According to legend, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay once said that the best way to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the French revolution would be to have another revolution. Now Finlay’s own centenary has arrived, marked by a series of simultaneous gallery and museum shows, from Edinburgh to Basel, Vienna to New York. Curated by his executor and collaborator Pia Maria Simig, they are taking place under the general title Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments. This is indicative of his vast array of work across different media and sites, including poetry, sculpture, works on paper, gardens and sundry public commissions. It’s a dispersed and complicated oeuvre, and hard to grasp as a whole. Indeed, since Finlay thrived on ambiguity and antagonism, it’s also possible to read Fragments as a verb. His work is divisive, courts controversy, splits opinion: witness Jonathan Jones in the Guardian denouncing his idiocy, extremism, crassness, foolishness, bloodthirstiness, raving and superficiality. How shall we put Finlay back together again? 

Born to Scottish parents in the Bahamas in 1925 – his father was a bootlegger – Finlay was sent to boarding school in Scotland but left formal education aged 13 after the family’s investment in a Florida orange farm collapsed. A short stint at the Glasgow School of Art was likewise disrupted by his enrolment in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1943. On his return from duty he moved to the Southern Highlands, where he worked as a shepherd and began to write stories, plays and poems. Much of his subsequent work unfolds from these experiences of war and rural labour. His masterpiece, the garden at Little Sparta – in the Pentland Hills, where he lived from 1966 until his death – places the two in a difficult embrace. Realised with his second wife Susan Finlay and a host of collaborators, it features dozens of neoclassical engravings and columns, aircraft carrier birdbaths, homages to French landscape painters and pre-Socratic philosophers, chunks of dry-stone walling, a loch framed by a black stone monolith that looks like a nuclear submarine. It is an idyll of toy soldiers, an embattled pastoral, full of melancholy, beauty and violence.  

At Victoria Miro in London there are sixteen works on show, mostly sculptures from his later decades. On the right-hand side of the ground-floor an elegant neon sign reads A, E, I, O, Blue. The wordplay is simple, pleasing and demands no immediate explanation. This version, made with Julie Farthing, dates from 1992. But the earliest iteration of the text – a printed poem – was titled ‘The Colours of the Vowels’. There, the allusion to Rimbaud’s sonnet ‘Voyelles’ is explicit, with its famous opening line: ‘Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O’. Finlay’s rendition sits somewhere between homage and literalisation, as he illuminates the author of Les Illuminations. Perhaps the viewer supplies the now-missing ‘u’, completing the pun.   

But Finlay was not, like Rimbaud, a poet of visionary intensity. He is detached and ironic, even in his tantrums, and quite capable of mildness, even dullness. The facing wall features eight engraved ship’s bells, in a multiple edition also on show at David Nolan Gallery in New York. The gnomic texts – which double as titles – pair material and technical features of boats with poetic, philosophical and vernacular fragments. I liked especially down to the red-lead – autumn, which refers to how wear-and-tear on a ship’s hull exposes the red lead primer paint beneath. Autumn, too, has its redness, and indicates the wear-and-tear of the passing year. I want to ring the bell to announce my great insight, but they’re polished to a great shine – in fact they look brand new – and don’t invite such play.   

This is one of the challenges of Finlay’s blue-chip era. In 1977, on the occasion of a show at the Serpentine, the art historian Stephen Bann noted a tension in Finlay’s work. On the one hand was the ‘intractably small’ print ephemera that Finlay produced through his Wild Hawthorn Press, hundreds of examples of concrete poetry. On the other, the ‘obstacle of the inconveniently large’ themes that he often evoked. Bann gave as example the elements, sea, sky and earth; but Finlay’s allusions to the classics and the French revolution sometimes also function in this way. Yet much of the later work, from the mid-1980s onwards, is neither too small nor too large: it is, rather, gallery-sized. This tends to mute some of Finlay’s virtues. The print work, even if destined for a rare book library, could pass from hand-to-hand, intimate and conspiratorial; the outdoor works aspire to the status of ruin, oddly utopian in their temporal shudder. Such good tricks of scale and proportion are hard to sustain.  

But perhaps it’s sentimental of me to want the work smudged with thumbprints or trailing moss and water damage, stamping my feet to demand more entropy. However pristine, the work at Victoria Miro does retain critical bite. Opposite the bells there are three stone columns engraved with poetry. One of them, deploying the Greek name for the swallow (Chelidon), reads: ‘ΧΕΛΙΔΩΝ / Shrill twitter / sharp little wings’. The letterforms dart around the column and the internal rhymes sing. In an age where poetry is mostly marginalised, disposable, it’s hard not to admire Finlay’s dogged commitment. Here are lines worth chiselling, glosses and translations from Virgil and Homer. As ever, Finlay is austere. We might compare his citations to the lush graffiti of his contemporary Cy Twombly, where we can sense the pulse in the painter’s wrist. Here the artist is aloof, if not entirely absent. It’s neoclassicism rather than romanticism.   

As if to emphasise this point, there’s an empty plinth in the middle of the floor, about knee-high, made of raw brick and Portland stone. One side is engraved with ‘Flattop / Tombstone / Altar’, the other with ‘A Place / For Light / To Land’. Finlay presents us here with the difference between use and contemplation, blunt matter and lyrical substance. The tone, as in much of his work, is elegiac. Maybe in the end it’s all intended to be ephemeral, simply ‘a place for light to land’. This understated modesty, a glimpse of the fleeting, forms a dialectic with one of the most prominent works at Little Sparta: eleven large blocks of stone inscribed with a quote from the Jacobin revolutionary Saint-Just, The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future. When we tilt our head, catch the light playing tricks, or the pun clicks into place, that’s when the cracks start to show.   

Upstairs the works are devoted exclusively to the French revolutionary theme that came to dominate in Finlay’s practice from the 1980s onwards. Emerging from his aesthetic commitment to neoclassicism, Finlay increasingly adopted a kind of mock-Jacobin praxis. The trigger, in part, was a tax dispute: Strathclyde Regional Council wanted to classify a building at Little Sparta as a commercial art gallery, therefore liable to business rates. Finlay, inveighing against the secularisation of the age, insisted that it was a temple to Apollo, and therefore exempt. In his war against the bureaucrats and tax collectors, Finlay reimagined his friends and supporters as the ‘Saint-Just Vigilantes’, and made endless teasing, cajoling and threatening work about the campaign. His extremity seems to have peaked in the mid-1990s when he displayed the decapitated model heads of critics including Waldemar Januszcsak, Gwyn Headley (author of a book about architectural follies for the National Trust), and others.  

Finlay, who suffered from agoraphobia and hardly travelled outside the Pentland Hills for thirty years, was a difficult man. He seems to have demanded and sometimes inspired great loyalty, to have often broken friendships, and to have been indisposed to reconciliation. But he was also evidently capable of great tenderness and generosity. His magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (1962-67) published writers from all over the world, ranging from the Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos to early translations of Paul Celan. Little Sparta – known simply as Stonypath for the first decade of its existence – was a site of domestic life, family and friendship, in addition to being a key outpost of the rural avant-garde. Inevitably, Finlay’s Jacobin turn and his enthusiasm for the terror is scandalous on either side, whether Conservative or radical: he takes it too seriously, says one detractor; he doesn’t take it seriously enough, says the other. He was also, undeniably, wayward. He corresponded with the Nazi architect Albert Speer about the garden at Spandau prison and made egregious work using the SS insignia, simultaneously flippant and overbearing. But he can’t simply be dismissed as a reactionary, any more than he can be claimed straightforwardly as a leftist.  

In Republic (1995) at Victoria Miro there are five green watering cans alternating with five cream and red drums on plain white plinths. Bann, in a note from the accompanying catalogue, tells us that ‘watering can’ (arrosoir) was the name for the day of the month on which Robespierre was guillotined. He adds that the drums are an oblique citation of Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the drummer boy Joseph Bara, who was killed by Royalists in 1793. In a more banal key, I was reminded of the sound of water dripping onto the leaves of plants, rhyming with the cry of the swallow on the column downstairs. As viewers we must think poetically: watering cans are to plants as drums are to soldiers? Drums are to swords as watering cans are to ploughshares? The work is knowingly kitsch, a little annoying, but somehow hard to resist. Just as it begins to seem too flimsy for our ideas, a new association sets another train of thought in motion.   

On the back wall there’s a carved relief in stone, Head of the Dead Marat (1991), based on Jacques-Louis David’s pen and ink preparatory drawing for his famous painting. The object is head-height, head-size, and Marat’s eyes are barely closed. Fabricated by the sculptor Neil Talbot, it is spare and quite beautiful. In Farewell to an Idea, T. J. Clark situates David’s finished painting of Marat’s death as one starting-point of modernism. The picture, writes Clark, turns on the ‘impossibility of transcendence’, and insists on the entanglement of art with politics. He recounts the pomp of the procession as David’s work is presented to the public. Near Finlay’s Marat there’s a lithograph of a similar passage from Camille Desmoulins, accompanying another neon, Ici on Danse (1992). It surveys the ruins of the Bastille, now populated by an ‘artificial wood’. Still visible is a ‘bas-relief representing slaves which had aptly adorned the fortress’s great clock’. This vision of liberty – of dancing on the ruins of the prison – remains immensely moving. It’s a vision of the future as much as of the past.  

The register of Finlay’s later work is persistently tragic, a reminder of the incompletion of the revolution of 1789, the betrayal of the revolution of 1917, the whole sorry calendar. He refuses – to quote Clark again – ‘to come to terms with the world’s disenchantment’. The arrangement of ceramic candlesticks on stools, 12 / 1794 (1994), each named after a member of the Committee for Public Safety, is particularly ghostly. The candles aren’t lit, just as the drums aren’t played and the bells aren’t rung. Even as Finlay finds dozens of ways to combine and recombine his slogans and motifs, there’s a kind of stuckness at work. What he gives us are objects of revolutionary melancholy.   

Finlay died in 2006. He is recognised, today, as one of the main proponents and innovators of concrete poetry, one of the great gardeners of the twentieth century, and one of the most important Scottish artists of his generation. The garden at Little Sparta – where Finlay ended up a little like Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, digging his trenches and re-enacting battles – is open to visitors in spring and summer. It is so stunningly original and strange that it can make the rest of his work feel ancillary, workaday material necessary only to support the unhinged splendour. But this is unfair. All the fragments of Finlay’s poetic universe are worth pausing over, piece by piece.   

I was planning to end by turning to an artist’s fable recounted by Philip Guston. In a talk from 1974, he discusses Mark Rothko’s Seagram Building murals, and says they were destined for an executive boardroom (he gets this wrong: it was the building’s restaurant). According to Guston, Rothko ‘was going to make them really shake in their boots, with these big dark murals, really give it to them’. The gloomy scale of the work would be felt as oppressive by the businessmen of Park Avenue, ruin their days. But Guston would have taken a different approach: ‘My way would be of doing these murals so deep underground that when they were put up no one would even see them but the whole building would just crumble’. Here, the further the art stays away from commerce and the ordinary metrics of success, the more powerful it becomes. We could call Rothko and Guston’s contrasting attitudes reform or revolution, Girondins and Jacobins. 

But then on a warm day I set out to try and find a commission of Finlay’s in the City of London, An Arcadian Dream Garden, installed just outside the Gherkin in 2004. I walked down the whole of London Wall, heading East from the Barbican down to Liverpool Street. The street is dotted with ruins, and quickly gets crowded by buildings with little water features and gestures of greenery, the capitalist pastoral writ large. Finlay’s installation is a series of engravings on marble benches. The lettering is elegant, a light copper colour, in need of refilling here and there. The inscriptions are whimsical and delightful: Carved on a low, broken column in a clearing, the numerals oo xxx ccxvil (the dialling code for Delphi); or – half-illegible under the remnants of someone’s abandoned salad – A rose lying on a rock under a thundercloud. Here are the gardens to come, an imaginary order more real than ersatz glass and concrete, a soft utopia in place of alienation.   

It was only when I looked around that I realised these benches are part of the security architecture of the financial district, designed to ward off a car bomb. Adjacent to Finlay’s installation is a memorial to the three people killed by the IRA’s bombing of the Baltic Exchange in 1992, on the site where the Gherkin now stands. So one of Finlay’s final works materially constitutes part of the ‘ring of steel’ built to suppress violent insurgency in the heart of the City, renewed during the War on Terror. What would Saint-Just say? My own instinct is that art can’t retain any subversive power when it’s so yoked to the state’s machinations. And yet, maybe the irony and contradiction is so severe, so lacking in pathos and transcendence, that this is Finlay’s greatest work of all.  

Read on: Luke Roberts, ‘Wreckage’, Sidecar.