richard demarco at the Signet library

celebrating

75 years of

the edinburgh international festival

2 August 2022

2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the birth of the Edinburgh International Festival, and we are delighted to share in the celebrations at the Signet Library with a man who is undoubtedly one of the great figures in European and Scottish art, Richard Demarco.

Richard Demarco was born in Edinburgh in 1930. At the centre of his hugely influential and international career has been his steady belief in the power of the arts to bring peace and healing between the nations. This was the principle that gave birth to the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and it has been a guiding principle to Richard throughout his lifetime.

Richard was the creator of the Demarco Gallery, a founder of the Traverse Theatre and Traverse Gallery. Richard’s career will always be profoundly associated with that of his great friend and collaborator, Joseph Beuys and it was his inspirational curation of the ground-breaking Strategy: Get Arts exhibition in Edinburgh in 1970 that brought Beuys to Scotland for the very first time. Richard is one of the greatest creative and driving forces in the history of the Edinburgh International Festival and has attended every single Festival since 1947.

Richard Demarco’s inspirational revival and reinterpretation of the artist’s path as The Road to Meikle Seggie has been the foundational idea behind a long series of cross-continental collaborations between artists from every part of Europe to Scotland, building artistic conversations across even such boundaries as the Iron Curtain.

Festival 75 will take as its centrepiece A Conversation with Richard Demarco at the Signet Library where Richard will discuss his life and career and reflect on the astonishing 75 year journey of the Edinburgh International Festival. This will be accompanied by an exhibition drawn from Richard Demarco’s remarkable archive of Festival programmes, literature and other material.

The Edinburgh International Festival was born in the aftermath of the Second World War to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” in Scotland and Europe, healing the wounds of conflict through the language of the arts. Its founders, the manager of Glyndebourne Rudolph Bing, Lady Rosebery, Audrey Mildmay and the theatre director Sir Tyrone Guthrie formed the idea for the Festival during the dark days of 1944. Convinced that a broken Europe’s pre-war arts festivals would be impossible to recreate for many years, a British centre was sought which was the right size and provided an appropriate backdrop. Rudolph Bing had been the director of the Salzburg Festival in peacetime, and now Edinburgh Castle brought back those memories to him. The idea for the festival was enthusiastically received by the then Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir John Falconer. The rest is history.