Over the last few years we have become accustomed to exhibitions, some of them not unimportant, that open without publication of a proper catalogue. Instead we have had to make do with publications that ‘accompany’ the exhibitions. Some of these, though no true substitute for a catalogue, are excellent. Some less so. The new show at Charleston in Lewes features the work of Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, always known as The Two Roberts. There is no catalogue, no accompanying publication, not even a single postcard. Instead we are served up with what amounts effectively to a book launch for Damian Barr’s new novel The Two Roberts, a fanciful fiction which the author fondly imagines to be a meaningful recreation of the life and times of the two artists.

Damian Barr is the curator of the exhibition. According to his appearance on Radio 2’s Book Club the curatorship was not his own idea. Notwithstanding his book, he is a puzzling choice as, rather disarmingly, he admits that he had never even heard of Colquhoun and MacBryde until just a few years ago. Anyway, however the exhibition came about it’s well worth a visit. My first thoughts were that the works were rather too much of their time, but a second visit proved increasingly rewarding and the paintings grew on me significantly, especially those of MacBryde.

My primary objection is that Barr seems far less interested in the work than in the story of two ‘gay, working-class Scottish artists’ (this formulation often repeated) meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art in 1933 and seemingly inseparable until Colquhoun’s death in September 1962 at the age of 47. This narrative obviously means a great deal to Barr, but it seems that though they lived together as a couple they were not particularly public about their homosexuality. Barr would perhaps say that pre-1967 they couldn’t be. But I don’t think that that is the point.

The artist Sven Berlin spent a lot of time with them when they visited him in Cornwall but did not realize they were gay until later. MacBryde once described a meeting they had with Sir Kenneth Clark at the National Gallery. Clark, starting to talk to Colquhoun about modern art, said ‘you hear about it, the way you hear about homosexuality, but you never come across it’. And their friend Ian Fleming, who taught them at Glasgow and whose portrait of The Two Roberts is in the Charleston show, once denied that they were gay, before adding ‘at least not in Scotland’.

This may refer in part to the fact that Colquhoun’s father disowned Robert in 1946 after confirmation of the gay relationship he had with MacBryde. This is not mentioned by Barr. He does exhibit some press cuttings about Colquhoun, apparently kept in secret by his mother throughout her son’s life. This is touching as far as it goes, but I still find the statement by his mother printed on one of the large montage panels in the Colquhoun memorial exhibition at the Establishment Club in Greek Street, slightly guarded, albeit splendidly generous to MacBryde. She wrote ‘Bobby met Robert Macbryde the first day he attended The Glasgow School. They became such close friends. What could I do about it? Why should I? And where would Bobby be now without MacBryde. Robert MacBryde did a lot for Bobby’.

But, as I have said, the show is well worth visiting for its artistic merits alone.