The Hidden Lane Gallery

Following on from Margaret Watkins will be the works of Hilda Goldwag, the Vienna-born painter who came to Glasgow in 1938 as a refugee from encroaching Nazism. Her family were to follow, but they all perished in one or other concentration camp.

Hilda Goldwag died in 2007 in Glasgow at the age of ninety six. Sporadic interest in her work brought her a small following, through exhibitions in Strathclyde University’s Collins Gallery , and at the Lillie in Bearsden. Mulholland hopes that the show at the Hidden Lane Gallery will bring her wider recognition, and help remove her from the category of (almost) forgotten women.

The Margaret Watkins theme will come and go at the Hidden Lane during the next couple of years. The first exhibition is general and wide ranging . There will be separate shows of her advertising work (which she regarded as equally important and equally artistic) of her visits to the then called Leningrad and to Moscow, her extensive work in Paris, and particularly in Glasgow in the 1930’s. The foreign tours and Glasgow pictures exist mainly in negative form, and will be shown as some original prints, backed up by many images printed in the original way by master printer Robert Burns.

Later in 2010 there will be exhibitions of glass, and of stained glass, and the first Scottish exhibition of the work of talented young Belfast painter Lorcan Vallely, who for some time had his studio in the Hidden Lane, to the rear of the gallery.

The opening exhibition is under the general theme of Forgotten Women, the first being the photographic work of Canadian-born Margaret Watkins, who was at the centre of artistic life in New York in the 1910’s and 20’s. She came in 1928 to Glasgow to visit her three maiden aunts – and got stuck, dying in 1969 in the Hyndland family home she inherited, alone and forgotten.

Prior to her death she gave a large box to Mulholland – on a strict promise that he would not open the tied and sealed trunk until after her death. Forty years after her demise, and with decades of work in the meantime, Margaret Watkins is at last receiving the recognition that eluded her after she left New York. The box contained original photographs taken, processed and printed by her. Many had been exhibited in major galleries in North America and Europe up to 1927. She is now in virtually every encyclopaedia of photography, and being recognised as the innovator of certain styles of photography credited to others, whom she taught. Among these were Paul Outerbridge (of the famed Ide Collar and later questionable nude studies) and Margaret Burke-White, who took the well known picture of Gandhi on his prayer mat, and the iconic images of the Chrysler building in New York in the 1930’s – as well as being one of the most celebrated of the Magnum war photographers.