Art

It is a time of change for many of Scotland’s art spaces. This year has seen the Ingleby Gallery open in its fine new space in Barony Street, and the high-profile opening of the V&A in Dundee. Next year brings the closure of the Fruitmarket Gallery for redevelopment and new premises for Edinburgh Printmakers at Fountainbridge. Meanwhile, Glasgow’s Common Guild has just announced that it is to leave Woodlands Terrace for pastures new (and as yet undisclosed).

One of Scotland’s leading artists has said he hopes a new statue of Charles Rennie Mackintosh will help Glasgow move on from the devastating fire which destroyed the celebrated architect’s best known building.

Eduardo Paolozzi and Andy Warhol were contemporaries. Born in 1928, Warhol was just four years the junior. Both were sons of first generation immigrants, but though that doesn’t seem to be refelcted in Warhol’s work, it was definitive in Paolozzi’s. One of his major works, Manuscript of Monte Cassino, is, for instance, a profound rumination on time, displacement and the dislocation of war. It is also monumental. There is nothing remotely comparable in Warhol’s art which seems instead determinedly to reflect the transience and immediacy of contemporary culture. That doesn’t make it any less significant, but it does suggest how much difference there is between the two. Nevertheless the exhibition Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi: I want to be a machine starts from the proposition that they had a lot in common. Elaborating this idea, it is certainly a rich show of the work of both.

“She devoted her life to preserving and cataloguing the cherished age-old traditions of the Hebrides in photographs and written documents.” So began The Scotsman’s obituary for Margaret Fay Shaw, published in December 2004 following her death at the age of 101. “Had she not persisted,” the obituary continues, “an entire slice of Scottish culture could have disappeared.”

The Talbot Rice Gallery is home to two shows offering a female response to gender inequality. By Susan Mansfield

The founders of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebrations are to launch a new week-long arts festival across the city’s Old and New Towns in 2019 to mark the birthday of Robert Burns.

In May 1931, an international conference was held in Eastbourne, focusing on how best to assess and track the ability of schoolchildren. Scotland, England, France, Germany, Switzerland and the USA were all represented, and at the end of the conference it was decided that each nation should conduct a different research exercise and report back. Scotland was tasked with trialling an intelligence test, and so, in the summer of 1932, all the children in Scotland born in 1921 – 87,498 of them aged ten or 11 – were tested. The exercise was repeated 15 years later, in 1947, with a new set of children. The tests were then put away and forgotten, although by one account they were invoked in the arguments that led to the abolition of the Eleven-Plus.

Buying art can be an intimidating prospect, but it doesn't have to be. Gone are the days of being sniffed at if you didn't know your Monets from your Michelangelos. When it comes to filling your home with pieces that make you smile, there are a few criteria but none, you'll be glad to know, have anything to do with impressing anyone other than yourself.

If any proof were needed that time flies, we have it in the fact that the National Galleries of Scotland’s NOW series of contemporary group shows has just revealed its fourth iteration, marking the halfway point in the three-year programme. So far, these shows – each one focusing on a single artist and radiating out in a range of directions – have proved surprising and revelatory, never pandering to the predictable. NOW 4 is no exception. Here, the central artist is Monster Chetwynd (formerly Marvin Gaye, Spartacus and Lali Chetwynd). She sets the tone for the show straight away, having designed wallpaper for the main corridor which splices together images from the NGS collection. Against this, and in good-natured argument with it, are prints from Goya’s Los Disparates series, because, for all its wacky contemporaneity, this NOW show is in more obvious dialogue with art history than any of its predecessors.

Children are naturally creative and love any opportunity to paint, scribble, draw, cut and stick - even if that’s on surfaces you would prefer they steered well clear from.

A bronze statue of Mohamed Salah unveiled yesterday at an international youth 
gathering in Egypt has been criticised for its poor resemblance to the prolific Liverpool striker.

Work from soldiers in the trenches gives a unique window into the experiences of those on the front line in the First World War