Colourist puts gallery in frame for record visitors

The first major show in a public gallery devoted to the work of Colourist painter FCB Cadell in more than 70 years looks set to be one of the biggest draws in the history of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The exhibition, which opens on Saturday with some 80 works by the Edinburgh artist, kicks off an annual series on the Colourists, the popular group of four Scottish painters who worked in the early decades of the 20th century.

Gallery staff are watching to see whether the Cadell show breaks a record 70,000 people who visited the former Dean Gallery, now known as Modern Two, for a group exhibition on the Scottish Colourists staged more than a decade ago. That exhibition later travelled to the Royal Academy in London.

Edinburgh art dealer Guy Peploe, grandson of Cadell’s fellow Colourist and close friend SJ Peploe, said yesterday: “I would expect a tremendous response. This is the biggest commitment the national galleries have shown to the Colourists since 2000.”

Cadell has a more traditional, painterly style, far from cutting-edge contemporary art of the kind lionised by modern art galleries or Turner Prize norminations. Mr Peploe said it had needed a “change in the genetic code” of the galleries to devote a major show to the Scottish artist.

“We should congratulate them on having done this,” he said.

Cadell lived from 1883-1937. Born and raised in Edinburgh, he trained in France as a young man, returning to work from a studio in George Street and live at several addresses in the city. He died of cancer in penury, struggling to sell his paintings in the closing years of the Depression, but last year one of his pictures of Venice sold for more than £500,000, a record.

The exhibition, which runs until March, matches his popular Iona landscapes with modern photographs of the places he painted, from Iona Abbey to beaches and bays, and ranges from self-portraits to Edinburgh interiors. It charts the radical change in his style after the First World War, during which he served in the Somme, from impressionistic work to sharp modern, art deco colours and lines.

The show includes many works that have never been shown in public, mostly from private collections across the UK, and also features Cadell family heirlooms that can be seen in his best-known pictures, from the silver tea sets in The Orange Blind to an 18th century Chinese bowl in The Blue Fan.

Curator Alice Strang is preparing work for two shows to follow, with Peploe, probably the best-known of the group, next year and JD Fergusson in 2013. She praised Cadell’s bold use of blocks of colour and composition as a truly modern “disciplined and controlled” style.

Simon Groom, the galleries’ director of modern and contemporary art, said: “The Colourist show in 2000 was our most popular exhibition, so there is an appetite and an interest. Given it’s the first major Cadell show almost since his death, and given how extraordinary he is as a painter, then all these things should appeal.”