built from. He documents his creations in vivid photographs, mapping, inspecting, and recording the everyday wonders of nature.

The Royal Scottish Academy building is an unusual venue for an artist like Goldsworthy. Built in 1826 it has Greek columns and is thoroughly neo-classical in its design. yet, when talking about setting up the exhibition, Goldsworthy simply noted that nature exists everywhere, not just in rural spaces, it doesn’t stop at the city boundary.

For him, the land is raw and he enjoys the hard manual labor of his creations. “The land may look pastoral and picturesque, but it’s a brutal place, the farm a tough place. Sheep make the Scottish landscape.” Thus, the carpet of raw fleece going up the long stairs from the entry and ending at a pair of marble columns wrapped in barbed wire. The fleece is softly inviting, yet closer inspection reveals the dirt and vegetation trapped within the fleece, dotted by the paint used by farmers to note age and final disposition of the sheep. “That wire fence is about the difficulties and obstructions which every artist has to face, especially one that works in the land. But it is also about finding a way through.”

Atop the polished fine oak of the flooring, Goldsworthy piled fallen oak branches, windfall salvaged from Dumfriesshire fields (where he lives), arranged in a dramatic passage you must walk through. “We are bound up in the land. Look at your dining room table. There is a disconnect nowadays between us and the land.”

His most spectacular room installation is of 10,000 reeds or bullrushes suspended from its skylights. Pictures do not convey the sheer grandeur of this installation, provoking a cathedral-like sense of sacred. Using only natural light, reed mace (bullrushes) from Scottish lochs was used to create this curtained chamber that you can step into and feel the light change.

A simple room of stones speaks eloquently of our deepest connection to the earth. The stones are dug out, not under a hedge or around a cow barn, but from grave sites, including that of his wife. “My former wife Judith died in 2008 and when I was visiting her grave, I noticed there was a pile of stones by the cemetery wall. And I discovered they’re found in every cemetery, displaced from digging graves,” he says. “So when a body goes into the earth, there are always some stones left over. There’s an exchange between the body and the land and I thought that was very powerful.” He collected the stones from hundreds of gravesites across the region over nearly three years.

Judith Gregson, a ceramicist from the Potteries, and her father also inspired the wall of cracked red mud in the exhibition, which took 20 people to make and ten days to dry. Like much of his work, it looks effortless, but it is far from it. The catalogues notes that red earth is used by local farmers to mark the sheep and its distinctive color comes from the high iron content of the earth, which we share in our blood. On the wall next to Red Wall are three monitors playing a video of the artist cleaning a rock with the red clay literally bleeding into the stream. A visceral connection of blood, iron, water, and earth. Stunning.

In another room, a video of him “washing” his hands with blackberries links to this imagery.

Nearby, a video of his “Hedge walk” plays. In an interview for The Guardian, he talks about how his performance pieces are uncomfortable because he is not a performer. “They are very personal acts done in an often public place.” Hedge walking is “pretty brutal”, he admits. “I came out of one or two of those feeling pretty beaten up. But what a beautiful thing to do. Swimming through a hedge.” He’s probably retired from hedge walking, however. “You only do them while they are giving you something. The intention of my work has always been to understand my relationship with the land. I don’t go out to improve what is there. But I do feel this need to be a participant, working with it, learning about it. Art has an amazing ability to open your eyes to what’s around you – such as the hedge. Maybe that’s what art is. It just takes you somewhere you’ve never thought of going, whether it’s in the mind or the world.”

I particularly enjoyed the lower gallery area which had many images from his early works, going back to the late 1970s.

All images copyright Lisa McSherry, 2025, except where noted.

A .pdf of the Exhibition Guide is here.

More photos are here, including many taken during the installation, which offer a fascinating glimpse into the process of creation.

Our final point of interest during our time in Philadelphia was indeed the iconic Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we for sure took the back entrance to avoid climbing two stories-worth of elevation. This doesn’t lead to some hobbit hole entrance, it’s basically the same lobby as the front entrance, just… you know, further back. Bonus, it put us directly at the entrance to their fascinating temporary exhibition, “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s.” It wasn’t strictly about war-time art although (naturally) that took up a lot of conceptual space. The picture on the left, for example, was an example of propaganda posters that were generated fresh, daily, by Russian artists to keep the home fires burning. Like seriously, there were hundreds of these images plastered everywhere in the cities. (This one in particular was showing up around the time that formal alliances were being announced between Russia and the English-speaking powers.) There were also numerous examples of artistically-designed scarves that were sold as fundraisers for war efforts. I’ve got an acrylic scarf with a print of Van Gogh’s “Cherry Blossoms” but some of these were just bonkers.

And speaking of Van Gogh, it was only a mild irritation to realize we hadn’t needed to make a special trip to London last year to see Sunflowers… not that London isn’t a good time, but still.

PMA is a world-class museum, something that Americans can sometimes have an inferiority complex about. All the great museums are in Europe, right? While there certainly are great museums all over Europe, for better or for worse the primary driver in the “greatness” of a museum is the money behind it, and there’ve been plenty of rich jerks in the States over the years who got bees in their bonnets to put their home cities on equal footing with the capitals of Europe. The results of such efforts are on ample display here and it’s definitely worth the visit.

Returning to New York, he hired on at Vogue magazine as an associate; his job was to prepare layouts and suggest ideas for covers to the magazine’s photographer. The magazine’s Art Director, Alexander Liberman, looked at Penn’s contact sheets from his recent travels and recognized “a mind, and an eye that knew what it wanted to see.*” Liberman encouraged Penn to do more with his photographs, beginning a collaboration that transformed modern photography. While at Vogue, Penn traveled the world utilizing an old theater curtain as a backdrop, or a tent studio that could be dismantled and taken from location to location. Penn felt “in this limbo [of the tent] there was for us both the possibility of contact that was a revelation to me and often, I could tell, a moving experience for the subjects themselves, who without words—by only their stance and their concentration—were able to say much that spanned the gulf between our different worlds.”

Offset print production declined in the 1960s, increasingly frustrating Penn with how his images looked on the page. In response, he became an alchemist. Utilizing extensive research and experimentation, Penn sought out and implemented nineteenth-century printing methods in search of greater control over the subtle variations and tonalities he sought in a print. In the end, he perfected a complex process for printing in platinum and palladium metals, enlarging negatives for contact printing on hand-sensitized artist’s paper, which was adhered to an aluminum sheet so that it could withstand multiple coatings and printings.

Penn’s work trims away anything nonessential to his compositions and focuses on his subjects. Nothing feels frivolous yet the images aren’t dour. His work primarily filled the pages of Vogue, particularly the haute couture collections of Paris, but he also produced a series of nudes, cigarettes (yes, really), and street materials. These series were rarely enjoyed, many found them repulsive, but Penn saw in the subject matter “a treasure of the city’s refuse, intriguing distorted forms of color, stain, and typography.”

In 1950–51, inspired by old prints of street criers, Penn began a series of photographs depicting representatives of the Small Trades in Paris, London, and New York. The project began in Paris, where he was assisted in the selection of subjects by French Vogue editor Edmonde Charles-Roux and photographer Robert Doisneau. Penn’s reflections on the tradespeople:

In general, the Parisians doubted that we were doing exactly what we said we were doing. They felt there was something fishy going on, but they came to the studio more or less as directed— for the fee involved. But the Londoners were quite different from the French. It seemed to them the most logical thing in the world to be recorded in their work clothes. They arrived at the studio, always on time, and presented themselves to the camera with a seriousness and pride that was quite endearing. Of the three, the Americans as a group were the least predictable. In spite of our cautions, a few arrived for their sittings having shed their work clothes, shaved, even wearing dark Sunday suits, sure this was their first step on the way to Hollywood.

One of the major projects of Penn’s career, which he pursued intermittently between 1948 and 1971, was a group of photographs made during his travels which he called Worlds in a Small Room. Following an experience in Cuzco working in a daylight studio, Penn sought out other opportunities to improvise or bring a studio with him to make portraits in a neutral environment. These encounters attempted to bridge the gaps of language, culture, and geography, to connect on a human level.

* Quotes and images from The Irving Penn Foundation (website).

Our “reason” for going to London was primarily to see the “Poets and Lovers” exhibit at The National Gallery — the first major exhibition of Van Gogh’s work there since 2010 and part of the NG’s 200th Anniversary celebration. Labeled a blockbuster and once in a lifetime, the show features 61 works, including some of the most revered and rarely, if ever, loaned. The curators aimed to show the artist rather than the tortured soul we probably all know about. There was no self-portrait with ear bandage, for example, and a great deal of text placing him in the context of his connections to many other painters of the time. We see the painter as part of a creatively expressive time who was far more deliberate and thoughtful about his work than audience might have realized. (Fair warning, this is an image-heavy post.)

But it’s like that every day, sometimes in passing I find such beautiful things that in the end you have to try to do them anyway. ~Letter to his brother, Theo

Most of the six rooms feature works from his time in Arles (February 1888-May 1889) and at the asylum outside Saint-Rémy-de- Provence (May 1889-May 1890). This was a period of astonishing production for the artist, he completed around 200 paintings in Arles and 150 in Saint-Rémy, which works out at one every two days.

The curators often displayed works according to Van Gogh’s writing about how he envisioned they might be seen by visitors to his Yellow House, or in a gallery. One such is the triptych of two of the Sunflowers (one from the National Gallery and the other from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) on either side of Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle (La Berceuse) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All the three paintings are displayed in imposing frames, hung some distance apart, although Van Gogh wanted them to almost touch, like an altar triptych. He envisaged them presented in simple, slender wooden frames. The two Sunflowers would have been in natural pine and the frame for La Berceuse painted red.

His works display motion; writhing trees, fields like waves, skies filled with air in colors but rarely just blue. A highlight for me was the inclusion of 19 reed and ink drawings, some displayed next to his impasto oils with their thick, dizzying swirls of paint of the same subject. In seeing them displayed thusly, you can get a sense of what he saw.

It was, however, deeply disappointing that the curators chose to overlook the vital part his sister in law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, played in managing his legacy after Van Gogh’s death. It was she who carefully managed the placement of his works in exhibitions, galleries, and museums all over the world.

While “once in a lifetime” feels a bit over the top, this was a magnificent exhibition that captured an unusual part of Van Gogh’s artistic legacy.

All images in this post are from Wikipedia and licensed under CC 2.0. Cover photo: The National Gallery Photographic Department/Photo: The National Gallery, London