The Main Event: Another World

No, I wasn't performing an audacious and unsavoury raid on the men's loos, just watching the installation team at work on one of the defining artworks of 20th-century art, Marcel Duchamp's notorious Fountain, the piece of sanitary ware passed off as an artwork that was to change the face of art for ever.

This artist's grubby joke has become the stuff of high culture, as visitors to the Dean Gallery this summer will discover. Duchamp's Fountain will be the first thing that they see in Another World, a massive and suitably cluttered exhibition celebrating the gallery's own world-class collection of Dada and Surrealist art, with some prestigious loans thrown in for good measure.

"It looks quite sculptural," laughs Patrick Elliott, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, "but Duchamp didn't see it as an artwork in that sense. When he first submitted it to an open exhibition in 1917 (the work on display is actually an authorised replica from 1964 on loan from the Tate] I think it was set up really to antagonise the selection committee, to stretch the definition of art. For Duchamp, art became about subversion, about appropriation. He took it in a new direction, but it took some time for everyone else to catch up."

But catch up we have. Dada and Surrealism, once scorned as subversion, showmanship and superficiality, is recognised as the art that has come closest to explaining our own century.

Sex, death, bad behaviour, men's toilets, all the stuff that had been cleaned up, repressed and hidden for generations came tumbling out in the open. Born out of the turbulence and turmoil of the First World War, bolstered by the writings of Freud on the unconscious and the social conflicts of the modern age, it is credited with giving birth to everything from modern advertising to Monty Python.

Messy, audacious, brainy, full of puns and tricks and traps and at times as puerile and simplistic as a schoolboy joke, Surrealist art may have changed the way we see the world forever, and paradoxically this specialist stuff is now absolutely mainstream. "I came to art through Dali and Magritte," says Elliott. "It gets hold of your imagination, takes you off to places. There's obviously lots of stuff for the academics, but anyone can grasp it once you know it's about dreams and nightmares."

And what nightmares. There are works such as Max Ernst's nightmare paintings of gloomy forests and giant sprawling plant life, responding to the darkness of the European politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Or there's Magritte's Black Flag, an oppressive collection of flying machines that might have been a response to the horrors of Guernica.

Death was an absolute obsession, from Magritte's tiny painting of a female body topped by a skull to a spectacular loan of a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Head/Skull, which manages to be both simultaneously. But the Surrealists also loved jokes, and their playfulness is apparent everywhere, from the elaborate hoaxes and wordplay of Duchamp to Dali's comical play on forms.

So how did the buttoned-up Presbyterian culture of contemporary Scotland come to have a world-class collection of such unbuttoned art? From the dreamscapes of Dali and the suburban surrealism of Magritte to four important paintings by Mir, every room in the Dean is packed with internationally significant art.

Much of it came to the gallery through the acquisition of works from the collection of British artist and collector Roland Penrose, together with a 1995 bequest from Gabrielle Keiller, a wealthy champion golfer who married into the Dundee jam family.

For Elliott, the show has been a chance not only to highlight the spectacular strengths of art made in centres such as Paris, New York or Berlin but the work of later and lesser known Surrealists from Britain. He believes that much of it is still underrated. What unites these figures with their sophisticated European cousins?

"These are all artists confident enough about their imagination to send it out into the world," he explains. And it's a confidence that the galleries clearly share. What has he learned about the collection by putting on the show? "Just how good it really is," he quips immediately, and with that he's off to check once more on that porcelain.v

Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Saturday until 10 January. www.nationalgalleries.org

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, July 4, 2010.