‘This devastated masterpiece must be Scotland’s Notre Dame’: Artist Lachlan Goudie on why gutted Glasgow School of Art building demands more urgent action

Scotland should treat the rebuilding of Glasgow’s gutted School of Art with the same urgency as France when it rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral, according to one of the country’s leading artists.

The £800 million, five-year rebuild of the iconic church in Paris is due to be finished in 2024, to coincide with the arrival of the Olympics, but, in Glasgow, the future of the famous art school, the masterwork of world-renowned architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is less certain.

Now, artist Lachlan Goudie has demanded immediate action to rebuild the school after two devastating fires at the A-listed building and said if the school’s management cannot lead the project, it should be taken over by heritage bodies guided by ministers.

Goudie said: “Whatever the permutations and machinations of the management there, big questions should be asked as to why, on a national level, governmental attention is not being expressed more loudly as to why this is not a project like Notre Dame in Paris? Why it’s not being made a national commitment to support, encourage, scrutinise and rebuild the identity of Glasgow as a city but more widely the association of Scotland with one of the greatest architects who ever lived?

“The memory of that building is fading, and students are going to Glasgow School of Art without realising how vital it was to previous generations. If you mess around with a legacy like that, we will be so much the poorer for forgetting the importance of it and in defining who we are as a nation.”

Architects were invited to bid for the contract to lead the £62m “faithful reinstatement” of the Glasgow art school in April, almost four years after the second blaze at the building destroyed it as the rebuild ordered after the first fire in 2014 was nearing completion.

The management was criticised for its stewardship of the famous building while it was also accused of launching a misleading global fundraising campaign in the wake of the fire despite insurance being in place to pay for the rebuild.

Goudie, a celebrated painter, art historian and broadcaster, fears the work to rebuild is too slow and lacks any urgency, adding: “It seems to be bogged down in apathy and carelessness. We’ve all heard how the school has been the focus of criticism but I think it’s time now for that criticism to be widened. There are structures in Scotland to take care of our cultural heritage more widely and the argument should be made strongly that action is needed now, not in five years’ time.”

Goudie, who has worked on the BBC’s Life Drawing Live and The Big Painting Challenge, is preparing to launch his latest exhibition, Painting Paradise, which refers not only to the series of stunning locations from where he has painted over the past year – from Edinburgh and Barra to France and Mauritius – but to that sense of paradise he finds in painting.

He said: “There’s a lot of negativity that could distract us in life at the moment. That sense of pressure and the demands that life is placing on people can make you feel a bit worn down, fatigued and depressed by the toil. For me, going to these places was the best placebo ever and revitalised me. It made me feel positive and optimistic and gave me energy and a sense of joie de vivre.

“Those are things that are sometimes deemed trivial in art and the paintings really celebrated and admired are the ones that get to grips with the thorny, dispiriting misery of life. But I’m of the opinion it’s just as valid to be a person who works hard to communicate the zest and lifeblood of why we are all here in the first bloody place – and it’s certainly not to be miserable.”

The exhibition is split into five sections and begins with work produced during a short residency in Edinburgh’s New Town.

“For me, Edinburgh is as exotic as the Southern Hemisphere,” added Goudie, whose father, Alexander, was also a renowned painter. “I would go there on day trips to exhibitions or to Jenner’s with my parents when I was growing up. It was a foreign country to me as I’d spent no more than four days in it before last year, when I had the chance to spend two weeks in a very handsome apartment. I never left the flat because I had so many challenges of looking out of the windows and painting the skyline.”

He later found himself painting in the woodland of rural Inverness-shire, the only sound for miles being the sway of the wind in the trees and the gentle flow of water into a lochan, and then onto Barra. He also travelled to the Cote D’Azur, seeing the south of France with fresh eyes.

He said: “My mum is from Brittany and when my dad died she moved to Nice. I visit when I can, but I hadn’t been for three years before this trip. It was my first time abroad since the pandemic and it was such a tonic.

“Travelling is a privilege, but I also realised how important it is to my well-being. I went last October and to sit and enjoy a bit of warmth, hear a different language on the streets and different food in the markets, was a sense of novelty which was a really important part of the experience. It was going back to a place I know very well but seeing it with fresh eyes.”

The art school said a detailed report exploring options for the future of the building was released last year and concluded rebuilding was the preferred option. Eleanor Magennis, director of estates, hopes an outline business case will be published next year but said work had been progressing.

She said: “We have been working through the next stages of the project, including further stabilisation works and invitations to tender for a cost consultant, project manager, and an architect-led design team, as well as developing and planning the next phases of the faithful reinstatement of the Mackintosh Building.”

‘I was walking in the footsteps of giants’

Painting Paradise is also an exhibition about Lachlan Goudie following in the footsteps of his heroes.

“In the case of the tropics, artists like Gauguin made expeditions to Tahiti and the Pacific and the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and for them it was an unbelievable encounter,” said Goudie, whose acclaimed book, The Story of Scottish Art, was recently released in paperback. “At every place, I used as my guides other artists who had been to these places before me, and I scrutinised what they did and how they solved visual problems a century before I was faced with them.

“In Edinburgh, Frances Cadell, the great Scottish colourist and society painter used his beautiful apartment as a backdrop, such as in The Orange Blind, one of his most famous paintings. Artists like that were an inspiration simmering at the back of my mind.

“In Invernesshire I was looking at artists like Horatio McCulloch or the Glasgow Boys and in Barra the work of SJ Peploe. In France, looking at the place with those fresh eyes I’d mentioned, it must have been how it felt for JD Fergusson when he went there in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and created some of the most dazzling paintings in Scottish art history. Every time I pick up a brush I sense a crowd of painters bustling around me. They are my artist heroes. It was a wonderful, positive experience and hopefully people will enjoy a little bit of sunshine in the back end of autumn when looking at them.”

Painting Paradise is at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh from November 3-26.