Damian Barr is the busiest man in the book business. When we meet via Zoom, the Lanarkshire-born author and broadcaster is not long home in Brighton, where he lives with his husband Mike, having spent the previous day in Edinburgh presenting three episodes back-to-back of the latest series of The Big Scottish Book Club.

Now appearing at events across the UK promoting his second novel, The Two Roberts, Barr has also fitted in a spin-off role curating a show about his new book’s real-life protagonists, artists Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The exhibition opens at Charleston In Lewes gallery in East Sussex next month and runs until April. ‘This is the first exhibition of their work in England since Robert Colquhoun died in 1962,’ explains Barr. ‘Lewes was important to them. They lived there from 1947 to 1949 and did some of their most important work there, including designs for Donald Of The Burthens, a ballet staged at Covent Garden.’

For Barr, there is a sense of relief that Kilmarnock-born ‘Robert’ (Colquhoun) and  Cumnock-born ‘Bobby’ (MacBryde) are out in the world again. Rescuing ‘the boys’ from art historical obscurity has been his mission these last five years. ‘I’m in love with them both!’ he laughs. ‘In the initial set of notes I received following my first draft, it was pointed out I had to write about them as they really were. And they could be difficult!’ The result is a tender and unflinching double portrait of the real-life love affair between the two Ayrshire artists.

It’s been 12 years since Maggie & Me burst onto the publishing scene, Barr’s award-winning memoir of growing up gay in Lanarkshire against the backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain. He followed that in 2019 with his masterful debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, which focused on South Africa’s culture of toxic masculinity. The Roberts first began to burrow into Barr’s psyche after he spotted a post on pre-Musk Twitter from The Dick Institute in Kilmarnock featuring a MacBryde still life.

Then in late December 2020, under a post about Robert Colquhoun from Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery, Barr and I recall segueing into a direct-message dialogue about the two artists. As an Ayrshire girl, who attended Kilmarnock Academy almost five decades after Robert Colquhoun was a pupil in the late 1920s and early 1930s, I developed a love of art in the same rooms in which he was taught. A lifelong love of the Roberts ensued. The lockdown of 2020 offered Barr an opportunity to take a deep dive into their life and times.

‘I’d seen them mentioned in footnotes in books about Francis Bacon and Soho in the 1950s. In lockdown, I had time and energy to explore their art and their love affair. Scotland has a canon of great artists who are rightly famous, but the Roberts are not celebrated enough. They should be talked about in the same breath as Mackintosh, Eardley et al.’

Barr feels strongly that the pair’s ‘gayness’ played a large part in this omission. ‘The ugly truth of it is that it was illegal to be gay when they were alive and their lives were overshadowed by homophobia.’ Like Barr, the Roberts were from working-class backgrounds in small-town Scotland, navigating their sexuality against a backdrop of fear. Having met on their first day at Glasgow School Of Art in 1933, their talent was recognised by tutors as a single entity, something Barr weaves deftly into his narrative. They went on to blaze an often-messy trail after moving to London in 1942 and becoming an integral part of Soho’s art scene. 

Feted with spreads in Vogue magazine and filmed by a young Ken Russell, they exerted a palpable influence on Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and others. In the 1940s and 1950s, they enjoyed critical success with work being bought for collections such as New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. But heavy drinking and financial pressures led to early deaths for both. Colquhoun died of a heart attack in 1962, aged 47, preparing an exhibition which may have heralded their comeback. MacBryde moved to Ireland and was killed in a car accident outside a pub in 1966. All this, and much more besides is explored in Barr’s novel, an honest, tender, raw and affectionate portrayal of Robert and Bobby.

The Two Roberts is published by Canongate on Thursday 4 September, with author events at Glasgow School Of Art, Tuesday 9 September and The Portobello Bookshop, Edinburgh, Thursday 11 September; main picture: Kirsty Anderson.