WE aren’t too familiar with early American painting, and the tradition of touring huge canvases has died out, but this collection brings both together, showing how the emerging nation was learning to describe and define itself

MANY years ago the American abstract expressionist painter, Robert Motherwell told me an amusing anecdote about Mondrian. When the Dutch painter first arrived in New York in 1940, Motherwell and another young painter, William Baziotes, were delegated to show him around.

A MASSIVE bronze hand, foot and ankle and some scattered stones sit in front of St Mary’s Cathedral at the top of Leith Walk in Edinburgh. Thousands of people walk past them every day, but I suspect not many feel much curiosity.

TO ADAPT a famous headline about a small earthquake in Chile: “2013, obscure artist’s bicentenary, few celebrate.”