Richard Demarco established the Edinburgh Arts Summer School in 1972, inspired by experimental schools like Black Mountain College. The school brought together international students and faculty for an interdisciplinary program in Edinburgh. Key figures involved included Joseph Beuys, who had a profound influence on Demarco's thinking, and Jack Burnham, who led a workshop on creative adaptability. The summer school grew out of Demarco's experience promoting the arts in Edinburgh through various galleries and organizations and his belief in the power of international cultural exchange.

1. ‘EDINBURGH ARTS’ 1972
RICHARD DEMARCO’S FIRST EXPERIMENTAL SUMMER SCHOOL
GILES SUTHERLAND
DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
THE UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE
g.sutherland@dundee.ac.uk

2. The Richard Demarco Gallery logo, 1966
Designed by Forth Studios/ John Martin

3. Maison Demarco and The Trocadero
Demarco’s family upbringing brought him into direct contact with
European café culture, of the kind experienced from Paris to Kraków in
the 19th century and early twentieth centuries.
….my parents had moved from
Portobello to Edinburgh in 1930,
not anticipating The Wall Street
Crash which swiftly brought
disaster to their business: a ‘state
of the art’ cafe and ‘Thé Dansant’
on Princes Street, which they
called ‘The Trocadero’. This was
an Edinburgh version of ‘Maison
Demarco’ on Portobello
Promenade, a popular meeting
place for all those citizens of
Edinburgh who wished to
experience the atmosphere of a
Parisian café....

4. Holy Cross Academy, Edinburgh
1907 - 1969
“I must acknowledge the fact
that it was Marion Urquhart,
Holy Cross's redoubtable
music teacher, who was
responsible for introducing
me to the experience of the
Edinburgh Festival when she
arranged for a party of fourth
formers to attend one of the
Festival concerts in the Usher
Hall in August 1947 during
the very first Edinburgh
Festival. It was an experience
which altered the course of
my life; so for me the history
of Holy Cross Academy is
firmly intertwined with that
of the Edinburgh Festival.”
Richard Demarco
“David Harding's essay on 'Holy
Cross and Art Education'
describes, with accurate detail,
the world of Miss Teresa Clarke
conducting her art classes in a
glass-roofed conservatory,
evoking memories of Eduardo
Paolozzi beginning his career as a
world renowned artist, sitting at
a desk at the very back of the art
room. Harding gives due praise to
Teresa Clarke's successor, Felix
McCulloch, as a gifted and
dedicated teacher who also
managed to find the time to
become a professional artist
specialising in stained glass as
well as being an insightful art
critic with a regular column in the
Edinburgh Evening News. David
Harding became an inspiring
teacher at Glasgow School of Art,
establishing the world-renowned
School of Public Art.” Richard
Demarco
Richard Demarco attended Holy Cross
Academy, Edinburgh, from 1942 –
1947
Holy Cross was a Catholic school
within a largely Protestant-based
educational system.
As well as Scots, pupils were drawn
from the Italian, Polish, Irish and
Ukrainian communities. This
international context help determine
Demarco’s pan European outlook

5. Duns Scotus Academy, Edinburgh 1957-1967
“Of course, my first exhibitions after the
art school were connected to Duns
Scotus, my children – the ones I was
teaching – and I put them on in the
Paperback Bookshop. Then at the
Gateway Theatre and then at the
Traverse Theatre. But mainly at the
Bookshop. That’s how I began….”
“My art room was a converted
science lab, fitted out as a
science lab. It was not fit for
purpose. You could only get in
and out by climbing a spiral
staircase. …it was a bedroom of
Lord Boothby as a boy…I was
there for ten years ….I had the
chance to move to Edinburgh
College of Art to teach because
they were so impressed by my
teaching and getting all these
boys to present these fantastic
portfolios….”
Richard Demarco taught at Duns
Scotus between 1957 and 1967. The
school was set up by a lay order of
Irish Catholic teachers, the Christian
brothers in 1953 and closed in 1977.
It occupied Beechwood House, the
former home of Lord Boothby and
was named in honour of the Scots
theologian and philosopher John
Duns Scotus c. 1266-1308. Scotus
was educated the the University of
Oxford and died in Cologne. He was
influenced by the work of Aristotle.
Acquinas, Augustine of Hippo. Scotia
me genuit. Anglia me suscepit. Gallia
me docuit. Colonia me tenet.

6. The Paperback Bookshop, 1959
Jim Haynes, an expatriate American, in 1959,
set up the Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh,
the first of its kind in Britain. The Paperback
quickly established itself as a centre of social
and cultural activity in the city, also hosting a
programme of exhibitions organised by
Richard Demarco, poetry readings,
discussions and theatre performances. The
International Writers Conference of 1962 and
Dramatists’ Conference of 1963, had their
origins in the Paperback Bookshop, being
devised and organised by John Calder and Jim
Haynes.

7. The Traverse Theatre & The Traverse Gallery, 1963
Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre
Club opened in January 1963
in premises at James Court in
the city’s Old Town, initially
established as a subscribing
members club to ensure
freedom from the prevailing
censorship regulations. John
Martin was chairman, Richard
Demarco was vice-chairman
and Terry Lane was artistic
director.

8. The Richard Demarco Gallery, 1966
The Inaugural Exhibition was of work by an international group of
over fifty contemporary artists, including Joseph Herman. Over
the next few years, the gallery presented group and solo
exhibitions by artists from many countries, whilst providing an
important platform for Scottish artists and artists from elsewhere
in the UK. Though committed to supporting new British art, the
exhibition programme was international in scope. In 1968
Demarco visited the Venice Biennale and Documenta for the first
time, and made the first of his many visits to Eastern Europe,
establishing on-going dialogues with artists, arts institutions and
professionals in Poland and Romania, and laying the foundations
for many future collaborations. Pedagogy, in its broadest sense,
lay at the heart of the RDG philosophy, which in turn had to be
balanced with commercial imperatives.

9. Black Mountain College (1933 -1957)
Edinburgh Arts Summer School, an experiment
in alternative, interdisciplinary pedagogy,
inspired by Black Mountain College, North
Carolina (1933 -1957). Black Mountain College
was, itself, the inheritor of the ideals of the
Staatliches Bauhaus, Berlin closed by the Nazis
in 1933. The Faculty included John Cage,
Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller,
Charles Olson, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Paul
Goodman and Robert Rauschenberg.

10. Joseph Beuys (1921-86)
Demarco first came across the work of
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) at Documenta
IV (1968); subsequently, Demarco invited
Beuys to work in Scotland. Beuys first
visited Scotland in May 1970, the start of
a long collaboration. Beuys had a
profound effect on Demarco’s thinking as
an educator, an artist and a thinker.
“I think of him every minute of every day. He’s
on my shoulder, whispering away, but he’s
telling me the art world’s going to go through
some rocky patches and everybody thinks that
the art world is okay if the art is housed in
something like Bilbao. Well the Bilbao space is
the absolute opposite of the Poorhouse, isn’t it?
And you know when Beuys was at the opening
of the Munchen Gladbach museum, he wasn’t
drinking with anybody, he was making an
artwork with a piano, he was cutting up the
roses, placing the roses in the piano in the glass
case. Now when you go there, you see the dead
roses. When I saw him, the roses were fresh cut
on that day…” Richard Demarco

11. Sir Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932)
“The reunion of Europe, then, can most strongly, even if slowly, be made
through the education of travel…in that combining of the best of modern
cultural travel with something of the old spirit of pilgrimage which that
helps effectively to renew. The Brownings and Ruskin in Italy were
examples of this union in their day: why not renew it more widely? … our
scheme of educational travel will grow and spread into fuller pilgrimages
… throughout Baltic and Mediterranean lands alike, …with ever increasing
appreciation of all their regional and civic interests, the natural, the
spiritual, and the temporal together, and in aspects historic, actual and
incipient. Does this seem ‘Utopian’? It is after all but what the tourist and
the wandering nature-lover, the art-student, and the historian have long
been doing, and what the regional agriculturalist and the town planner are
now in their turn doing. Today it lies with re-education, with
reconstruction, and with re-religion as well, to organise these contacts
more fully.” Patrick Geddes, 1920

12. Aegina & John Zervos, 1971
In 1971 while holidaying in on the
island of Aegina, Greece, at the
holiday home of Ian and Elizabeth
Mason, Demarco met Greek
American, John Zervos, who had
developed a summer school on the
island, a short journey form Athens.
Zervos’ educational model was
based on North American students
travelling to Greece to learn about
the culture of the country they
were visiting.
Prior to the establishment of
Edinburgh Arts Demarco embarked
on a series of lecture tours of North
America to publicise his vision of an
international multidisciplinary
summer in Edinburgh (known as the
Athens of the North) and to recruit
students.

13. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972

14. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972

15. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972 Jack Burnham (b.1931)

16. Edinburgh Arts Summer School 1972 & Paul Neagu (1938-2004)

17. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972

18. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972
Tom Hudson (1922-1997) Creative Adaptability Workshop

19. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972

20. Edinburgh Arts Summer School, 1972 Karen Rand Anderson (b.1951)

21. ‘EDINBURGH ARTS’ 1972
RICHARD DEMARCO’S FIRST EXPERIMENTAL SUMMER SCHOOL
GILES SUTHERLAND
DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
THE UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE
g.sutherland@dundee.ac.uk