Art review: What You See Is Where We're At

Published on Monday 7 December 2009 21:11

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, EDINBURGH ***

&#149 Roy Lichtenstein

IF MODERN means being of our time, how can something be both modern and historical? And how is it possible to go on being modern for 50 years? That is the paradox of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, founded 50 years ago this year. Its origins reflected the belief that at the beginning of the last century self-styled Modernism had shaken off the dust of history. A new art, it was herald of a new age.

Nor did the Scots come late to this belief. In 1903, Charles Rennie Mackintosh wrote of Modernism that it "is something vital, something good, the only possible art for all, and the highest achievement of our time". Mackintosh's own Modernist masterpiece, Glasgow School of Art, also celebrates its centenary this year. It is one of the earliest and most elegant statements of these radical new ideas; while Mackintosh's friend JD Fergusson was the only British artist to be fully part of the dramatic events that changed the face of art in Paris 100 years ago.

In 1938, a new kind of gallery for this new kind of art was mooted by Stanley Cursiter, director of the National Gallery. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had started very modestly just nine years earlier. Cursiter's proposed institution was to be a powerhouse for contemporary art in Scotland.

The war intervened, however. It was 20 years before his idea bore fruit, and when it did, the gallery's first keeper, Douglas Hall, had immediately to face the paradox of combining history and the present: was the new gallery to be a historical collection of Modern Art (upper case), by then already history, or was it for modern art (lower case) as it evolved? How was it to relate to art in Scotland in the present; and was it also to tell the story of modern art here? Over the years the gallery has tried to cover all these things, matching a contemporary exhibition programme with the gradual build-up of a historical collection which is now large and patchy, yet internationally significant. Its relationship to living art in Scotland has been the weakest bit. Recently, the Turner Prize generation have been given space, but the previous generation missed out badly. Until recently, Ian Hamilton Finlay was represented only by works on paper, and far from having representative collections of major contemporaries such as Elizabeth Blackadder, Ken Currie, or Will Maclean, if they are represented at all, it is only in a perfunctory way.

The Gallery of Modern Art began in Inverleith House, a Georgian domestic building. Twenty-five years later it moved to its current home, the former John Watson's School in Belford Road. Fifteen years after that move, the Dean Gallery opened on the other side of the road. It was a former orphanage, while John Watson's was a school for fatherless children. I don't think this legacy of deprivation met by charitable intent has affected the way the galleries have evolved. Nevertheless, neither a Georgian house, nor a Georgian institution would ever be first choice for a gallery of modern art. Indeed, Cursiter wanted a new building. He had a design and even a site in mind. In the late 1970s, when "dishing the Nats" became a priority for Westminster in advance of the 1979 referendum, money miraculously became available for Scottish projects. Some was used to build the gloomy Scottish basement for the National Gallery at the Mound. According to the late Colin Thompson, NGS director at the time, there was also money for a new Gallery of Modern Art on Cursiter's chosen site, but the opportunity was missed. So the SNGMA still works in an architectural straitjacket, just as it did when it first opened in the small domestic rooms of Inverleith House.

The gallery has always worked in a financial straitjacket, too. In 1938, it would have been possible to form a representative collection of Modernism with limited means. Twenty years later, modern masterpieces had become classics with prices to match. Nevertheless, some important early acquisitions were made, the small but lovely Cubist painting The Candlestick by Braque, bought in 1976, for instance, and Picasso's still-life with fish, Les Soles, bought in 1967. Less conventional was the purchase of pictures such as Otto Dix's Girl on a Fur in 1980 and, in the same year, Roy Lichtenstein's Pop masterpiece In the Car. Nevertheless, the SNGMA might have remained a very poor relation of other galleries of the kind, if it had not been for the acquisition of Eduardo Paolozzi's studio, then of the Keiller and Penrose collections, and more recently of Anthony d'Offay's collection. With Paolozzi's gift, the SNGMA became at a stroke the central collection for one of the most significant artists to come out of Scotland in the last century. Closely linked, the Penrose and Keiller collections gave the gallery a major body of Surrealist work, while the d'Offay collection includes some of the most celebrated, if not necessarily the best, art of the past 40 years.

For 48 of the 50 years of its existence, the gallery had only two directors (formerly called keepers), Douglas Hall and his successor, Richard Calvocoressi. The present director, Simon Groom, took over only two years ago. The complete rehang of the gallery that marks the anniversary is his first chance to make his mark. It was exciting, he said, bringing a fresh eye to such a big collection. It does feel fresh and his approach is imaginative too.

There is a room devoted to still-life, for instance, which includes Chardin, Peploe, William Nicholson, Braque and Morandi. (Very welcome, that break in the artificial chronological boundary between the SNGMA and the NGS.) A room devoted to the figure has two paintings by Francis Bacon alongside a Lucien Freud and a wonderful late Picasso on loan. Joan Eardley and William Johnstone hang alongside Auerbach and Kossoff in a room on the theme of paint. Paolozzi appears in several places and looks stronger every time, especially in the richest parts of the hang, two corridors devoted respectively to drawing and to collage. This is how the Scottish collection should work, presented as part of the wider story of European art. (We should see it that way at the Mound too, but we don't.)

Yet, a richer mix would have reached out to the public much better. There is no Gillies here, no Ian Hamilton Finlay, and in a room devoted to Lger and Beckman it would have been right to include John Bellany, so much indebted to Beckman. Upstairs, on the theme of colour, JD Fergusson's La Terrasse, Caf d'Harcourt and an exquisite little Peploe hang beside works by masters of colour Bonnard and Delaunay. It is illuminating, but leaving out a proper display of the Colourists was bound to cause a furore, as indeed it did. That elephant trap would have been avoided if this initial display had been geared more carefully to meeting people's expectations.

Commitment to contemporary art is admirable too, but need so much space be given to all 60 of Douglas Gordon's silly faces with cut-out eyes, when his tedious list of names of everyone he has ever met already fills the stairwell, its height matching his ego?

The central room is taken up with a pretty banal installation by Martin Boyce that suggests he has been looking over Toby Paterson's shoulder and hasn't fully understood what he has seen. Although his plans are evidently still too fluid to be published here, Simon Groom assures me that over the next 12 months, room by room, the whole display will entirely change. As it does, all our criticisms will be met and all the omissions made good. I look forward to that very much.

&#149 Until 28 February

CRITIC'S CHOICE

The End of the Line – Attitudes in Drawing, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until 10 January

IS DRAWING making a comeback? The End of the Line takes work by 11 artists to argue that it is; that although very few young artists learn to draw, nevertheless drawing is alive and well. The exhibition is at the Fruitmarket. Go along and make up your own mind.

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