Following the huge success of GENERATION, the nationwide celebration of 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland which took over the whole of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for much of 2014, the Gallery is now planning a major rehang of masterpieces from its impressive permanent collection. The display will include four works by William Turnbull which were recently acquired by the Gallery through the Henry and Sula Walton Fund, with support from the Art Fund.
20th Century: Masterpieces of Scottish and European Art will feature important works from both British and European artists, and is set to explore the role of creativity as artists adapted and responded to events of the most rapidly-evolving and tumultuous century in human history. Demonstrating the vital links between artistic communities across the UK and mainland Europe, the display will trace and celebrate the major developments in twentieth-century art, from expressionism and cubism, to abstraction and Pop Art.
Crucially, some of the best of modern Scottish art will be placed alongside the work of modern European masters in an effort to examine the importance of international and local contexts.
For example, in the first room work by French artist Édouard Vuillard shares space with the Scottish Colourists JD Fergusson, Samuel Peploe and FCB Cadell, as well as Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s The Mysterious Garden (1911), while the final room will feature both Glasgow-born artist Steven Campbell’s Elegant Gestures of the Drowned after Max Ernst (1986) and Silenzioso Sangue (1979/85), by Italian painter Mimmo Paladino.
Major mainstays of the collection – such AS Pablo Picasso’s The Soles (1940) and Figure Study I (1945-46) by Francis Bacon – will be on show, as will Oskar Kokoschka’s Self-Portrait as a Degenerate Artist (1937), a long-term loan from a private collection. They will be joined by a number of new and recent additions, including For Sale (1961), the first work by New Zealand-born Pop artist Billy Apple (b.1935) to enter the collection.
There will also be a memorial display celebrating the work of the Scottish sculptor, painter and printmaker William Turnbull, who died in 2012. Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922 and, like other artists of his generation, spent a number of years in Paris, where he met some of the century’s greatest artists, including Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi. Turnbull’s work ranges from delicate bronzes such as Heavy Insect (1949) to the large, totemic sculpture Night (1962-63), which combines carved rosewood and cast bronze elements. These will be shown alongside a group of important works, including the paintings Untitled (Aquarium) (1950) and 15-1958 (1958), and two bronze sculptures, Aquarium (1949) and Acrobat (1951), acquired by the Gallery in 2014 through the Henry and Sula Walton Fund, with assistance from the Art Fund. Also on show for the first time will be 23 works on paper – ink, watercolour and chalk drawings – which have been presented by the artist’s family through the Art Fund.
In addition the Gallery has recently been gifted three significant paintings by the Scottish Colourist painter FCB Cadell (1883-1937). They have been presented by members of the Ford family, in honour of Sir Patrick Ford (1880-1945), who supported the artist’s visit to Venice in 1910. All three works were painted during this trip, which proved to be a pivotal moment in the artist’s career.
It was in the north-eastern Italian city that Cadell’s handling of paint became looser and more expressive, and he experimented with increasingly vivacious colours, a decision which influenced much of his subsequent art. The new acquisitions, all flooded by intense sunlight, are On the Canal, Venice, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice and From the Calcina Hotel.
Keith Hartley, Deputy Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “The display of the Gallery’s permanent collection will show the range, depth and quality of what has been collected over the last 55 years, enabling us to tell some of the key stories of modern art and its development. Scottish art has played a distinguished role in these stories and it is fitting therefore that it should be shown in a truly European context.”
From 21 February 2015
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission: Free
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