The painter Brüer Tidman had an unusually close and loving relationship with his mother, Charlotte, constructed around a bond of complicity forged when they fled together, and forever, when he was about nine or ten, from his father. This bond continued to tighten throughout their subsequent lives, ending finally with her death two years ago at the age of 98 (on the same day as the show ends), a death the exact moment of which Brüer inadvertently missed, to his frustration and sorrow. The mother as artist’s muse is not a common one in Western art, which makes this emotional, loving and cathartic exhibition all the more important. From his early exquisite pencil drawings of her, usually around the kitchen table, the artist has documented and explored their relationship in a way that has few precedents.
After her death, working out aspects of his emotional and loving attachment and loss has produced a completely different set of large-scale images that together form a powerful and resonant circle around the enclosed room in the Library where they have been beautifully hung. These are no longer direct, observational and figurative works, but heart-wrenching screams of paint that at the same time have a calm and reflective beauty that begins to make some sense of an order after death, a resolution of pain and loss, with their warm tones and repeated abstracted shapes, of open mouths, cold white feet, clasped hands, attendants and the shadow of the artist. This room gave me the same sense of seriousness and depth as the hang of Poussin’s Seven Sacraments in their special room in the Scottish National Gallery. One is appropriately of Extreme Unction.
When she was already in her 80s, Brüer gave his mother the materials to try her hand at painting (do we believe in a genetic component of artistic talent?) and some of the resultant dazzling flower paintings, on their matt-black ground, and all done at the same old kitchen table, are also on show in a long, glittering line. The two of them exhibited together once before, four years before Charlotte died, but this is a very different show. This deftly-hung show is really Brüer’s and there will not be many exhibitions you will ever go to that will move you in such a powerful way, or allow you to ponder, witness and engage with so closely such an unusual and powerful bond between a mother and her son.
My only sadness was that the catalogue is rather woeful, with image scale and placement issues, eccentric typography and, most irritatingly of all, no titles, sizes or artist credits for any of the images reproduced. This outstanding show deserved a real document of record.
