In the photograph, Jon Schueler (1916 – 1992), born in Milwaukee, with Swiss/German antecedents, stands on the empty ‘silver sands of Morar’. He has a warm smile. The faint outline of the Isle of Eigg is just visible on the horizon, at the right. Its distant and unique contour is an appropriate metaphor for Schueler’s life and work in Scotland.
Jon Schueler on the Sands of Morar, 1970.[1]
“The only way to grasp it is to hold it for a moment”
When this photograph was taken, Schueler was at the beginning of his second major residency in Scotland. He was staying in Romasaig, a former schoolhouse near Mallaig that he had rented. He lived and painted there until 1975 and he returned for the summer months almost every year until 1990. He has been described as an important member of the mid-twentieth-century New York school of Abstract Expressionists and he retained a studio in that city until he died in 1992. ‘The intriguing question, as his friend and fellow artist Ken Dingwall posed, is ‘what the devil was Jon doing in Scotland?’.[2]
Jon Schueler, according to contemporaries, was a charismatic man and an imposing and committed artist. A recent case study explores the role and impact, if any, that Scottish spaces and places had in his art.
[1] Photograph supplied by Magda Salvesen. © of Jon Schueler Estate.
[2] Transcript of a talk by Kenneth Dingwall on 18th October, 2005 in the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. Transcript provided by Kenneth Dingwall, personal communication.