• What you see is where you\'re at, part 2 from 27 March 2010

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHERE YOU’RE AT
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Part 2 from the 27 March 2010
Admission Free

The next stage of the re-hang celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with eight dynamic new displays:

• New displays of Scottish Colourist and of German and Austrian Expressionist work
• First Scottish showing of key Ian Hamilton Finlay work from ARTIST ROOMS collection
• New and recent work by Scottish artist Callum Innes
• First Scottish showing of internationally acclaimed contemporary artist Fiona Tan
• New display Young Scottish Painters highlighting emerging contemporary talent
• Selection of works by former Director of the Gallery, Douglas Hall
• New work by 2009 John Watson Prize winner Jacob Bee

This spring will see the opening of the second major wave of What you see is where you’re at, a programme of dynamic changing displays that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.   New rooms will include the first Scottish showing of a key piece by Ian Hamilton Finlay from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, new work by Callum Innes, a showcase for emerging talent from Scotland, and a fresh look at the Scottish Colourists.  These eight new displays form part of the innovative re-hang launched in November 2009, and will join works already on show, including outdoor pieces by Nathan Coley and Martin Creed, a spectacular installation by Douglas Gordon, and works from Henri Matisse to Dan Flavin,.  

Central to the second phase of the re-hang is The Intimate Colourist which will explore the small-scale work of the Scottish Colourists including pieces by F. C. B. Cadell, J. D. Fergusson, G. L. Hunter and S. J. Peploe. This selection of over 40 works will situate vibrant first impressions of landscapes, such as Peploe’s Veules-les-Roses next to Cadell’s rapidly composed sketches of soldiers on leave.  The Intimate Colourist will be a revelation to many, and uncover a more personal side to these well loved artists’ works.

A new selection from the SNGMA’s renowned collection of German and Austrian Expressionist art will bring together masterpieces by the German artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach with five superb paintings by the Austrian Expressionist artist, Oskar Kokoschka.  This display will also incorporate Kokoschka’s animated portrait of The 14th Duke of Hamilton with his wife the Duchess of Hamilton which is on loan from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery whilst it is closed for refurbishment.

The largest room of the Gallery will be taken-up with a spectacular installation of Sailing Dinghy (1996) by the late Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Sailing Dinghy comprises a real sailing boat complete with rudder and sails, sitting land-locked on the gallery floor. Numbers affixed to the boat refer the viewer to a short poem printed on the gallery wall, which evokes the power and movement of the vessel. This is the first Scottish showing of this important work from the hugely popular ARTIST ROOMS collection.

What you see is where you are at continues to showcase the best in contemporary art.  In the upper galleries a display of paintings by Callum Innes, including new works, will be shown alongside two rooms curated by the artist, which brings together works by Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Ellsworth Kelly, Anna Barriball and Imi Knoebel. The series of rooms present a unique opportunity to enjoy the dynamic dialogue between an artist’s own work and what he values in the work of others.

In the lower galleries a hauntingly beautiful film by the internationally acclaimed artist, Fiona Tan will be shown.  Downside Up, an early work from 2002, is an evocative film in which an ordinary street scene is transformed through the simplest of means into an extraordinarily rich poetic vision.  The artist’s presentation at the Dutch pavilion was one of the highlights of the 2009 Venice Biennale, and this display marks Tan’s first showing in Scotland.

Alongside these established artists will be the first in a series of exhibitions highlighting emerging contemporary talent.  Young Scottish Painters will present a changing programme of six-week solo shows that will introduce the work of some of the most exciting young artists in Scotland.  Beginning this series is the abstract painter Alex Dordoy (b.1985), followed by Sophie Mackfall (b.1984) and Alan Stanners (b.1985).

The second phase of What you see is where you’re at will also explore the Gallery’s history.  Since its foundation in 1960, the Gallery of Modern Art has had only three directors (or Keepers, as they were originally called) and the collection is heavily indebted to the personal vision of these individuals.  The Gallery’s first director from 1960 to 1986, Douglas Hall, has been invited to curate a display of works that he is particularly proud of having acquired for the Gallery’s collection, which include paintings by artists such as Fernand Léger, Chaim Soutine, L.S.Lowry, Joan Eardley, and William Johnstone.

To complement the historical, Jacob Bee, winner of the John Watson Prize 2009 (given annually to a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art) will create a site-specific audio installation, which will explore the location and history of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s building and site. 

Throughout the anniversary year the displays will change on a rotating basis. As well as showcasing new displays from the collection, this dynamic programme will also consist of new commissions from many leading Scottish and international artists. Details will be announced throughout 2010. 

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-

NOTES TO EDITORS

ARTIST ROOMS
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Sailing Dinghy forms part of the programme of ARTIST ROOMS, the collection of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland for the nation. ARTIST ROOMS was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS is being shared with museums and galleries throughout the UK with thanks to the support of independent charity The Art Fund, and within Scotland, the Scottish Government.

Following the success of 2009, 21 museums and galleries across the UK in 2010 will be showing 25 ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions and displays from the collection created by the curator and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008.  ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government has been devised to enable this collection held by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.  To find out more information about ARTIST ROOMS on Tour please visit www.artfund.org/artistrooms.  To see the full ARTIST ROOMS collection please visit www.tate.org.uk/artistrooms and www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms

• Diane Arbus

PRESS VIEW: Thursday 11 March, 11.30 am – 1.00 pm

DIANE ARBUS
ARTIST ROOMS
13 March – 13 June 2010
DEAN GALLERY, Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS; 0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission free

The striking and profoundly original work of legendary American photographer Diane Arbus will be the subject of a major exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh this spring.  Diane Arbus, which is part of the 2010 programme of ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions, will bring together some 70 black-and-white photographs, spanning the artist’s career from the mid-1950s until her untimely death in 1971.  This outstanding selection of Arbus’s images was put together by the donor of the ARTIST ROOMS collection, Anthony d’Offay, in collaboration with the artist’s estate, and is one of the finest collections of her work in existence.  The exhibition will also feature a small number of additional loans from a private collection, including an early self-portrait, taken when Arbus was pregnant with her first child in 1945.

ARTIST ROOMS is the new national collection created by the curator and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and NGS in February 2008. Artist Rooms on Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government has been devised to enable this collection to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.  Following its successful launch in 2009, 21 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing 25 ARTIST ROOMS in 2010. To find out more information about ARTIST ROOMS on Tour please visit www.artfund.org/artistrooms.  To see the full ARTIST ROOMS collection please visit www.tate.org.uk/artistrooms and www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms

Diane Arbus will be the first exhibition in Scotland to be devoted to the photographer’s work in almost 40 years.  Occupying the top floor of the Dean Gallery, it will feature some of her most celebrated images, including Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970, and Young man and his pregnant wife in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C 1965.  It will also include her lesser-known early work in 35 mm, as well as a very rare portfolio of original prints, A box of ten photographs, which Arbus produced shortly before her suicide in 1971.  This includes perhaps her most iconic image, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967.

Diane Arbus is one of the most significant photographers of the twentieth century, an influential figure whose compellingly honest style of photography paved the way for the work of many contemporary photographers and artists.  Her distinctive approach is marked by the directness of her portraiture, and by her ability to find the familiar in the strange, and discover the unusual in the ordinary.  Arbus undertook ‘to photograph everybody’, including circus and freak-show performers, transvestites, nudists and people with learning disabilities.  The resulting portraits are bold and frank, but they also reflect the level of trust that Arbus worked hard to establish with her subjects, creating a complex, collaborative relationship that underpins the images, and invests them with much of their power. 

Arbus was born in New York in 1923, and began taking photographs in partnership with her husband, Allan Arbus, in the 1940s, working for fashion magazines such as Glamour and Vogue.  It was not until the 1950s that she began to work seriously on her personal interests, after studying with the Austrian photographer Lisette Model, an experience that transformed her work.  During the 1960s, Arbus received two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship grants, which allowed her to pursue projects such as her study of American Rites, Manners and Customs, and in 1967 she was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.  A year after her death in 1971, Arbus was the first American photographer to have her work selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious showcase for contemporary art in the world. 

In the late 1950s Arbus was experimenting with different techniques and looking for projects that interested her.  She worked in many locations around New York, and followed in the tradition of American street photography, candidly photographing her surroundings with a 35mm camera.  It was at this point that she became drawn to people who worked at, and visited, the amusement parks in Palisades Park and Coney Island, representatives of a subculture or underworld that remained a rich source of fascination for her.  The exhibition will include an early example, Fire eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, N.J. 1956, as well as more iconic images such as Albino sword swallower at a carnival, Md. 1970, taken much later in Arbus’s career. 

The latter was originally commissioned for Esquire, the first magazine to publish Arbus’s work, in 1960.  While she had mixed feelings about her commercial assignments, a period of imaginative magazine publishing in the 1960s created opportunities for Arbus to work on projects that aligned with her own personal interests.  Well-known images such as A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.C 1966 and A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. 1966 were made for an article on ‘American Families’ published in the UK by The Sunday Times Magazine.

These images are typical of Arbus’s distinctively frontal, square-format portraiture, a style which developed after she began using a 2 ¼ inch, twin-lens Rolleiflex camera in 1962.  Arbus often placed her sitters in the centre of the picture frame,  intensifying the sense of an interaction or collaboration between her and the subjects she sought out.  She photographed many of her subjects in New York’s public parks (Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962; Woman with a locket in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965), but many of her portraits are of people she met, befriended and then photographed, with striking intimacy, at home, usually in their bedrooms (Naked man being a woman N.Y.C. 1968). 

Arbus was deeply interested in gender and identity, and often photographed transvestites and transsexuals (Two female impersonators backstage, N.Y.C 1961; A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966).  These works also reflect her broader interest in the rituals and customs of self-contained groups or mini-societies, such as ethnic minorities (Puerto Rican women with a beauty mark, N.Y.C. 1965; Jewish couple dancing, N.Y.C. 1963); nudists (Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. 1963); wealthy socialites (Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in an evening gown, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. 1968); and the residents of institutions for people with learning disabilities (as seen in a series of untitled images from 1970-71).

Diane Arbus’s singularly humane and compellingly personal approach to her subjects helped to redefine documentary photography, bridging the gap between this most accessible medium and the ‘higher’ arts.  Her work has been described as an uncritical ‘celebration of things as they are’, which explores the extraordinary variety that can be found in the lives, emotions and appearances of ordinary people.  This exhibition will offer an excellent overview of a truly remarkable body of the work.

Following its showing in Edinburgh, Diane Arbus will be at Nottingham Contemporary from 24 July to 26 September 2010, as part of ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund.  The Talbot Rice Gallery, the public art gallery of The University of Edinburgh, will be the venue for another ARTIST ROOMS display which opens this spring.  Work by the American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer will be on show at the Talbot Rice from 27 March until 15 May 2010.

-ENDS-

For further information and images please contact: pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
Tel: 0131 624 6247 / 6314 / 6332 / 6325

Notes to Editors:

This exhibition forms part of the programme of ARTIST ROOMS, a new collection of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland for the nation.  The collection, which comprises more than 730 works, was assembled by Anthony d’Offay, whose London galleries played a key role in the promotion and understanding of twentieth-century art in the UK over a period of more than 30 years.  ARTIST ROOMS was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments.  The guiding principle for the creation of this national resource was the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. ARTIST ROOMS is being shared with museums and galleries throughout the UK thanks to the support of independent charity The Art Fund, and within Scotland, the Scottish Government. 

The Art Fund
The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections; campaigns on behalf of museums and their visitors; and promotes the enjoyment of art. It is funded from public donations and has 80,000 members.  Since 1903 the charity has helped museums and galleries all over the UK secure 860,000 works of art for their collections.  Recent achievements include: helping secure Titian’s Diana and Actaeon for the National Galleries of Scotland and The National Gallery in February 2009 with a grant of £1 million; helping secure Anthony d’Offay’s collection, ARTIST ROOMS for Tate and National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008 with a grant of £1 million – and providing an additional £500,000 for the collection to be toured throughout the UK in 2009 and 2010; and running the Buy a Brushstroke public appeal which raised over £550,000 to keep Turner’s Blue Rigi watercolour in the UK.  For more information contact the Press Office on 020 7225 4888 or visit www.artfund.org .  The Art Fund is a Registered Charity No. 209174

• NATIONAL GALLERIES ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP WITH THE HIGH MUSEUM IN ATLANTA

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is delighted to announce a major new partnership with The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The NGS will be sending a series of exhibitions over the next four years to Atlanta and to other institutions in the US to raise the profile of the NGS and its collection in North America. The NGS wants to attract attention to the world-class quality of its holdings and to broaden its international base of support. The National Galleries also hope to help raise awareness in the US of the importance of Scotland as a centre for the visual arts.
 
The first exhibition will be “Venetian Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland” and will comprise 13 paintings and 12 drawings from the NGS collection. The exhibition will showcase some of the highlights from the NGS including the newly acquired Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist and an Unidentified Male Saint and Venus Rising from the Sea by Titian; Lorenzo Lotto’s Virgin and Child with Saints Jerome, Peter, Francis and an Unidentified Female Saint; and Jacopo Tintoretto’s Christ Carried to the Tomb.
 
The exhibition will travel to the High Museum, Atlanta from 16 October 2010 to 2 January 2011 and then on to Minneapolis Institute of Arts (5 February to 1 May 2011) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (21 May to 14 August 2011).

This is the first exhibition in a series that will unfold over the next four years. Further touring exhibitions highlighting differing aspects of the NGS collections are under development.
 
John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “While we have shown works from our collections in the past in the US, this is the first time that we have entered into a extended collaboration with an international partner. Through this partnership with the High we will be bringing works from our collections to a huge audience in different parts of North America and this will be a major boost to our international profile. The sustained relationship also provides a platform from which we hope to attract interest and support for our projects and activities back in Scotland.”

Michael E. Shapiro, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director of the High Museum of Art, said: “For centuries, these paintings have mesmerized the public and influenced generations of artists. In the 65 years that the Titians have been on public display in Edinburgh, people have made pilgrimages to Scotland to see them and other works in the National Galleries’ exquisite Venetian collection. Now, the people of Atlanta and the southeast region, as well as other parts of the U.S., can see these great works from the height of the Venetian Renaissance. With this exhibition, we hope to help raise awareness of how vital it is to keep masterpieces like these accessible to the public. It also continues our program of bringing great works of art from around the world to Atlanta and then to other cities across the U.S.”

Fiona Hyslop MSP, Minister for Culture and External Affairs: “This is the beginning of a significant partnership between NGS and their counterparts in North America.  The tour reflects the important role our national collections play in representing Scotland overseas.  It will undoubtedly increase interest in, not only these national treasures, but our wider cultural history and heritage.”

The High Museum in Atlanta has instigated other partnerships of this kind in recent years, most notably with the Louvre in Paris.
 
For further information and images please contact Patricia Convery on 0131 624 6325 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org  or  www.nationalgalleries.org

 
-ENDS-
 
Notes to Editors:

High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 12,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s Media Arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005, the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta. For more information about the High, please visit www.High.org.

The Woodruff Arts Center
The Woodruff Arts Center is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. The Woodruff is unique in that it combines four visual and performing arts divisions on one campus as one not-for-profit organization.  Opening in 1968, the Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art and Young Audiences.  To learn more about the Woodruff Arts Center, please visit www.woodruffcenter.org.

 
List of works to be included in Venetian Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland:

Paintings
 
Jacopo Bassano The Adoration of the Kings
Paris Bordon Venetian Women at their Toilet
Paris Bordon Rest on the Return from Egypt
Giovanni Cariani Portrait of a Young Woman as St Agatha
Lorenzo Lotto Virgin and Child with Saints
Jacopo Tintoretto Christ carried to the Tomb
Follower of Jacopo Tintoretto, Portrait of a Gentleman.
Titian Venus Anadyomene
Titian Diana and Actaeon (jointly owned with the National Gallery, London)
Titian Diana and Callisto (Bridgewater Loan)
Titian Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and an Unidentified Male Saint (Bridgewater Loan)
Paolo Veronese Mars and Venus
Paolo Veronese St Anthony Abbot as Patron of a Kneeling Donor
 
Drawings
Domenico Campagnola Landscape with Juno and Callisto
Battista Franco God the Father
Battista Franco The Baptism of Christ with Sts Bernardino of Siena and Francis
    Palma Giovane St Martin and the Beggar
  Palma Giovane Allegorical Figures of Painting and Sculpture (recto);
Annunciation and other figure studies (verso
Lorenzo Lotto Portrait of a Bearded Man)
Pordenone, The Continence of Scipio
Jacopo Tintoretto, A Man with Outstretched Arms
Titian (attributed to) A Composition of Three Figures
Palma Vecchio Self-portrait
Venetian School, Landscape with Wooded Bluffs and a Watermill
Paolo Veronese Studies for a Baptism of Christ
 
Acquisition of Diana and Actaeon
Diana and Actaeon was acquired for the nation by the NGS and the National Gallery in London in February 2009, following a large scale public and private fundraising campaign. The painting was bought for £50 million from the Duke of Sutherland with generous contributions from private and public donations, Scottish Government, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Monument Trust and The Art Fund, along with National Gallery, London and NGS funds.

• Sandford Award

National Galleries of Scotland Receives Sandford Award for Excellence in Heritage Education

The National Galleries of Scotland schools programme has been awarded the prestigious Sandford Award for Heritage Education. The Sandford Award, presented by the Duke of Wessex at a ceremony at Windsor Castle, is the only independent benchmarking of educational excellence in the heritage sector in the UK and recognises quality and excellence in educational services and facilities.

The entrants were assessed by a panel of independent Judges including OFSTED Inspectors, former head teachers, education consultants and heritage-property-based education officers.  The judges praised the National Galleries of Scotland for ‘a commitment to helping children explore the collections themselves and making them feel confident about their ideas about paintings and artists.’

The National Galleries of Scotland schools programme is an established part of the Galleries’ education activity and attracts thousands of pupils and teachers every year. Schools visitors to the National Galleries of Scotland are invited to investigate the Galleries collection, linking what they see to their own experiences. Working alongside artists and art historians in the gallery space pupils and teachers are encouraged to think creatively and independently. Guided visits usually focus on four or five artworks enabling visitors to explore the work fully through investigation, gallery-based activities and lively discussion. Pupils use transferable skills such as looking, describing, discussing, analysing and making; all of which contribute to the overall learning experience. Artworks are used to explore all subject areas creatively, promoting cross-curricular learning and helping children develop the four capacities of the Curriculum for Excellence.

The Sandford Award judge’s said: National Galleries Scotland offer a programme for schools which is accessible, welcoming and places the collections at the heart of all school activities and events. Central to their schools programmes is a commitment to helping children explore the collections themselves and making them feel confident about their ideas about paintings and artists. NGS schools programmes are developed to encourage learning how to look and enjoy what they see: Two comments stand out for me: a pupil saying that she had enjoyed looking at a painting because at first glance it looked dull and like something that you would just walk past, and another from a Cultural Coordinator saying that her group had been ‘ecstatic’ at the end of their visit with lots of ideas to take back to the classroom.

The Sandford Award Scheme currently encompasses 200 historic sites within the historical and cultural environments of the United Kingdom and Ireland and including historic houses, museums, galleries, cathedrals, places of worship, gardens, landscapes and historic artefacts.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-

• The Printmaker\'s Art

THE PRINTMAKER’S ART
20 February – 23 May 2010
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission free

A collection of iconic prints, by some of the finest European artists of the past 500 years, will be on show at the National Gallery of Scotland this spring.  The Printmaker’s Art will highlight the enormous skill of artists such as Rembrandt, Piranesi, Hogarth, Manet and Whistler, and will include some of the most beautiful and accomplished prints ever made.

Prints are made by drawing onto a surface such as a woodblock, metal plate or lithographic stone, and then transferring the image, using a variety of means, onto a separate sheet of paper.  Over the centuries, artists have exploited a diverse range of printmaking techniques to create an array of distinctive effects that cannot be achieved in any other medium.  In the process many great artists, such as Blake, Goya and Toulouse-Lautrec, have produced prints that are considered to be among their most brilliant and influential works.

Highlights of The Printmaker’s Art will include an impression dating from 1511 of Dürer’s celebrated woodcut The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Rembrandt’s tour-de-force etching, The Three Crosses.

The 30 works on display have been selected not only for their exquisite beauty, but also to trace the development of printmaking techniques over the centuries, and to demonstrate the sophisticated processes that led to their creation.  The Printmaker’s Art also showcases the breadth and variety of the Gallery’s world-class collection of prints.

ENDS
For further information and images, please call the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• Diana and Actaeon Scottish Tour Announcement

DIANA AND ACTAEON CELEBRATES ITS FIRST ANNIVERSARY

SCOTTISH TOUR PLANS ANNOUNCED

On the first anniversary of the nation’s acquisition of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the National Gallery in London are delighted to announce a tour of the painting to three venues in Scotland in 2010.
 
The painting will be on public display in Aberdeen Art Gallery from 28 May to 27 June, at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow from 1 July to 1 August and at the McManus Galleries, Dundee from 6 August to 5 September.

Fiona Hyslop, Scottish Minister for Culture, said:

“Increasing access to the nation’s cultural collections is very important to us, so I am pleased to see Diana and Actaeon is to be displayed in Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow.  I am sure the tour will not only attract visitors to the host venues; it will stimulate interest in other local museums and galleries.  This can only be a good thing, both in terms of the benefits of cultural participation to individuals and for the contribution such high profile exhibitions make to local economies.”

Margaret Hodge, Minister for Culture and Tourism said:

“I am really pleased that this picture will now be touring the country.  So many individuals and organisations worked together to save it for the nation; it is absolutely right – and thoroughly democratic - that it should now be seen and enjoyed by the widest possible audience.”

John Leighton, Director-General of the NGS said:

“The successful campaign to acquire Titian’s Diana and Actaeon brought one of the great masterpieces of Western art into public ownership. This tour will allow audiences across Scotland to experience the power and magic of this great painting at first hand.”

Dr. Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, London said:
 “Diana and Actaeon was acquired for the nation and the National Gallery in London hopes as wide an audience as possible will be able to enjoy it.  We are delighted that the painting will first tour Scotland, the home of the painting for so many years.  The National Gallery will announce a further tour to other parts of the United Kingdom when arrangements are finalised.”
Diana and Actaeon was acquired for the nation by the NGS and the National Gallery in London in February 2009, following a large scale public and private fundraising campaign. The painting was bought for £50 million from the Duke of Sutherland with generous contributions from private and public donations, Scottish Government, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Monument Trust and The Art Fund, along with National Gallery, London and NGS funds.

Diana and Actaeon has been seen by many thousands of people in London and Edinburgh during the past year. It is currently in London as part of a new display demonstrating Titian’s significant influence on his peers and on later paintings within the National Gallery’s collection, hanging alongside paintings by Cezanne, Rubens, Poussin, Claude, Constable and Titian’s The Death of Actaeon.

There have been numerous projects and events focusing on the picture throughout the past year. Picture in Focus: Diana & Actaeon is a cross-curricular education project for schools run in partnership by the NGS and the National Gallery in London - involving five Scottish high schools and ten UK secondary schools in the pilot stage, before a proposed national roll-out in 2011.

In Scotland Diana and Actaeon also takes prominence within school art tours and is the focus for music recitals, creative writing sessions and the subject for monthly life-drawing classes. In London the painting is the focus of regular Lunchtime and 10 Minute Talks, and will be the subject of Art Through Words (30 January 2010), a project for blind and partially sighted visitors.

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Comments from representatives of the touring venues:

Aberdeen City Council’s Vice Covener for Education, Culture and Sport, Martin Greig said: “I am truly delighted that this magnificent work by Titian is coming to Aberdeen. Diana and Actaeon is a beautiful picture of immense art historical significance. The display in Aberdeen Art Gallery is a fantastic opportunity for this important painting to be appreciated and admired by a wide audience. There is a great appetite for culture in the area and this exhibition will appeal to many.”

Bailie Liz Cameron, Chair of Culture and Sport Glasgow, said: “This summer Kelvingrove will be hosting the most important exhibition of the Glasgow Boys works ever to be staged. The addition of the Titian, thanks to our partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland, will only serve to increase Kelvingrove’s status as Scotland’s leading visitor attraction.”

Cllr Bob Duncan, Convenor for Leisure, Arts and Communities with Dundee City Council said:
“We are delighted to be hosting this prestigious national acquisition within the newly restored McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum. It is important that we bring the very best to the city to complement the nationally recognised collections we hold on behalf of the citizens of Dundee and indeed the nation. The National Galleries are to be congratulated on this initiative of bringing this work to the people of Scotland.”

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Diana and Actaeon by Titian was formerly part of the Bridgewater Collection; a collection of paintings on long term loan to the National Gallery of Scotland from the Duke of Sutherland since 1945.

The Galleries have also been granted the opportunity to buy a second painting - Diana and Callisto - for a similar amount by 2012.

ABOUT THE BRIDGEWATER COLLECTION
The Bridgewater Collection, currently on view at the National Galleries of Scotland, is the most important private collection of Old Master paintings on loan to an institution in the UK and counts among the most important art collections anywhere in the world.  The loan includes masterpieces by artists such as Raphael (3), Titian (4), Rembrandt (1) and Poussin (8). The pictures have been on continuous public view in the National Gallery of Scotland since the collection was placed there in 1945 by the then 5th Earl of Ellesmere, later 6th Duke of Sutherland. It forms the core of the National Gallery of Scotland’s world-famous displays of European art.

ABOUT DIANA AND ACTAEON
Diana and Actaeon is one of six large-scale mythologies inspired by the Roman poet Ovid that Titian painted for King Philip II of Spain. Titian began the picture and its companion Diana and Callisto in 1556, the year of Philip’s coronation. Spurred on by the prestige of royal patronage, he unleashed all his creativity to produce works of unprecedented beauty and inventiveness.

Titian worked for three years to perfect these masterpieces, which were shipped to Spain in 1559. He claimed their lengthy genesis was due to the relentless pains he took to make sumptuous works of art worthy of the King.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund
Using money raised through the National Lottery the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) sustains and transforms a wide range of heritage for present and future generations to take part in, learn from and enjoy. The transformation of Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum was enabled with a grant of over £13 million from HLF while the refurbishment of the McManus Galleries is benefiting from a £5 million grant. 

PRESS ENQUIRIES
For the National Galleries of Scotland
Patricia Convery – Head of Press, Tel: 0131 624 6325, Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org
For the National Gallery, London
Tracy Jones /Razeetha Ram - Head of Press, Tel: 020 7747 2839/020 7747 2519
General Press Office number: 020 7747 2865
Email: tracy.jones@ng-london.org.uk/ razeetha.ram@ng-london.org.uk (please email both)

4 February 2010

• The Young Vermeer

THE YOUNG VERMEER
10 December 2010 – 13 March 2011
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org

Three paintings from Johannes Vermeer’s early career will be reunited for the very first time at in a display at the National Galleries of Scotland in December 2010. The Young Vermeer will present a unique opportunity to compare directly these three works and discover more about the development of this celebrated artist.

Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) is world-renowned for his meticulous paintings of Dutch interiors, which reflect his fascination with optical effects and serenely balanced compositions. He produced few works – of which less than forty survive – during his career in Delft.  The National Gallery of Scotland is one of only 17 galleries worldwide that holds a work by Vermeer in its collection.  Whilst his later work concentrates on domestic interiors, his early paintings seem to have focused primarily on traditional subjects derived from the Bible and classical mythology.

The Young Vermeer will show three paintings created between 1653 and 1656: The National Galleries of Scotland’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, (c.1654-55); The Procuress (1656) from Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; and Diana and her Companions (c.1653-54) from Mauritshuis, the Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague.  While these early works differ greatly from his later paintings in terms of subject-matter, size, and style they already show Vermeer’s interest in the depiction of colour, light, and texture.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-

Exhibition Tour

12th May – 22 August  2010 Mauritshuis, The Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague
3rd September – 28 November 2010 Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
10th December 2010 – 13th March 2011 National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

• Wild Rovers Press Release

Wild Rovers - Parallel Lives in Crieff

14 January - 28th February 2010 
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 624 6200 
www.nationalgalleries.org
A dramatic exhibition of photographs and video from the streets of Crieff will be held in the IT Gallery of the National Gallery of Scotland this winter.  Wild Rovers documents a partnership project organized by the National Galleries of Scotland and Perth & Kinross Council to reflect on the history of the Crieff area and welcome the launch of the Strathearn Community Campus.

Inspired by paintings of the Highland landscape and its cattle by Victorian artist Peter Graham - from the National Gallery of Scotland and Perth Museum and Art Gallery collections - local residents and school students, aided by artist Gavin Lockhart, created flags, surreal digital photographs and a dramatic community ‘stampede' mark the passage of Crieff from its past on an ongoing journey to the future.  Using masks as a device to see Crieff through the eyes of the cattle formerly brought to the market, local participants met the challenge ‘to see things differently' and enact a symbolic ‘re-branding' of their hometown. 
Wild Rovers is part of the National Galleries of Scotland Education Outreach series Parallel Lives, which aims to make key works in the National Galleries of Scotland collection more directly relevant to the diverse communities living in Scotland.  This partnership with Perth & Kinross Council is the first time the National Galleries of Scotland has delivered its successful Parallel Lives outreach initiative outside Edinburgh.  Through its Parallel Lives initiative, the National Galleries of Scotland is committed to working in partnership with local authorities across Scotland, using existing works of art to inspire whole communities.  
ENDS

For further information and images, please call the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

NOTES TO EDITORS

The exhibition will tour to the Strathearn Community Campus in March 2010.

• Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró And The Surrealists

ANOTHER WORLD 
DALÍ, MAGRITTE, MIRÓ AND THE SURREALISTS 
10 July 2010 - 9 January 2011
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission £7 (£5 concessions)
Press view - Friday 9 July 2010, 11.30am – 1pm

A comprehensive survey of Surrealist art, which will bring together masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró, will be the major summer exhibition at the Dean Gallery in 2010.  Another World, which will be the centrepiece of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s 50th anniversary celebrations, will offer a fascinating overview of arguably the most important art movement of the twentieth century. The exhibition will include major loans from public and private collections and will offer visitors the chance to see the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s world-famous collection of Surrealist art in its entirety for the first time.

Surrealism is the name given to an art movement which began in Paris in the 1920s and soon spread around the globe.  Meaning ‘beyond realism’, the term refers to the world of dreams, nightmares, the irrational and the strange. Today Surrealism has become part of our daily visual language, infiltrating every aspect of art, design and advertising.

The Surrealist collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) is one of the largest anywhere in the world and rivals those found in New York, Paris, Chicago and London. As well as containing dozens of famous paintings and sculptures, it also includes a substantial number of prints, archival material, periodicals, books, letters and other publications. Another World will explore this collection in its totality and will include several print portfolios which have never been shown before by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy.  The holdings of Surrealist art are particularly rich thanks to two major acquisitions: in 1995 the SNGMA purchased part of the collection formed by the English Surrealist artist Roland Penrose; and that same year, Gabrielle Keiller bequeathed her magnificent collection to the Gallery. 

Befitting an art movement which championed the irrational, Another World will be displayed in an unusual and exciting manner.  Coloured walls will be densely hung alongside display cases filled with the Gallery’s extensive collection of books and manuscripts. In this dynamic setting visitors will be able to experience the visceral intensity of Surrealist art shown as it was originally intended.  This is the only UK showing of this major exhibition.

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, said: ‘The 50th anniversary of the Gallery provides us with a wonderful opportunity to celebrate our world-famous collection of Surrealist art. The collection contains over sixty paintings, including masterpieces by artists such as Dalí, Miró and Picasso, as well as four of Magritte’s best paintings, collages and prints by Max Ernst, major sculptures by artists including Giacometti and Duchamp, and a vast collection of rare and beautiful, illustrated books. This will be the first time the entire collection will have been shown together, and will occupy the whole of the Dean Gallery. We have also negotiated some outstanding loans, to produce a really comprehensive and stunning exhibition.’

ENDS

For further information and images, please call the Press Office on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder goes on display at the National Gallery of Scotland

INFORMATION STRICTLY UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL THURSDAY 17 DECEMBER AT 11AM

Press Call: Thursday 17 December at 11am at the National Gallery of Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh

LEONARDO'S MADONNA OF THE YARNWINDER GOES ON DISPLAY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF SCOTLAND

The National Gallery of Scotland is delighted to announce that the painting, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder by Leonardo da Vinci will go on display in the Gallery from today. In 2003 it was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, the Dumfriesshire home of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. The painting was recovered in 2007. The Madonna of the Yarnwinder is the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in Scotland and is on loan to the Gallery from the Duke and the Trustees of the Buccleuch Heritage Trust.

In this pioneering and influential composition, an unusually large Christ Child is shown perched on a rocky outcrop beside his mother. He gazes intently at the cross-shaped form of a wooden yarnwinder, precociously aware of his future Crucifixion.  The Virgin's tender, sorrowful expression and hesitant gesture reinforce the poignancy of the action.

This little panel is probably identical with one described in a letter dated 14 April 1501 from Fra Pietro da Novellara, head of the Carmelite order in Florence, to Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua and avid patron and collector of art.  The letter clarifies that Leonardo was painting it for Florimond Robertet, a trusted minister and diplomat of the King of France, who had close ties to Italy. Leonardo had a notoriously poor record for bringing his works to completion, and it is unclear whether the painting was ever actually delivered to Robertet.

There has been much debate regarding the extent of Leonardo's direct involvement in the painting, but it seems likely that the overall design, and the execution of the figures and the foreground rocks, are entirely his.  The background landscape, on the other hand, is not characteristic of Leonardo, and was probably added or completed by another artist, possibly quite a bit later. Technical examination has revealed landscape features and figures in the background that are no longer visible on the surface.  That some of these reappear in early copies and variants of the composition supports the idea that the background may have been left unfinished by Leonardo and completed only later.

The painting was the focus of an exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: The Mystery of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, organised here at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1992.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• National Gallery of Scotland announces Impressionist Gardens, its major summer exhibition for 2010

IMPRESSIONIST GARDENS
31 July to 17 October 2010
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org

The highlight of the 2010 summer season at the National Gallery Complex will be a ground-breaking exhibition on the subject of paintings of Impressionist Gardens.  This major international exhibition of around 90 works will include spectacular loans from collections around the world, and will be the first ever to be devoted to this fascinating subject.  The famous names of Impressionism will be well represented, with fine examples by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Manet and Sisley.  In addition, the exhibition will examine the continued significance of the Impressionist garden to the generation of artists working immediately after the Impressionists, such as Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard.  Lenders to Impressionist Gardens, which has been organised in partnership with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, will include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; the Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Tate, London; and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome.  This will be the only UK showing.

Gardens and flowers were a constant theme in Impressionist painting and inspired these great artists to produce some of their most beautiful and memorable paintings.  Claude Monet is perhaps the best known in this respect, with his famous paintings of the gardens of his various homes, most notably the splendid garden he created at his house at Giverny in rural Normandy.  All the Impressionists, however, featured gardens in their work, ranging from the ‘working’ or kitchen gardens portrayed by Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Berthe Morisot, to the splendidly ambitious gardens of Gustave Caillebotte, himself a member of the Impressionist group, and whose magnificent bequest of Impressionist paintings to the French state forms the basis of the world-famous collection of Impressionism now housed in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

This exhibition will trace the origins of the Impressionist garden, beginning with examples by the great school of early 19th-century flower painters at Lyons and looking at such important precursors as Delacroix and Corot, before moving on to the ambitious central section of the show which will feature many outstanding paintings by the Impressionists themselves.  A final section will examine the ‘spread’ of the Impressionist garden in the late 19th and early 20th century.  European and American artists will feature in this section and will include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Gustav Klimt and John Singer Sargent.

In addition to providing this dazzling array of world-class masterpieces, the exhibition will also illustrate the history of gardening during the 19th century, demonstrating how attention switched from the great estates and parks to the suburban garden, an environment which the Impressionists very much made their own as they portrayed ‘modern life’.  The exhibition will therefore have a twin appeal, both to those who love great art and to the great army of gardening enthusiasts everywhere.

Impressionist Gardens is being curated by Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland and organiser of many exhibitions on Impressionism, and Dr Clare Willsdon, Reader in History of Art at the University of Glasgow and a world expert on the subject.

ENDS

For further information and images, please call the Press Office
on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• ARTIST ROOMS 2010 tour announced – 21 exhibitions from Llandudno to Fort William

ARTIST ROOMS 2010 TOUR ANNOUNCED – 21 EXHIBITIONS FROM LLANDUDNO TO FORT WILLIAM

COLLECTION GROWS IN STRENGTH AS NEW GIFTS ARE ADDED

21 British museums and galleries from Llandudno to Fort William will be able to show masterpieces of contemporary art in 2010 thanks to ARTIST ROOMS, Anthony d’Offay’s gift to the nation made in 2008. The ARTIST ROOMS 2010 Tour has been made possible by The Art Fund and supported by the Scottish Government. Held jointly by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, ARTIST ROOMS is the largest public gift of art to museums in UK history. The collection has now been enhanced by artists and collectors who have made significant donations to the scheme including:

ED RUSCHA The Music from the Balconies 1984 – donated by the artist

IAN HAMILTON FINLAY – IDYLLS END IN THUNDERSTORMS 1986 and A LAST WORD RUDDER 1999 donated by the Estate of the artist.

Pledged works include:

AGNES MARTIN – an important late painting pledged by a private American collector*

ROBERT THERRIEN – a major work has been pledged by the artist*

JANNIS KOUNELLIS – a major work has been pledged by the artist*

ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government has been devised to enable this collection held by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.

The ARTIST ROOMS tour in 2009 reached around 8 million people nationally, over 700,000 people outside of London and Edinburgh in towns and cities as far afield as Stromness in Orkney, Cardiff in Wales, Middlesbrough in Teesside and Bexhill in East Sussex. A total of 372 works went on tour. The 2010 ARTIST ROOMS Tour will see works from this outstanding contemporary collection reach a further 16 towns and cities across the UK including Stornoway, Perth, Nottingham, Thurso, Llandudno, Eastbourne and Belfast.

The 2010 ARTIST ROOMS tour venues are:
• Manchester Art Gallery (showing Ron Mueck – 4 February to 11 April 2010)
• Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh (showing Jenny Holzer – 27 March to 21 May 2010)
• Hunterian Museum in Glasgow (showing Joseph Beuys – 1 April to 2 June 2010)
• Perth Museum & Art Gallery (showing Andy Warhol – 17 April to 23 October 2010)
• Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (showing Agnes Martin – 15 May to 11 July 2010)
• Nottingham Contemporary (showing Diane Arbus – 24 July to 26 September 2010)
• An Lanntair in Stornoway (showing Ian Hamilton Finlay – 30 August to 30 November 2010)
• The Ulster Museum in Belfast (showing Richard Long - September 2010 to February 2011)
• Towner in Eastbourne (showing Robert Mapplethorpe – 25 September to 21 November 2010)
• Highland Touring Circuit: Swanson Gallery Thurso; The Lime Tree, Fort William; Timespan, Helmsdale; Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (showing Ed Ruscha – October 2010 to March 2011)
• BALTIC in Gateshead (showing Anselm Kiefer –1 October 2010 to 16 January 2011)
• Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno (showing Alex Katz – 30 November to 19 February 2011)
• New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester (showing Gerhard Richter – dates tbc)

ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions in 2010 at National Galleries of Scotland and Tate galleries will include:
• Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland (showing Diane Arbus – 13 March to 13 June 2010)
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (showing Ian Hamilton Finlay – April to August 2010, Gilbert & George – August to November 2010 and Robert Therrien – August to November 2010)

• Tate Britain (displays will include Damien Hirst 2010 – Spring 2010 to Autumn 2010)
• Tate Modern in London (displays include Agnes Martin, Jenny Holzer and Andy Warhol – Summer 2010 to Spring 2011).
• Tate Liverpool (details to be confirmed)

In 2010, facilitated by The Highland Council, a circuit of four galleries will enable the work of American artist Ed Ruscha to reach audiences across the Scottish Highlands, building on existing partnerships from Lochaber to Caithness. We aim to use this innovative model of a “tour within the tour” in subsequent ARTIST ROOMS tours.

Education
More than 3,000 young people took part in education projects related to exhibitions within the 2009 tour through the museums’ tailor-made outreach programmes funded by The Art Fund and Scottish Government. Highlights included:
• Warhol-inspired fashion show and music night in Wolverhampton, which has resulted in an ongoing relationship between the young people and museum. University students in the city transformed a disused shop in the Mander Shopping Centre into a Warhol ‘Factory’running daily workshops with artists for the public. Staff at a local department store set up a special window display inspired by the Warhol ARTIST ROOM featuring high street clothes and accessories.
• The production of a special newspaper in Middlesbrough called The Modern Times, which took Gerhard Richter’s work as its starting point, and included articles on fashion, music reviews, and curator interviews, devised and created by 14-21 year olds. The finished publication was distributed to 48,000 households in Middlesbrough and the young people said taking part had had a profound impact on their understanding of art, and that it had influenced their personal career goals.
• Young people from local communities worked with the Tramway in Glasgow, making neon signs in the spirit of Bruce Nauman, whose work from the ARTIST ROOMS collection was exhibited there. The neon signs were then displayed in the surrounding area, including in shop windows.

The Art Fund and Scottish Government are delighted to be funding further outreach projects in 2010. To build on the successes of the projects, a new post – that of Education Co-ordinator – has been created for the 2010 Tour supported by the Scottish Government’s grant.

To find out more information about ARTIST ROOMS on Tour please visit www.artfund.org/artistrooms. To see the full ARTIST ROOMS collection please visit www.tate.org.uk/artistrooms and www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms

*NB. Details of works pledged to ARTIST ROOMS will be announced once they have been formally accessioned.

For further information contact

Patricia Convery, Head of Press and Marketing, National Galleries of Scotland
Tel: 0131 624 6325 Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org

Ruth Findlay, Senior Press Officer, Tate
Tel: 020 7887 4940 Email: ruth.findlay@tate.org.uk

Quintilla Wikeley, Head of Communications, The Art Fund
Tel: 020 7225 4820 Email: qwikeley@artfund.org

Notes to Editors
The Art Fund
The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections; campaigns on behalf of museums and their visitors; and promotes the enjoyment of art. It is funded from public donations and has 80,000 members. Since 1903 the charity has helped museums and galleries all over the UK secure 860,000 works of art for their collections. Recent achievements include: helping secure Titian’s Diana and Actaeon for the National Galleries of Scotland and The National Gallery in February 2009 with a grant of
£1 million; helping secure Anthony d’Offay’s collection, ARTIST ROOMS for Tate and National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008 with a grant of £1 million – and providing an additional £500,000 for the collection to be toured throughout the UK in 2009 and 2010; and running the Buy a Brushstroke public appeal which raised over £550,000 to keep Turner’s Blue Rigi watercolour in the UK. For more information contact the Press Office on 020 7225 4888 or visit www.artfund.org . The Art Fund is a Registered Charity No. 209174

• BP Portrait Award 2009

PRESS VIEW: Thursday 10 December, 11.30 am – 1.00 pm

BP PORTRAIT AWARD 2009
12 December 2009 - 21 February 2010
THE DEAN GALLERY, SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART,
Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

A stunning group of fifty-six paintings selected for the BP Portrait Award 2009 will be shown at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh this winter.  Organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London, this prestigious annual award attracts entrants from around the world, and carries a first prize of £25,000.  Now in its thirtieth year, and twentieth year of sponsorship from BP, the award promotes the best in contemporary portrait painting, by encouraging artists to focus upon and develop the theme of portraiture in their work.  Peter Monkman, a 44-year-old art teacher from Surrey, has won the 2009 award with a haunting portrait of his daughter Anna, titled Changeling 2. 

This hugely popular exhibition, which will be shown at the National Galleries of Scotland for only the third time in its history, will bring together the cream of this year’s submissions.  The judges for 2009, who had the difficult job of choosing from a record field of 1,901 entries, included James Holloway, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the artist Gillian Wearing.  Among the works on display will be the prize-winners, who were announced in June: Peter Monkman’s Changeling 2; Michael Gaskell’s Tom, which was awarded the second prize of £8,000; Manuel by Annalisa Avancini, which won the third prize of £6,000; and Benfica Blue by Mark Jameson, who received the £5,000 BP Young Artist Award. 

Other highlights will include Dan Llewelyn Hall’s striking portrait of Harry Patch, who, until his death in July, at the age of 111, was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches during World War I, and Edinburgh artist James Metcalfe’s thoughtful, though topless, portrait of Gregor Fisher, the actor celebrated for his portrayal of Rab C. Nesbitt.

Reflecting the international profile of the competition, the BP Portrait Award 2009 includes the work of artists from Russia, South Africa, Spain, the USA, Israel, Canada, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Belgium, Ireland, Italy and the UK.  Also on show will be a series of exquisite portraits by Emmanouil Bitsakis, winner of the BP Travel Award 2008, who used his £5,000 bursary to visit north-west China where he sketched and painted the Uigur people, a Muslim minority.  (The BP Travel Award 2009 has gone to Isobel Peachey, who will travel to Belgium and Switzerland to depict enthusiasts taking part in historical re-enactments).

Closer to home, the exhibition encompasses a broad range of talent, from young artists fresh from college to established portraitists with an international reputation, from self-taught painters to retired academics.  Artists over the age of 40 have been able to enter the competition since 2007, but it remains a powerful springboard for the careers of exceptional young painters (the renowned Scottish artist Alison Watt won the award in 1987). 

Scottish artists selected for this year’s exhibition include Glasgow-based Jennifer Anderson, with an ethereal portrait of her sister, titled White Linen; Isle of Lewis-born Donald Macdonald, whose touching portrait of his future father-in-law, shows the sitter recovering from open-heart surgery; and Jennifer McRae, a well-established portrait painter, whose work has appeared in the BP Portrait Awards on many occasions since 1995.

Nicola Kalinsky, Deputy Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and co-ordinator of the exhibition said: “It’s tremendously exciting to be welcoming back the BP Portrait Award, but this time in new surroundings - we will be using the beautiful rooms of the Dean Gallery whilst the Portrait Gallery in Queen Street is closed for its refurbishment.  This year’s selection is full of variety, demonstrating a range of painterly techniques, from flawless photo-realism to rich, expressive handling, and depicting a wide range of sitters, from children still unformed and new to the world, to those whose faces embody a lifetime’s experience.”

Tim Smith, External Affairs Director for BP in Scotland said: “We are delighted to bring the prestigious BP Portrait Award 2009 to the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh for its only Scottish showing.  This year’s awards attracted a record number of entrants and the quality and variety of entries shows that portraiture continues to thrive in the UK and internationally.  The exhibition is free to attend and I would encourage you to go along to see the 56 fascinating and diverse portraits selected by the judges.”
[ENDS]

For further information and images, please contact the National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314 /247; pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

 
Notes to editors

• The BP Portrait Award 2009 and Travel Award 2008 opened at the National Portrait Gallery, London, where it was on show from 18 June until 20 September 2009.  The exhibition will tour to Southampton City Art Gallery, from 2 October to 22 November, and the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, from 12 December 2009 to 21 February 2010.
• The competition was judged from original paintings by this year’s panel: James Holloway, Director, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Charlotte Mullins, art historian and critic; Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London (Chair); Des Violaris, Director, UK Arts and Culture, BP; and Gillian Wearing, artist.
• This year’s winner, Peter Monkman (b.1964) was shortlisted for the first time this year, having been included in the BP Portrait Award exhibition in 1999, 2001 and 2003.  Currently Director of Art at Charterhouse School, Surrey, Monkman studied visual arts at the University of Lancaster, John Moores University Liverpool and the University of London.  His painting Changeling 2 is part of a series of portraits of his daughter which explore the concept of the changeling, a child substituted for another by a supernatural force.  The winner also receives a commission.
• Second Prize-winner Michael Gaskell (b.1963) lives in Sheffield and won Second Prize in the BP Portrait Award in 2003 and was commended in both 2001 and 1999.  He studied at St Helen's College of Art and Design and Coventry Polytechnic and has been exhibiting his work for over twenty years.  Gaskell’s portrait of his son, Tom, was begun when the sitter was 17, and was inspired by the artist’s admiration for the work of Botticelli and Holbein. 
• Third Prize went to Annalisa Avancini (b.1973) for her painting Manuel.  Avancini, a painter and design teacher from Italy, studied at the Arts High School of Trento and the Marangoni Institute in Milan.  She was attracted to her subject, whom she has painted on three occasions, by the way ‘his story shines through his face.  Despite his young age his life is rich in experience.’
• The recipient of the BP Young Artist Award is chosen from among entrants aged between 18 and 30.  Now in its third year, the £5,000 award has gone to Mark Jameson, who submitted a compelling portrait of his sister, Lyndsey, titled Benfica Blue.  Painted in their parents’ Durham home, the highly accomplished portrait was completed in less than a month.  The 29-year old Jameson graduated from Sunderland University with a degree in Fine Art in 2003.

• The Monument Trust Announcement Press Release

PORTRAIT OF THE NATION PROJECT RECEIVES £2 MILLION GRANT FROM MONUMENT TRUST

The National Galleries of Scotland is delighted to announce a £2 million boost to its Portrait of the Nation project, the ambitious scheme that will transform the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) over the next two years.  News of this generous award, which has been made by The Monument Trust, a Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust, comes in the week that building contractors moved into the Gallery, and work began in earnest on the refurbishment.  In the two years since fundraising for Portrait of the Nation began, the campaign has built up a tremendous momentum, with very positive and generous responses from a number of trusts and private individuals.  The Monument Trust grant puts the figure raised to date at more than 80 percent of the £17.6 million total, and builds upon the contributions of other major funders, such as the Scottish Government, which committed £5.1 million in December 2007, and the Heritage Lottery Fund, which confirmed its grant of £4.8 million in March 2009.

Speaking of the award by The Monument Trust, James Holloway, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said: “We are extremely grateful to The Monument Trust for its wholehearted endorsement of Portrait of the Nation.  Their generous contribution puts us within reach of our £17.6 million target, and brings us much closer to realising the ambitious plans we have for the Gallery.  We closed our doors back in March, and after months of meticulous planning, and the careful removal of our collection, it has been very exciting this week to see our Building contractors, BAM Construction, move into the gallery, and to witness the beginnings of the transformation they will help us to realise.”

Portrait of the Nation will involve the repair, conservation and creative adaptation of the SNPG, a magnificent Arts and Crafts building which opened in 1889, as the first purpose-built national portrait gallery in the world.  The project will increase by 50 percent the amount of gallery space within the building, as well as creating a range of new visitor facilities.  Portrait of the Nation will also reinvent the way in which the national collection is displayed, illustrating the richness of Scotland’s history and culture with a dynamic programme of exhibitions, and placing a new emphasis on photography and Scottish art.  The building was handed over to BAM Construction on 2 November, and work will continue for the next two years.  The refurbished Gallery is due to re-open in autumn 2011.

John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) has added: ‘Portrait of the Nation will be a very significant development for the National Galleries of Scotland.  Following this refurbishment we will at last be able to make effective use of one of the most outstanding buildings in Edinburgh.  More importantly, the project will enable the wonderful collections to be presented in a coherent and understandable way, appealing to a wide range of new national and international audiences.  We are very grateful to The Monument Trust for this generous contribution, which gives us the opportunity to let this much-loved institution reach its full potential.’

The NGS recently launched a unique fundraising initiative in support of Portrait of the Nation, which gives members of the public the chance to associate their name (or that of a loved one) with a very special element in the Portrait Gallery’s decorative scheme.  At the heart of the campaign, known as Gallery of Stars, is William Hole’s beautifully detailed mural mapping the night sky, painted in the late 1890s, which decorates the ceiling of the Gallery’s magnificent entrance hall.  From Friday 2 October, visitors to the National Galleries’ website (www.nationalgalleries.org/stars) have been able to navigate their way amongst the 47 constellations - comprising 2,222 individual stars - contained within Hole’s vision of the firmament, and claim for themselves their own little piece of heaven.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on 0131 624 6325 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

-ENDS-
Notes to Editors:
Key objectives of Portrait of the Nation:
Portrait of the Nation has three sets of objectives – for our Audiences, Collections and Building - which will deliver a range of specific outcomes.

Audiences
• increase visitor figures by 50% to 300,000 a year
• introduce education facilities including:
a multi-purpose Education Suite, suitable for a variety of groups
a Seminar Room
a new Education and Events Programme
a new Resource and Learning Centre on the 1st floor
• introduce New Media interpretation facilities throughout the building
• create a Visitor Hub with a new shop, café, entrance desk and information point

Collections
• display 50% more works of art
• introduce a new approach to the display and interpretation of the collection, with regularly changing exhibitions based around 5 key areas: Reformation, Empire, Enlightenment, Modernity  and Contemporary.
• create a helpful Introductory Gallery
• create a permanent gallery for the Scottish National Photography Collection
• provide a focus for Scottish art, including a Contemporary Scotland Gallery

Building
• restore original features, re-open parts of the building closed to the public and reinstate the top-lit galleries on the 2nd floor
• create 50% more gallery space
• create new visitor services

External Photocall:  2nd November 2009 at 3.30pm for new installation There Will Be No Miracles Here by Nathan Coley.  Please meet at the front door of the Dean Gallery, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHERE YOU’RE AT
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
From 28 November 2009
Admission free
Press view: 27 November 2009, 11.30am – 1pm

For the first time in twenty-five years the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will be re-hung in its entirety to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding. Opening during the Homecoming Scotland Finale Celebrations, the display will reveal the richness and range of the collection in a series of rooms which aim to delight and surprise.

Since its opening in Inverleith House in 1960, in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens, its move to a larger building on Belford Road in 1984 and the expansion into the Dean Gallery in 1999, the collection has grown to more than 5000 works and is now considered one of the best in Europe.

Thematic displays will bring together iconic works, forgotten pieces and new acquisitions in innovative and often unexpected combinations and contexts: a room focusing on still-life will include work by Chardin, Morandi and Peploe; collage will bring together work by Picasso, Paolozzi, Agar and Burra; two successive rooms will contrast the use of colour internationally around 1910 with the use of colour in Pop and Op art from the 1960s; a further room is devoted to an exploration of white.

Interspersed among these thematic displays, other spaces will focus on a single artist, or work. The centrepiece of the re-hang will consist of an extraordinary, large-scale installation by Martin Boyce, who represented Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale.  This specially commissioned work is a recent acquisition to the collection and is being shown for the first time.  Supported by Homecoming Scotland, and entitled Electric Trees and Telephone Booth Conversations, the installation makes full use of the height and dramatic scale of the largest room in the Gallery.

Other rooms devoted to solo artists include a spectacular installation of works by Douglas Gordon, whilst the artist Callum Innes has been given total freedom to curate a two-room display with works from the collection and selected loans. American artist David Schutter, alumni of the Randolph Cliff artist-in-residence programme which is supported by Edinburgh Collage of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland, will be marking his first showing in the UK with a room of new works.  There will also be new work by the young German artist Kitty Kraus, who is shortly to show at the Guggenheim, New York.  The re-hang will also include displays from ARTIST ROOMS, a new collection of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland for the nation.  Outside, a major work by Nathan Coley, There Will Be No Miracles Here, will be installed in the grounds of the Dean Gallery, the installation of this work has been supported by the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland.  Whilst a new work by Martin Creed, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT, will illuminate the facade of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Culture Minister Michael Russell said:  “This collection belongs to the people of Scotland, so I am thrilled that the Gallery is being re-invigorated in time for this year’s St Andrew’s Day celebrations.

“The unveiling of this major new installation by Martin Boyce is a fitting contribution to the Homecoming Scotland Finale Celebrations.  Having just completed a very successful run representing Scotland at the world-renowned Venice Biennale of Art, there is no doubt that Martin’s work is of the highest quality.  At the forefront of contemporary visual art, he continues the long history of Scots making important contributions to the world – exactly what the Homecoming celebrations are all about”

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, said: “The 50th anniversary of the Gallery provides us with a wonderful opportunity to celebrate one of the great European collections of modern and contemporary art, and to demonstrate our commitment to collecting and showing the very best national and international art here in Scotland.  We are extremely grateful to Homecoming Scotland for their support in helping us bring such world-class art to a wider audience. “

Throughout our anniversary year the displays will change on a rotating basis. As well as showcasing new displays from the collection, this dynamic programme will also consist of new commissions from many leading Scottish and international artists. Details of which will be announced throughout the year.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

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NOTE TO EDITORS

Drawings made in relation to the paintings by David Schutter will be on show at sleeper [note lower case s], 6 Darnaway Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6BG, www.sleeper1.com,
0131 225 8444, 30 November – 18 December 2009, admission free

For further information on Martin Boyce’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale 09, please visit the Scotland and Venice website at www.scotlandandvenice.com

Martin Boyce’s ‘What You See Is Where You’re At’ is part of the Homecoming Scotland Finale Celebrations: Scotland’s Biggest Ever St Andrew’s Do. Running from 26th - 30th November, with more than 40 events and opportunities to visit some of Scotland’s major attractions for free across Scotland, a full programme of activity is available at www.homecomingscotland2009.com

The Homecoming Scotland Finale Celebrations herald the start of the winter festival season in Scotland, inviting visitors to extend their stay beyond the St Andrew’s weekend to sample the sights and sounds in a range of towns and cities.

Homecoming Scotland is funded by the Scottish Government and is managed by EventScotland the national events agency in partnership with VisitScotland, the country’s national tourism agency. Homecoming is part financed by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund.

FURTHER INFO:
Homecoming Scotland - Gayle Wilson, PR Manager, 0131 472 2067/ Gayle.Wilson@eventscotland.org

• Sir Peter Lely: Artist and Collector

SIR PETER LELY: ARTIST AND COLLECTOR
13 November 2009 – 14 February 2010
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 624 6200
Admission free

This winter the National Gallery of Scotland celebrates one of the most fashionable portraitists in 17th-century Britain, Sir Peter Lely (1618-80), in a display of 28 works on paper.  Lely was one of the greatest artists working during one of the most turbulent periods of British history, the English Civil War.  As Principal Painter to Charles II, he was the most celebrated artist at the glamorous Restoration court and was also famous for being one of the first great collectors of art in Britain, amassing an important collection judged by the artist himself as ‘the best in Europe’.  This exhibition of rarely seen art works will explore his life and career considering him as both artist and collector.

Lely was a painter of Dutch origin but spent most of his working life in England. He began his career producing history and landscape paintings but he became renowned as a portrait painter and was appointed Principal Painter to Charles II in 1660.  In this privileged position he produced magnificent portraits of the Restoration courtiers including controversial subjects such as Charles II’s infamous mistress Nell Gwyn and his favourite illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth.

Lely was one of the first artists in Britain to have his work copied in mezzotint, a printmaking technique used to reproduce paintings using half tones to achieve a particular richness in quality.  Lely saw the potential in this method as a means to publicise his own work, and embraced the technique whilst actively encouraging a number of Dutch printmakers to come to England and practice it.  Due to his interest and love of collecting, at his death in 1680 he left behind a large collection of art works including 10, 000 prints and drawings and nearly 600 paintings .

This exhibition includes drawings, engraved prints and mezzotints by and attributed to Lely, by Italian and Flemish Old Masters and by a variety of established print makers.

Sir Peter Lely: Artist and Collector comprises works on paper from both the Scottish National Gallery and Portrait Gallery.  This exhibition demonstrates not only the influence of one of Britain’s greatest 17th-century artists, but also highlights the wealth and importance of the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection of works on paper.

For further information and images, please call the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

• \'Painter\' and The Studio

'Painter' and The Studio
Paul McCarthy and the Myth of the Artist
The Dean Gallery, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
17 October 2009 - 14 February 2010
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission Free

This winter, a display at the Dean Gallery will examine how art institutions present the figure of the artist. ‘Painter’ and The Studio will contrast the Gallery’s own re-creation of a studio of sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi with the video work Painter (1995), a deliberately provocative artwork by American artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945).

Painter shows the grotesque figure of the artist at work, taking a comic and savage look at myths of artistic creativity and the art-world: a self-obsessed painter waiting for inspiration in his studio, labouring on the canvas, holding narcissistic meetings with an art dealer, and self-important curators. 

Images of artists in their studio have a long tradition in art history, spanning the  Renaissance to Romanticism and beyond. In picturing themselves at work, artists often created flattering and dramatic portraits, intended to reflect a particular self-image.  Since the 1960s, these self-images have been increasingly questioned. While art criticism exposed clichés and stock phrases, artists themselves attacked and criticised old-fashioned artistic stereotypes. Paul McCarthy is one of the most influential of these artists. With a traditional background in painting, McCarthy made his name with performance art, mocking traditional artistic ideas.

McCarthy’s piece is shown next to the Dean Gallery’s own ‘Paolozzi Studio’. This display is an educational stage-set, exhibiting the generous donation of Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), and is one of our most popular and successful displays. By contrasting the ‘Studio’ presentation with McCarthy’s critique, ‘Painter’ and The Studio casts a second glance at how art galleries present the making of art.

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, USA) lives and works in California. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2005); Tate Liverpool (2003). Recent Group Exhibitions include MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Barbican Art Gallery, London; J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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• Scottish National Portrait Gallery Invites Supporters to Join its Gallery of Stars

SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY INVITES
SUPPORTERS TO JOIN ITS GALLERY OF STARS

The National Galleries of Scotland will this week launch a unique fundraising initiative, in support of Portrait of the Nation, the ambitious project to refurbish and redefine the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.  Gallery of Stars will give the public the chance to associate their name (or that of a loved one) with a very special element in this remarkable building’s decorative scheme.  At the heart of the initiative is William Hole’s beautifully detailed mural mapping the night sky, painted in the late 1890s, which decorates the ceiling of the Gallery’s magnificent entrance hall.  From Friday 2 October, visitors to the National Galleries’ website (www.nationalgalleries.org/stars) will be able to navigate their way amongst the 47 constellations, comprising 2,222 individual stars, contained within Hole’s vision of the firmament, and claim for themselves their own little piece of heaven.

In the months since the Portrait Gallery closed its doors, in preparation for a £17.6 million refurbishment that will transform both the building and the way its world-famous collection is displayed, William Hole’s ceiling has been painstakingly photographed and mapped.  A special graphic has been prepared for the website, which renders Hole’s scheme in detail, and makes it possible to zoom in on constellations, and to isolate specific stars, each of which has been given a unique number.

Supporters of Gallery of Stars will be able to use this facility to reserve stars with a particular, personal significance, perhaps relating to their birth-sign, or to a constellation named for a favourite mythological hero or creature.  Hole, a keen amateur astronomer, designed the ceiling to represent a zenith map of the stars of the northern hemisphere, projected to correspond with the space available.  The stars are picked out in gold against the dark night sky, whilst mythical representations of the various constellations are painted a paler blue, helping to identify the twelve signs of the zodiac and familiar figures such as Orion, the Great Bear and Pegasus.  The ceiling is populated with many figures from Greek myth, including Andromenda, her parents Cassiopeia and Cepheus, and her husband, Perseus.  It also features the water-serpent Hydra, his brother Draco, and the stern and sails of Jason’s famous ship, the Argo.  Among the menagerie of animal constellations are a hare, dolphin, four dogs, an eagle, fox, swan and horse’s head.  More exotic beasts include Camelopardus (the Giraffe) and a unicorn.

Across the ceiling, the stars vary in magnitude just as they do in reality, and will be divided into categories of small, medium and large, corresponding to donations of £250, £500 and £750 respectively. In recognition of their generosity, supporters of Gallery of Stars will receive a limited-edition certificate that illustrates the position of their chosen star.  In addition, their name and star will be recorded in the Gallery when it re-opens in 2011, as well as on the NGS website. Donors will be able to select stars for themselves, or purchase them as gifts, perhaps to celebrate the birth of a child, a birthday, wedding, or to commemorate the life of a loved one.

Donations may be spread across a period of three years, bringing the cost of buying a star to as little as £6.95 per month.  In addition to the website (www.nationalgalleries.org/stars), supporters can reserve a star, request a donation form, or simply get more information about Gallery of Stars and Portrait of the Nation by calling 0131 624 6459.

For press information please contact the NGS Press Office on 0131 624 6325 / 6247 / 6314 / 6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

Portrait of the Nation is the £17.6 million project to renovate and rejuvenate the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, in Edinburgh.  It will involve the repair, conservation and creative adaptation of this magnificent Arts and Crafts building, which opened in 1889 as the first purpose-built national portrait gallery in the world.

Starting from an urgent need to restore the building, the project aims to forge an innovative and exciting new gallery.  Portrait of the Nation will double the amount of gallery space within the building, and will reinvent the way in which the national collection is displayed.  The project will also create a range of enhanced visitor facilities, including an education suite, a resource and learning centre, enhanced dining and retail areas.  All of this will be underpinned by an innovative and far-reaching events programme.

The Gallery collection will be presented in a reinvigorated and more engaging way, illustrating the richness of Scotland’s history and culture with a dynamic and extensive exhibition programme with a new emphasis on photography and Scottish art.  The regularly changing exhibitions and increased number of works on display will ensure that there will always be something new to see.

Major funders of Portrait of the Nation include the Scottish Government, which announced a contribution of £5.1 million in December 2007, and the Heritage Lottery Fund, which confirmed its grant of £4.5 million in March 2009.

Portrait of the Nation will re-open to the public in autumn 2011.

• The finest Scottish art and food come together at the National Gallery

THE FINEST SCOTTISH ART AND FOOD COME TOGETHER AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY

NEW RESTAURANT WILL OPEN FOR BREAKFAST AND SATURDAY DINNER

THE SCOTTISH CAFÉ AND RESTAURANT AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY
The National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2
www.nationalgalleries.org

The National Galleries of Scotland is delighted to announce a new collaboration with Victor and Carina Contini, the hugely successful partnership that brought the restaurant Centotre to Edinburgh. The Scottish Café and Restaurant at the National Gallery will celebrate the very best ingredients from Scottish producers and growers, offering delicious, yet affordable food in a wonderful setting. The restaurant, which, for the first time, will serve breakfast every day from 9.00 am, will open on 19 October 2009, in the National Gallery Complex, on The Mound. The restaurant will also now open for dinner on Saturday evenings.

Following the same principles of fresh, simple, good value food on offer at Centotre, the concept for The Scottish Café and Restaurant will focus on local produce and Scottish cuisine. 

Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland said: “We are delighted to be working in partnership with such a high-profile and successful company as Centotre. At the National Gallery of Scotland we feel it is particularly appropriate that the cuisine will have a distinctly contemporary and Scottish flavour – to be enjoyed by our visitors from home and abroad! “
 
Carina Contini said: “We are thrilled to have won the contract with the National Gallery of Scotland and are looking forward to showcasing the best of Scottish producers and suppliers in The Scottish Café and Restaurant.”

The restaurant interior will have a new look, devised by Annie and Lachie Stewart of ANTA, a family-run Scottish design and architecture firm.  Individually commissioned, hand-woven fabrics, Scottish oak and Caithness slate will feature in their planned redesign.  A number of original oil paintings by the celebrated Scottish artist Sir William Gillies will also be on show.

The Café will serve great coffee and traditional Aberdeen Butteries, made to its own special recipe. Lunch will include hearty homemade soup, old-fashioned tasty open sandwiches, beautiful salads and lots of irresistible homemade cakes. Traditional Afternoon Tea and the classic Scottish favourite, High Tea, will be served from 3pm to 6pm every day. The Restaurant will be open from Monday to Sunday, from 9.00 am until 5 pm, with dinner being served on Saturday evenings.

For more information please contact the NGS Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 6247/ 6332/ 6314 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain

Press View: 11.30-1pm Thursday 5th November 2009
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL

PAUL SANDBY (1731–1809): PICTURING BRITAIN
A Bicentenary Exhibition
7 November 2009 – 7 February 2009
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission Free

This winter the National Gallery of Scotland will present a major exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the artist Paul Sandby (1731-1809). A pioneer landscape painter and brilliant innovator with watercolour, Sandby played a key role in promoting the appreciation of spectacular scenery across Britain and inspired many later travellers and artists. Although the significance of his work has long been acknowledged, this is the first exhibition to include and analyse the full range of Sandby’s achievement.

Paul Sandby was born in Nottingham in 1731. He visited Scotland early in his career as a part of the Military Survey, which through map making, formed part of the campaign to control the country after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. During his time as the Survey’s chief draughtsman he was based in Edinburgh and produced numerous ground-breaking landscape and genre studies.  These works became well known through prints, and stand at the beginning of the rich tradition of depicting the drama and beauty of Scottish landscape – which was later developed by artists such as Runciman, Nasmyth, More and Turner. Sandby also came to know the work of important Enlightenment figures, such as the poet Allan Ramsay and the architect Robert Adam. Key works by Sandby exploring Scottish subjects in the exhibition include Roslin Castle (Yale Center for British Art), Horse Fair on Bruntsfield Links, Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland), and part of the ‘Great Map’ of Scotland of c.1753 (British Library).

Following his time in Scotland, Sandby settled in London where he worked as a teacher, landscape painter and printmaker, forging a considerable reputation. Thomas Gainsborough considered him ‘the only Man of Genius… [for] real Views from Nature’. From the 1760s he made many highly finished watercolours and gouaches at Windsor, which are in a number of cases the outstanding works of his career. They include Sandby’s dramatic View of Windsor on a Rejoicing Night of 1768 (Royal Collection), which was painted in the year the artist became a founder member of the Royal Academy.

Sandby has often been considered the ‘father’ of watercolour painting in Britain; he refined the use of the medium and employed it to explore a broader range of subject matter than any previous artist in the country. He delighted in the study of rural and urban views, street scenes, royal parks and ancient castles, and always retained an interest in fascinating anecdotal details – which embrace the fashions, occupations and entertainments of the people he encountered.  Picturing Britain features over one hundred loans, including oil paintings, watercolours, gouaches, prints and sketchbooks, coming from all the major collections which house his work: The Royal Collection, The British Museum, The British Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum and The Yale Center for British Art. It also includes some outstanding works from private collections, which have never previously been published.

This exhibition was organised by Nottingham City Museums and Galleries in association with the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Its catalogue has been published by the Royal Academy of Arts, and in 2010 the Mellon Centre in London will host a complementary academic conference. The research for the exhibition and accompanying catalogue have been generously funded by The Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

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CATALOGUE

Paul Sandby, Picturing Britain
Edited by John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels
Published by the Royal Academy of Arts
£19.95

EDUCATION PROGRAMME

The Education Programme which complements the exhibition will include lectures for adults and events and workshops devised for children and community groups.

EXHIBITION TOUR

Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery:
25 July 2009 - 18 October 2009

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh:
7 November 2009 - 7 February 2010

The Royal Academy of Arts, London:
13 March 2010 – 13 June 2010

• A Model of Order: Concrete Poetry

A MODEL OF ORDER: CONCRETE POETRY
3 October 2009 – 3 January 2010
DEAN GALLERY, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
Telephone 0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission free

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish Poetry Library will join forces this autumn in celebrating Concrete Poetry, an art form that crosses easily between the literary and the visual.  A Model of Order will take in a number of exhibitions and displays, in venues across Edinburgh, as well as a programme of special events.  These will explore Concrete Poetry as an international movement, together with other, related forms of literary and artistic experimentation.  Highlights of the display at the Dean Gallery will include original publications containing the work of major proponents of the movement, such as Eugen Gomringer, the Swiss/Bolivian poet, and printed works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, the internationally acclaimed Scottish artist, who died in 2006.  This will be the first time that the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish Poetry Library have collaborated in this way.

During the early twentieth century, the European avant-garde set out to demolish the boundaries between traditional art forms.  Artists, writers and poets began to combine words and imagery in a variety of ways that created many different visual effects.  Scraps of newsprint and painted words found their way into Cubist oil paintings, while writers embraced a radical use of typography, as seen in early Futurist, Dada and Surrealist publications.

The term Concrete Poetry was coined in the 1950s, to describe the work of an international group of artists, based largely in Brazil and Germany.  For them, each poem (which might consist of just a single word, crisply positioned on the page) was a thing in itself, real and concrete, having a clear structure and a material presence of its own.  Scotland also played an important role in this movement, with the involvement of writers and artists such as Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay.  For Finlay, the concrete poem was ‘a model, of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt’.

ENDS

For further information and images, please call the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

Notes to Editors

For more information on the city-wide Concrete Poetry events please visit the following websites;
Scottish Poetry Library, www.spl.org.uk
National Library of Scotland, www.nls.uk
Edinburgh Central Library, www.edinburgh.gov.uk
Edinburgh College of Art, www.eca.ac.uk
Fruitmarket Gallery shop, www.fruitmarket.co.uk
Old St. Paul's Scottish Episcopal Church, www.osp.org.uk
 

• Running Time Press Release final

Press view:   Friday 16th October 2009 11.30am -1pm
The Dean Gallery, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR

Running Time
Artist Films in Scotland: 1960 to Now
17 October 2009 – 22 November 2009
The Dean Gallery, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission Free

The National Galleries of Scotland is delighted to announce a major new exhibition at the Dean Gallery, which explores artists’ film and video from the 1960s to the present day. The first exhibition of its kind dedicated exclusively to film and video in Scotland, Running Time will reveal the richness and diversity of filmmaking in this country. This ambitious programme presents a unique collection of single screen film and video works, featuring more than 100 films by over 60 artists, revealing this fascinating legacy.

Scotland has a long and important history in the development of works in film and video. From the early pioneering works of Margaret Tait and David Hall, to the internationally renowned works of contemporary artists such as Douglas Gordon and Luke Fowler, Running Time will demonstrate how film and video has developed its own language and become the medium of choice for many artists. The exhibition will be presented in five thematic programmes which will change weekly throughout the run of the show.

Each programme will invite thematic comparisons between generations of artists, revealing continuing common interests. Portraits in Action will explore an ongoing concern with performative film, placing work by Douglas Gordon and Mark Neville alongside earlier videos by Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield. Places in Time will assess the manipulation of the documentary genre in artist film and video, from Margaret Tait’s ethereal, avant-garde films of the 1960s to Luke Fowler’s recent multi-layered films which combine new and archival footage to create atmospheric, sampled histories, such as Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006).

Drama and Suspense brings together a group of films videos and animations that suggest the uncanny and subvert the cinematic conventions of narrative to create a state of tension in the viewer, including Henry Coombes’ powerful 19th century drama, The Bedfords (2009) and a series of unusual films by Matt Hulse, who won a ‘best of the fest’ award in Edinburgh’s International Film Festival 2009.

Sound and Vision and Form in Motion are both grouped to reveal important developments in the history of film and video in Scotland. Sound and Vision explores the influence of experimental music on artists’ work, revealing a distinctive stylistic approach to film-making, as seen in the work of Katy Dove and Craig Mullholland.  Form in Motion will present a selection of works which interrogate the formal conventions of the medium, with a number of seminal videos from the 1970s including work by David Hall and Stephen Partridge, first shown together in the exhibition Video: Towards Defining an Aesthetic (1976) at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, juxtaposed with a number of experimental, digitally edited films made since the 1990s.

This diverse programme will be shown on the upper floor of the Dean Gallery. The two large rooms will both screen a reel of projected films, whilst the smaller rooms will exhibit work on television monitors.  In addition a new commission at the entrance to the gallery, by Glasgow-based artist Torsten Lauschmann, will form a dramatic prelude to the exhibition.  This film installation by one of Scotland’s most exciting emerging artists has been commissioned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and funded by the Scottish Arts Council to complement this exhibition.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.
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• As Others See Us

AS OTHERS SEE US
TRICIA MALLEY AND ROSS GILLESPIE
An exhibition to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns and the Year of Homecoming, 2009.

8 August – 8 November 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission free
www.nationalgalleries.org

Robert Burns, Scotland’s National Bard, has an unassailable place in the affections of the people of Scotland. The award-winning photographers Ross Gillespie and Tricia Malley have marked the Homecoming celebration by making a series of portraits of prominent and adopted Scots. Each sitter has been asked to choose and respond to a quotation from the poet, and to reflect upon the continued relevance of Burns in modern Scotland. Peter Capaldi, Eddi Reader, Liz Lochhead, Janice Galloway, Sandy Stoddart, Peter Howson, Edwin Morgan and Alex Salmond have all been included. The resulting portraits and commentaries, brought together in this exhibition, make for a celebration of contemporary Scottish culture, and a reinforcement of the values and aspirations that found their eloquent expression in the poetry of Robert Burns.
Ross Gillespie and Tricia Malley have worked together for almost 20 years under the name of broad daylight and have an instinctive eye for capturing the character and personality behind their subject. Tricia’s background as a documentary photographer combined with Ross’s background as an illustrator has created an almost unique collaboration which allows art to frequently and successfully mimic life.
The display will be shown in the National Gallery Complex due to the closure of the Portrait Gallery for refurbishment.

Culture Minister Michael Russell said: “This meld of first-class portraiture and eloquent verse demonstrates exactly why Robert Burns work remains relevant 250 years after his birth.  As Others See Us celebrates the creativity of our artists and the influence Burns’ work continues to exert on people across Scotland and beyond.  This is exactly why we are celebrating his life and work throughout this year.”

-ENDS-
For further information on any of these exhibitions, please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325 / 314 / 332 / 247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

Notes to Editors:

• Portrait of the Nation is the National Galleries of Scotland’s transformational £17.6 million project to restore the Scottish National Portrait Gallery building and to re-present the collection. Please visit www.nationalgalleries.org for further information.

• A full set of images and texts can be viewed at www.broaddaylightltd.co.uk. There is also a book available from www.luath.co.uk which includes essays by Prof David Purdie, and Julie Lawson, Chief Curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

• The exhibition has been produced in partnership with the Scottish Parliament and is sponsored by Homecoming Scotland, Hasselblad, Leith, Bowens, Clyde Blowers, FirstGroup, Prof. Walter Nimmo, Prof. David Purdie and friends, and broad daylight.

• Ross Gillespie and Tricia Malley can be contacted on 0131 667 7124 or at info@broaddaylightltd.co.uk

• Agnes Martin ARTIST ROOMS Press Release

AGNES MARTIN EXHIBITION OPENS IN EDINBURGH

ARTIST ROOMS
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
6 August – 8 November 2009
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission Free

A rare display of one of America’s foremost abstract painters will be unveiled this summer as part of the programme of ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The presentation of late works by Agnes Martin (1912-2004) will include three paintings held in ARTIST ROOMS, complemented by a group of works on loan from a private collection.

Martin is acclaimed for her singular, abstract practice that spanned a career of nearly five decades. Born in Canada, Martin was descended from Scottish pioneers who moved from the Isle of Skye to Canada in the late 19th century. She moved to New York in 1957 where she became influenced by the work of the American Abstract Expressionist artists. Her development of a pure, abstract style led her work to be aligned with Minimalism. However, Martin refuted this, maintaining that her concern was with the inner, emotional world. For most of her career, Martin worked in isolation, inspired by her reading of ancient Chinese Tao philosophy and by the bare desert landscapes in New Mexico where she resided from 1967 until her death in 2004.

Dating from between 1994 and 2003, the eight paintings presented at the Gallery of Modern Art, highlight the scope of Martin’s late practice, particularly her tactile handling of paint and use of a broader range of hues in her palette. In contrast to the large grid-based works the artist made in the 1960s, these paintings are primarily composed of horizontal bands of ethereal colour, and all are painted on a uniform size of canvas, reduced in scale. These works move between a preoccupation with ordered geometry and the irregularity created by hand-drawn pencil lines. She viewed this deliberate inconsistency which undermines the possibility of geometric perfection as analogous to the human condition. In the late 1990s after a long period of leaving her works untitled, Martin reintroduced titles into her work to evoke states of euphoria and memories of past happiness, such as the two paintings Happy Holiday (1999) and Faraway Love (1999) which will be on show at the Gallery of Modern Art this summer.

This exhibition forms part of the programme of ARTIST ROOMS, a new collection of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland for the nation. ARTIST ROOMS was established through The d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS is being shared with museums and galleries throughout the UK with the support of independent charity The Art Fund, and within Scotland, the Scottish Government.

Throughout 2009, National Galleries of Scotland and Tate and 13 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008. This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of The Scottish Government.

This exhibition is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival.

-ENDS-

For further information and images please contact:
Patricia Convery at the National Galleries of Scotland at pconvery@nationalgalleries.org
Tel: 0131 624 6325

Notes to Editors:
The collection of 725 works, representing one of the most important holdings of post-war and contemporary international art in private hands, was assembled by Anthony d’Offay, whose London galleries played a key role in the promotion and understanding of twentieth-century art in the UK over a period of more than 30 years.

The Art Fund is giving £250,000 per year to help Tate and National Galleries of Scotland to work with 13 regional partners in 2009 and more thereafter. In 2009 ARTIST ROOMS will be shown at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern and Tate St Ives; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Tramway, Glasgow Museums; Inverness Museum and Art Gallery; Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast; National Museum Cardiff; Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney; Aberdeen Art Gallery; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield; The Lightbox, Woking; and firstsite, Colchester.

• Art Competition for Schools 2009

RECORD-BREAKING YEAR FOR NGS ART COMPETITION FOR SCHOOLS

Sponsored by Scottish Widows

The best young artists in the country are to be celebrated on 17 June 2009 at the National Galleries of Scotland, when the prize-winners of the 2009 Art Competition for Schools will receive their awards from John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS). Fantastic prizes for individual winners, classes and schools will be collected by over fifty of Scotland’s most talented young artists and their prize-winning works of art will tour the country for the next year. Keith Brown MSP for Schools and Skills will speak at the event to congratulate the winners.  In addition Douglas Johnson, Director of Public Affairs will represent Scottish Widows who are sponsoring the competition for a fourth consecutive year.

With a record-breaking 5,796 entries received this year, a 44% increase on last year.  Entrants faced tough competition in all six categories: nursery, primary schools (P1-3 and P4-7), secondary schools, special education schools and groups. Young artists were inspired by a variety of themes including Food is Fantastic, Super Duper Animal, A Sense of Place, and Look Up Look Down.  The competition was launched online in December when schools from all over Scotland were invited to enter. Thousands of artworks were subsequently received from across Scotland from Portree to Perth.

Praising the high standard of entries this year, Linda McClelland, event organiser, said:
“The judges always have a difficult task but with a 44% increase in entry numbers, 2009 has proved a particularly memorable year. After last year’s hugely successful exhibition, which toured to venues in Inverness and Glasgow, we hope the 2009 show can be another record breaker!”

As part of last year’s touring exhibition, works from the 2008 competition were displayed in Pentagon Centre in Glasgow from November 2008 to January 2009 and then to the Raigmore Hospital, Inverness from February to May 2009.   Work by winners of the 2009 competition will tour to two venues across Scotland.

- ENDS -
Further information and images from the NGS Press Office
Tel: 0131 624 6325 / 332 / 247 or e-mail pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

NOTES TO EDITORS:

From Wednesday 17 June until 20 October 2009 the winning pieces will be on show in the Weston Link at the National Galleries of Scotland.  Full details of how to enter in for 2010 will be online from August this year.

WINNERS:

Category A Nursery: Food is Fantastic

1st: Abbie Turner, Musselburgh
2nd: Megan O'Reilly Rae, Edinburgh
3rd: Alejandro Oroz Storm, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Ella Macmillan, Inverness
Special Merit: Emma Kelly, Nielston
Special Merit: Jasmine Tucker, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Ryan Brown, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Harry Moir, Aberdeen
Special Merit: Max von Habsburg, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Niamh McDougall, Bellsmyre

Category B Primary 1-3: A Super Duper Animal

1st: Ben Murray, Kelso
2nd: Baillie Cuthbert, Midlothian
3rd: Thomas Holmes, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Stuart Mackay, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Shadri Nel, Isle of Skye
Special Merit: Cerys Baird, Tarbert
Special Merit: Chelsea Horne, Midlothian
Special Merit: Leon Hepburn, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Ewan Hodgson, Pitlochry
Special Merit: Mark MacQueen, Isle of Skye

Category C Primary 4-7: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter

1st: Lara Bauchop, Edinburgh
2nd: Steven McDiarmid, Portree
3rd: Ruby Partridge, Isle of Skye
Special Merit: Sarah Robertson, Isle of Skye
Special Merit: Andrew Johnson, Inverkeithing
Special Merit: David Walker-Lothian, Clackmannanshire
Special Merit: Angelika Maly, Livingston
Special Merit: Sophie Miller, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Alistair Burnett, Perth
Special Merit: Zoe Kelly, Paisley

Category D S1-S2: A Sense of Place

1st: Alexander Crawford, Clackmannanshire
2nd: Stephanie Gibson, Ross-shire
3rd: Rory Irwin, Clackmannanshire
Special Merit: Ben Wilmot, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Linnet McGregor, Perth
Special Merit: Lucy Allison, Penicuik
Special Merit: Maxine Walker, Aberdeen
Special Merit: Katie Ross, Clackmannanshire
Special Merit: Jay Pettie, Perth
Special Merit: Eleanor Couser, Clackmannanshire

Category E Special Education Schools: Look Up, Look Down

1st: Jack Johnstone, Edinburgh
2nd: Daniel Cole, Glasgow
3rd: Jamie Kamal, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Liam Finlayson, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Thomas Williams, Port Glasgow
Special Merit: Mathew Coyle, Coatbridge
Special Merit: Matthew Docherty, Glasgow
Special Merit: Lorna Shimmons, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Tony Schofield, Edinburgh
Special Merit: Christopher Graham, Glasgow

Category F Group Work

1st: Hillside School, Aberdour
2nd:  Prospect Bank School, Edinburgh
3rd:  Wester Coates Nursery, Edinburgh

• Rough Cut Nation Press Release

PRESS VIEW:  11.30am – 1pm, Thursday 30th July 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD

ROUGH CUT NATION

SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Telephone 0131 6246 6200
7th – 30th August
12 noon – 8pm Thurs- Sat, 12 noon – 5pm Sun, Tues, Wed, closed Mon
www.nationalgalleries.org

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery will be given a radical makeover this summer, when a group of young Scottish artists come together for Rough Cut Nation, a unique, collaborative project that will temporarily transform the Gallery’s interior.  Currently closed for a major refurbishment, the building will re-open for three weeks in August, to showcase a dramatically remixed version of Scottish history that will be painted, pasted and projected directly onto the Gallery’s walls. 

Artists involved in Rough Cut Nation will take as their starting point William Hole’s original decorative mural scheme, which fills the entrance hall with figures and events from Scotland’s past.  They will use the full armory of street-art techniques, including spray paint, stencils, stickers, emulsion, rollers, brushes, pens, digital projections and fly-posters to create a temporary, multilayered, wall-based installation in the now empty Gallery space.

This dynamic collaboration will feature artwork and designs from Elph, Fraser Gray, Kirsty Whiten, Mike Inglis, Peter Martin, Jason Nelson, DUFI, Machism, Paco, Jo Basford, Janie Nicoll and Skint.  A series of Rough Cut Nation events investigating the exhibition’s themes of national identity, portraiture and storytelling will precede the exhibition. These will be undertaken by the artists in conjunction with youth and community groups from Dundee Contemporary Arts, McManus Galleries (Dundee), Out of the Blue (Leith), Fairbridge (Edinburgh) and WHALE Arts Agency (Wester Hailes). Images and ideas from these off-site events will be fed into the main installation.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of events and activities in which members of the public can get involved.  The public will be invited to contribute their own portraits, drawings and ideas to the installation as facilitated by the artists through a series of drop-in workshops.  Every Saturday throughout the exhibition Avalanche Records will host live music events with up-and-coming bands from around the country and abroad. Acts confirmed so far include Tut Vu Vu and The John Knox Sex Club.  A full line up of events and activities will be announced in July.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

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• Forthcoming May 2009

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS MAY 2009

Please find below our programme of exhibitions and displays for the coming months.  For further information please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325 / 314 / 332 / 247, or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

For general enquiries please call 0131 6246 6200

Information may also be found on our website:
www.nationalgalleries.org

For monthly updates on our news, exhibitions and events join our email bulletin on:
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/mailinglist

NOTES: Current as of May 2009. 

General opening hours:   
National Gallery of Scotland Complex
Monday–Sunday  10am–5pm
     Except Thursday  10am–7pm

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Dean Gallery
     Monday–Sunday  10am–5pm

SPECIAL PROJECTS

PORTRAIT OF THE NATION

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, home to the collection of Scottish portraits and the National Photography Collection, is now closed while it undergoes a major refurbishment. This outstanding Grade A building, at the heart of the New Town on Queen Street in Edinburgh, was designed by architect Sir Robert Rowand Anderson to be a celebration of the people of Scotland. Portrait of the Nation will restore this ideal, breathing new life in to its galleries whilst creating much needed new facilities. The collection will be presented in a reinvigorated and more engaging way, illustrating the richness of Scotland’s history and culture with a dynamic and extensive exhibition programme with a new emphasis on photography and Scottish art. The regularly changing exhibitions and increased number of works on display will ensure that there will always be something new to see.

To find out more about Portrait of the Nation visit: http://www.nationalgalleries.org/potn

EXHIBITIONS

FOUR SCOTTISH PAINTERS:
BARNS-GRAHAM, BELLANY, DAVIE AND REDPATH
4 October 2008 - 28 June 2009
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

This new display of work concentrates on four pivotal Scottish artists of the post-Second World War period taken from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s permanent collection.  All students of Edinburgh College of Art, Anne Redpath (1895-1965), Alan Davie (b.1920), Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) and John Bellany (b.1942) were centrally engaged with the development of painting in Britain in this period. This is a chance to see the work of some of the most influential figures in British art of the second half of the twentieth-century.

TWO HORIZONS:
WORKS FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF CHARLES ASPREY AND ALEXANDER SCHRÖDER
28 February – 19 July 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

Two Horizons presents a unique opportunity to see a fascinating selection of works by internationally regarded contemporary artists from the collections of Charles Asprey and Alexander Schröder. This exhibition brings together the work of established artists, such as Andreas Slominski, Isa Genzken, and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with that of the younger emerging generation, including Kitty Kraus, Lucy McKenzie and Gillian Carnegie.  Comprising of painting, sculpture, and installation, Two Horizons showcases works by leading figures of the international art world which will be on display in Scotland for the very first time.

ARTIST ROOMS
Celmins, Gallagher, Hirst, Katz, Warhol, Woodman,
14 March – 8 November 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008. This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of the Scottish Government.

The opening displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh this spring will include the work of Vija Celmins, Ellen Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman.  Highlights will include Celmins’ beautiful, delicate images of seas, deserts and the night sky, a complete series of landscape and portrait paintings by the American painter Alex Katz and Francesca Woodman’s intimate, surrealist-influenced photographs. Damien Hirst, the most prominent British artist of today, will feature in an expanded display across several rooms. This will bring together works from ARTIST ROOMS - such as the iconic Away from the Flock (an early example of Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde) and a recent butterfly painting - with additional loans from further collections.

ARTISTS’ BOOKS: THE SCOTTISH CONTRIBUTION
21 March – 21 June 2009
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

Artists’ Books: the Scottish Contribution is an exhibition of books drawn from the Gallery of Modern Art Collection.  All produced in Scotland or by Scottish artists, these works range from small press publications to mass-produced exhibition catalogues.  In recent years, there has been a move away from the classic Livre d’Artiste towards a more accessible, democratic form of artist’s book. The artist’s book has become less about the handmade and more about the concept and its wider distribution.  This exhibition charts this change as seen through works in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s collection.

TURNER AND ITALY
27 March – 7 June 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £8 (£6 concessions)

This major exhibition celebrates the love affair between the artist J. M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and Italy. Turner and Italy sets out to explore this complex and enduring relationship, and show how Turner became enchanted by the country’s climate, landscapes and architecture; drawing inspiration from them he created some of the greatest images of Romantic art.  The exhibition will include over 100 works, including oil paintings, watercolours, sketchbooks, and books from Turner’s library which illustrate his fascination with Italy. Spectacular loans from collections in Washington, Philadelphia, Melbourne, Paris and London will feature in the exhibition. It has been created by the National Gallery of Scotland and will travel on an international tour to Italy and Hungary; Edinburgh will, however, be the only UK venue.

 
ALIVE WITH INNOVATIONS: PAOLOZZI’S BEGINNINGS
28 March – 27 September 2009
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

Eduardo Paolozzi was one of the most influential British artists of the 20th Century. Always interested in taking conventions head-on, Paolozzi set an early example for the strong international impact of Scottish art. His forceful contributions to sculpture, printmaking and collage established his position at the forefront of the post-war avant-garde.

Taking the title of one of Paolozzi’s rambunctious collages as its title, Alive with Innovations showcases highlights of his work from 1950s, illustrating the striking, fresh, and powerful impact they had in a time of austerity. Including a digital presentation of Paolozzi’s notorious 1952 ‘Bunk!’ lecture, the display embraces bold images, unconventional media and a surreal sensibility. Showing his blunt, brutalist sculptures, his energetic drawings, and his radical collages from commercial material, this display brings together the best parts of the artist’s exciting and rebellious work of the 1950s.

ROBERT ADAM’S LANDSCAPE FANTASIES:
WATERCOLOURS AND DRAWINGS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
25 April – 2 August 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission free

This spring the National Gallery of Scotland will reveal an undiscovered side to the work of Robert Adam (1728 – 1792), his landscape fantasies. Adam was a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and one of the most innovative architects in Britain in the eighteenth century, world renowned for his “Adam Style”. This exhibition is dedicated to his picturesque landscapes which were made towards the end of his life, purely for his own relaxation and enjoyment.  Robert Adam’s Landscape Fantasies will include over 30 watercolours, including his spectacular rendition of Cullen Castle. A number of early drawings by his sketching partners Paul Sandby and John Clerk of Eldin will also be on display.  These works were never shown in Adam’s lifetime, and this exhibition is a unique opportunity to see the private visions of one of the greatest architects of the eighteenth century.

RAPHAEL TO RENOIR
MASTER DRAWINGS FROM THE COLLECTION OF JEAN BONNA
5 June - 6 September 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £4 (£3 concessions)

This exceptional exhibition consists of 120 European master drawings, watercolours and pastels by many of the greatest names in Western art. They come from the distinguished collection formed over the past twenty years by Jean Bonna, who is based in Geneva. The show has been organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it was shown earlier this year. The National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh will be the only European venue.

The exhibition offers the rare opportunity to view outstanding examples of European drawings spanning some 500 years, from the Italian Renaissance to late nineteenth-century France. The principal strength of the collection lies in the Italian and French schools, including such celebrated artists as Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Guercino, Claude Lorrain, Canaletto, Watteau, and, from the nineteenth century, Ingres, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin and Redon.

PAUL & NUSCH ELUARD AND SURREALISM
27 June – 27 September 2009
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission Free

A display which highlights the friendship of Roland Penrose with the surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife Maria Benz known as Nusch.  Penrose first met Eluard in Paris in 1929 and their friendship, which lasted until Eluard’s death, is well documented in the Gallery’s Penrose archive. For Eluard painting and poetry were intimately linked, and it was his custom to collaborate with artist friends such as Max Ernst, Man Ray and Pablo Picasso. In 1930 he met Maria Benz, (1906–1946) a muse and model for Man Ray and for Picasso, and married her in 1934. This exhibition shows their friendship through photographs and letters and also includes Eluard’s many book collaborations, together with his collages and works from his art collection. 

THE DISCOVERY OF SPAIN
BRITISH ARTISTS AND COLLECTORS: GOYA TO PICASSO
18 July – 11 October 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £8 (£6 concessions)

This major exhibition will be a spectacular celebration of Spanish culture, as seen through the eyes of British artists and collectors.  It will encompass the period from 1800 to the 1930s – from the age of Goya to that of Picasso.  Spain is now a familiar and much-loved part of the British view of Europe, but in the eighteenth century it was relatively little known.  The Discovery of Spain will explore the process by which this changed, and convey the excitement of the era when the country’s architecture, customs, fashions and painting were gradually ‘discovered’ by artists and collectors, and created a sensation in Britain.  Highlights will include the work of the Spanish masters Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo, Zurbaran, Goya and Picasso, and the British artists David Wilkie, David Roberts, John Frederick Lewis, John Phillip, Arthur Melville and David Bomberg. Loans are to include important works from the Royal Collection, the National Gallery, London, Tate and other distinguished public and private collections across the UK.  There will be over 130 works on show, including oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints.  The Discovery of Spain can only be seen in Edinburgh, during the 2009 International Festival.

THE ENLIGHTENMENTS
Presented by the Edinburgh International Festival
7 August – 27 September 2009
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

The 2009 Edinburgh International Festival takes as its inspiration the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. The Festival’s Visual Arts programme, The Enlightenments, consists of a series of individual projects, commissions and installations in various locations across Edinburgh. The exhibition at the Dean Gallery will present a group of displays by acclaimed international contemporary artists.

Tacita Dean’s film Presentation Sisters documents the daily routines and rituals of the last remaining members of a small ecclesiastical community. Edinburgh Drawing: Chatter Shapes by Greg Creek features Edinburgh’s architecture and landmarks interspersed with scatological notations, doodles, dreams and invented prose. Gabrielle de Vietri’s Hark! greets visitors as they arrive at the Gallery; singers relate the news, horoscopes, stock exchange information and current affairs of the day. dread, Joshua Mosley’s digital film of animated clay figures, presents a fictional encounter between Rousseau and Pascal. Lee Mingwei’s installation elevates viewers above their immediate surroundings. 2007 Turner Prize-nominee Nathan Coley will also present a new work for The Enlightenments.

Other venues presenting The Enlightenments include The University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery and Collective Gallery.

CONCRETE POETRY
4 October - December 2009
DEAN GALLERY, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free

A display highlighting examples of concrete poetry drawn from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Collection, from the earliest experiments in visual poetry to contemporary innovations. Concrete poetry bridges the gap between poem and picture, using text in the same way as colour and line to describe a thing or an idea. Normal typographical rules do not apply here – instead, the meaning of the words is enhanced and made sense of by their visual form. This exhibition explores the long established links between the literary and the visual, where the artist’s book provides fertile ground for experimentation.
 
AS OTHERS SEE US
TRICIA MALLEY AND ROSS GILLESPIE
An exhibition to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns and the Year of Homecoming, 2009.
8 August – 8 November 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission free

Robert Burns, Scotland’s National Bard, has an unassailable place in the affections of the people of Scotland.  The photographers Ross Gillespie and Tricia Malley have marked the Homecoming celebration by making a series of portraits of prominent Scots and adopted Scots.  Each sitter has been asked to respond to a quotation from the poet, and to reflect upon the continued relevance of Burns in modern Scotland.  The resulting portraits and commentaries, brought together in this exhibition, make for a celebration of contemporary Scottish culture, and a reinforcement of the values and aspirations that found their eloquent expression in the poetry of Robert Burns.   

-ENDS-

For further information on any of these exhibitions, please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325 / 314 / 332 / 247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• The Discovery of Spain Press Release

PRESS VIEW: 16 July 2009, 11.30 am - 1.00 pm

THE DISCOVERY OF SPAIN
BRITISH ARTISTS AND COLLECTORS: GOYA TO PICASSO
18 July 2009 – 11 October 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org

The exhibition is generously supported by The Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland, The Spanish Tourist Office, The Spanish Ministry of Culture and The University of Edinburgh.
Admission £8.00 (concessions £6.00), FREE to children under 12

A spectacular celebration of Spanish culture will bring some Mediterranean colour to Edinburgh this summer, as the National Gallery of Scotland unveils the highlight of its festival programme for 2009.  The Discovery of Spain will explore the fascination for Spanish art and culture in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, and examine the taste of Hispanophile collectors and artists.  Outstanding examples of Spanish art, including works by Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo and Zurbarán, will form a dramatic centerpiece for the exhibition.  Paintings by major British artists who were captivated by the experience of travelling through Spain will also dominate the show; these include important paintings by Sir David Wilkie, David Roberts, John Phillip, Arthur Melville and David Bomberg.

The Discovery of Spain can only be seen in Edinburgh, and will include over 130 paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and photographs, with important loans from the Royal Collection, the National Gallery, London, Tate, and other distinguished public and private collections across the UK. 

Spain is now a familiar and much-loved part of the British view of Europe, but in the eighteenth century it was relatively little known.  The Discovery of Spain will explore the process by which this changed, and convey the excitement of the period from 1800 to the 1930s (the eras of Goya and Picasso), when the country’s architecture, customs, fashions and painting were gradually ‘discovered’ by artists and collectors, and created a sensation in Britain.

The period covered by The Discovery of Spain begins and ends with conflicts which prompted extraordinary artistic responses from both Spanish and British painters - the Peninsular War (1807-14) and the Spanish Civil War.  In the first of these, British military intervention played a key role in Spain’s struggle for independence from France, and artists from both countries drew inspiration from the dramatic events of the war.  Goya sensitively depicted the British hero, The Duke of Wellington (National Gallery, London), and the harrowing reality of the conflict in his Disasters of War prints; while Sir David Wilkie adopted a more romanticised approach in his magnificent The Defence of Saragossa (Royal Collection).

The Defence of Saragossa proved extremely popular on Wilkie’s return to Britain and the series of paintings to which it belongs was quickly acquired by King George IV.  Its popularity reflected a growing enthusiasm among British artists for Spanish subjects, which developed throughout the nineteenth century.  A major stimulus to this was the publication in 1845 of Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain.  A landmark in travel literature, it helped shape the British perception of Spain, as did the brilliant watercolours and oil paintings of artists such as John Frederick Lewis, David Roberts and John Phillip, who toured extensively through the country, delighting in its culture, customs, costumes and architecture. 

Phillip painted animated studies of Spanish life, sometimes on an epic scale, among which ‘La Gloria’: A Spanish Wake (National Gallery of Scotland) is the supreme example.  At the time of its purchase in 1897, Phillip’s masterpiece was the most expensive painting the Gallery had ever acquired.  David Roberts’ extended trips to Spain in the 1830s and ’40s (during which he produced beautiful studies of buildings such as the cathedrals in Burgos and Seville) were a prelude to his work in Africa and the Near East.  To their fascinated British audience, the work of these artists depicted an irresistible culture hovering between the familiar and the exotic.  The architecture of Moorish Spain, represented in the exhibition through the work of Owen Jones, provided a decorative vocabulary which was to have a significant impact on Victorian design, and enriched further the perception of Spain as being quite unlike any other part of Europe.

Richard Ford was also a discerning critic and connoisseur who contributed to the growing awareness of Spanish art in Britain.  The Discovery of Spain will celebrate the extraordinary quality of the collections of Spanish painting formed in the nineteenth century by figures such as the Duke of Wellington, Sir William Stirling-Maxwell and John and Joséphine Bowes.  Among the outstanding loans exploring their taste will be Velázquez’s A Spanish Gentleman (Apsley House), Zurbarán’s St Francis in Meditation (National Gallery, London), El Greco’s The Tears of St Peter (Bowes Museum) and Woman in a Fur Wrap (Pollok House), and Murillo’s Flower Seller (Dulwich Picture Gallery).  Such works created a complex and layered image of the ‘golden age’ of Spanish art, ranging from the moving and profoundly spiritual paintings of Zurbarán, to the sensual appeal of El Greco’s portraits, and charm of Murillo’s scenes of everyday life.  It was above all Velázquez’s achievement which exerted a powerful influence upon generations of painters in Britain.  The various ways in which this was felt will be explored in the exhibition through works such as Sir John Everett Millais’s Souvenir of Velázquez (Royal Academy of Arts), John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of W. Graham Robertson (Tate) and James McNeill Whistler’s Brown and Gold (Self-Portrait) (Hunterian Art Gallery). 

In the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, the explorations of British artists in Spain extended beyond the urban centres, when painters such as Arthur Melville, William Nicholson and David Bomberg became attracted to the qualities of brilliant light and vibrant colour to be found in the varied landscapes across the country.  The sun-filled exuberance of Nicholson’s Plaza del Toros, Málaga (Tate), was in stark contrast to the more sober tones for which the artist is better known, while Melville’s vivid sense of colour found its perfect expression in watercolours such as The Orange Market, Saragossa (Fleming Collection) and oils such as A Spanish Sunday; Going to the Bullfight (Dundee University).

The exhibition’s last section will address the crisis of Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, which prompted a new sense of sympathy with Spain on the part of many British people.  It will include Picasso’s extraordinary Weeping Woman (Tate), which toured Britain with the artist’s iconic depiction of the devastation and suffering caused by warfare - Guernica - in 1938.  The painting will be shown along with the artist’s preparatory drawing for it and a related etching. This group will form a powerful finale to The Discovery of Spain.  They will be shown alongside diverse and richly imaginative responses to the conflict from major British artists, such as Percy Wyndham Lewis, Edward Burra and Henry Moore.

The Discovery of Spain has been organised by Christopher Baker, Deputy Director at the National Gallery of Scotland, and guest-curated by Dr David Howarth (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Paul Stirton (University of Glasgow).  A team of specialists will contribute essays to the catalogue, which will make a major contribution to the study of Hispanic-British cultural relations: David Howarth, Paul Stirton, Nick Tromans, Hilary Macartney, Michael Jacobs and Claudia Heide.

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

To complement the exhibition, a special education programme has been devised to cater for a wide variety of audiences.  This will include lectures for adults, theatrical and musical evenings, and events for schools and community groups.  Speakers contributing to the lecture programme include the broadcaster Andrew Graham-Dixon, the artist Alison Watt, the critic Richard Cork, and Gabriele Finaldi, Deputy Director of the Prado.  In addition, an international conference exploring the issues raised by the exhibition will be held at the National Gallery of Scotland in October 2009; the papers will be published in 2010.

A TASTE OF SPAIN

To coincide with the opening weekend of the exhibition Edinburgh – A Taste of Spain (17-19 July) will be held on the Mound, outside the National Gallery in the heart of Edinburgh.  The Spanish regions will provide live music, theatrical performances and the opportunity to taste superb food and wine.  Taste of Spain is FREE.  For more information see www.tastespain.info.

ENDS

For further information and images, please call the Press Office
on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• Robert Adam press release final

Photocall Friday 24 April 2009, 11.30am - 1pm

ROBERT ADAM’S LANDSCAPE FANTASIES:
WATERCOLOURS AND DRAWINGS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
25th April – 2nd August 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission Free

This spring the National Gallery of Scotland will reveal an undiscovered side to the work of Robert Adam (1728 – 1792), his landscape fantasies. Adam was a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and one of the most innovative architects in Britain in the eighteenth century, world renowned for his “Adam Style”. This exhibition is dedicated to his picturesque landscapes which were made towards the end of his life, purely for his own relaxation and enjoyment.

The watercolours on display feature magnificent castles perched perilously on towering mountain tops and steep cliff faces surrounded by gushing waterfalls, rivers and gorges. Adam’s atmospheric landscapes are spectacularly lit, with dark heavy skies and long brooding shadows. Though imaginary, these Romantic views often take as their reference points the sublime landscape and alluring architecture of Adam’s native Scotland.

Robert Adam was born in Kirkcaldy in 1728, and moved with his family to Edinburgh at a young age. He started his professional career working in his father’s successful architectural practice in the capital. One of his first commissions was to undertake the building and rebuilding of the Highland forts after the conclusion of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. In 1754 Adam left Scotland for Italy on a modified Grand Tour, where he studied classical ruins and perfected his drawing skills. When he returned to Britain in 1758, he moved to London where he opened his own architectural practice. He quickly became the fashionable architect of the day and in 1761 was appointed Royal Architect to King George III. Adam’s strength lay not only in designing grand buildings but also providing fantastic decorative schemes for their interiors and all the furnishings down to the smallest details.

Robert Adam’s Landscape Fantasies will include over 30 watercolours, including his spectacular rendition of Cullen Castle. A number of early drawings by his sketching partners Paul Sandby and John Clerk of Eldin will also be on display.  These works were never shown in Adam’s lifetime, and this exhibition is a unique opportunity to see the private visions of one of the greatest architects of the eighteenth century.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-

• Raphael to Renoir Press Release

Press View:  3 June 2009 at 11.30am to 1pm at the National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh

RAPHAEL TO RENOIR
Master Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna
5 June - 6 September 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £4 / £3 concession

This exceptional exhibition consists of 120 European master drawings, watercolours and pastels by many of the greatest names in Western art. They come from the distinguished collection formed over the past twenty years by Jean Bonna, who is based in Geneva. The show has been organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it was shown earlier this year. The National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh will be the only European venue.

The exhibition offers the rare opportunity to view outstanding examples of European drawings spanning some 500 years, from the Italian Renaissance to late nineteenth-century France. The principal strength of the collection lies in the Italian and French schools, including such celebrated artists as Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Guercino, Claude Lorrain, Canaletto, Watteau, and, from the nineteenth century, Ingres, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin and Redon.

Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland said: “We are thrilled by this prestigious collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum and the opportunity to play host to one of the most significant private collections of drawings to have been formed in recent times.”

Highlights include extraordinary drawings such as Raphael’s Study of Soldiers (ca. 1515-16), Parmigianino’s The Holy Family with Shepherds and Angels (ca. 1523-24), Hans Hoffmann’s beautifully rendered watercolour A Wild Boar Piglet (1578), an atmospheric Woman in a White Bonnet (ca. 1882-85) by Georges Seurat, and a vibrant pastel, La Barque (ca. 1900), by Odilon Redon.  Gratifyingly, two of the Bonna drawings – Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Three Studies of Female Heads (ca. 1718-19) and Paul Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women (ca. 1899) – are preparatory studies for paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland’s permanent collection.  

Jean Bonna’s first love was books, and he has built up a very important private library. Inspired in part by book illustrations, he developed an interest in old master prints, and from there to collecting drawings. Over the past two decades he has become one of the most discriminating living collectors of old master and nineteenth-century drawings. The Bonna collection now comprises some 400 drawings, the best of which have been selected for this exhibition, all to be displayed in period frames.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org or 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332.

www.nationalgalleries.org

• HLF Press release

HLF CONFIRMS GRANT FOR REFURBISHMENT OF SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) are delighted to announce that the HLF has confirmed the £4.5m award to support Portrait of the Nation, the imaginative scheme to renovate and rejuvenate the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Scottish Government already announced its support in December 2007 with a grant for £5.1 million.

James Holloway, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery said: “We are delighted with the support from the HLF. Their confidence in the scheme is a terrific boost at this critical stage of the project. Portrait of the Nation will enable us to create an imaginative and bold portrait gallery suitable for Scotland in 21st century for the enjoyment of the Scottish people and visitors to Scotland.”

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG) is the first purpose-built national portrait gallery in the world, and the refurbishment will mean that it will be used entirely for its intended purpose for the first time in its history. This outstanding Grade A building, at the heart of the New Town on Queen Street in Edinburgh, was designed by architect Sir Robert Rowand Anderson to be a celebration of the people of Scotland. Portrait of the Nation will restore this ideal, breathing new life in to its galleries at the same time as creating much needed new facilities.

Portrait of the Nation will open up and restore large areas in order to create 50% more gallery space. A range of visitor services, including an education suite, a resource and learning centre and enhanced dining and retail areas, will all be underpinned by an innovative and far-reaching events programme.

The SNPG’s collection – a remarkable body of 30,000 works in a rich variety of media – is an exceptional resource. The collection will be presented in a reinvigorated and more engaging way, /illustrating the richness of Scotland’s history and culture with a dynamic and extensive exhibition programme with a new emphasis on photography and Scottish art. The regularly changing exhibitions and increased number of works on display will ensure that there will always be something new to see.

The HLF grant comes at the very moment when the gallery is about to close to the public in order to start the refurbishment process. The NGS are celebrating with a special Farewell Festival for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on April 4th and 5th.  This is a weekend of celebratory events for visitors with a special emphasis on families and children. For further information please go to www.nationalgalleries.org.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on 0131 624 6325 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-
Notes to Editors:
Key Objectives of Portrait of the Nation:
Portrait of the Nation has three sets of objectives – for our Audiences, Collections and Building - which will deliver a range of specific outcomes.

Audiences
• Increase visitor figures by 50% to 300,000 a year.
• Introduce education facilities including;
• A multi-purpose Education Suite, suitable for a variety of groups
• A Seminar Room
• A new Education and Events Programme
• Create a new Resource and Learning Centre on the 1st floor.
• Introduce New Media interpretation facilities throughout the building. 
• Create a Visitor Hub with a new shop, café, entrance desk and information point.

Collections
• Display 50% more works of art
• Introduce a new approach to the display and interpretation of the collection, with regularly changing exhibitions based around 5 Key Areas; Reformation, Empire, Enlightenment, Modernity  and Contemporary.
• Create a helpful Introductory Gallery
• Create a permanent gallery for the Scottish National Photography Collection. 
• Provide a focus for Scottish art, including a Contemporary Scotland Gallery.

Building
• Restore original features, re-open parts of the building closed to the public and reinstate the top-lit galleries on the 2nd floor. 
• Create 50% more gallery space
• Create new visitor services

Heritage Lottery Fund
Using money raised through the National Lottery, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) sustains and transforms a wide range of heritage for present and future generations to take part in, learn from and enjoy. From museums, parks and historic places to archaeology, natural environment and cultural traditions, we invest in every part of our diverse heritage. HLF has supported more than 28,800 projects, allocating over £4.3billion across the UK.  For more information, please call Katie Owen, HLF Press Office on tel: 020 7591 6036/07973 613820.

• Old Sea Dog points the way to the future at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

OLD SEA DOG POINTS THE WAY TO THE FUTURE AT THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is delighted to announce the acquisition of James Coull (1786-1880) by Scottish portrait painter James Irvine (1822-1889). The painting was acquired through Peter Johnson of Ackermann and Johnson based in London and is the final acquisition before the Portrait Gallery closes for refurbishment on Sunday 5 April 2009.

The portrait shows an Ordinary Seaman, one of tens of thousands who manned Britain’s Merchant and Royal navy’s during the age of imperial and economic expansion. James Coull’s story is one which will be told in the new Portrait Gallery when it reopens in November 2011.

In the past the Portrait Gallery has looked at history through the eyes of the great and the famous rather than, in this case, the sailors below deck. Portrait of the Nation, the Portrait Gallery’s exciting renovation project, will change that. This is why the purchase of James Coull’s portrait is of such importance.

James Holloway, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said “James Coull’s eye view of life at sea in the nineteenth century is as valuable as that of the admirals who were his superiors. Press-ganged into the British navy, James Coull fought the French at Trafalgar, was wounded by the Americans at Chesapeake Bay and manned Arctic Whalers. His portrait is a particularly valuable acquisition for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery because it is such a rare portrait of an ordinary seaman who lived long enough to become an international celebrity.  At his death both the London and New York Times published his obituary.”

James Irvine was a successful Scottish portrait painter born in Menmuir, in the region of Angus in 1822.  After displaying a natural, artistic flair for painting he was sent to serve an apprenticeship with acclaimed artist, Colvin Smith, also from the same area.  Irvine went on to establish himself in a studio in Edinburgh but continued to work in the areas of Arbroath and Montrose.

His subject James Coull was also a local man and a subject with a very compelling past.  Coull was born near Montrose in 1786.  The death of his father at a young age left his family destitute and Coull was forced to work at sea as a cabin boy at the age of eight years old.  An apprenticeship in navigation skills left Coull trained as a Quartermaster and many an adventure ensued Coull’s life at sea.  He fought alongside Lord Nelson in historical naval battles like the Battle of Copenhagen (1801) and the Battle of Trafalgar (1805).  The War of 1812 between the British Empire and the United States of America, in which Coull was Quartermaster of the victorious Royal Navy vessel HMS Shannon, saw Coull badly wounded by a musket ball to the arm.  The injury resulted in Coull losing his left hand and having to retire from the Royal Navy with an annual pension of £16.  However, a handicap could not keep Coull from the seas and he continued his naval life as a ship’s cook on Montrose whaling ships.  He died in Montrose at the age of 95, ‘a very popular and much loved man’ and was buried with full military honours.        

Irvine painted ‘Old Coull’ five times and obviously found him to be a fascinating man and subject.  Undoubtedly anecdotes of Coull’s adventurous naval life kept Irvine entertained whilst he focused on Coull’s craggy and expressive face.  This painting is likely to be the same picture Irvine exhibited in 1874 at the Royal Scottish Academy with the title: Coull, Quartermaster, one of the boarders of the Chesapeake.   
 
For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• Scottish National Portrait Gallery Farewell Festival

SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY FAREWELL FESTIVAL
4 April – 5 April 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org 

Join us for a celebratory weekend marking the temporary closure of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as we begin our exciting and ambitious Portrait of the Nation project. See portrait artists at work and hear them in conversation; enjoy live music performances; have your portrait made or create your own.  Plus, hear about our plans for the future, tell us about your memories of the Portrait Gallery and toast the exciting future of this much-loved gallery.

Farewell Festival Programme of Events

Saturday 4th April

All day - Queen Street Café – Enjoy the best of the café’s delicious fare chosen by visitors in the last week. You can also obtain discount vouchers for the Dean & GMA café.

Keep in touch postcard: What will you miss most while we are closed? Tell us your favourite thing about the PG on a postcard.

11.00am -5.00pm Entrance Hall & Raeburn Room
Meet Mary Queen of Scots & Robert Burns in full costume.

Drop in workshops on the Ambulatory & Raeburn Room
11am –12pm & 1- 4pm
Choose from:
• Picture Yourself: digital photography with digital artist Janey Nicoll
• Drawing and painting portraits – create an original drawing at an easel, working from a live costumed model or with the help of a mirror capture yourself in time by making a self portrait using lots of drawing materials. 
• Creating a clay portrait bust – Inspired by works in the PG collection try your hand at modelling a 3-D clay head and shoulders bust to take home.

Demonstrations by Alex Main
11am – 1pm & 2pm -4pm
Sculptor Alex Main, who has recently made a bust of actress Tilda Swinton, demonstrates how he starts making a portrait bust from a model using clay. Through examples he will explain the stages involved in transforming the clay sculpture into a bronze, discuss his techniques and answer questions.

11:15am & 12:15pm
Behind the Scenes: Prints and Drawings
Senior Curator Stephen Lloyd looks at highlights of the Portrait Gallery’s extensive prints and drawings collection.
12 places – booking on the day essential

12:00-12:45pm Main Hall
Live Music Now: Sarah Naylor (fiddle) and Douglas Millar (Piano/keyboard)
.
1.15-1.45pm
Iain Clark and Muriel Gray - in conversation (Temporary Exhibition gallery)
Broadcaster Muriel Gray will discuss portraiture with Iain Clark in relation to his own work and illustrated by his portrait of Muriel. Muriel will reflect on the role of the sitter in portraiture and Iain on the process of creating photographic portraits.

2-2.45pm
Portrait of the Month
An introduction to a selection of some of the many faces in the Portrait Gallery's collection including Mary Queen of Scots, John Campbell, 4th Duke of Arygll, The Oncologists and a self portrait by John Bellany.
Meet in the main entrance.

3.-3.45pm
Portrait of the Month
An introduction to a selection of some of the many faces in the Portrait Gallery's collection including Walter Scott, Flora Macdonald, Flora Drummond and works by Calum Colvin.
Meet in the main entrance.

4-4.30pm
Ken Currie in conversation with Dr Tom Normand (Room 2)
Dr Tom Normand, University of St Andrews talks to artist Ken Currie about his striking portrait of the three Oncologists. Discussing his relationship with the sitters, the reasons behind the choice of subject matter and the impact of the work on the viewer.

Programme Sunday 5th April

Visit the Queen Street Café  & shop
Enjoy the best of the café’s delicious fare chosen by visitors in the last week. Get your discount vouchers for the Dean & GMA café.

Keep in touch postcard: What will you miss most while we are closed? Tell us your favourite thing about the Portrait Gallery on a postcard.

11.00am -5.00pm Entrance Hall & Raeburn Room
Meet Mary Queen of Scots & Robert in full costume.

Drop in workshops on the Ambulatory & Raeburn Room
11am – 12pm & 1- 4pm
Choose from:
• Picture Yourself: digital photography with digital artist Janey Nicoll
• Drawing and painting portraits - create an original drawing at an easel, working from a live costumed model or with the help of a mirror capture yourself in time by making a self portrait using lots of drawing materials. 
• Creating a clay portrait bust – Inspired by works in the PG collection try your hand at modelling a 3-D clay head and shoulders bust to take home.

11:15 & 12:15
Behind the Scenes: Prints and Drawings
Imogen Gibbon looks at highlights of the Portrait gallery’s extensive prints and drawings collection. 12 places – booking on the day essential

4.00pm Main Hall
Speeches & toast supported by Drambuie and Ruthvens

Musical finale 4.15 – 17.00pm Main Hall
The Cast : Mairi Campbell & Dave Francis (Main Hall)
Live music in the Main Hall. Mairi was awarded Scots singer of the year 2008 and their recording Auld Lang Syne featured in the film  ‘Sex and the City’ in 2008

• Two Horizons press release

TWO HORIZONS:
WORKS FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF CHARLES ASPREY AND ALEXANDER SCHRÖDER
28 February – 19 July 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org 
Admission free

Two Horizons presents a unique opportunity to see a fascinating selection of works by internationally regarded contemporary artists from the collections of Charles Asprey and Alexander Schröder. This exhibition brings together the work of established artists, such as Andreas Slominski, Isa Genzken, and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with that of the younger emerging generation, including Kitty Kraus, Lucy McKenzie and Gillian Carnegie.  Comprising of painting, sculpture, and installation, Two Horizons showcases works by leading figures of the international art world which will be on display in Scotland for the very first time.

This exhibition marks an exciting new collaboration between the Gallery of Modern Art and the London and Berlin-based collectors Charles Asprey and Alexander Schröder.  Long time friends and collaborators, both Asprey and Schröder have been collecting contemporary art since the early 1990s, but have never shown their collections together before now.

Both collectors have championed the original and the daring, allowing striking new parallels to be drawn between artists as seemingly diverse as, for example, Lucy McKenzie and Marc Camille Chaimowicz. Glaswegian artist Lucy McKenzie’s work presents a lively critique of the art world.  Her metal sculpture Panache (2001) and the painting One Pound (2001) both humorously subvert primary symbols of power in the art market, whilst Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s beautiful and elegiac Man Looking out of Window (for SM) emphasises the notion of the artist as a staged persona, surrounded by the symbols of his trade. In Two Horizons, McKenzie’s and Chaimowicz’s works enter into a lively and original dialogue, all the more forceful for being so unexpected.

Two Horizons is an eclectic meeting of works, which allows the visitor to look again, do a double-take and discover new perspectives. With humorous observations and challenging juxtapositions, this exhibition showcases some of the most significant and up-and-coming names in contemporary art.

Full list of artists:
Tom Burr (b. 1963 in New Haven, USA; lives and works in New York)
Gillian Carnegie (b. 1971 in Suffolk)
Marc Camille Chaimowicz (born in Paris, lives and works in London and Burgundy)
Lukas Duwenhögger (b. 1956 in Munich; lives and works in Istanbul)
Keith Farquhar (b. 1969 in Edinburgh; lives and works in Edinburgh)
Ian Hamilton Finlay (British, 1925-2006)
Isa Genzken (b. 1948 Bad Oldesloe, Germany; lives and works in Berlin)
Kitty Kraus (b. 1976 in Heidelberg; lives and works in Berlin)
Lucy McKenzie (b.1977 Glasgow; lives and works in Glasgow)
Raymond de Lafage (French, 1656-1684)
Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, USA; lives and works in New York)
Henrik Olesen (b. 1967 Esbjerg, Denmark; lives and works in Berlin)
Manfred Pernice (b. 1963 Hildesheim, Germany; lives and works  in Berlin)
Andreas Slominski (b. 1959 Meppen, Germany; lives and works in Hamburg)

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

• 25 Years of Photography Press release

25 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
CELEBRATING THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATIONAL COLLECTION
14 February - 19 April 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org
Admission free

The enormous contribution of Scottish photographers to the development of their medium will be celebrated this spring, in a special display marking the first quarter-century of the Scottish National Photography Collection.  Since 1984, nearly forty thousand photographs – dating from the beginnings of the art-form in the 1840s to the present day – have been acquired for the collection, which is housed at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.  Comprising a selection of 38 works, both historic and modern, 25 Years Of Photography will document the remarkable growth of the collection in its short history, and highlight the vast wealth of material in its holdings.

In 1984 the National Galleries of Scotland took the decision to build upon the Portrait Gallery’s existing collection of works by the pioneering, Edinburgh-based photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, and formally established the Scottish National Photography Collection.  Its remit is to collect, research and exhibit photography, and to produce publications on the subject, with a Scottish bias to its energies.  Scottish photographers have been internationally renowned since the very earliest days of the medium, and the collection now offers an unrivalled archive of their work and achievements. 

Highlights in the display will include Hill and Adamson’s engaging portrait of The Misses Farnie with Brownie (about 1845); J Craig Annan’s stunning highland landscape The Dark Mountains (1890); Alfred Buckham’s breathtaking aerial photograph of Edinburgh and the Forth Estuary, Sunshine, Wind and Rain (about 1918); and the collection’s most recent addition, Iain Stewart’s richly atmospheric landscape,   Erribol (from the series Darkeden), which was purchased in February 2009, and has been printed specially for the display.

25 Years Of Photography will bring together the work of historic and current photographers working in similar areas, to see how they echo, reflect or react against each other, and to explore three broad themes: People; Land and Stone; and Staged and Constructed. 

The first of these will illustrate the strong tradition of social documentary in Scottish photography, with examples such as Grace Robertson’s Mothers’ Pub Outing (1954) and Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s Calderari Gypsy Children (1994).  It will also explore different strands of portraiture, with fine examples by Pradip Malde (Richard Walker (1985) and David Williams (Six form girl, primary 1 girl, St Margaret’s School, from the series Pictures from No Man’s Land (1984)). 

Land and Stone will examine the response of Scottish photographers to the country’s rural and urban geography, including Raymond Moore’s spare and beautiful Raes Knowes (1980); Thomas Annan’s Close No. 101, High Street, Glasgow (1868-71); and Patricia Macdonald’s remarkable aerial photograph Castle, Island and Cracking Ice, Loch Leven (1987). 

Staged and Constructed will feature the work of photographers who have a more direct hand in arranging their subject matter, or constructing images, such as Calum Colvin (untitled image from the series Constructed Narratives (1985)) and Andy Wiener (Separation, from the series, Love Scenes (1989)).

25 Years Of Photography will also highlight the important work of the National Galleries of Scotland in commissioning modern prints of historic photographs that currently exist only as negatives.  Using photographers who are particularly sympathetic to their predecessors’ work, or who are working in a similar area of practice, the collection has helped to revive the beauty and impact of lost images such as George P Lewis’s Corporation tram-driver and conductor Glasgow (1918), and Fred Bremner’s River Crossing, River Jhelum, Kashmir (1900).

The display will also reflect the international collection, which includes the work of distinguished European photographers, particularly those whose practice (exemplified by Roger Mayne’s Children playing on a lorry, Glasgow (1958)) was of particular importance in Scotland in the mid-twentieth century. 

ENDS

For further information and images, please call the Press Office
on 0131 624 6247/ 325/ 332/ 314

pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

Notes to Editors

To coincide with this exhibition, there will be a conference on 28 March, when the newly-revised edition of The Companion Guide to Photography in the National Galleries of Scotland will be published.

• Diana and Actaeon Secured Press Pack

DIANA AND ACTAEON IS SECURED FOR THE NATION

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the National Gallery, London (NGL) are delighted to announce that Titian’s Diana and Actaeon has been acquired for the nation from the Duke of Sutherland. The acquisition has been made possible with the generous contributions from private and public donations, Scottish Government, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Monument Trust, The Art Fund charity and NGL and NGS funds. 

The painting will be shared by the National Galleries of Scotland and National Gallery, London and will be displayed for 5 years at each institution in turn.  The purchase of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon brings this extraordinary painting into public ownership and we have received assurances that the rest of the Bridgewater Collection will remain on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland for the next 21 years.

The National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery, London, formed a partnership in August 2008 to raise £50 million to acquire Diana and Actaeon by 31 December 2008. We are grateful to the Duke of Sutherland for offering the painting at much below its market value and for giving us several years in which to make payments.
 
John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said “We are absolutely thrilled that one of the most important paintings in the world will be added to the national collections for the enjoyment and inspiration of the public and we are delighted that the world-famous Bridgewater Collection will continue to be available on long loan to Scotland. We are hugely grateful to all the individuals and all the funding bodies who responded so warmly and wholeheartedly to this campaign over the past four months.”
 
Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, London said “The response to our appeal to buy this great painting has been astonishing. The notes pressed into collecting boxes and the cheques sent to us by the general public, the generosity of individual friends of the gallery and the support given by the trustees of charitable bodies combine to make this a great success story. It testifies to the power of Titian's painting and the conviction that public access to the greatest works of art is of the utmost importance.”

Spokesman for the Duke of Sutherland said “A spokesman for the Duke of Sutherland said that the Duke was delighted to have reached agreement for this wonderful work to remain in Britain, on public view. He expressed his great appreciation to the Galleries for their helpful and supportive approach over the past 18 months of complex and painstaking negotiations, and he looked forward to many more years association between his family and the National Galleries of Scotland through the continuing loan of the Bridgewater Collection."

Breakdown of funding:
• £7.4 million in donations and pledges from individuals trusts and the general public, of which £150,000 was donated via The Art Fund. (The amount raised from the general public in response to leaflets, direct mail, collection boxes, sales of badges and the media is circa £400,000).
• £2 million from The Monument Trust
• £1 million from The Art Fund
• £10 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund
• £12.5 million Scottish Government Special purchase grant
• £12.5 million from NGL, comprising £11.5 from bequests, general donations and investment income from these sources and £1 million Grant-in-Aid
• £4.6 million from NGS purchase funds, trust funds and reserves

NOTES TO EDITORS

The Galleries have also been granted the opportunity to buy a second painting - Diana and Callisto - for a similar amount by 2012.

ABOUT THE BRIDGEWATER COLLECTION
The Bridgewater Collection, currently on view at the National Galleries of Scotland, is the most important private collection of Old Master paintings on loan to an institution in the UK and counts among the most important art collections anywhere in the world.  The loan includes masterpieces by artists such as Raphael (3), Titian (4), Rembrandt (1) and Poussin (8). The pictures have been on continuous public view in the National Gallery of Scotland since the collection was placed there in 1945 by the then 5th Earl of Ellesmere, later 6th Duke of Sutherland. It forms the core of the National Gallery of Scotland’s world-famous displays of European art.

ABOUT DIANA AND ACTAEON
Diana and Actaeon is one of six large-scale mythologies inspired by the Roman poet Ovid that Titian painted for King Philip II of Spain (Titian’s great portrait of whom featured in the recent Renaissance Faces exhibition at the NGL). Titian began the picture and its companion Diana and Callisto in 1556, the year of Philip’s coronation. Spurred on by the prestige of royal patronage, he unleashed all his creativity to produce works of unprecedented beauty and inventiveness.

Titian worked for three years to perfect these masterpieces, which were shipped to Spain in 1559. He claimed their lengthy genesis was due to the relentless pains he took to make sumptuous works of art worthy of the king.

SUPPORTING COMMENTS

Linda Fabiani MSP, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture said “I am delighted to announce that this world-class collection has been saved for Scotland, underlining the prestige of our National Galleries and offering real educational and economic benefits for years to come.  This is a significant investment in Scotland’s future, securing a collection worth many millions of pounds for future generations at a fraction of the market cost.  Over 1.5 million people visited the Bridgewater Collection last year, with two thirds of those coming from outside Edinburgh.  The collection is a significant tourist draw with a half day visit to the National Galleries equating to an estimated annual £27 million tourist spend, with the indirect economic impact of this rising to an estimated £50 million a year. The Bridgewater Collection clearly represents significant educational opportunities, allowing the National Galleries to teach with the most famous artists in art history: Titian, Raphael, Rembrandt, Poussin to name a few.  This collection is a vital source of artistic excellence and inspiration for research, scholarship and the creative industries.  The international interest and support generated around this campaign offers a golden opportunity for our National Galleries to raise its profile and show the world that Scotland will continue to punch above its weight in cultural excellence.” 

Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, said “We're so delighted that generations to come will be able to enjoy this truly extraordinary work of art. Our grant of £10million was a big challenge for us financially, but is exactly what the National Heritage Memorial Fund was set up to do. The generous help of all the partners and the public have ensured the painting is now safe. And because our grant will be made in staggered payments the Fund will continue to be able to help save other heritage treasures.”

David Barrie, Director of The Art Fund said “The Art Fund was the first to put money on the table for Diana and Actaeon – at £1 million our largest donation ever for a single work of art. Since 1903, our members have enabled The Art Fund to keep thousands of great works of art on public display, and none has a more distinguished pedigree than this magnificent painting. We are proud to have played our part in ensuring that it will never now be lost to public view.”

The National Heritage Memorial Fund
The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) was set up to save the most outstanding parts of our national heritage, in memory of those who have given their lives for the United Kingdom. It currently receives £10million annual grant-in-aid from the government.  www.nhmf.org.uk.  For more details, please contact Katie Owen or Alison Scott, NHMF Press Office, on (020) 7591 6036/32.

The Monument Trust
The Monument Trust is a charitable foundation established by the late Simon Sainsbury. It supports a wide range of charities in the fields of arts and heritage, health and social care, and criminal justice. For more details, please contact Alan Bookbinder, Director, Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, on 020 7410 0330

The Art Fund
The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections; campaigns on behalf of museums and their visitors; and promotes the enjoyment of art.  It is entirely funded from public donations and has 80,000 members.  Since 1903 the charity has helped museums and galleries all over the UK secure 860,000 works of art for their collections. For more information contact the Press Office on 020 7225 4888 or visit www.artfund.org 

The Art Fund is a Registered Charity No. 209174

PRESS ENQUIRIES

For the National Galleries of Scotland
Patricia Convery – Head of Press
Tel: 0131 624 6325
Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org
Or
Erica Bolton, Bolton & Quinn
Tel: 020 7221 5000 (5 lines)
Email: erica@boltonquinn.com

For the National Gallery, London
Tracy Jones /Razeetha Ram - Head of Press
Tel: 020 7747 2839/020 7747 2519
General Press Office number: 020 7747 2865
Email: tracy.jones@ng-london.org.uk/ razeetha.ram@ng-london.org.uk (please email both)

• ARTIST ROOMS On Tour press pack

PRESS INFORMATION

ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund, supported by The Scottish Government

• Tour Schedule
• 50 rooms of contemporary art by 25 artists
• 10 additional works by 7 artists
• Anthony d’Offay biography

Contact Details:

Patricia Convery
Head of Press
National Galleries of Scotland
Tel: 0131 624 6325
Mobile: 0131 343 3250
Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org

Helen Beeckmans
Head of Press
Tate
Tel: 0207 887 4940
Mobile: 07887 952375
Email: helen.beeckmans@tate.org.uk

Erica Bolton & Jane Quinn Ltd
Tel: 020 7221 5000
Mobile: 07711 698186
Email: Erica@boltonquinn.com

Madeleine Burbidge
Interim Head of Press
The Art Fund
0207 225 4820
07912 777761
www.artfund.org
 

Tour Schedule 2009

Tate Britain
2 March 2009 – 2010
Ian Hamilton Finlay
(BP British Art Displays 1500-2009)
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Sailing Dinghy 1996 is a monumental one-room installation comprising a full-sized sailing boat and poem. The sailing boat, which Hamilton Finlay has sailed on the sea, measures over five metres tall and four metres wide, while a poem forms a ‘key’ that describes the parts of the boat and evokes its movement.  In the 1960s Hamilton Finlay was widely known as one of Britain’s foremost concrete poets, and much of his early poetry concerns sailing and fishing boats. His work, often collaborative and in a wide variety of materials, is a unique blend of art and poetry - this installation combines his love of ships and the sea with his love of literature and the potency of words. A second ARTIST ROOMS display of Gilbert & George will open at Tate Britain in late April as part of the BP British Art Displays 1500-2009.
Contact:
Louise Butler, Press Officer, Tate Britain
Tel: 020 7887 8732 Email: louise.butler@tate.org.uk

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
14 March – 8 November 2009
Vija Celmins
Damien Hirst
Ellen Gallagher
Alex Katz
Andy Warhol – stitched photographs
Francesca Woodman
Damien Hirst, Vija Celmins and Alex Katz are among the artists whose work will be shown in a series of inaugural displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Highlights will include Vija Celmins’ beautiful, delicate images of seas, deserts and the night sky, a complete series of landscape and portrait paintings by the American painter Alex Katz and Francesca Woodman’s intimate, surrealist influenced photographs. Damien Hirst, the most prominent British artist of today, will feature in an expanded display across several rooms. This will bring together works from ARTIST ROOMS - such as the iconic Away from the Flock 1994 (an early example of Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde) and a recent butterfly painting - with additional loans from further collections. A further ARTIST ROOMS display dedicated to the work of Agnes Martin will open at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in early August. ARTIST ROOMS transforms the ability of the Gallery of Modern Art to display modern international art now and into the future.
Contact:
National Galleries of Scotland Press Office
Tel: 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 Email: pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
 

Wolverhampton Art Gallery
28 March – 21 September 2009
Andy Warhol – posters and paintings
This exhibition of major portrait paintings and a selection of posters will represent some of the most important themes in Andy Warhol’s practice. Highlights include the iconic multi-part paintings Skulls 1976 and Self-Portrait Strangulation 1978 as well as the celebrated four-part mural-size work of 1986, Camouflage. Portraits and posters of Man Ray 1967, Mick Jagger 1980, Gilbert and George 1975, and Muhammad Ali 1978 reveal Warhol’s enduring fascination with glamour, celebrity and contemporary icons. Whilst film posters provide new insights into the breadth and depth of the artist’s career as well as his eye-catching ability as a graphic artist. On display alongside these works will be Andy Warhol’s work Jacqueline 1964 from Wolverhampton’s Pop Art Collection.
Contact:
Zoe Papiernik, Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Tel: 01902 552040

Tate Modern
April 2009 – 2010
Anselm Kiefer
Jeff Koons
Jannis Kounellis
Ed Ruscha
Robert Therrien
Andy Warhol - black and white diptychs
(UBS Openings: Tate Modern Collection)
Six ARTIST ROOMS including Anslem Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Ed Ruscha, Robert Therrien and Andy Warhol will be unveiled at Tate Modern in April as part of UBS Openings: Tate Modern Collection. Robert Therrien’s gigantic sculpture No Title (Table and Four Chairs), 2003 will fill the central gallery of a display exploring scale. Other highlights include major paintings by Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol in the States of Flux galleries on Level 5. Works by Jannis Kounellis and Anslem Kiefer will go on show in a suite of galleries dedicated to the Arte Povera movement.
Contact:
Bomi Odufunade, Press Officer, Tate Modern
Tel: 020 7887 4942 Email: bomi.odufunade@tate.org.uk

Tramway, Glasgow
17 April – 31 May 2009
Bruce Nauman
This exhibition features works by the internationally celebrated American artist, Bruce Nauman. Highlights include two unique neon pieces: the early work, La Brea/Art Tips/Rat Spit/Tar Pits, 1972; and a loan from Anthony d’Offay’s own collection, Trust Me Only Big Studio, 1984; two sculptures, Untitled, Hand Circle, 1996 and Partial Truth, 1997; the important unique two-monitor video work, Raw Materials Washing Hands, 1996; and two further videos dated 1986 and 1999. The exhibition will take place in Tramway’s new gallery Tramway 5, a beautiful new space located at the front of the historic building.
Contact:
Andy Lindsay, Marketing Officer, Tramway
Tel: 0141 276 0950 Mob: 07901 677730
 
Tate Britain
20 April 2009 – 2010
Gilbert & George
(BP British Art Displays 1500-2009)
This display will comprise eleven works ranging from 1970 to 1991 including eight from ARTIST ROOMS complemented by three works from Tate Collection. The display will be part of Tate Britain’s BP British Art Displays 1500-2009. It will include early black and white pictures from the 1970s, including the video A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men 1970 and bold-coloured works of the 1980s and 90s such as Existers 1984, and Family Tree 1991. Since 1970 Gilbert & George have been important figures in the international art world. Working as a pair and presenting themselves as ‘living sculpture’, incorporating themselves into their art, they set out to provoke their viewers, making them think and question conventions and taboos. Their early work emphasised the artists’ own image, their place as misfits in society and their concept of ‘art for all’. But by the late seventies their work explored the world and the people around them in the East End of London.
Contact:
Louise Butler, Press Officer, Tate Britain
Tel: 020 7887 8732 Email: louise.butler@tate.org.uk

Inverness Museum and Art Gallery
26 April – 27 June 2009
Robert Mapplethorpe
The Highland Council will be hosting a special exhibition of works by the celebrated American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe at Inverness Museum & Art Gallery. The group of photographs in the ARTIST ROOMS collection is probably the best collection in the world of the artist’s work after the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The selection focusses on Mapplethorpe’s portraits -  many depicting the most influential artists, writers and musicians of his day including Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Patti Smith  - and his iconic self-portraits.
Contact:
Cathy Shankland
Tel: 01463 663861 Email: cathy.shankland@highland.gov.uk

Tate Liverpool
12 May – 13 September 2009
Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) was a pioneer of Conceptual Art and Minimalism. The monumental and colourful Wall Drawing #1136 from the ARTIST ROOMS collection was first installed at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in 2004 and is a late example of LeWitt’s work, where vibrantly coloured bands are painted directly onto the wall of the gallery space. At Tate Liverpool it will span the 22 metre long wall of the ground floor gallery. This display of Sol LeWitt’s work from ARTIST ROOMS runs in parallel with Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour 1950 to Today (29 May – 13 September 2009).
Contact:
Stacey Arnold, Press Officer, Tate Liverpool
Tel: 0151 702 7444 Email: stacey.arnold@tate.org.uk
 

Ulster Museum, National Museums Northern Ireland
20 May 2009 – May 2010
Richard Long
Cornish Slate Ellipse will be made by Richard Long this year especially for ARTIST ROOMS and will be installed in an external site located in the Botanic Gardens, Belfast. The work will take the form of a large floor-based sculpture comprising cut slate pieces arranged as an ellipse. Long has been a major figure in international and British art since the late 1960s. His practice is based on his relationship with the natural environment, and on his response to walks made outdoors in nature. Works by Long often take the form of geometric shapes made from organic materials such as stone, sticks or mud. Cornish Slate Ellipse will be installed outside in 2009 but in future years may also be exhibited in the context of a gallery or museum.
Contact: Anne Stewart, Curator of Fine Art, Ulster Museum 
Tel: 028 90395234 Email: Anne.Stewart@nmni.com

Tate St Ives
16 May – 20 September 2009
Lawrence Weiner
This display comprises a cycle of ten wall text works from 1988. All of the texts seem to refer to a manipulation of objects or matter in the physical world and have a very powerful sculptural quality: ‘CRUSHED BETWEEN COBBLESTONES’, TUCKED IN AT THE CORNERS’ or ‘DAUBED WITH MUCK AND MIRE’. Lawrence Weiner is one of the most acclaimed American artists working today. A key member of the New York conceptual art world of the 1960s, for over 40 years Weiner has been using language as the material for his work.  Whilst it usually takes the form of large typographic wall texts, he refers to his work as sculpture, and the words, phrases and statements he employs are often representative of states or processes grounded in materiality. His works exist simultaneously as instructions, propositions and evocations as well as the thing in itself.
Contact: Helen Munro Berry, Press Officer, Tate St Ives
Tel: 01736 792185 Email: helen.munroberry@tate.org.uk

National Museum Cardiff
9 May – 19 August 2009
Diane Arbus
The work of the legendary New York photographer, Diane Arbus, will be the subject of the ARTIST ROOMS exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff. 69 black and white photographs will be shown, including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: Box of Ten, 1971. This is one of the most important collections of Arbus’ work in the world.
Contact:
Catrin Mears, Communications Officer, Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
Tel: 029 2057 3185/07920 027067 Email:  catrin.mears@museumwales.ac.uk

New Art Gallery, Walsall
15 May – 5 July 2009
Andy Warhol – drawings
An exhibition of drawings by Andy Warhol will go on show at The New Art Gallery, Walsall. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is the most influential artist of the post-war period and this exhibition of early illustrative works will reveal an alternative side of Warhol’s character and career. The unique collection of 50 early works on paper dating from c. 1950 to 1962 and four later drawings, demonstrate Warhol’s move between the worlds of commercial art and advertising and the New York Pop Art scene.  In the 1950s, Warhol was one of the best known and highest paid illustrators in New York. His colourful and whimsical drawings of people, animals, insects, shoes and accessories adorned advertisement features, shop windows, and book covers.  As Warhol developed his own concept of Pop Art, he, himself became a household brand.  His self-portrait along with those of Mick Jagger and David Hockney reflect his enduring fascination celebrity, fame and mortality. 
Contact:
Hollie Latham
Marketing and Development Manager
Tel: 01922 654402 Email: LathamH@walsall.gov.uk

Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney
19 June – 5 September 2009
Bill Viola
The work of one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists is to be shown at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness for the first time. Bill Viola has been creating emblematic installations in video and sound for over 35 years.  Curated by the Pier Arts Centre, the exhibition will feature video works from the artist’s Passions series created between 2000 and 2002. The two works in ARTIST ROOMS, Four Hands and Catherine’s Room, will be complemented by Surrender from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland and Ascension on loan from the artist’s studio.
Contact:
Isla Holloway
Tel: 01856 850 209 Email: isla.holloway@pierartscentre.com

De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea
4 July – 27 September 2009
Joseph Beuys
This exhibition provides an exciting opportunity to show work by Joseph Beuys in a building whose architecture, like the work of the artist, is rooted in socialist ideals and whose purpose is to provide a cultural centre for its locality. The exhibition will feature sculptures, photographs, drawings, and watercolours as well as a selection of posters recalling live actions and events by Beuys. Highlights will include the vitrine, Fat Chair 1964 – 85, the late sculpture Scala Napoletana 1985 and works on paper such as the lithograph A Party for Animals, 1969. The exhibition will explore Beuys’s ideas on economics, politics, activism, anti-establishment, teaching, learning and philosophy and raise questions as to how these ideas have extended beyond Beuys’s own lifetime and how they can continue to inform new thinking today.
Contact:
Sally Ann Lycett
Tel: 01424 229137 Email: sally.ann.lycett@dlwp.com
 

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
6 August – 8 November 2009
Agnes Martin
In August 2009, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will dedicate a room to the work of the influential minimalist artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Featuring the three late paintings included in ARTIST ROOMS, the display will be complemented by further works lent by the artist’s estate. Martin’s delicate technique expresses a quiet tension between ordered geometry and the irregularity of hand-drawn pencil lines, an inconsistency which she viewed as analogous to the human condition. This presentation will enable audiences in Scotland to experience at first hand the ethereal beauty and subtlety of the artist’s practice.
Contact:
National Galleries of Scotland Press Office
Tel: 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 Email: pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

mima Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
28 August - 15 November 2009
Gerhard Richter
One of the world's greatest living artists, Gerhard Richter is receiving widespread attention in the UK at present. The exhibition will feature paintings from several phases of the artist's career, from the 1980s to the present. Highlights will include a rare sculpture from 1971, a number of acclaimed monochrome abstractions and the 2004 sculpture 11 Scheiben (11 Panes of Glass).
Contact:
Nina Byrne
Tel: 01642 726 710 Email: nina_byrne@middlesbrough.gov.uk

Aberdeen Art Gallery
29 August – 31 October 2009
Ron Mueck
Australian-born, London-based, Ron Mueck has become widely recognised for his sculptures, which replicate the human figure at greatly exaggerated or reduced scale, but always in the utmost detail. His incredibly life-like works have been exhibited internationally and have captivated the public wherever they have been shown. The exhibition will feature the three sculptures from ARTIST ROOMS: Wild Man, 2005; Spooning Couple, 2005; and Mask III, 2005 along with a further work lent by the National Galleries of Scotland.
Contact:
Deirdre Grant, Cultural Services Promotions Officer
Tel: 01224 523711 Email: DeGrant@aberdeencity.gov.uk

The Lightbox, Woking
14 November 2009 – 14 February 2010
Jenny Holzer
Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s blue light installation, BLUE PURPLE TILT, is the centrepiece of this exhibition. The work, which is over 4 metres high, features seven doubled-sided vertical LED signs with messages from several of Holzer’s early text series. The show will also feature two large paintings Protect, Protect and Shape the Battlefield, in which Holzer presents declassified American military documents relating to the war in Iraq. Holzer’s dynamic and thought-provoking work aligns well with the creative and inspirational programmes which The Lightbox aims to bring to its various target audiences throughout the year
Contact:
Tel: 01483 737800 Email: info@thelightbox.org.uk

Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield
19 December 2009 – 27 March 2010
Robert Mapplethorpe
The city’s very first exhibition of works by one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century. Born in 1946, Robert Mapplethorpe produced some of the most iconic images of the last 50 years. His work includes intimate pictures of friends and acquaintances, acclaimed studies of the statuesque male and female nude, delicate flora still lifes, and a wealth of enduring celebrity portraits, with subjects including Patti Smith, Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The exhibition will include highlights from throughout Mapplethorpe’s career.
Contact:
Chris Harvey, Communications Officer, Museums Sheffield
Tel: 0114 278 2664 Email: chris.harvey@museums-sheffield.org.uk

firstsite, Colchester (Offsite Project)
Autumn 2009
Johan Grimonprez
The contemporary visual arts organisation firstsite are delighted to be in discussions to work with ARTIST ROOMS in presenting Johan Grimonprez’s important video work Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y, 1997 as an offsite project in autumn/winter 2009. In this work the Belgian artist Grimonprez used found television and video footage to trace the history of airplane highjackings from 1931 up to 1997. With a powerful soundtrack that includes spoken extracts taken from novels by Don DeLillo the work reflects upon the concept of history and its documentation. Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y holds a particular resonance for Colchester and firstsite since it was shown in the town in 2001 as part of firstsite's exhibition Trauma, which opened in the week of the 9/11 attacks in New York. firstsite is currently based in offices in Colchester and are running a programme of offsite works in locations around Essex until they move into a new landmark premises that will house a vibrant programme of changing exhibitions, workshops, lectures and community events. Further details about the presentation of Grimonprez's work will be announced in the spring.
Contact:
Lindsey Evans, Press and Marketing Assistant, firstsite
Email: Lindsay@firstsite.uk.net

 
ARTIST ROOMS

50 ROOMS OF CONTEMPORARY ART BY 25 ARTISTS

Diane Arbus
Joseph Beuys
Vija Celmins
Gilbert & George
Johan Grimonprez
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Damien Hirst
Jenny Holzer
Alex Katz
Anselm Kiefer
Jeff Koons
Jannis Kounellis
Sol LeWitt
Richard Long
Robert Mapplethorpe
Agnes Martin
Ron Mueck
Bruce Nauman
Gerhard Richter
Ed Ruscha
Robert Therrien
Bill Viola
Andy Warhol
Lawrence Weiner
Francesca Woodman

10 ADDITIONAL WORKS BY 7 ARTISTS

Georg Baselitz
Ellen Gallagher
Richard Hamilton 
Mario Merz
Charles Ray
Robert Ryman
Cy Twombly

 
 
50 ROOMS OF CONTEMPORARY ART BY 25 ARTISTS

Diane Arbus 1923-1971
Three rooms comprising 69 black and white photographs, including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: Box of Ten, 1971.

Diane Arbus pioneered the photographic approach that bridges the gap between documentary and fine art. She explores the amazing variety of the lives, inner emotions and exotic appearances of ordinary people. Her subjects transcend social convention and establish an intense relationship with the viewer through the direction of their gaze. In so doing they reveal Arbus’ method which relied upon a sense of trust between the artist and her sitter. Arbus studied photography during the 1940s and 50s in New York and her first published photograph appeared in Esquire in 1960, she began making portraits in the early 1960s and was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1970 Arbus embarked on a project to create a series of limited editions of her work, but tragically committed suicide shortly after the first Box of Ten was produced. Less than a dozen copies of this work were printed before the artist’s death, making the body of work in ARTIST ROOMS - put together in collaboration with the artist’s daughter and the Trustees of her Estate - one of the best collections in existence.

Despite her reputation as one of the great figures of American photography to date, neither Tate nor the NGS hold any works by Arbus. Both institutions are committed to expanding their representation of twentieth-century photography. Tate recently acquired works by earlier twentieth-century photographers, such as Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and Jindřich Štyrský (1899-1942), as well as more contemporary photographers. The NGS has an important collection of historical photography, and a growing collection of contemporary photographers, including work by John Coplans (1920-2003), Lee Miller (1907-1977) and Andreas Gursky (b.1955). The addition of this remarkable group of works by Arbus will radically alter the way in which photography can be shown as a key medium in the history of twentieth-century art.

 
Joseph Beuys 1921-1986
Six rooms comprising 136 works including: 20 sculptures; Untitled, 1970 (a portrait of the artist on canvas on the theme of Elastic Foot: Plastic Foot), two further photographic works dated 1980; 110 drawings and watercolours, three multiples and the family’s archive of 422 posters. 

Beuys is recognised as one of the most influential figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Artist, political and social activist (he was a founder of the Green Party) and educator, Beuys’s philosophy proposed the healing power and social function of art in which all people can participate and benefit. His works are based on what he called ‘constellations of ideas’ and can incorporate any kind of material or object to represent these ideas according to their various inherent properties or purposes. From the 1950s onwards many of his works are made from or allude to a distinctive group of materials in particular, felt, fat and copper for their insulating, conductive and protective, transmitting and transforming properties. Beuys produced a vast body of work that bridges art and science and includes performance, drawing, print-making, sculpture and installation. His complex interlocking themes cover archaeology, geology, anthropology, zoology, myth, history intuition, medicine, energy and communication, amongst others. Beuys’s own image and life story is inextricably linked to his work and he registers as a shamanistic presence throughout his oeuvre. This group of works brings together important subjects from the sixties such as the Fat Chair with later works from the eighties culminating with the important Scala Napoletana which dates from the period of Beuys’s final work Palazzo Regale. It was made at the same time in Naples, only a few months before his death, and relates to the same theme of the shaman/king’s death and communication with the beyond.

Tate’s holdings include: Animal Woman, 1949 cast 1984; Bed, 1950; Bathtub for a Heroine, 1950, cast 1984; Fat Battery, 1963; Felt Suit 1970; Four Blackboards, 1972; Untitled (Vitrine), 1983; The End of the Twentieth Century and Three Part Drawing, 1983; as well as a number of prints. The NGS holds a complete collection of Beuys’s multiples, but only one sculpture, Three Pots for the Poorhouse, 1974. The addition of ARTIST ROOMS, which includes a large number of important early sculptural works and a unique and important group of drawings, offers the opportunity of establishing a comprehensive national collection of the artist’s work, covering major themes over a range of media. The group of  drawings is one of the finest in existence and represents an aspect of Beuys’s activity not currently represented in either Tate or NGS’s collection. Together with key works such as Scala Napoletana, the Donation will create a public collection of international importance.

 
Vija Celmins born 1938
One room comprising 24 works on paper, including three unique drawings: Untitled (Desert-Galaxy), 1974; Night Sky #19, 1998; and Web #1, 1999.

American artist Vija Celmins makes paintings, drawings and prints. Using charcoal, graphite and erasers she produces delicate monochromatic images based on photographs of the sea, deserts, the night sky and other natural phenomena. Through her slow rigorous approach, the meticulous precision of her technique, and serial exploration of her subjects, Celmins seems to question the nature of representation. The seminal drawing Web #1 is typical of her apparently fragile, ephemeral images and is the first of nine works on the theme of the spider’s web made between 1998 and 2006. It is accompanied by a series of four ‘web’ prints from 2001 and 2002. These web images echo the web-like construction of the universe in her parallel preoccupation. Among other works in the Donation are a series from the 1980s Concentric Bearings and two negative images of night-skies in which the sky appears white and star formations are transformed into black markings. All these works focus on something small and individual in the context of vastness. The images they depict seem fragile because they record a specific human glimpse through a telescope or camera which is ephemeral and frozen in time. Yet the subjects are strong and timeless and beyond our comprehension in the detail of their existence. 

These works will be the first by Celmins to join the NGS collection, and will significantly augment the four lithographs from the 1970s by the artist currently held in Tate’s collection (Sky 1975, Galaxy 1975, Ocean 1975, Desert 1975).

 
Gilbert & George b. 1943, b. 1942
Two rooms comprising nine works: an early magazine sculpture, George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit, 1970; Crusade, 1980; Fallen Leaves, 1980; Thirst, 1982; Hunger, 1982; Existers, 1984, Family Tree, 1991; Light Headed, 1991; Faith Drop, 1991.

Gilbert & George have been important figures in the international art world since 1970. Working as a pair and presenting themselves as ‘living sculpture’, incorporating themselves and their lives into their art, they set out to provoke their viewers, to make them think and question conventions and taboos. In the key 1970 magazine sculpture included in ARTIST ROOMS they are smiling up at the viewer with cut-out letters pinned to their chests, which read ‘George the Cunt’ and 'Gilbert the Shit’ respectively. Their early work emphasised the artists’ own image, their place as misfits in society and their concept of ‘art for all’. But by the late seventies they had moved beyond the enclosed spaces of their house, their drinking and their life as artists, to explore the world and the people around them in the East End of London. The ‘Dirty Words’ series focused on graffiti photographed in the streets of the city. Gilbert and George were now not just taking art to the people but incorporating the people into the art. At the same time they declared their purpose was to find and accept all that was good and bad in themselves. The big multi-part brightly coloured works from the eighties in ARTIST ROOMS come mainly from this period of huge energy and change, when Gilbert and George were also developing new and specifically modern techniques of photography and printing to make their art appropriate to the people with and for whom it was made. Throughout the decade they also exhibited their work around the world in a highly modern way, masses of huge brightly coloured images made from glazed panels arranged and hung according to their precise instructions. 

Tate holds only two works by Gilbert & George from the eighties. The strong group of major works of the period in ARTIST ROOMS would greatly enhance the emotional and environmental impact of their multi-part works in the collection. The NGS only holds one work by Gilbert & George, Exhausted, 1951; the addition of the works from ARTIST ROOMS will enable proper representation of their work in Scotland. 

 
Johan Grimonprez born 1962
One room video installation dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y, 1997.

The young Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez came to prominence when his highly acclaimed one-hour video montage, dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y was first shown at Documenta X in 1997. Using found television and video footage the artist traced the history of airplane highjackings, from 1931 up to 1997, to reflect upon the concept of history and its documentation. The video footage and televised images of hijackings are juxtaposed with clips referencing the Cold War and other collective activities, while a voiceover reads quotations from Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Mao II. While the title suggests the possibility of ‘calling up’ history, the work highlights the subjective conditions under which any connection can be made or any conclusion drawn. Grimonprez draws attention to both the abundance of information available via the television and the missing links – the knowledge that hidden or unseen events occur that cannot be recorded – and thus presents the viewer with the potential impossibility of recording historical fact.

dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y will be the first work by Grimonprez to enter both Tate and NGS.

 
Ian Hamilton Finlay 1925-2006
One-room installation, Sailing Dinghy, 1996, comprising sailing boat and poem

Ian Hamilton Finlay combines his love of nature, his garden and the sea with his love of literature and the potency of words. In the 1960s he was widely known as one of Britain’s foremost concrete poets, but went on to extend his ideas beyond the printed page to become objects in the world. His work, often collaborative and in a wide variety of materials including stone carvings,  constructions and neon lighting, is a unique blend of art and poetry. The room installation Sailing Dinghy encapsulates the artist’s passion and affection for ships and the sea. It consists of a boat used by Hamilton Finlay himself, accompanied by a poem which evokes its movement.  Much of his early poetry concerns sailing and fishing boats.

Tate has extensive holdings of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work – the majority of these (130) are works on paper and they are complemented by a number of artist’s books and thirty-nine objects including sculptures, reliefs and installations. Similarly, the NGS has important and extensive holdings of Hamilton Finlay’s works on paper and smaller objects. Sailing Dinghy relates to many of the artist’s works in both Tate’s and NGS’s collection which also explore ships, the sea and sailing (mostly smaller scale works on paper or sculptures in glass), and will be the first monumental work by the artist to enter Tate and NGS collections.

 
Damien Hirst b. 1965
One room featuring five works: the largest early spot painting in the series, Controlled Substances Key Painting, 1994; the important formaldehyde piece, Away from the Flock, 1994; the significant recent triptych, Trinity – Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology, 2000;  the very large butterfly diptych, Monument to the Living and the Dead, 2006; and a photograph, With Dead Head, 1981/1991.

Damien Hirst is the most prominent artist to have emerged from the British art scene in the 1990s. His role as an artist and curator has proved fundamental in the development of the group, mainly from Goldsmiths College, that became internationally known as ‘the YBAs’. Hirst’s work forces viewers to question their understanding of issues such as the fragility of life, our reluctance to confront death and decay and other dilemmas of human existence. He is best known for his ‘Natural History’ works – large-scale sculptures featuring dead animals floating in Minimalist looking vitrines – but also for his mirrored pharmacy cabinets lined with shelves full of evenly spaced drug bottles, pills, sea shells or cigarette butts, and his paintings, which he produces in series. An example of these, included in ARTIST ROOMS, is the early Controlled Substances Key Painting (Spot 4a): a canvas where a grid of dots of different colours is accompanied by letters in alphabetical order that seem to dissect and reorganise the very matter of painting into cells. Also included in ARTIST ROOMS is the key work Away from the Flock, a version of which was first exhibited in Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away which Hirst curated for the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. This work, which features a sheep floating in formaldehyde, represents an important step in Hirst’s practice: on this occasion, rather than the safety we might experience when contemplating a dead shark, what resonates in this clinical display of dead matter, is the religious theme of the death of an innocent lamb. The large butterfly diptych Monument to the Living and the Dead, 2006 was made specifically for ARTIST ROOMS.

Tate currently holds two sculptural works by Hirst: the early cabinet piece Works Without Life, 1991 and the installation Pharmacy, 1992, as well as the portfolio of prints The Last Supper, 1999 and one other print from a mixed portfolio. Tate has also been working with the artist to extend its holdings. The NGS holds two paintings by Hirst, a collaborative work with Paul Simonon from 1998, the other a ‘spin’ painting of 1996; it also owns one small cabinet-work containing needles and syringes from 1995; and a set of the print series, The Last Supper, 1999.

 
Jenny Holzer born 1950 
One room comprising a digital text piece BLUE PURPLE TILT, 2007 and two paintings Protect Protect and Shape the Battlefield, both 2007.

The conceptual artist Jenny Holzer came to prominence in the late 1970s. She uses provocative statements in exhibitions or other public places to elicit debate. Her text-based works present and call into question the rhetorical strategies of different forms of speech and writing, from philosophical tracts to fundamentalist preaching. The selection of works from ARTIST ROOMS demonstrates the flexibility of her approach. BLUE PURPLE TILT consists of seven double-sided vertical LED signs on which a selection of messages from several of Holzer’s early text series run. Protect Protect and Shape the Battlefield are two large paintings from a recent series in which Holzer presents declassified American military documents relating to the current war in Iraq.

Tate’s holdings of Holzer’s work includes one electronic text piece Truisms, 1984 and a portfolio of prints, Inflammatory Essays, 1979-82. ARTIST ROOMS will enable Tate to update its representation of the socio-political aspect of her work. The NGS holds no work by the artist and so will be able to present Holzer for the first time.

 
Alex Katz born 1927
One room comprising a group of 20 small paintings.

The American painter Alex Katz began working in the 1950s, focusing on figurative subjects which set him apart from the avant-garde mainstream but brought him public recognition in the 1980s when many young artists began to work in related ways. Primarily working from life, Katz produces images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed strokes and planes of flat colour. Although best-known for large-scale portraits, painted in his distinctive, stylised manner, Katz has also consistently made small paintings primarily as studies, which function as independent pieces and which can be considered as a distinct body of work. This group of twenty small paintings in ARTIST ROOMS spans his career. The collection also shows the artist’s preoccupation with landscape and in many of the works Katz tends towards a more expressionistic approach, with reductive compositions such as Green Shadow #2, 1998 and 3pm, November, 1997 that display a debt to Japanese art in their close-up, cropped compositions.

Tate holds one painting Hiroshi and Marcia, 1981 and a single print, Dark Eyes, 2000. The NGS has no holdings of Katz’s work. The sequence of paintings in ARTIST ROOMS offers a distinct and well-rounded introduction to Katz’s spare, flattened style.

 
Anselm Kiefer born 1945
Three rooms comprising six works: three early paintings (Palette, 1981, Urd Werdande Skuld (The Norns), 1983 and Man under a Pyramid, 1996); a landscape painting; and two major installations (Cette obscure clarté  qui tombe des étoiles, 1999 and Palmsonntag, 2006).

A key figure in European post-war culture Anselm Kiefer’s art derives from his vast awareness of history, theology, mythology, literature and philosophy and an extraordinary ability to work with all kinds of materials from lead to concrete, from straw to human hair and sunflower seeds. He grew up near the French border on the Rhine. France was the land of his dreams on the other side of the river. In his early work he set out to understand Germany’s recent history, then still a taboo subject and one which inevitably aroused criticism and misunderstanding when he attempted it. He was interested in Beuys’s work and visited him but was not a pupil of his. Pictures of this period show Kiefer setting out on his journey, walking through a forest holding a burning branch. Later works draw on German military history, Wagnerian mythology and Nazi architecture to grapple with the possibility of pursuing creativity in the light of catastrophic human suffering. Kiefer’s technique of layering paint and debris gives visceral life to his preoccupations with decay and re-creation. ARTIST ROOMS includes major works from across the artist’s career. Palette, 1981 expands on his theme painting = burning which will cleanse the countryside and cauterize the wound inflicted by Nazism. Here painting is symbolised by a palette suspended above a smouldering abyss by a rope which is alight in several places. The painting Urd, Werdande, Skuld refers to the norns or fates of Germanic mythology whose names are Past, Present and Future and who sit by the well at the foot of the Yggdrasil, spinning or weaving the fate of men. They are an invisible presence in the grandiose vaulted emptiness of one of the un-built monuments to the delusion of the Third Reich. After the reunification of Germany Kiefer moved to Barjac in the South of France in 1992 where he continued to develop preoccupations he had already initiated but which also had wider implications. His exploration of revolution in generation and in particular The Women of the Revolution began in Germany and expanded to include Women of Antiquity. His study of ancient belief systems such as the Kabbala also grew. He travelled widely, to South America, India, China and Australia. His painting took on both a world and a cosmic view. In Barjac he worked on an ever larger scale. Confronted with the plants, climate and history of the South of France, inevitably sunflowers made their way into his work. He became increasingly interested in natural cycles, and in Robert Fludd’s theories about the lives of plants, the microcosm and the macrocosm, and his suggestion that for every plant there exists a correlated star. Man under a Pyramid, 1996 reflects the artist’s interest in exploring his mind and body through meditation and in relating it to the stars and the cosmos through the pyramid, in this case seen in the form of a large crumbling stone pyramid from the ancient remains of Mexico or Egypt. Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles (The dark light that falls from the stars) is a favourite line from Le Cid by Corneille which came to mind when Kiefer began to work with sunflowers ‘There was an obvious parallel with the black seeds on the flower and the night and the stars. The seeds were the stars. When I stuck them on a white canvas they became inverted stars, black on white like a negative.’ Kiefer’s preoccupation with the stars has now developed further into various huge paintings of star maps. The huge installation Palm Sunday, 2006, which refers to the Christian holy day, the Sunday before Easter, combines the balance between death and resurrection, decay and recreation so characteristic of Kiefer’s work. The theme of Palm Sunday is the triumph before the betrayal, and death. There is some sense that nature is the betrayed in the fallen palm and framed ossuary of branches which covers the wall, though regeneration is always a possibility. 

Tate holds four works by Kiefer: Parsifal I-III, 1973; a book of woodcuts, The Rhine, 1981; Lilith, 1987-9; and Let a Thousand Flower Bloom, 2000. NGS has no holdings of Kiefer’s work. The rich holdings found in ARTIST ROOMS will complement the works held in Tate’s collection, and make available, for the first time, many important works by Kiefer across the United Kingdom.

Jeff Koons born 1955
Two rooms comprising 17 works: New Hoover Convertibles, 1981-7; a basketball piece, Encased, 1983-1993; Winter Bears, 1988; the billboard Made in Heaven, 1989; Mound of Flowers, 1991; Bourgeois Bust – Jeff and Illona, 1991; a rare set of nine Easyfun mirrors, 1999; Caterpillar (with chains), 2002 and a portfolio of prints, Art Magazine Ads, 1988-89.

Through his use first of everyday items such as vacuum cleaners and basketballs and later by creating oversized kitsch objects, Jeff Koons reflects upon the power of consumer industries and the aesthetics and culture of taste. Although Koons makes use of the kind of references reminiscent of Pop Art his means of production, first in the studio and then demanding total perfection from specialists in each chosen medium, far outstrips anything from that earlier period. His perfectionism is legendary. Drawing together a range of styles and spanning a broad chronology from early 1980s to the late 1990s, the works in ARTIST ROOMS highlight some of the artist’s most important series. In New Hoover Convertibles Koons preserves a banal, household object as a new commodity in perpetuity making its function obsolete within a contained vitrine. The idea of protected perfection is at the heart of Encased, from the artist’s series of basketball works, in which Koons sought to achieve constant equilibrium by suspending the balls in liquid. Winter Bears was first shown in Koons’s landmark exhibition Banality. The carved wooden figures derive from popular figurines, blown up to mammoth proportions to create a sculpture that is at once familiar yet grotesque. Koons’s fascination with kitsch and Baroque styles is also found in Mound of Flowers and the Bourgeois Bust, a marble sculpture which depicts the artist and his wife, Ilona. This portrait bust is part of a larger body of work in which Koons and Illona starred in their own erotic romance, documented through a series of sculpture and photographic works. The billboard Made in Heaven and the Art Magazine Ads use standard advertising methods and were made to publicise the project.

Tate holds just one work by Koons from 1985, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank. NGS has no holdings of the artist’s work. The substantial group of works in ARTIST ROOMS touches on the full range of Koons’s complex and diverse oeuvre and offers the possibility of an in depth display of the artist’s work for the first time at Tate and NGS and across the United Kingdom.

 
 
Jannis Kounellis born 1936
Four rooms comprising 16 works: three important early works dating between 1960 and 1971; three more recent large-scale installations, two wall-hung multi-media works, and eight multiples dating from c.1989-1991 and 2001-2005.

Born in Piraeus, living and working in Rome since 1956, Jannis Kounellis was a seminal contributor to the radically and internationally influential Arte Povera group and he continues to inspire young artists today. Often epic in scale, Kounellis’s work possesses a grandeur that reflects his frequent choice of themes and ideas from the past and emphasises the fragmentary relationship the past has with the present. The works in ARTIST ROOMS span Kounellis’s career and represent the rich diversity of this important artist’s work. The group includes a rare and important early painting of 1960 from the series in which the artist drew freehand the basic elements of written communication, letters, numbers and arrows to make paintings and drawings on paper or thin canvas, and then filled in with black enamel paint. In the poetic Untitled, 1971 Kounellis painted an extract from the score of Bach’s St John Passion on a dark green canvas and had a cellist playing music from the oratorio in front of it on the occasion of its first exhibition. The Donation also includes Kounellis’s well-known Arte Povera work Untitled, 1969 with sacks containing lentils, rice, peas, corn, beans, potatoes and coffee.  Kounellis is known for his combinations of antithetical materials such as sacking, beans, cotton, metal and wool. The multiples, conceived of as small contained sculptures produced in editions, draw together his most significant media and offer an excellent introduction to his work.
 
Tate holds three unique works: a wood and wool sculpture from 1968, a multi-media installation from 1979 and a work on paper from 1983, as well as a print portfolio from 1999. NGS has no holdings of Kounellis’ art. The wealth of works included in ARTIST ROOMS will revolutionise the way in which Kounellis can be represented in both collections.

 
Richard Long b. 1945
Two rooms featuring eight works: two sculptures (Somerset Willow Line, 1980 and Cornish Slate Ellipse, to be made 2009); four works on paper (A Line Made by Walking, 1967; In the Cloud, 1991; River Avon Mud drawings, 1988; River Avon Mud Slow Hand Spiral, 2005); a multiple (Nile (Papers of River Muds)), 1999; and the River Avon Book.

Richard Long first became known during the late 1960s and soon became known as an important figure in both the international and British art worlds. He leads a generation of distinguished British artists who wanted to extend the possibilities of sculpture beyond the confines of work in traditional materials and to give it meaningful existence as part of the place in which it is made, so that work, artist and place interact and become one. The other important, and particularly revolutionary, aspect of his work is the relationship between movement and time which affects everything in existence. Long’s work is rooted in his deep affinity with nature, developed during solitary walks. Most of these take him through uncultivated areas, in Britain or as far afield as Nepal, Africa, Mexico and Bolivia. While travelling he sets himself specific tasks, such as walking a straight line for a predetermined distance, following the source of a river, or picking up and then dropping stones at certain intervals along the way. Long never makes permanent alterations to the landscapes he passes through. Instead he adjusts nature’s placement of rocks or wood to form simple, geometric shapes, sometimes working in the landscape and sometimes bringing the natural materials into a gallery.  He documents his journeys with photographs, maps, wall drawings and printed statements, which evoke his personal responses to the landscapes. He has said that his aim is to explore ‘relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement’.  However, Long has also said that whereas photographs and text works feed the imagination, sculptures feed the sense. Walking and works made in the landscape are only half the story. Urban and rural worlds are mutually dependent and have equal significance in his work.

The selection of sculptures and works on paper by Richard Long included in ARTIST ROOMS will both augment and complement Tate’s existing holdings of the artist, which currently consist of 41 works. The additional works such as the River Avon Mud drawings 1988, of which Tate holds none, will enable Tate to present a comprehensive account of the artist’s way of working. NGS has a modest but growing collection of work by the artist, who has a special connection with Scotland through his interest in its landscape. This includes one site-specific outdoor sculpture and one large slate floor piece. The addition of ARTIST ROOMS will enable NGS to show the wider range of media used by this important artist.

 
Sol LeWitt 1928-2007
One-room installation Wall Drawing #1136, 2004, straight and non-straight colour bands.

Regarded as one of the pillars of wisdom in the international art community Sol LeWitt was an important pioneer of Conceptual and Minimalist art during the 1960s. The first line of his Notes on Conceptual Art reads ‘Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions which logic cannot reach’. His early sculptural works using geometric shapes, seriality and pre-determined structures broke away from the personal and emotive gestures dominant in Abstract Expressionism. Taking the form of a set of instructions which are then produced by assistants, the artist’s numerous Wall Drawings employ systems which enable line and colour to exist as independent entities. Wall Drawing #1136, 2004 is a late example where vibrantly coloured straight and non-straight lines are painted directly onto the four walls of a gallery space to create a three-dimensional environment which surrounds the viewer.

NGS holds one installation, Five Modular Structures, dating from 1972, and two works on paper from 1971 and 1973. Tate has built up a good collection of LeWitt’s work, including important print portfolios dating from 1971 to 1999, and five unique works dating between 1965 and 1981 (Untitled, 1965, painted aluminium; A Wall Divided Vertically…, 1970, graphite on wall; Two Open Modular Cubes/Half-Off, 1972, enamelled aluminium; Five Open Geometric Structures, 1979; and Six Geometric Figures (+ Two) (Wall Drawings) 1980-81). Neither institution currently represents a major installation from the artist’s late career, nor his concern with colour. Wall Drawing # 1136 will therefore provide the ability to show a survey of LeWitt’s oeuvre and offers the possibility of an in-depth display in Scotland for the first time.

 
Robert Mapplethorpe 1946-1989
Three rooms comprising a major collection of 64 black and white photographs, including 17 vintage prints signed by the artist.

The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe pushed the boundaries of his medium with both his subject matter and innovative techniques. Originally trained as a sculptor, his understanding of the human body in relation to the light which reveals it also extends his photographs beyond the boundaries of sculpture in a way that has yet to be surpassed in either medium. His distinctive style possesses a classical quality that revels in the sensual quality of nature and the human body. His work was often considered controversial but Mapplethorpe triumphed over legal campaigns testing the right to individual freedom of expression. His work therefore also holds a significant place in the history of artistic struggle to depict the world as it is with honesty and truth. The group of photographs in ARTIST ROOMS, probably the best collection in the world after the Guggenheim Museum, includes studies of flowers, portraits of many of the most influential artists, writers and musicians of the period, including Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Patti Smith, and iconic self-portraits.

Mapplethorpe is not currently represented by either Tate or NGS. As with the work of Diane Arbus, this body of photographs will have a significant impact on Tate’s and NGS’s capacity to represent the history of photography.

 
Agnes Martin 1912-2004
One room featuring three 1990s paintings: Untitled #5, 1994; Happy Holiday, 1999; and Faraway Love, 1999.

Agnes Martin’s career as one of America’s foremost abstract painters spans nearly five decades. Her earliest works from the 1960s are characterised by large, grid-based compositions. Later Martin reduced the scale of her square canvases and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal colour. These works move between a preoccupation with ordered geometry and the irregularity created by hand-drawn pencil lines. She viewed this deliberate inconsistency which undermines the possibility of geometric perfection, as analogous to the human condition. The three paintings from Martin’s later career held in ARTIST ROOMS exemplify her exquisite handling of paint. The delicate colours appear to project beyond the picture plane to engage all the senses. Happy Holiday and Faraway Love come from a sequence of paintings from the late 1990s in which the artist used titles to evoke states of euphoria, contentment and memories of past happiness.

Tate owns one early painting by Agnes Martin, Morning, 1965. NGS has no holdings of Martin’s work. The addition of these three paintings by Martin from the 1990s will add a fresh dimension to Tate’s holdings of minimalism and geometric abstraction and will greatly compliment the NGS’s small but important holding of post-War minimalist and abstract works by Judd, Flavin, LeWitt and others.

 
Ron Mueck b.1958
One room featuring three sculptures: Wild Man, 2005; Spooning Couple, 2005; and Mask III, 2005.

Ron Mueck has become internationally recognised for his unique realist sculptures that replicate the human figure with unrivalled technical skill. The powerful psychological range of Mueck’s sculpture focuses not only on universal experiences of birth, life and death but on emotional states such as isolation, fear and tenderness. The three works in ARTIST ROOMS represent the scope of Mueck’s approach to the human condition, from the uneasy intimacy of Spooning Couple, the vulnerability of the giant Wild Man

• ARTIST ROOMS generic press release final

ARTIST ROOMS Collection of Contemporary Art Goes Nationwide

The Art Fund Backs the First UK Tour of ARTIST ROOMS

The Scottish Government Supports Tour in Scotland

The tour of ARTIST ROOMS, a unique scheme to bring one of the largest and most imaginative acquisitions of post-war and contemporary art to audiences across Britain, from Bill Viola in Stromness to Joseph Beuys in Bexhill on Sea, is launched today.

Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008. This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of the Scottish Government.

The 2009 ARTIST ROOMS On Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government will include works by Diane Arbus, Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ellen Gallagher, Gilbert & George, Johan Grimonprez, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Ron Mueck, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Robert Therrien, Bill Viola, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, and Francesca Woodman.

Anthony d’Offay’s guiding principle for the creation of ARTIST ROOMS was the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government has been devised to take those displays beyond the collection’s owners, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, and to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly of young people.

The Art Fund is giving £250,000 per year to help Tate and National Galleries of Scotland to work with 13 regional partners in 2009 and more thereafter. In 2009 ARTIST ROOMS will be shown at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern and Tate St Ives; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Tramway, Glasgow; Inverness Museum and Art Gallery; Ulster Museum, National Museums Northern Ireland, Belfast; National Museum Cardiff; Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney; Aberdeen Art Gallery; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; New Art Gallery, Walsall; mima Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield; The Lightbox, Woking; and firstsite, Colchester.

ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation. It has materially strengthened Tate’s ability to represent some of the most important art of the latter half of the twentieth century, and helps establish Scotland as a world-class destination for contemporary art.

John Leighton, Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “ARTIST ROOMS provides wonderful opportunities for audiences throughout Scotland and the rest of the UK to experience a diverse range of top-quality modern and contemporary art. We are delighted by the scope of this year’s programme and we look forward to working with our partners across the country on this ambitious and innovative project.”

Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate said: “The presence of contemporary art across the UK will be dramatically transformed by the ARTIST ROOMS tour. This new form of dynamic national collection is without precedent anywhere in the world. We are extremely grateful to The Art Fund and the Scottish Government for the significant financial commitments that have enabled us to realise this ambitious project.”
 
Anthony d’Offay said: “It is wonderful to see ARTIST ROOMS coming to museums and galleries across the United Kingdom and am delighted that the works in the collection will be used in this way. I am deeply grateful to all the artists and institutions who have participated in the idea of ARTIST ROOMS with such creative energy and generosity.”

David Barrie, Director of The Art Fund, said: “The Art Fund's core purpose is to give people all over the UK the chance to encounter great works of art.  For more than a century, we've done this mainly by giving money to help museums and galleries buy works of art. But we can do other things, and although it is a new departure, our funding of this ambitious tour of exhibitions is perfectly in line with our mission. Having helped last year with the acquisition of ARTIST ROOMS, we are now proud to be making real Anthony d'Offay's generous vision.”

Linda Fabiani, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture said: “ARTIST ROOMS is an imaginative and powerful collection that will truly ‘open the doors’ to contemporary art for people in towns and cities across Scotland and the UK.  The economic benefits linked to these exhibitions will be very welcome particularly as we look to maximise tourism revenue through Scotland’s Year of Homecoming.  The Scottish Government is providing the National Galleries of Scotland with £175,000 per annum towards the costs of touring Artist Rooms across Scotland, benefiting museums and galleries in 2009 from Orkney to Edinburgh.”

Barbara Follett, Minister for Culture, Creative Industries and Tourism said: “One of the best things about Anthony d’Offay's gift is that it is not just about London. Nor even just about London and Edinburgh – but about the country as a whole. This highlights the responsibility that we – the Government, the national museums, artists and donors – have to make world-class art accessible to audiences nation wide. There is no point in talking about universal cultural entitlement if people cannot take this up because they do not live in, or near, a capital city."

Notes to editors:

The Art Fund will provide ARTIST ROOMS On Tour with The Art Fund £250,000 plus VAT in 2009 and 2010 with the 2011 allocation to be confirmed by 31 July 2010.

The collection of 725 works, representing one of the most important holdings of post-war and contemporary international art in private hands, was assembled by Anthony d’Offay, whose London galleries played a key role in the promotion and understanding of twentieth-century art in the UK over a period of more than 30 years.

The acquisition for the national collection was made under a part gift/part sale at cost agreement. The cost of the collection to Anthony d’Offay was some £26.5 million, and he asked for and received £26.5 million, i.e. the original costs of these works. The collection was valued in 2008 at £125 million. The costs of the acquisition, which included the purchase of the artworks and set up and accessioning was £28 million. These costs were met by £10 million each from both the Scottish and British Governments, £7 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and £1 million from The Art Fund. All taxes were paid in full. 

The agreement also includes a provision for the establishment of a £5 million endowment fund by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, the interest from which will be used for the acquisition of further rooms by important contemporary artists, ensuring that the collection can continue to grow in the future.  An initial contribution of £500,000 each from the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate has been made towards the £5 million endowment fund. The endowment has been increased significantly by a major grant of £500,000 from The Henry Moore Foundation, one of the largest gifts made in its thirty-one year history. 

Richard Calvocoressi, Director of The Henry Moore Foundation, comments: “I cannot think of a more effective way of realising one of the principal aims of the Foundation – which is to promote public appreciation of art – than helping ARTIST ROOMS expand and develop in new directions. The unique feature of this exciting project is that world-class contemporary art will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, not only in London and Edinburgh but throughout the UK.”

The museums have asked Anthony d’Offay, to serve as an unpaid ex officio curator for a period of 5 years, and he has agreed.

The Art Fund

The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections; campaigns on behalf of museums and their visitors; and promotes the enjoyment of art. It is funded from public donations and has 80,000 members. Since 1903 the charity has helped secure 860,000 works of art for museums and galleries across the UK. In addition to helping secure Anthony d’Offay’s collection, ARTIST ROOMS, for Tate and National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), last year it also helped save Rubens’ sketch for the ceiling at Banqueting House, Whitehall, for Tate and pledged £1m to help NGS acquire Titian’s Diana and Actaeon with The National Gallery. For more information contact the Press Office on 020 7225 4888 or visit www.artfund.org . The Art Fund is a Registered Charity No. 209174

Audio clips of Linda Fabiani commenting on the ARTIST ROOMS exhibition, toward which the Scottish Government is providing £175,000 for its tour of Scotland, are available at www.scotland.gov.uk/downloads

Press Enquiries:

Patricia Convery, National Galleries of Scotland
Tel: 0131 624 6325

Helen Beeckmans, Head of Press, Tate
Tel: 020 7887 4940

Erica Bolton, Bolton & Quinn
Tel: 020 7221 5000 (5 lines)

Madeleine Burbidge, Interim Head of Press, Art Fund
Tel: 0207 225 4820

• GMA ARTIST ROOMS press release 09

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND ANNOUNCE OPENING DISPLAYS IN ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund supported by
The Scottish Government

Hirst, Celmins, Gallagher, Katz, Woodman, Warhol
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4
14 March – 8 November 2009
Admission free

Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by the n ation in February 2008. This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of the Scottish Government.

Anthony d’Offay’s guiding principle for the creation of ARTIST ROOMS was the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund supported by The Scottish Government has been devised to take those displays beyond the collection’s owners, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, and to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly of young people.

ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation. It has materially strengthened Tate’s ability to represent some of the most important art of the latter half of the twentieth century, and helps establish Scotland as a world-class destination for contemporary art.

The opening displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh this Spring will include the work of Damien Hirst, Vija Celmins, Ellen Gallagher, Alex Katz, Francesca Woodman and Andy Warhol.  Highlights will include Celmins’ beautiful, delicate images of seas, deserts and the night sky, a complete series of landscape and portrait paintings by the American painter Alex Katz and Francesca Woodman’s intimate, surrealist-influenced photographs. Damien Hirst, the most prominent British artist of today, will feature in an expanded display across several rooms. This will bring together works from ARTIST ROOMS - such as the iconic Away from the Flock (an early example of Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde) and a recent butterfly painting - with additional loans from further collections.  Later in 2009 the SNGMA will be showing another ARTIST ROOM display, featuring the work of the American painter Agnes Martin, from 6 August until 8 November.

The opening tour of ARTIST ROOMS in Scotland will also include displays at Tramway in Glasgow; Inverness Museum and Art Gallery; the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney; and Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum.  Comprehensive information on displays from the collection, and on its depth and range will be available on a specially developed section of the National Galleries of Scotland’s website: www.nationalgalleries.org/artistrooms.

-Ends-

For press enquiries please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

Notes to Editors:
The collection of 725 works, representing one of the most important holdings of post-war and contemporary international art in private hands, was assembled by Anthony d’Offay, whose London galleries played a key role in the promotion and understanding of twentieth-century art in the UK over a period of more than 30 years.

The Art Fund is giving £250,000 per year to help Tate and National Galleries of Scotland to work with 13 regional partners in 2009 and more thereafter. In 2009 ARTIST ROOMS will be shown at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern and Tate St Ives; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Tramway, Glasgow Museums; Inverness Museum and Art Gallery; Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast; National Museum Cardiff; Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney; Aberdeen Art Gallery; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield; The Lightbox, Woking; and firstsite, Colchester.

• Old Masters: New Masters

Old Masters: New Masters

NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
21 January – 11 March 2009
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
Admission Free

Old Masters: New Masters celebrates an exciting new collaboration between the National Galleries of Scotland and the Master of Fine Arts Printmaking and Artists’ Book Course at Edinburgh College of Art.  This is the first time that MFA students have visited the Print Room of the National Gallery of Scotland and used works from the collection as a source of inspiration for their own work. This exhibition brings together two ECA students’ work with the original prints and drawings that inspired them.

Grazyna Dobrzelecka and Jonathan McFadden both selected landscape drawings by 19th century Scottish artists, Alexander Nasmyth and William McTaggart, as a basis for their work.  These pieces will now be displayed alongside their work in the first exhibition resulting from this collaboration. 

Jonathan McFadden studied at Texas State University, graduating in 2006. His work combines traditional printmaking, digital photography and installation art. Grazyna Dobrzelecka moved to Scotland in 2004 where she worked for a short time as a trainee kilt-maker. This experience fuelled her fascination with Scottish art and culture. Before enrolling on the MFA Printmaking Course she studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating with First Class BA hons.

Valerie Hunter, Senior Curator with the Department of Prints and Drawings said “This has been a very interesting project and a wonderful opportunity for me to work with two artists studying at Edinburgh College of Art. I found it exciting that these young artists from America and Poland are looking back to earlier Scottish artists to inspire contemporary art works. It was also a treat for me to work with living artists – since the Graphics Collection at the National Gallery stops at the beginning of the 20th century – I usually only deal with the work of dead ones”.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.
-Ends-

• Turner in January

TURNER IN JANUARY: THE VAUGHAN BEQUEST
1 – 31 January 2009
THE NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org 
The Gallery is open on 1 January from 12 noon until 5 pm; from 2 January opening hours revert to normal: Monday to Sunday 10 am – 5 pm, Thursday 10 am –7 pm
Admission free
Exhibition sponsored by Artemis Investment Management Ltd

In keeping with a century-old tradition, New Year’s Day at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh will be marked by the opening of the annual display of watercolours by
J M W Turner (1775–1851).  The thirty-eight works in the display were bequeathed in 1900 by Henry Vaughan, a London art collector who amassed an outstanding group of watercolours by the British painter.  A perennial favourite in the Gallery’s exhibition calendar, the display runs throughout January, providing a thoughtful counterpoint to the more energetic celebrations of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, and a welcome injection of colour during the darkest month of the year.  This year the Vaughan Bequest display will also serve as a taster for a major international exhibition which will be the highlight of the Gallery’s programme in Spring 2009.  Turner and Italy will explore the artist’s fascination with the country, and its impact upon his work (for further information, see below).

Recognised as perhaps the greatest of all British artists, Turner was a master of watercolour painting, using the medium to create stunning land- and seascapes, topographical views and designs for book illustrations.  Vaughan acquired examples from every period of the artist’s career, and chose each with a connoisseur’s eye for quality.  The exquisite works in his bequest range from early wash drawings of the 1790s, to colourful and atmospheric watercolour sketches of Continental Europe, executed in the 1830s and 1840s.

In the late 1790s, in early years of his career, Turner made a number of journeys to the mountains of North Wales that had a profound effect on his developing style.  For Turner, as for many artists and writers at the end of the eighteenth century, the vastness and violence of nature inspired an awe, or even a terror, which equated to an experience of the ‘Sublime’.  It was the opportunity to express these emotions through landscape painting which attracted Turner repeatedly to the mountains of Britain and the Continent, and to paint the savage elemental forces seen in avalanches, storms and mountainous seas. These forces can be seen in works such as Loch Coruisk, Skye which was painted after one of the artist’s trips to the Scottish Highlands, in 1831; and Sion, Capital of the Canton Valais, which was probably painted after one of his many journeys to the Swiss Alps. 

Turner also visited Venice on three occasions, in 1819, 1833 and 1840, and the Vaughan Bequest features six of the artist’s stunning views of the city.  In The Piazzetta, Venice, one of Turner’s most spectacular Venetian studies, a bolt of lightening dramatically illuminates the Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Basilica.  Turner created such effects by scratching away to reveal the paper once he had painted on it: he sometimes used his thumbnail, which he is reputed to have grown like an ‘eagle-claw’, for such a purpose.

Other works, such as The Grand Canal by the Salute, Venice, and The Sun of Venice, which were probably made in situ, in 1840, demonstrate Turner’s consummate mastery of atmospheric lighting effects.  In these watercolours, light itself seems to have become the main subject.

For much of his career, Turner was engaged in commissions to provide illustrations for books, and many of his trips were undertaken with a specific publishing project in mind.  The artist’s prolific activities as an illustrator are represented here by a number of images, including scenes painted for Robert Cadell’s collected editions of the Poetical and Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott.

In his will, Henry Vaughan stipulated that the Turner watercolours must not be subjected to permanent display, since continual exposure to light would result in their fading.  Though the technology now exists to more easily protect these vulnerable works on paper, Vaughan ruled that the collection could only be shown in January, when daylight is at its weakest, and as a result the annual exhibition has become a much-loved tradition at the National Gallery.

Opening on 27 March, and running until 7 June 2009, the keenly-anticipated Turner and Italy will be the first exhibition to provide a comprehensive overview of Turner’s complex and enduring relationship with the country.  Turner was enchanted by Italy’s climate, landscapes and architecture and drew inspiration from them to create some of his most admired works.  This exhibition of around 100 oil paintings, watercolours and sketchbooks will include spectacular loans from collections across the world, including works from Washington, Philadelphia, Melbourne, Paris and London.  Turner and Italy has been organised by the National Gallery of Scotland, and Edinburgh will be the only UK venue in the exhibition’s international tour.

[ENDS]
For further information and images, please call the Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314
pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org

• DUTCH MANNERISM: GOLTZIUS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

DUTCH MANNERISM: GOLTZIUS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
22 November 2008 – 8 February 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org 
Admission free

The National Gallery of Scotland invites you to view some treasures from its collection and celebrate the ‘Dawn of the Golden Age’ of Dutch Art this autumn. Dutch Mannerism focuses on two major acquisitions made by the National Gallery of Scotland in recent years: Hendrick Goltzius’ extraordinary drawing of a Bust of a Man with a Tasselled Cap and Abraham Bloemaert’s splendid painting, Miracle of the Loaves. These masterpieces will be shown beside approximately 30 prints and drawing from the permanent collection including examples of by Goltzius’ contemporaries, Jacob Matham, Jan Saenredam, and Jacques de Gheyn.

The word ‘Mannerism’ derives from the Italian maniera and this style of art is usually associated with Italian painting, sculpture and architecture of the period between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. Dutch Mannerism, however, was the predominant style in the art of the Northern Netherlands from about the 1580s until the 1610s and developed from the NethverlandishNeverlandish tradition blended with Italian and German art. Paintings, drawings and prints of Dutch Mannerism are among the most sophisticated and celebrated works of Dutch Art and form the brilliant ‘Dawn of the Golden Age’.

The most important artist of Dutch Mannerism is Hendrick Goltzius. In 1587 he produced one of his most memorable drawings, the Bust of a Man with a Tasselled Cap. This large pen drawing is undoubtedly the most extraordinary addition of recent decades to Goltzius’s oeuvre. An unknown work until acquired in 2000 by the National Galleries of Scotland from the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch at Boughton House (Kettering, Northamptonshire), it probably came from an album bought by one of the Dukes of Montagu in the eighteenth century. The sheet is dominated by the fleshy head of a man with huge double chins, wearing a high cap with flaps and a tassel and shows Goltzius’s technical virtuosity and his power of imagination.

Goltzius along with fellow artists Van Mander and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1562-1638) founded the ‘Haarlem Academy’. While we do not know how long it existed or how it worked the impact of the three artists on Dutch art cannot be overestimated. While Haarlem clearly was the centre of Dutch Mannerism, there was also a distinct Utrecht Mannerism style represented by Abraham Bloemaert and Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638). Bloemaert’s painting, The Miracle of the Loaves - where Christ is shown with the five loaves and two fishes which will feed the five thousand – is typical of mannerist painting as the main scene takes place in the middle distance, and is framed and partly obscured by monumental figures in the foreground. Bloemaert painted this work shortly after staying in Amsterdam in 1591-2 which had given him the opportunity to meet artists from Haarlem. It is the earliest surviving depiction he made of this rarely depicted subject.

Bloemaert was also a prolific draughtsman. Other treats on show include Venus Appeals to Cupid to Make Pluto Fall in Love with Proserpina which dates from the same period as the painting in the National Gallery of Scotland and Chariclea Crowning Theagenes which is a preparatory drawing for a painting of 1626. Both works show Bloemaert’s interest in unusual subjects from Antiquity and how he continued to use often returned to mannerist forms and compositions throughout his long career in many of his late drawings.

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on 0131 624 6325/6314/6332/6247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-
Notes to editors:
There will be two lectures in conjunction with this exhibition:

· Dutch Mannerism: GoltziusGotzius and his Contemporaries (WL), Hawthornden Lecture Theatre by Tico Seifert, Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Scotland – Fri 28 November, 12.45 – 1.30pm
· Michelangelo and Italian Sources of Dutch Mannerism, Hawthornden Lecture Theatre by Michael Bury – Tuesday 2 December, 12.45 – 1.30pm

A booklet, Dutch Mannerism, has been published by the National Galleries of Scotland to co-inside with the exhibition.

• Turner and Italy press release

Released: November 2008

Press View:
Tuesday 24 March at 11.30am to 1pm.,
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh

TURNER AND ITALY

27 March – 7 June 2009

NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL

Admission £8 (£6 concessions)

The major exhibition next Spring at the National Gallery of Scotland will celebrate the love affair between the artist J. M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and Italy. Turner and Italy sets out to explore this complex and enduring relationship, and show how Turner became enchanted by the country’s climate, landscapes and architecture; drawing inspiration from them he created some of the greatest images of Romantic art.

The exhibition will include over 100 works, including oil paintings, watercolours, sketchbooks, and books from Turner’s library which illustrate his fascination with Italy. Spectacular loans from collections in Washington, Philadelphia, Melbourne, Paris and London will feature in the exhibition. It has been created by the National Gallery of Scotland and will travel on an international tour to Italy and Hungary; Edinburgh will, however, be the only UK venue.

Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland said: “Turner was probably the greatest and most inventive of all landscape painters. His unique sensitivity to nature’s variety, allied to his astonishing technical facility, mark him out as a truly extraordinary talent who never ceases to amaze us. This will be the most important Turner show ever mounted by the Galleries and we are looking forward to it enormously.’

Turner travelled to Italy seven times, and past exhibitions have considered particular aspects of his Italian work, such as his love of Venice, but this is the first to provide a comprehensive overview and consider the impact it had on his British art. Turner and Italy will also be the most ambitions Turner exhibition ever shown in Scotland, and will provide an inspiring introduction to his achievement, through what are arguably the artist’s most admired works.

Highlights will include the artist’s great Rome from the Vatican (Tate Britain) of 1819, a glowing panorama of the city, which shows Raphael painting in the foreground, and late masterpieces, such as his 1844 Approach to Venice (National Gallery of Art, Washington), which the critic John Ruskin considered ‘…the most perfectly beautiful piece of colour of all that I have seen produced by human hands, by any means, or at any period.’

Turner’s journeys to Italy were made at a time when such travels could take many weeks. The onslaught of mass tourism had not yet begun, and he not only delighted in, but also exploited all he experienced. As an astute businessman as well as ingenious artist, Turner used Italy to inspire the two most successful aspects of his career in Britain: the creation of ambitious oil paintings which were exhibited annually to a startled public, and the production of watercolours that were engraved for publication, so spreading his vision far beyond his immediate audience.

Because Turner’s enthusiasm for Italy was sustained throughout his career it illustrates all the distinct stages in the stylistic evolution of his work, and the transition he made from early, conventional topographical studies, to the highly charged, emotive, and visionary pictures of his later years. Together the have created a deeply romantic, potent view of Italy which has remained popular ever since.

The National Galleries of Scotland will publish the catalogue to accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by James Hamilton (Guest Curator), Christopher Baker (Deputy Director, National Gallery of Scotland, and organiser of the exhibition), Nicola Moorby (Curator, Tate Britain) and Jacqueline Ridge (Keeper of Conservation, National Galleries of Scotland).

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-

Notes to Editors:

International Tour:
Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, Italy
16 November 2008 - 22 February 2009

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
27 March 2009 - 7 June 2009

The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary
15 July - 25 October 2009

Education:                   
The Education Department of the National Galleries of Scotland is organising a lecture series and events for schools and community groups to complement the exhibition.

• £10 million lifeline granted from National Heritage Memorial Fund to help save Titian masterpiece for the nation

£10 MILLION LIFELINE GRANTED FROM NATIONAL HERITAGE MEMORIAL FUND TO HELP SAVE TITIAN MASTERPIECE FOR THE NATION

Today, the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), the UK’s fund of last resort for saving great heritage at risk, announced its decision to award £10million to The National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery to help acquire Titian’s pre-eminent masterpiece, Diana and Actaeon.

The NHMF’s contribution is the most significant so far to the campaign, bringing a welcome boost as the December deadline approaches.

The painting - which is currently on special loan to the National Gallery - has been offered to both Galleries on extremely favourable terms by the current owner, the 7th Duke of Sutherland.

Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, said: “This is exactly what the National Heritage Memorial Fund was set up to do. We have moved quickly to show our support and hope this persuades others to dig deep to make this dream a reality. It was an extraordinary and challenging decision for us financially, but it’s as important as ever to protect our enduring cultural heritage – those things of outstanding quality that enrich our national life.

“The NHMF is privileged to be able to take a really long-term view, and if our contribution helps the campaign to succeed, generations to come will be able to enjoy this truly extraordinary work of art.”

“As well as recognising the outstanding quality and importance of ‘Diana and Actaeon’, NHMF was particularly keen to help the Galleries secure the continued loan of the rest of the Bridgewater Collection – the greatest private collection of old masters on loan to a public gallery in the world. Staggered payments will enable the Fund to spread the costs and remain open to help save other heritage treasures.”

John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland said: “This extremely generous and wholehearted support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund represents a major boost for the campaign to acquire this superlative masterpiece for the national collections. In supporting this acquisition the Fund has also recognised fully the vital importance of keeping the Bridgewater Collection on view in Scotland and available for the inspiration and enjoyment of the present and future generations.”

Nicholas Penny, Director, National Gallery London said: “We are enormously grateful to the National Heritage Memorial Fund for this hugely generous offer. It represents a crucial endorsement of the value of acquiring the Titian and will inspire others to support the campaign. It brings us significantly closer to our target.”

The Galleries have until the end of this year to raise the £50m to acquire Diana and Actaeon. If this is successful, they have also been offered assurances which we hope will secure the loan of the rest of the Bridgewater collection for the next 21 years, and the galleries will be offered an option (which may be exercised up until 2012) to buy a second painting, Diana and Callisto for a similar amount. Both paintings will then go on a rotating display between London and Edinburgh, spending five years at a time in each location.

A grant of £1million was awarded by The Art Fund last month.

Due to popular demand, Diana and Actaeon’s visit to London will now be extended until Sunday 14 December 2008.

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors:

The Collection

The Bridgewater Collection has been on continuous public view in the National Gallery of Scotland since 1945 and the loan constitutes one of the greatest loans of old master pictures from a private collection to a public museum anywhere in the world. It immeasurably enriches the appeal and status of the National Galleries of Scotland as a centre of cultural excellence. The loan consists of twenty-seven paintings and one drawing by artists such as Raphael, Titian, Poussin and Rembrandt and it attracts visitors from all over the world.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund
• The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) is a ‘fund of last resort’ set up to save the nation’s heritage in memory of those who gave their lives for this country. It currently receives £10million annual grant-in-aid from the government. www.nhmf.org.uk
• Four paintings were purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland from the Bridgewater Collection in1984 with the help of an NHMF grant of £1,030,000.
• A £7.6millon Heritage Lottery Fund award in 2003 helped secure Titian’s Venus Anadyomene for the NGS, also part of the Bridgewater Collection.
• NHMF has helped save many works of art for the nation, including:
- Turner’s The Blue Rigi, saved last year by Tate with the help of a grant of £1.95million;
- A portrait of John Donne acquired by The National Portrait Gallery in 2006 with a grant of £750,000;
- A portrait of Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton by Gavin Hamilton acquired by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery with a £200,000 grant from the NHMF.
- A portrait of Sir Richard Arkwright acquired by the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston with a £132,000 grant.

Press Enquiries

National Heritage Memorial Fund
Alison Scott or Katie Owen at the NHMF Press Office
Tel: 020 7591 6032/6036 mobile: 07973 613820.
Email: katieo@hlf.org.uk / alisons@hlf.org.uk

National Galleries of Scotland
Patricia Convery – Head of Press
Tel: 0131 624 6325
Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org

National Gallery London
Razeetha Ram/Tracy Jones – Head of Press
Tel: 0207 7747 2519/ 0207 747 2865
General Press Office number: 0207 747 2865
Email: razeetha.ram@ng-london.org.uk / tracy.jones@ng-london.org.uk (please email both)

• Demarco Archive Press Release

DEMARCO ARCHIVE GOES ONLINE

An ambitious project to open up a unique record of cultural life in Scotland over the last 50 years will reach completion this month, with the launch of the Demarco Digital Archive website on 1st November 2008.  The website - www.demarco-archive.ac.uk - will be the culmination of three years’ work to establish a digital database of photographs and documents from the archive of Richard Demarco, the celebrated Edinburgh-born artist, gallery director and promoter of the arts.  Funded by a grant of £312,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project to create online access to around 10,000 items is a collaboration between the School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, the Demarco European Art Foundation and the National Galleries of Scotland. This fascinating material, most of which has not been seen before, will provide a remarkable insight into the history of the visual and performing arts in Scotland from the early 1950s to the present day.

Comprising hundreds of thousands items amassed by Richard Demarco, the archive documents his long career as an artist, collector, exhibition organiser, theatre promoter, educator, and influential advocate for both Scottish and international contemporary art.  Born in 1930, Demarco was a co-founder and artistic director of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, which opened in 1963.  He went on to establish the Richard Demarco Gallery, and between 1966 and 1998 mounted a radical and innovative programme of exhibitions and events, bringing European artists such as Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, Tadeusz Kantor and Blinky Palermo to the UK for the first time. 

Strongly internationalist in outlook, Demarco has played a pivotal role in promoting cross-cultural links, organising a series of innovative summer schools and educational journeys, and forging especially strong links with artists, writers, performers and theatre companies from Eastern Europe (in particular Poland, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary and the Baltic states).  He has also used his extensive network of international collaborators to establish connections and create outlets for Scottish artists across Europe and beyond.

In recognition of its unique significance, much of Demarco’s document archive covering the period from 1963 to 1995 was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1995.  The photographic archive is maintained by The Demarco European Art Foundation, established in 1992, which has continued to add a huge range of material of international significance.  The creation of the digital archive and website, selected and managed by Duncan of Jordanstone, is seen as a way of opening up the riches of these archives to a wider public.

The larger part of the digital archive comprises photographic images, reflecting Demarco’s use of the camera as a documentary and a social tool.  His great skill has been to bring together leading artists, thinkers and practitioners from many disciplines and to give them a platform on which they can interact.  Having organised and participated in exhibitions, performances, conferences, exchanges, meetings and events of all kinds, he has used his camera to record them all.  For the website, photographs have been chosen to reflect the full range of Demarco’s activities and to represent the most historically important aspects of his career (such as the landmark performances of Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen’s Scottish Symphony: Celtic Kinloch Rannoch in 1970, and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 in 1973).  Fully searchable and cross-referenced, the website will create an indispensable resource for public use and professional research, and will serve as an introduction and complement to the physical archives. This is a continuing project and information will continue to be added into the future.

Euan McArthur, Project Director at Duncan of Jordanstone said, ‘Richard Demarco’s work is of great historical importance for Scottish and international contemporary art.  There are so few public archives in this field that it is all the more important that we digitise these images to make them publicly available.  Making the images available in digital format will give the public and many researchers in contemporary art history access to this unique historical record.  Dundee is well placed to do this work with our knowledge of the archive and digital facilities.  We are delighted to work with such an important archive.’

Richard Demarco, who was closely involved in the selection of material for the digital archive, said, ‘Enduring art originates in the meetings of friends and their shared values and aspirations.  I have always believed that the archive was an artwork, and my life’s work.  This is the justification of that belief.’

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland said ‘The Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to be involved in this project. The Demarco Archives hold a wealth of information about the contemporary art scene in Europe from the 1960s to the present day. At a time when Scottish artists feature so strongly on the international stage, it is important that the pioneering work of Demarco should be recognized and made available to the widest possible audience.’

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland press office on 0131 624 6325/6332/6247/6314 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org or the Press Office at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design on

-ENDS-

• Charles Avery \'The Islanders\' Press Release

Press view: 11.30am -1pm Friday 28 November 2008
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

THE ISLANDERS: AN INTRODUCTION
CHARLES AVERY
29 November 2008 – 15 February 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org 
Admission free

Sponsored by the Friends and by the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland
The Islanders: An Introduction has been organised by Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London.
 

An exhibition by one of the most creative and thought-provoking Scottish artists of the last decade invites you on an expedition to an imaginary island.  The Islanders: An Introduction is the latest instalment in an epic four year project to describe life on an island created by the artist Charles Avery.  Using texts, drawings, installations and sculpture Avery has detailed the landscape, customs, and culture of his island, creating a challenging space for philosophical inquiry.  

The Islanders: An Introduction will bring together the project so far, including several new works which will be shown in Scotland for the first time.  Among these will be a large-scale sculptural installation, which was purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2007.  This sculpture depicts one of the most striking features of Avery’s invented world - a motley group of deities, who live on a wasteland called The Plane of the Gods.  This is the Island’s most popular tourist attraction and is home to the erect and threatening August Snakes. Visitors to the exhibition will also discover mysterious landscapes such as the Eternal Forest, where the mythical beast the Noumenon is rumoured to live.  Other exhibits include a large taxidermy sculpture of a fearsome Ridable, a magnificent specimen of the islands wildlife and the bitterly disgusting, but ruinously addictive gin-soaked pickled eggs which are sold in the island’s marketplace.

Inspired by his upbringing on the island of Mull - and by time spent in Rome, and Hackney Avery’s work has its roots in figures as diverse as William Blake, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Jorge Luis Borges, Ludwig Wittgenstein and P.G. Wodehouse. Once complete, Avery plans for his Island project  to be encapsulated in several large, leather-bound encyclopaedic volumes.

Charles Avery was born in Oban in 1973 and is based in London. In 2007, he was selected with five other artists to represent Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, as part of the Scotland and Venice exhibition. In 2003 he was one of four finalists in the Award for Italian Art, shown in that year’s Venice Biennale. He has recently been selected for the forthcoming TATE Triennial in 2009.  Following its exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Islanders: An Introduction will tour to Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

The Islanders: An Introduction is organised in collaboration with Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art.  A book published by Parasol unit will accompany the exhibition, with contributions by Nicolas Bourriaud, Tom Morton and Ziba de Weck Ardalan.

For further information on the exhibition, or images, please call the
National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314

pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• Parallel Lives 2

Parallel Lives 2: 
See the Future
5th November 2008 to the 18th January 2009
NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND (see notes to editors for more details)
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org  

On Wednesday the 5th November 2008, an exhibition of the major community art initiative, Parallel Lives 2 opens across three National Galleries of Scotland venues. This project, launched by Robin Harper MSP in February, aimed to find ways of making works in the National Galleries’ collection more directly relevant to communities living in contemporary Edinburgh.

Three visionary works of art were chosen as the inspiration for the project -
· Marcel Broodthaers’ surreal sculpture ‘ La Tour Visuelle’, 1966
· George Seurat’s post-impressionist landscape ‘La Luzerne, St. Denis’, 1885
· James Edgar’s portrait of preacher and philanthropist ‘Rev. Thomas Guthrie’, 1862

Parallel Lives 2 offered people the opportunity to investigate these challenging works of art and use them to express their views on contemporary life. Community groups from Leith, North and West Edinburgh worked with contemporary artists to produce creative responses that give shape and form to their views on social issues. These responses can now be seen next to the original works they were inspired by in this dramatic and innovative exhibition.

A Field of Wheat before Wester Hailes (2008)
At the National Gallery Complex visitors will be able to see a video projection of the living landscape of West Edinburgh next to post-impressionist masterpieces by Seurat, Monet and Cezanne. Participants in West Edinburgh saw the changes in their local landscape paralleled in Georges Seurat’s transformative vision of the urban fringe of Paris. Led by photographer Craig MacLean, participants gathered thousands of images submitted by local residents to form a mosaic landscape representing the life of this community.

Tower of Leith (2008)
An imposing and dramatic tower of 100 MP4 players showing simultaneous videos recorded on the mobile phones of people from Leith can be seen at the Dean Gallery. This amazing Dalek-like structure is both alien and mysteriously alive. It updates Marcel Broodthaers’ ‘tower’ which provokes debate about surveillance and the positive and negative uses of digital imaging technology. The community’s response, facilitated by video artist Gavin Lockhart, takes the form of a contemporary ‘Tower of Babel’.

Does Reform Reform You? (2008)
At the Portrait Gallery, people from North Edinburgh frankly air their views about child poverty, in a video made reacting to a portrait of a 19th century missionary alongside badges and jerseys bearing activist slogans. The portrait of the nineteenth century reformer Dr. Guthrie, founder of the notorious ‘Ragged Schools’, raised the question of contemporary attitudes to poverty, charity and social policy among older people in North Edinburgh. Working with the artist Kevin Reid, their response includes oral testimonies and slogans coined in response to Guthrie’s missionary activity.

As a result of the project, communities and individuals have learned new skills and have relished the offer to represent themselves on the national stage by interpreting and creating works of art as a focus for local issues. We hope to have proved once again that the art in Scotland’s national collection can be a lasting inspiration to all the people of Scotland.

'Parallel Lives', Documentary Film (2008)
A 15 minute documentary film of the project, made by director Lou MacLoughlan of Beanland Films, is part of the exhibition reviewing the project. This ground-breaking film is a fascinating record of the people on the project getting to grips with the NGS artworks. They are seen freely expressing their opinions as part of a lively and thought-provoking appraisal of an outreach project.

Parallel Lives 2 is a partnership project with Edinburgh’s Capital City Partnership, Edinburgh Neighbourhood Partnerships, WHALE, Out of the Blue Arts Trust and North Edinburgh Arts.

Following its exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, Parallel Lives 2 will be shown in community venues in 2009.
 
To find out more about the project visit www.parallellives2.org

For further information on the exhibition, or images, please call the
National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314
pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

Notes to Editors

Parallel Lives 2 will be exhibited across the National Galleries and can be seen at these three venues:

A Field of Wheat before Wester Hailes (2008)
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL

Does Reform Reform You? (2008)
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD

Tower of Leith (2008)
The Dean Gallery, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR

• Tracey Emin Gifts Major Sculpture as Visitors Have Last Chance to See Record-Breaking Exhibition

Tracey Emin, whose retrospective exhibition Tracey Emin: 20 Years closes at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art on Sunday 9th November, has generously donated a major sculpture to the Gallery. Roman Standard (2005) comprises a bronze pole 13-foot tall, surmounted by a little bird, cast in bronze. Part of the exhibition, it has been erected in the grounds of the Gallery, close to the entrance. The work can be seen as a kind of self-portrait: the bird is small and vulnerable, but at the same time it is visible from a distance and commands attention.

Tracey Emin commented: ‘On the final days of installing my show, 20 Years at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, I had very strong, mixed emotional feelings. Complete happiness and enjoyment of not just installing my show but being really happy in Edinburgh and enjoying every moment of the fantastic hospitality that was shown to me. I also had feelings of sadness, of counting the seconds and hours knowing that I would soon be leaving. Patrick Elliott, the curator had seemed ecstatically happy about the positioning of my sculpture, Roman Standard.  He said it looked like it had always been there and that’s the seed that was sown. I thought to myself that whilst it hadn’t always been there, why shouldn’t it stay there? The gift of Roman Standard is a gift to the Scottish National Galleries and to Edinburgh to say thank you.’ 

Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art said: ‘We are thrilled to have such a major work in the collection. We already own a number of monoprint drawings by Tracey, but we have nothing of this importance or scale. It was wonderful having Tracey here for the installation of the exhibition, and she returned on a number of occasions to give public talks, which were both popular and enlightening. This is not only a great work and a significant addition to the collection, but it also acts as a reminder of her time here’.

Tracey Emin: 20 Years has attracted over 40,000 visitors, breaking the Gallery of Modern Art’s record for an exhibition of work by a living artist.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• Diana and Actaeon by Titian goes to London

The campaign to save Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto for the nation entered a new phase today (22 October) with the unveiling of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon in Room One of the National Gallery in London.

The painting is a special loan to London from the Bridgewater Collection, which hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. The public will have just four weeks to see Titian’s great masterpiece in London, before it returns to Scotland later in November 2008.

The National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery London have formed a partnership in an effort to raise the required funding to acquire the two Titians, and to obtain assurances concerning the loan of the rest of the Bridgewater Collection in Scotland. The current owner, the Duke of Sutherland, has offered the Galleries the chance to acquire the two works on extremely favourable terms.

The Galleries have until the end of this year to raise £50m to acquire Diana and Actaeon. If this is successful, we have also been offered assurances which we hope will secure the loan of the rest of the Bridgewater collection for the next 21 years, and the galleries will be offered an option to buy the second painting, Diana and Callisto for a similar amount by 2012. Both paintings will then go on a rotating display between London and Edinburgh, spending five years at a time in each location.

Diana and Actaeon will be shown in London alongside the National Gallery’s Death of Actaeon, Titian’s sequel to Diana and Actaeon, in which the luckless Actaeon is turned into a stag. This work was saved for the Nation when it was acquired following a nationwide public appeal in 1972, and the two pictures will be reunited for the first time for two centuries.

Diana and Actaeon is one of six large-scale mythologies inspired by the Roman poet Ovid that Titian painted for King Philip II of Spain (Titian’s great portrait of whom features in Renaissance Faces, the exhibition running concurrently in the Sainsbury Wing). Titian began the picture and its companion Diana and Callisto in 1556, the year of Philip’s coronation. Spurred on by the prestige of royal patronage, he unleashed all his creativity to produce works of unprecedented beauty and inventiveness.

Titian worked for three years to perfect these masterpieces, which were shipped to Spain in 1559. He claimed their lengthy genesis was due to the relentless pains he took to make sumptuous works of art worthy of the king.

Diana and Actaeon depicts the fatal consequences of a mortal tragically caught up in the affairs of the gods. It is remarkable for its powerful dramatization of extremes of human emotion. With its rich array of colours, contrasting textures and dreamy atmospheric effects it is also a work of ineffable lyrical beauty. As evening light filters through Diana’s grotto, glimmering highlights refract through an elegant Venetian glass vase and sparkle in a lustrous mirror and across the water’s surface. The soft sensuousness of female flesh, Titian’s special hallmark, proliferates to delight his young patron’s erotic tastes.

The campaign to save the Titian’s received a boost last week, with the announcement that The Art Fund - the UK’s leading independent art charity - is donating £1 million, the largest grant for a single work of art in its 105 year history.

Over 60 artists from all over the UK have also joined the campaign to save the Titians. In a special gesture of support, Lucian Freud has given his approval for his Self-Portrait to hang in the National Galleries of Scotland next to the Self-Portrait by Rembrandt, whilst the Titian is in London.

Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery said “Diana and Actaeon has never been lent to any public gallery other than the National Gallery of Scotland. Its display in London is an extraordinary opportunity to see one of the greatest of all European paintings in an entirely different context. It is also part of our joint campaign to secure not only this painting and its pair for the British public, but help assure the future of all the masterpieces in the Bridgewater Loan for the National Gallery of Scotland for decades to come.”

John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said, “We have a matter of weeks to raise £50m to secure the future of one of the greatest paintings in the world for the British public. The response so far has been tremendous and we hope that the display of the Titian in London will encourage even more people to back our campaign.”

Press Enquiries

For the National Gallery
Razeetha Ram / Tracy Jones - Head of Press
Tel: 020 7747 2519 / 020 7747 2839
General Press Office number: 020 7747 2865
Email: razeetha.ram@ng-london.org.uk / tracy.jones@ng-london.org.uk (please email both)

For the National Galleries of Scotland
Patricia Convery – Head of Press
Tel: 0131 624 6325
Email: pconvery@nationalgalleries.org

Or

Erica Bolton, Bolton & Quinn
Tel: 020 7221 5000 (5 lines)
Email: erica@boltonquinn.com

• Forthcoming Exhibitions October 2008

Please find below our programme of exhibitions and displays for the coming months.  For further information on any of these, please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325/314/332/247, or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266

Information may also be found on our website
www.nationalgalleries.org

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS 2008/2009

NOTES: Current as of October 2008.  Information is subject to change.
**Denotes major summer exhibition

General opening hours:   
National Gallery of Scotland Complex / Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Monday–Sunday  10am–5pm
     Except Thursday  10am–7pm

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art / Dean Gallery
     Monday–Sunday  10am–5pm

HEROES
30 May – 7 December 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Admission free

This exhibition will examine the lives of individuals who were promoted as role models, through art and literature, in the Victorian era. With particular reference to the theories outlined by the writer and reformer Samuel Smiles in his 1859 book Self-Help, the exhibition will also critically re-examine what we mean by ‘Victorian values’. Drawn from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, True Grit will also bring together manuscripts and archival material from the National Library of Scotland, and a selection of internationally important artworks from other collections. Many of the exhibits, including material from the John Murray Archive recently acquired by the National Library, will be on public display for the first time.

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
ART COMPETITION FOR SCHOOLS 2008
13 June – 28 October 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission Free
Sponsored by Scottish Widows

This exciting exhibition – the outcome of the fifth year of the hugely successful Art Competition for Schools – features fifty-three winning artworks selected from thousands of entries submitted by pupils from schools across Scotland. There are six categories with different themes: nursery schools (Birds); primary 1-3 (Can you see the music?); primary 4-7 (Sit in Splendour); secondary 1-2 (Art to wear); special education schools (Come closer) and group work (selected from any of the above).

**IMPRESSIONISM AND SCOTLAND
19 July – 12 October 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £8.00 (concessions £6.00)
Sponsored by Baillie Gifford

This major international exhibition will explore the Scottish taste for Impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its impact on two generations of artists in Scotland. The label ‘Impressionism’ was, in this period, applied to artists as diverse as Whistler, Corot, McTaggart and the Glasgow Boys. This exhibition of over 100 works will include paintings, pastels and watercolours by these artists, as well as by Monet, Manet, Degas, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Scottish Colourists. Highlights of the show will include Degas’s L’Absinthe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which was famously hissed at when it came up for auction in 1892, and Lavery’s The Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery), a rare example of Scottish modern life painting. Other major Impressionist works will be on loan from private and public collections in the UK, Germany, the USA and Australia.

**TRACEY EMIN: TWENTY YEARS
2 August – 9 November 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission £6.00 (concessions £4.00)

Tracey Emin is one of the most celebrated artists of her generation, yet remarkably this will be the first retrospective exhibition of her work to be held in the UK. Born in London in 1963, she grew up in the Kent seaside resort town of Margate and studied Royal College of Art in London from 1987 to 1989.  Emin’s work draws directly upon her personal experiences, and often refers to traumatic episodes in her early life (being raped at the age of 13, her sexually promiscuous adolescence and a failed suicide attempt).  Her first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective, held at the White Cube Gallery in London in 1993, featured embroidered blankets, letters, mementos and photographs relating to such experiences.  Emin’s great achievement is to have drawn upon her background – the sort of background that a lot of people share, but which is largely uncharted territory in the world of art – and to have done so in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental.  The forthcoming retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will occupy the entire ground floor of the gallery and feature work dating from 1993 to the present day. It will include embroidered textiles, paintings, drawings, early unpublished prints, installations, photographs, sculptures and neon works.

FOOTLIGHTS:
CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF PERFORMANCE
9 August – 16 November 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission free

This display will feature works from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland and will look at ways in which artists over the centuries have chosen to record events and performances. The show will coincide with the SIBMAS international conference, which will be held in Glasgow in August 2008. This is first time this prestigious event has been held in Scotland. SIBMAS (Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle) is the international association for museums and libraries of the performing arts. The display will also coincide with the International Festival and Fringe events in Edinburgh and will serve as a link between the visual and performing arts.

JOHN MUIR WOOD AND THE ORIGINS
OF LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY IN SCOTLAND
2 August – 26 October 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Admission free

This exhibition will be the first to investigate the origins of landscape photography in Scotland. It will concentrate on images produced between 1840 and 1860, and in particular on the work of John Muir Wood, arguably Scotland’s first systematic landscape photographer. With bulky camera equipment, Muir Wood travelled by steamer along the Firth of Clyde, exploring the geography of Arran, Bute and the north Ayrshire coast. The exhibition will engage with a wider specialist and public interest in landscape questions and will contribute to a reconsideration of the practice of early photographers currently underway in Britain and abroad. The exhibition will also contextualise Muir Wood’s imagery by displaying examples of the landscape practice of other early photographers, including Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, Thomas Keith, Horatio Ross and W H F Talbot. We witness the emergence of a new creative form as each struggled to express the Scottish landscape imagination through photography.

THE INTIMATE PORTRAIT:
DRAWINGS, MINIATURES AND PASTELS FROM RAMSAY TO LAWRENCE
25 October 2008 – 1 February 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Admission free

The first ever major UK exhibition to examine a fascinating but relatively unknown aspect of British portraiture will open at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn.  The Intimate Portrait will explore the period between the 1730s and the 1830s – the heyday of British portraiture – when some of the country’s greatest artists produced beautifully worked portraits in pencil, chalks, watercolours and pastels, as well as miniatures on ivory, that were often exhibited, sold and displayed as finished works of art.  Jointly organised by the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum, this exhibition of nearly 200 works will draw upon the superb (and largely unexplored) holdings of intimate portrait drawings in the collections of both institutions, as well as upon important private collections that have been placed on long-term loan at the Portrait Gallery.  Highlights will include masterpieces by Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence and David Wilkie.  The exhibition will travel to the British Museum in London during spring 2009.

Keiller Library display
EXHIBITING SURREALISM:
THE INTERNATIONAL SURREALIST EXHIBITION, LONDON 1936
13 September 2008 – mid December 2008
DEAN GALLERY, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS
Admission free

The International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London on 11 June 1936, and signalled the emergence of the British surrealist group. Organised primarily by Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne and Herbert Read – with the help of French surrealists such as Breton and Eluard – it featured work by Dalí, Miró and Ernst, as well as by such British artists as Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. Lectures were given by both British and French surrealists: Dalí dramatically delivered his while wearing a deep-sea diving suit, but had to be rescued when he began to suffocate. It was a resounding success with a bemused London public, attracting over thirty thousand visitors during its three-week run. This display will draw on material from the Gallery’s extensive archives, which fully document the progress of the exhibition.
 
PORTRAIT OF THE NATION
14 November 2008 – 31 March 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Admission free

This exhibition will describe Portrait of the Nation, the National Galleries of Scotland’s major capital project.  The exhibition will show how Portrait of the Nation will transform the Scottish National Portrait Gallery with much more space and many more works of art on display. The Gallery closes to the public on April 5 2009 for two-and-a-half years and will reopen in November 2011.  During the period of closure every portrait will be removed for safety, the staff will be relocated and parts of the collection will be displayed in venues round Scotland and abroad.  The exhibition will examine the logistics of this large and complicated project and will give an idea of what the gallery will be like when it reopens.

DUTCH MANNERISM
22 November 2008 – 8 February 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission free

This display focuses on two major acquisitions made by the National Gallery in recent years: Abraham Bloemaert’s splendid painting Miracle of the Loaves, and Hendrick Goltzius’ extraordinary drawing of a Man with a Tassled Cap. Both are outstanding examples of so called “Dutch Mannerism”. Goltzius, as the most important artist of this generation, is represented with a range of impressive drawings and engravings. Around these masterpieces will be shown a selection of fine graphic art by his contemporaries, Jacob Matham, Pieter Saenredam, and Jacques de Gheyn. This display highlights little known treasures of the collection and celebrates the dawn of the Golden Age of Dutch Art.

 
GERHARD RICHTER
8 November 2008 – 4 January 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £6 / £4; children free (12 years and under)

Gerhard Richter is one of the most influential artists living today. His paintings, both figurative and abstract, with their superb mastery of technique, strong conceptual underpinning, subtle ambivalence and sheer beauty, have had a huge impact on several generations of artists and helped to make painting once again a vital means of artistic expression.  This will be the first major retrospective of Richter’s paintings to be held in Britain since 1991 and the first ever in Scotland. Drawn from a small, select number of private collections, the exhibition provides an unrivalled overview of the artist’s career from 1963 to the recent past. It will include many of his iconic works of the 1960s; based on magazine, newspaper and personal photographs, these paintings helped earn him the label of German Pop artist.  Richter quickly moved on to paint abstract canvases, which were to occupy much of his energy from the 1980s to the present day. The exhibition will contain a group of these magisterial paintings, which clearly demonstrate what a great colourist as well as a master of formal control he was. This is a rare opportunity to see in depth the work of one of today’s great artists.

CHARLES AVERY
THE ISLANDERS: AN INTRODUCTION
29 November 2008 – 15 February 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Admission free
Sponsored by the Friends and by the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland
Charles Avery - The Islanders: An Introduction has been organised by Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London.
 
A new exhibition of work by one of the most imaginative, thought-provoking and highly regarded Scottish artists to emerge in the last decade will be a highlight of this year’s winter programme at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.  Organised in collaboration with Parasol unit, in London, The Islanders: An Introduction is the latest instalment in an epic, ten-year project which describes through text, drawings, objects and installations, the topology, cosmology and inhabitants of an imaginary island.  Inspired by his upbringing on the island of Mull - and by time spent in Rome, and Hackney - this exhibition brings together previously exhibited and new works, including the Scottish premiere of the sculptural installation The Plane of the Gods, purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2007.  Also on display are several new works, including a large taxidermy sculpture of a fearsome 'Ridable', an animal which inhabits the Island, and a huge wall map detailing the Island’s territory.  Charles Avery was born in Oban in 1973 and is based in London. In 2007, he was selected with five other artists to represent Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, as part of the Scotland and Venice exhibition. Working across a range of media, this exhibition presents a complex fusion of philosophical enquiry and playfully inventive characterisation, executed with a distinctive and commanding style.

TURNER IN JANUARY
1 – 31 January 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission free

The New Year begins at the National Gallery of Scotland with its annual display of thirty-eight magnificent watercolours by J M W Turner (1775–1851), bequeathed in 1900 by the London art collector Sir Henry Vaughan. Turner is recognised as perhaps the greatest of all British painters, and was a master of watercolour painting, using the medium to create stunning land and seascapes, topographical views and designs for book illustrations.  The Vaughan Bequest display is shown throughout January every year, and has been a popular feature of the Gallery’s exhibition calendar for more than one hundred years. 
---

For further information on any of these exhibitions, please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325/314/332/247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections

Released: September 2008
Press view: 11.30 am – 1.00 pm, Thursday 6 November 2008, National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh

GERHARD RICHTER:
PAINTINGS FROM PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
8 November 2008 – 4 January 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
0131 624 6200
Admission £6 / £4; children free (12 years and under)

One of the greatest and most influential European artists of the last fifty years will be the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh this autumn.  Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections will be the second installment in the Bank of Scotland totalART series, the largest ever sponsorship of modern art in Scotland.  This will be the first time that such an exhibition has been seen in this country and the first large-scale survey of Richter’s work in the UK for nearly two decades.

Bank of Scotland has invested over £400,000 in Bank of Scotland totalART, which aims to ensure that modern art reaches the widest possible audience, creating educational and inspirational experiences for all.  The series opened with the hugely successful Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life…and Death, which brought 95,000 visitors to the National Gallery Complex in 2007.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter has done more than any other living artist to put painting back on the agenda for artists, critics and the public alike.  Since the early 1960s his paintings, both figurative and abstract, with their superb mastery of technique, strong conceptual underpinning, subtle ambivalence and sheer beauty, have had a huge impact on generations of artists, and have helped to make painting once again a vital means of artistic expression.  Arguably, he is the world’s greatest living painter.

Bank of Scotland totalART: Gerhard Richter will offer an unrivalled overview of the artist’s career, bringing together over 60 paintings dating from 1963 right up to the recent past.  The exhibition will include works from virtually every period of Richter’s development, beginning with his iconic black-and-white, photo-based works (which earned him the label of German Pop artist), and ending with his magisterial, sensuously coloured abstracts of the 1990s and beyond.

Working in a period in which painting has been deemed by many to be anachronistic and irrelevant, Richter has seemed determined to explore the full palette of possibilities that the medium has to offer: from figurative to abstract, from monochrome to multi-coloured, from flat, uniform application of paint to webs of swirling brushstrokes, from precise control to the use of chance.  In this exhibition, Richter’s mastery of paint can be explored in many of his finest and most famous works.

The exhibition, which has been co-organised with the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, the Albertina in Vienna and the MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg, has been made possible by the generosity of five private collections, which between them possess an extraordinary range of Richter’s paintings, and moreover of supreme quality.  In addition, a group of major paintings from the ARTIST ROOMS Collection, recently acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate from the Anthony d’Offay Collection, will be displayed for the first time. 

During the autumn and winter of 2008-09, the British public will be able to enjoy two other major presentations of Richter’s work: 4900 Colours: Version II, at the Serpentine Gallery, London (23 September – 16 November 2008); and Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London (26 February – 31 May 2009).

Sarah Cran, Head of Sponsorship, HBOS plc said: “We are really looking forward to the Richter exhibition, the second exhibition in the Bank of Scotland totalART series.  It promises to be a fantastic show.  Richter is one of the greatest living contemporary artists and a true inspiration to many aspiring art students.  Our innovative education programme which will accompany the exhibition will engage and educate these students.  There will also be a number of unique and exciting projects specifically geared towards young children and adults, ensuring that people of all ages and backgrounds have the opportunity to experience Richter’s work first hand.”

John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland said: “Gerhard Richter is arguably the most important and influential contemporary artist alive today so I am delighted that this major show will be coming to Scotland as the second exhibition in the Bank of Scotland totalART series.  I would like to thank Bank of Scotland for their continued support and I look forward to working with them to bring top-class modern and contemporary art to Scotland.”

For further information on the exhibition, or images, please call the
National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314

pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• National Gallery of Scotland Hosts the Penny Wedding

NATIONAL GALLERY OF SCOTLAND HOSTS THE PENNY WEDDING

The National Gallery of Scotland is delighted to announce the acquisition of The Penny Wedding by Alexander Carse. The acquisition has been made in keeping with the National Galleries of Scotland’s declared policy of strengthening the national collection of Scottish art. The painting has been on loan to the National Gallery since 1972 and this purchase ensures that the Gallery now possesses one of the two most important works by Carse in public museum ownership, matched only by The Village Ba’ Game (1818) in the McManus Galleries in Dundee. It was purchased at Bonham’s Scottish Sale on 29 August through the agency of Bourne Fine Art for £151,725 (£120,000 hammer price). 

A younger contemporary of David Wilkie, Carse (about 1790-1843) is still a relatively undocumented artist whose vital contribution to the portrayal of old Scottish pastimes and the development of Scottish genre painting continues to be underrated. Although distinctively Scottish, Carse’s Penny Wedding is clearly indebted to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings of peasant weddings which he possibly knew from reproductive engravings. Like these Old Master predecessors, Carse filled his composition with all sorts of humorous narratives. On the right of the picture two farmers or shepherds are gorging themselves on ham, while a third pulls down his bonnet to say grace. Behind them a pair of men are bickering over their voluntary contributions as the hat is passed round.
 
The Penny Wedding is one of Carse’s most ambitious and elaborate exercises in social genre. It was launched to the public at the British Institution in 1819 while the artist was living in London. That same year Wilkie showed his own composition on an identical theme at the Royal Academy, a picture commissioned by George IV when Prince Regent and now in the Royal Collection. In spite of its relative naivete by comparison with Wilkie, Carse’s iconic Penny Wedding provides a crucial link between David Allan’s late eighteenth-century illustrations of Scottish manners – the Gallery has an Allan watercolour (1795) on the same theme –and the internationally celebrated genre paintings of Wilkie. Carse evidently revelled in the raucous merriment and boisterous vitality associated with this distinctively Scottish custom whereby guests defrayed the costs of the wedding feast and any surplus was used to set up the couple in their new home.

Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery, said “The NGS faces many competing calls on its acquisition funds and of course at the moment we face the huge challenge of raising funds for the Bridgewater Titians. However, it is essential that we maintain our commitment to our national school of painting.  We recently acquired major works by the Glasgow Boys from the McIntosh Patrick collection.  Now we have bought this fascinating celebration of Scottish social customs from the earlier part of the nineteenth century.  We shall continue to search out the best in historic Scottish art as and when it becomes available.”

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• NEW SCOTTISH ACQUISITIONS: ART AND INDUSTRY - DAVID ALLAN

Released: Wednesday 15 October 2008-10-13
Photo call: Thursday 16 October at 11.30am at the National Gallery of Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh

 
Lead Processing at Leadhills: Smelting the Ore, 1780s
By David Allan
© NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND

NEW SCOTTISH ACQUISITIONS: ART AND INDUSTRY

In collaboration with the Scottish Government, the National Gallery of Scotland is delighted to announce one of the most fascinating Scottish acquisitions of recent years. Accepted by H M Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to the Gallery in 2008, David Allan’s four small oil paintings illustrating the stages of lead processing at Leadhills in Lanarkshire are a unique record of an industrial process in late eighteenth-century Scotland.

As a result, the National Galleries of Scotland now possess the most comprehensive and definitive collection of the work of David Allan of Alloa (1744-1796).  Following his ten-year sojourn in Italy from 1767, Allan returned to Britain in 1777 in the hope of establishing himself as a portrait painter in London. But in 1780, defeated by unequal competition from Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and Zoffany, he retreated to Edinburgh to renew the influential patronage he had first enjoyed in the 1760s. Amongst the first to resume their patronage were the Hopes of Hopetoun.

The magnificent mansion of Hopetoun House near South Queensferry, had been financed from the proceeds of the mines at Leadhills in the Lowther Hills of Lanarkshire where the Hopes had secured the mining rights in 1638. This beautiful but bleak locality, which probably witnessed primitive lead smelting as early as the ninth and tenth centuries, was famed as ‘God’s Treasure House in Scotland’ for its outstanding diversity of minerals, gold, and silver, the most highly prized and lucrative by-product of lead. The 3rd Earl of Hopetoun, who took a close interest in the operations of the mines and their management by the Scotch Mining Company as his lessee, undertook a personal tour of inspection in 1786. This may well have been the occasion of his remarkable commission to David Allan.

In the first of the set of four paintings, the Leadhills washer boys, who were often as young as nine, are shown pounding the crude ore under the watchful eye of the Earl and his Countess. The second painting depicts the sieving and washing of the broken ore – a hazardous occupation as the waste water was often contaminated and compounded the pollution from toxic fumes emanating from the smelters shown in the third painting. The last painting in the sequence shows the final weighing ceremony for the finished lead bars or ingots, averaging nine stone in weight. The Earl’s quota of every sixth bar having been extracted, the remaining ingots would be loaded on to horse-drawn carts for the long and costly overland journey to Leith and onward distribution or export by the Scotch Mining Company to the markets of Northern Europe and Russia.

Allan’s paintings were probably commissioned for Moffat House in the High Street of the fashionable health resort of Moffat. Now a hotel, the most elegant townhouse in Moffat had been built for the Hopes in the 1760s as the administrative headquarters for their estates in lowland west of Scotland, providing equally convenient access to Leadhills and the spa waters of the town itself. Stylised and sanitised for the benefit of his patrons and a genteel audience, Allan’s paintings focus on the actual industrial procedure as a vital source of private and national income and emphasise the productivity of the Scotch Mining Company as the lessees of Lord Hopetoun’s mines and the employers of some two hundred men. convey little idea of the real hardships of life in this isolated mining community where life expectancy for miners and their livestock was short and many fell victim to the dreaded lead ‘brash’ poisoning, dying in convulsions.
 
Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery said: ‘Allan’s paintings are of enormous interest – especially for all those engaged in the investigation and interpretation of Scotland’s social, industrial and economic history.  They complement perfectly the world-class collections of Leadhills minerals in National Museums Scotland. We are deeply grateful for this Acceptance-in-Lieu allocation, which adds something new to the Scottish national collection and we are greatly indebted to the private owners in question.’

For further information and images please contact the Press Office at the National Galleries of Scotland on 0131 624 6325/6332/6247/6314 or pressinfo@natioalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• The Intimate Portrait

Released: October 2008
Press view: 11.30 am – 1.00 pm, Thursday 23 October 2008, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

THE INTIMATE PORTRAIT:
DRAWINGS, MINIATURES AND PASTELS
FROM RAMSAY TO LAWRENCE
25 October 2008 – 1 February 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD
Telephone 0131 6246 6200; recorded information 0131 332 2266
www.nationalgalleries.org 

Admission free

Exhibition organised by the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum
Exhibition sponsored by Artemis Investment Management Ltd

The first ever major UK exhibition to examine a fascinating but relatively unknown aspect of British portraiture will open at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn.  The Intimate Portrait will explore the period between the 1730s and the 1830s – the heyday of British portraiture – when some of the country’s greatest artists produced beautifully worked portraits in pencil, chalks, watercolours and pastels, as well as miniatures on ivory, that were often exhibited, sold and displayed as finished works of art.  Jointly organised by the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum, this exhibition of nearly 200 works will draw upon the superb (and largely unexplored) holdings of intimate portrait drawings in the collections of both institutions, as well as upon important private collections that have been placed on long-term loan at the Portrait Gallery.  Highlights will include masterpieces by Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence and David Wilkie.

While oil paintings and sculpture dominated the very public art of portraiture which flourished in Georgian and Regency Britain, many artists were simultaneously involved in creating more private portraits for domestic consumption and display.  Portrait miniatures painted in watercolour on ivory were worn as jewellery or displayed as treasures in cabinets; pastels with their fragile but brilliant surfaces were protected under glass and hung within gilt frames; while drawings were either framed and hung in family groups or kept in albums or portfolios to be shown to friends and family. 

Until now, there has never been a serious investigation of these captivating modes of portraiture, and it has largely been forgotten that these smaller, more intimate portraits were also enjoyed by a wider public, and were exhibited in their hundreds at the Royal Academy in London and other public exhibition spaces in Britain, such as the Associated Society of Artists in Edinburgh.  Sir Thomas Lawrence’s magnificent portrait drawing of Mary Hamilton, which will feature in the exhibition, was one of thirteen works that he showed at the RA in 1789, most of them in pastels and chalk.  A contemporary press report stated: ‘The drawings in the Exhibition are this year and have been for several years past, superior in merit to the paintings.’

The Intimate Portrait will bring together works by around fifty artists, including many of the leading figures of the period, such as Richard Cosway, John Brown, Archibald Skirving, Francis Cotes, George Dance, Henry Fuseli and John Downman.  Of particular note will be two masterly self-portrait drawings by the young rivals Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.  The majority of the beautiful portraits in the exhibition will be largely unknown to the public, as their sensitivity to light means they can only be shown infrequently.

The exhibition will include sections devoted to pastels, drawings and miniatures, and in addition, will examine the themes of self-portraiture, the depiction of artists’ families and friends, and the portrayal of the political, social, literary and theatrical celebrities of the day.  Among the well-known sitters in the show will be Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Robert Burns, Lady Hamilton, the Duke of Wellington and the young Queen Victoria.

From the origins of polite society and the fashionable art world until the beginning of the Victorian era and the invention of photography – the period covered by this exhibition – portraits far exceeded in number any other genre exhibited and played a dominant role in visual culture and society.  This exhibition will explore the significance of intimate portraits as indicators of contemporary taste, sentiment and social and material culture in this period, by examining how and why they were made, commissioned, and displayed.  It will also examine these works’ crucial differences from oils, and above all, their qualities as portraits that are ‘intimate’ in the multiple senses of the words.

Speaking of the exhibition, Nick Wells, Head of communications at Artemis Investment Management Ltd, said, “As an Edinburgh-based company, Artemis is delighted to sponsor The Intimate Portrait at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.  The remarkable works on show will offer a fascinating insight into a type of portraiture that is hardly known and rarely seen today.  It is truly rewarding to facilitate their display and help to bring them to a much wider audience.”

Following its showing at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, The Intimate Portrait will be displayed in the Prints & Drawings gallery (Room 90) at the British Museum from 5 March to 31 May 2009.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, priced £25; written by co-curators Dr Stephen Lloyd, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and by Dr Kim Sloan, Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1880 at the British Museum.

For further information on the exhibition, or images, please call the
National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314
pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

or Katrina Whenham, Press Officer, British Museum, Great Russell Street,
London WC1B 3DG, Tel: +44 (0) 20 7323 8583
communications@britishmuseum.org

• Joint effort to secure Bridgewater Collection Titians for Nation

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND AND NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON JOIN FORCES TO SECURE THE FUTURE OF OLD MASTER COLLECTION FOR THE UK

Joint Statement on behalf of National Galleries of Scotland, the National Gallery London and the Duke of Sutherland:

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the National Gallery in London (NGL) are working together with the Duke of Sutherland to secure the long-term future of the Bridgewater loan of Old Master paintings.

The Bridgewater Collection, currently on view at the NGS, is the most important private collection of Old Master paintings on loan to an institution in the UK and counts among the most important art collections anywhere in the world.  The loan includes masterpieces by artists such as Raphael (3), Titian (4), Rembrandt (1) and Poussin (8). The pictures have been on continuous public view in the National Gallery of Scotland since the collection was placed there in 1945 by the then 5th Earl of Ellesmere, later 6th Duke of Sutherland. It forms the core of the National Gallery of Scotland’s world-famous displays of European art.

Over the years, the Bridgewater Collection has grown in value to the point where the Duke of Sutherland has decided that it would be prudent to review the holding in relation to the family’s overall assets, and he has therefore decided to offer a small number of selected pictures for sale to the nation, reflecting his strong preference that the entire collection should remain on public view in the UK. The Duke has offered the opportunity for the Galleries to acquire two masterpieces on extremely generous terms; Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, both by Titian.

Titian’s Diana & Actaeon is on offer at a net price of £50m.  The NGS and NGL will be seeking funds to acquire this work which would then be available for display on a rotating basis in London and Edinburgh. Assuming the funds can be raised to enable this purchase to proceed, the two Galleries will also be granted an option to acquire the second picture, Diana & Callisto in four year’s time for a similar amount. If the effort to acquire these works is successful then the remainder of the Bridgewater Collection will remain on long-term loan at the NGS.

The two Titians are arguably the finest works in the Bridgewater Collection. They were both painted as part of a cycle of works for Philip II of Spain and they represent a highpoint in Italian Renaissance art.

This is the first-ever collaboration of its kind between the London and Edinburgh National Galleries.

The Bridgewater Loan originally numbered 32. The National Gallery of Scotland acquired four paintings from the Loan in 1984 and Titian’s Venus Anadyomene in 2003.

John Leighton, Director General, National Galleries of Scotland:
“The Bridgewater Loan, so generously made by the Duke of Sutherland, is the most important Old Master paintings loan to any public museum in the world and is of supreme importance to Scotland and the rest of the UK. The present initiative is intended to secure the long-term future of the Loan for the public benefit. We are delighted to be working in close collaboration with the Duke and our colleagues in London in order to achieve this.”

Nicholas Penny, Director, National Gallery London:
“For a century, the agitation to preserve great works of art in British Collections from export has been animated by anxiety that Titian’s great paintings Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto might be sold.  Now the paintings have been offered on remarkably advantageous terms; their acquisition by both institutions would be an historic event.”

27 August 2008

Press Enquiries:

For National Galleries of Scotland/National Gallery London:
Erica Bolton, Bolton & Quinn
Tel: 020 7221 5000 (5 lines)
Email: erica@boltonquinn.com

For the Duke of Sutherland:
Terence Fane-Saunders
Chairman and Chief Executive
Chelgate Limited
Tel: 020 7939 7939
Email: tfs@chelgate.com

• NGS Art Competition for Schools 2008

Released: June 2008
Photocall: 12.15 – 1.30, Wednesday 18 June 2008

Budding Scottish artists rewarded in record-breaking year for NGS Art Competition for Schools

Sponsored by Scottish Widows

The best young artists in the country are to be celebrated on 18 June 2008 at the National Galleries of Scotland, when the prize-winners of the 2008 Art Competition for Schools will receive their awards from John Leighton, Director General of the NGS. Fantastic prizes for individual winners, classes and schools will be collected by over fifty of Scotland’s brightest young things and their prize-winning works of art will tour the country for the next year. Lord Leitch will also speak at the ceremony as Chairman of Scottish Widows, who are sponsoring the competition for a third consecutive year.

With a record-breaking 4,016 entries received this year, entrants faced tough competition in all six categories: nursery, primary schools (P1-3 and P4-7), secondary schools, special education schools and groups. Competition entries were based on selected NGS works, with the aim of encouraging Scottish schoolchildren to interact with and seek inspiration from works in their national collection. The competition was launched online in December when schools from all over Scotland were invited to enter. Thousands of artworks were subsequently received from places as far apart as Ballindalloch and the Borders.

Praising the high standard of entries this year, Linda McClelland, event organiser, said: “The standard of entries received this year has been outstanding, clearly demonstrating the creativity being nurtured in Scottish schools. I am delighted that the exhibition is to go on tour once again, making it easily accessible to the public throughout the coming year.”

Lord Leitch, Chairman of Scottish Widows, said: “This competition offers a great opportunity to encourage creativity in children and Scottish Widows is delighted to be supporting the National Galleries once again this year. With such an overwhelming response from across the country, competition for winning prizes has been tough and I would like to congratulate all the winners. I’m sure that the experience will have helped nurture the talents of these budding artists which will be appreciated by all those who visit the exhibitions as it tours Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness.”

As part of last year’s touring exhibition, works from the 2007 competition were displayed in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary from November 2007 to February 2008. These works were much praised by over 32,000 patients, visitors and hospital staff and so well was the work received that the hospital has arranged to purchase 6 of the pieces to add to their permanent collection. These six artists will be present at the prize-giving ceremony to collect their cheques.

- ENDS -
Further information and images from the NGS Press Office
Tel: 0131 624 6325 / 332 / 247 or e-mail pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

NOTES TO EDITORS:

From Wednesday 18 June, the 53 winning pieces will be on show in the Weston Link at the National Galleries of Scotland before touring to the Pentagon Business Centre, Glasgow and Raigmore Hospital, Inverness.

WINNERS:
Category A: Nursery Schools (Theme - Birds)
1st place
Zofia Magnucka, Edinburgh
2nd place
Allan John MacInness, Kyle
3rd place
Ross Elder, Kirkliston

Special Merit
Meghan Attah, Glasgow
Finn Loveman, Glasgow
Millie Sharkey, Edinburgh
Harris Ferrol, Aberdeen
Sam James, Croy
Ani Stewart, Lauder
Charlie Hamilton, Edinburgh
Category B: Primary 1-3 (Theme - Can You See the Music?)
1st place
Ben Mitchell, Bonnyrigg
2nd place
Paul Dowdeswell, Dalkeith
3rd place
Jack Scanlon, Edinburgh

Special Merit
Alexander Khaleeli, Edinburgh
Blair Grant, Edinburgh
Vicky Goodwin, Perth
Fraser Morrison, Blairgowrie
Ryan Hartley, Dollar
Katrina Bruce, Pathhead
Gregor Malone, Edinburgh
Category C: Primary 4-7 (Theme - Sit in Splendour)
1st place
Paul Weir, Loanhead
2nd place
Jake Scollay, Auchtertool
3rd place
Robbie Campbell, Glasgow

Special Merit
Marc Jackson, Livingston
Jed Clelland, Edinburgh
Lewis MacLeod, Isle of Colonsay
Matthew Lovie, Kintore
Jack Burrows, Inverness
Oliver Phillips, New Galloway
Megan, Dollar
Category D: S1 and S2 (Theme - Art to Wear)
1st place
Holly Joanne Sutherland, Edinburgh
2nd place
Kyle McAllister, Penicuik
3rd place
Ross McDonald, Perth

Special Merit
Rebecca Houston, Aberdeen
Megan Laing, Edinburgh
Jack Reid, Dunfermline
Fiona Glen, Edinburgh
Jennifer McGhee, East Kilbride
Kirsty Mearns, Dollar
Sarah Martin, Arbroath
Category E: Special Education Schools (Theme - Come Closer)
1st place
Anthony Knights, Edinburgh
2nd place
Kyle Tilley, Irvine
3rd place
Michael Carmichael, Glasgow
Special Merit
William Dickson, Irvine
Jamie Kamal, Edinburgh
Cody Fairgrieve, Edinburgh
Sarah McLean, Edinburgh
Gordon Irvine, Glasgow
Rei Komiya, Edinburgh
Michaela Donnelly, Edinburgh
Category F: Group Work (Theme - selected from other categories)
1st place
Hillside School, Aberdour
2nd place
Knightsridge Primary School Livingston
3rd place
St Serf's Primary School, Alloa

• Gerhard Richter Retrospective

Released: 12 May 2008

BANK OF SCOTLAND TOTAL ART SERIES CONTINUES WITH MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE ON RICHTER

Gerhard Richter: Paintings from private collections
8 November 2008 – 4 January 2009
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission tbc

Bank of Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland are pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition Gerhard Richter: Paintings from private collections as the next instalment to the Bank of Scotland totalART series. The NGS and HBOS announced last year the biggest ever sponsorship of modern art in Scotland with Bank of Scotland investing over £400,000 in Bank of Scotland totalART, a series of two major modern art exhibitions at the National Gallery Complex. The first exhibition, Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life..and Death was a huge success with over 95,000 people visiting the exhibition from 4 August to 7 October 2007.

By working in partnership, Bank of Scotland and the National Galleries aim to ensure that modern art reaches the widest possible audience, creating educational and inspirational experiences for all.

As a young artist, Richter produced work which not only contributed towards the rejuvenation of painting in Germany, but which also, through the artist’s use of printed media, provided an equivalent to some of the concerns of American Pop Art. It is, therefore, most appropriate that this exhibition, devoted to one of the greatest living post-war artists, follows our recent exhibition on Andy Warhol.

John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland said: “Gerhard Richter is arguably the most important and influential contemporary artist alive today so I am delighted that this major show will be coming to Scotland as the second exhibition in the Bank of Scotland totalART series. I would like to thank Bank of Scotland for their continued support and I look forward to working with them to bring top-class modern and contemporary art to Scotland.”

Sarah Cran, Head of Sponsorship, HBOS said: “We are extremely excited about the forthcoming Gerhard Richter exhibition and are delighted that the work of such an important artist will form part of the Bank of Scotland totalART series. The Warhol exhibition was a huge success which was in part due to the fantastic education programme which accompanied it. We are looking forward to creating even more innovative and unique education opportunities with the Richter exhibition, engaging the widest possible audience with his work.’

The exhibition will comprise more than 60 large scale works dating from 1963 to 2007 from three main private collections: the Böckmann in Berlin, the Ströher in Darmstadt and Frieder Burda Museum in Baden Baden, Germany. It will also be complemented by works in the artist’s own possession.

The exhibition will present the whole range of Richter’s excessive oeuvre, from photorealistic paintings to large-scale abstract compositions with their fascinating colours and technical perfection.

For further information or images:
For National Galleries please contact:
Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

For Bank of Scotland please contact:
Gillian McCormack on 0141 204 7970 or gillian@materialmc.co.uk
Jenny Mungall on 0141 204 7970 or jenny@materialmc.co.uk

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• FOTO: MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE, 1918-1945

Released: April 2008
Press View: Thursday 5 June 2008, 11.30am-1pm

FOTO: MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE, 1918-1945

7 June – 31 August 2008
DEAN GALLERY, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission £6.00 (concessions £4.00)

Launching the 2008 Summer Season at the National Galleries of Scotland, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe 1918-1945 is a thought-provoking and beautiful exhibition that explores the breathtaking success of modernist photography in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria, during a time of tremendous social and political upheaval. Organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, this will be the only European showing of Foto, and it will include many stunning works on display in Britain for the first time.

The first survey to explore this fascinating period in the history of photography, Foto will be unprecedented in scope, comprising around 150 photographs, books, and illustrated magazines, and will feature the work of more than 100 photographers. Images by internationally recognised masters such as László Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Höch, André Kertész, and El Lissitzky will be shown alongside those of historically important contemporaries such as Karel Teige, Edith Tudor Hart, František Drtikol, Martin Munkacsi and Trude Fleischmann.

Foto will demonstrate how photography caught the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists in central Europe, provided a creative outlet for thousands of dedicated amateurs, and became a symbol of modernity for millions through its use in magazines, newspapers, advertising, and books. The show will be divided into thematic sections, each bringing together work from across central Europe, to explore in depth eight key strands such as photomontage and war, gender identity, life and leisure in the modern metropolis, and the spread of Surrealism.

Commenting on the Dean Gallery exhibition, Matthew Witkovsky, Curator of Foto and Associate Curator of Photographs at NGA, Washington, said: “Presenting Foto in Scotland, home to many great talents of early photography and especially the team of David O. Hill and Robert Adamson, has a special meaning. The first art historical studies of photography were written in central Europe during the time period of this exhibition, and the very first such study was on Hill and Adamson. Past and present, regional and international came together in central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, as they do in Edinburgh today.”

Simon Groom, Director of Modern & Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “Foto is one of the most important and intelligent photography exhibitions of recent years. The works are radical politically as well as aesthetically, and the exhibition contains many of the ideas and iconic images that were to establish photography's status as the avant-garde medium of the 20th century.”

The first of four major summer exhibitions at the NGS, Foto will present a collection of stimulating and varied works of international significance, which will allow viewers to appreciate some of the most challenging, yet beautiful, experimental photography of the twentieth century.

-Ends-

For further information and images please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on 0131 624 6332/325/314. pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

Notes to Editors:
Foto is divided into eight thematic sections:
• The Cut-and-Paste World: Recovering from War
An exploration of the significance of photomontage, a technique that epitomized the era and found broad acceptance among avant-garde artists and mass-media outlets.
• Laboratories and Classrooms
Consideration of the adoption by modernist photographers of experimental camera work and dark room techniques.
• Modern Living
Examination of how image-making helped popularize modernity in a region filled with anxieties over sudden and massive urban changes.
• New Women—New Men
Analysis of the way in which the changing role of men and women in European society was not only reflected in, but also shaped by modernist photography.
• The Spread of Surrealism
Discussion of the role of photography in the spread of Surrealism across Europe.
• Activist Documents
Consideration of the development of photojournalism and the photo-illustrated press, and the use of photography by political activists.
• Land without a Name
Examination of the modernist approach to photographing the urban landscape; and the use of modernist landscape photography in constructing myths of national identity.
• The Cut-and-Paste World: War Returns
Discussion of how, as the political ramifications of surrealism gained primary importance, so too did the potential of photomontage to comment on the state of the world.

The exhibition catalogue, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945, written by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Associate Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, is published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with Thames & Hudson, London and New York. It includes an introduction by Peter Demetz, professor emeritus at Yale University; biographies of the artists; an extensive bibliography; and maps of the region showing the geopolitical shifts of the early 20th century. The exhibition catalogue is published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation.

The exhibition was curated by Matthew Witkovsky, Associate Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It travelled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (October 12, 2007 – January 13, 2008) and the Milwaukee Art Museum (February 9 – May 4, 2008) before its only European showing at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh (June 7 – August 31, 2008).

Foto is complemented by a specially curated film programme, highlighting the prolific correspondences of lens-based media in interwar Central Europe. The Filmprogram will be screened jointly at the National Galleries of Scotland and the Edinburgh Filmhouse.

• FACES AND PLACES: CREATING AND RECORDING SCOTLAND’S BUILDINGS

PRESS VIEW: 23 April 2008
11.30 am – 1.00 pm

FACES AND PLACES: CREATING AND RECORDING SCOTLAND’S BUILDINGS
24 April – 20 July 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh
Admission free

The richness of Scotland’s built heritage will be celebrated in a fascinating new exhibition which will open in Edinburgh this spring. A partnership between the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Faces and Places will highlight the work of the architects, engineers, industrialists, archaeologists and antiquarians who created Scotland’s buildings, and who recorded and studied those of Scotland’s past. A wide range of items will be on display, including paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, notebooks and instruments. The exhibition is part of the celebration of the centenary of RCAHMS in 2008.

Notable figures featured in the exhibition include Robert Adam (1728-92), Robert Stevenson (1772-1850) and Alexander Curle (1866-1955). Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Robert Adam was the son of architect William Adam; with his brother, James (1732-94), he transformed British architecture, creating a new style based on an inventive use of classical motifs. Although best known as a marine engineer, designing and constructing at least eighteen lighthouses, including the Bell Rock, Robert Stevenson also worked on bridge, road, railway and canal projects. He established the Stevenson engineering practice which continued, managed by his descendants, until 1952. Alexander Curle was the first secretary of RCAHMS on its founding in 1908. He was appointed as an archaeologist, ‘an outdoor man’, in order ‘to make an inventory of the ancient monuments of Scotland of earlier date than 1707.’ Using a bicycle as his mode of transport, he single-handedly surveyed the counties of Berwickshire, Sutherland and Caithness between 1908 and 1911.

Imogen Gibbon, co-curator of the exhibition from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery said: “This project has provided an opportunity for two national collections to work together in displaying a variety of artefacts which reveal the history of Scotland’s built heritage. Uniting faces and places, the exhibition highlights a number of less well-known figures in addition to those more prominent in their field.”

Veronica Fraser from RCAHMS added: “Faces and Places is a major component of the RCAHMS centenary programme and we are delighted to be working with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in bringing these individuals and their works to a wider audience.”

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland was set up in 1908, charged ‘to make an inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments…illustrative of the contemporary culture, civilization and conditions of life of the people in Scotland from the earliest times to the year 1707…’. In the century since then, RCAHMS’s responsibilities have expanded greatly, and the Commission now records and collects information relating to buildings and human landscapes of all periods.

Complementing the remit of RCAHMS to record and collect information, the Reference Section of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery houses a portrait archive of around 30,000 photographs of portraits in collections worldwide. This collection, with its particular emphasis on Scottish sitters and artists, is a unique and invaluable resource for those studying Scottish history, Scottish portraiture and the iconography of individual Scots. This resource has enabled portraits of many of the individuals featured in this exhibition to be sourced and has demonstrated how the research resources of two institutions can work in tandem to celebrate the centenary of RCAHMS with the exhibition Faces and Places – Creating and Recording Scotland’s Buildings.
-Ends-

For further information and images, please contact the National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 314 /247; pressoffice@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

NOTES TO EDITORS

Over the past hundred years RCAHMS has built up and acquired an extensive collection of illustrative and documentary material, from its own work, through acquiring other public collections, and through donations from architects’ practices, archaeological units and private individuals. All of this is accessible to the public through RCAHMS’s library and archive of manuscripts, photographs, drawings, models and digital media. (www.rcahms.gov.uk)

The first one hundred years: Through some of the individuals featured in the Faces and Places exhibition, Lesley Ferguson, Head of Collections, RCAHMS, will provide an insight into the wealth and range of the collections of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), in this its centenary year. (Wednesday 21 May 2008, 12.45 – 1.30pm, free, Hawthornden Lecture Theatre - Weston Link (National Gallery Complex).

• ARTIST ROOMS Press Release

Press Release
Strictly embargoed until: Wednesday 27 February 2008 at 10.30 am

NEW £125 MILLION NATIONAL COLLECTION WILL BRING CONTEMPORARY ART TO AUDIENCES ACROSS BRITAIN

A new modern art collection, to be known as ARTIST ROOMS, has been established, it was announced today, created through one of the largest and most imaginative gifts of art ever made to museums in Britain. The gift has been made by Anthony d’Offay, with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), The Art Fund and the Scottish and British Governments. ARTIST ROOMS will be jointly owned and managed by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the nation.

The collection of 725 works, representing one of the most important holdings of post-war and international contemporary art in private hands, was assembled by Anthony d’Offay, whose London galleries played a key role in the promotion and understanding of twentieth-century art in the UK over a period of more than 30 years.

Anthony d’Offay assembled the collection through his gallery over 28 years. The transfer of ownership is being made under a part gift/part sale at cost agreement. The cost of the collection to Anthony d’Offay was some £26.5 million, and he asked for and will receive £26.5 million, i.e. the original costs of these works. The collection has been valued today at £125 million.

Anthony d’Offay’s guiding principle for the creation of ARTIST ROOMS is the concept of individual rooms devoted to particular artists. Many of these rooms were conceived as specific installations by the artists themselves. They have been assembled so that the work of important post-war artists can be seen and appreciated in depth. The primary aim is to create a new national resource of contemporary art that will strengthen displays and create exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the UK so as to inspire new audiences, especially of young people. It is hoped that the donation by Anthony d’Offay will establish a precedent for philanthropy to be followed by other collectors.

ARTIST ROOMS takes the form of 50 rooms of contemporary art by 25 artists:
Diane Arbus (3 rooms), Joseph Beuys (5), Vija Celmins (1), Ian Hamilton Finlay (1),
Gilbert & George (2), Johann Grimonprez (1), Damien Hirst (1), Jenny Holzer (1), Alex Katz (1), Anselm Kiefer (3), Jeff Koons (2), Jannis Kounellis (4), Sol LeWitt (1), Richard Long (2),
Robert Mapplethorpe (3), Agnes Martin (1), Ron Mueck (1), Bruce Nauman (2), Gerhard Richter (3), Ed Ruscha (1), Robert Therrien (2), Bill Viola (1), Andy Warhol (6), Lawrence Weiner (1), and Francesca Woodman (1). In addition, there are ten works by a further seven artists: Georg Baselitz, Ellen Gallagher, Richard Hamilton, Mario Merz, Charles Ray, Robert Ryman and Cy Twombly.

A series of opening displays will be launched in Spring/Summer 2009 and staged at Tate galleries and the National Galleries of Scotland and a wide range of partner museums and galleries across the UK. The initial partners include Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; Firstsite, Colchester; Glasgow Museums; Inverness Museum and Art Gallery; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; New Art Gallery, Walsall; MIMA, Middlesbrough; The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney; Ulster Museum, National Museums Northern Ireland and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Additional galleries will be sought with which we hope to collaborate in 2009 and beyond.

ARTIST ROOMS will transform the nation’s collections of contemporary art as a whole. It will materially strengthen Tate’s ability to represent some of the most important art of the latter half of the twentieth century, and establish Edinburgh as a world-class destination for modern art. It will significantly enhance the way in which both institutions are able to represent post-war and contemporary art in their permanent displays.

The costs, which include the purchase of the artworks and set up and accessioning are
£28 million. These costs have been met by £10 million each from both the Scottish and British Governments, £7 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and £1 million from The Art Fund. All taxes have been paid in full.

The agreement also includes a provision for the establishment of a £5 million endowment fund by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, the interest from which will be used for the acquisition of further rooms by important contemporary artists and emerging young artists, ensuring that the collection can continue to grow in the future. An initial contribution of £500,000 each from the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate has been made towards the £5 million endowment fund.

The museums have asked Anthony d’Offay, to serve as an unpaid ex officio curator for a period of
5 years, and he has agreed.

Anthony d’Offay’s donation also includes the gallery archive of over 1,000 boxes which provides a unique record of contemporary art over a thirty year period.

John Leighton, Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “Anthony d’Offay’s immense generosity and powerful vision lie behind this innovative partnership. At a stroke our level of ambition has been raised to a new height and there is now the potential to bring great modern art to our publics, not just in Edinburgh and London, but right across the country, from St Ives to Stromness.”

Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate said: “A gift of this magnitude will completely transform the opportunity to experience contemporary art in the UK. Anthony d'Offay’s imaginative generosity establishes a new dynamic for national collections and is without precedent anywhere in the world.”

Carole Souter, Director of NHMF said: “Anthony d'Offay's wonderful collection of modern and contemporary art is one of the most important in private hands anywhere in the world. The National Heritage Memorial Fund's £7 million grant is safeguarding an extraordinarily rich collection of works for future generations to explore and enjoy."

David Barrie, Director of The Art Fund, said: "Anthony d’Offay's exceptional generosity has given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to transform the nation’s collections of the very best international modern art. The Art Fund, the only private sector contributor to the funding package, has given the second largest grant in its history to ensure that this extraordinary collection can be a source of inspiration to everyone throughout the UK, now and always.”
Linda Fabiani MSP, Minister for Europe, External Affairs & Culture said: “This is a hugely significant acquisition for the National Galleries and for Scotland - it adds real weight to the cultural renaissance we are experiencing here. The quality and acclaim of the works on display reinforces our reputation as arts enthusiasts and shows Scotland as a serious player on the cultural stage. The collection offers an opportunity to both inspire and engage with the widest range of people, in particular our young people. The doors to modern art have been well and truly opened for everyone in Scotland – I want to see everyone, young and old, from Scotland and beyond, visiting Artist Rooms and experiencing the very best in contemporary art.”
Press Enquiries:

Patricia Convery, National Galleries of Scotland
Tel: 0131 624 6325

Helen Beeckmans, Head of Press, Tate
Tel: 020 7887 4940

Erica Bolton, Bolton & Quinn
Tel: 020 7221 5000 (5 lines)

Angela-Claire Coutts
Communications Officer for Minister for Europe, External Affairs & Culture
Tel: 0131 244 2547

Notes to Editors:

Anthony d’Offay

Born in Sheffield in 1940, Anthony d'Offay studied art at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1962. Whilst at the University, he fell in love with the collections of the National Gallery of Scotland. Years later he described walking round the galleries on The Mound as “the defining experience of my life”.

In 1969, the year in which the gallery moved to Dering Street, he organised the ground breaking Abstract Art in England 1913-1915, which became an Arts Council touring show. Exhibitions followed dedicated to the largely forgotten period of English painting from 1910 to 1940, including Vorticism, Bloomsbury and the Camden Town Group. Scholarly shows included Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Spencer Gore, Gwen John, Stanley Spencer, Wyndham Lewis and Eric Gill.

Anthony d’Offay became interested in contemporary art and began to include shows by living artists in the gallery’s programme. These included Lucian Freud in 1972, Gilbert & George, 1972, Michael Andrews, 1974, William Coldstream, 1976, Eduardo Paolozzi 1977, Frank Auerbach, 1978, Richard Long, 1978 and Richard Hamilton in 1980.

In 1977 he married Anne Seymour, a curator with many years experience in the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery, who had a special interest in avant-garde international art. In 1980 they opened a gallery for contemporary art 23 Dering Street, a uniquely large space for London at that time. They, together with Marie-Louise Laband, Director of the gallery, inaugurated a programme of international contemporary art, starting with a seminal exhibition by Joseph Beuys, Stripes from the House of the Shaman in August 1980. The intention was to show the greatest contemporary art being made, much of which was largely unknown to the British public at that time.

Over the years, the gallery in London presented a large number of highly acclaimed exhibitions by some of the greatest artists of our time. Many of these shows later travelled to public institutions in Britain and abroad. In addition to the shows made for the spaces in London, the Gallery was involved in organising important exhibitions for museums and public galleries around the world. The gallery closed in 2001.

Anthony d’Offay has brought many important exhibitions to Edinburgh including Joseph Beuys, Gilbert & George, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Ed Ruscha and Robert Mapplethorpe. Most recently at the Royal Scottish Academy he initiated two major Festival exhibitions: in 2006 Ron Mueck attracted more than 125,000 visitors and last year’s Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life and Death was seen by nearly 100,000 people.

National Heritage Memorial Fund

The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) is the ‘fund of last resort’ for the nation’s heritage, coming to the rescue by funding acquisitions in memory of those who gave their lives for this country. In recognition of the vital role it plays and to help meet an increasing number of applications, the Government initially doubled NHMF’s income from £5million to £10million for 2007/08 and recently confirmed this increased funding until 2011. For further information about the NHMF, please contact Dervish Mertcan or Alex Gaskell at NHMF press office: 020 7591 6102/6032 or 07973 613 820. www.nhmf.org.uk

The Art Fund

The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections and campaigns widely on behalf of museums and their visitors. It is entirely funded from public donations and has 80,000 members. Since 1903 the charity has helped museums and galleries all over the UK secure 860,000 works of art for their collections. In January 2007 The Art Fund successfully led the public appeal to save JMW Turner’s Blue Rigi for Tate, and in July 2007 was instrumental in putting together a unique funding package to ensure Dumfries House in Ayrshire was secured for the nation. Independent of government, The Art Fund is uniquely placed to campaign on behalf of public collections across the UK and led the campaign to extend free admission to all national museums and galleries, which achieved success in 2001. Visit the charity’s website at www.artfund.org. For further information about The Art Fund contact Hannah Fox, Head of Press, on 020 7225 4888, 07912 777761 or hfox@artfund.org

• FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS 2007/ 2008

Please find below our programme of exhibitions and displays for the coming months. For further information on any of these, please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325/314/332/247, or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org

Information may also be found on our website
www.nationalgalleries.org

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS 2007/ 2008

NOTES: Current as of January 2008. Information is subject to change.
**Denotes major summer exhibition

General opening hours:
National Gallery of Scotland Complex / Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Monday–Sunday 10am–5pm
except Thursday 10am–7pm

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art / Dean Gallery
Monday–Sunday 10am–5pm

BACK TO THE FUTURE:
SIR BASIL SPENCE 1907–1976
19 October 2007 – 10 February 2008
DEAN GALLERY, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free
A collaboration between the National Galleries of Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Sir Basil Spence, the Dean Gallery will host an exhibition dedicated to the iconic architect this autumn. Spence is arguably Scotland’s most renowned modern architect. His numerous buildings and his belief that modern architecture could serve all society propelled this Scotsman into a position in which he became a willing and frequent spokesperson for modern architecture in this country and internationally. His range of projects, which includes grand private houses (Gribloch in Stirlingshire), social housing (in Glasgow’s Gorbals), exhibition architecture (for the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, 1938, and for the Festival of Britain, 1951), major public commissions (most famously the new Coventry Cathedral) and numerous university and civic buildings, affected and continues to affect the lives of many. The exhibition will be drawn from the extensive Sir Basil Spence Archive, which comprises in excess of 30,000 drawings, photographs, sketch-books, models and news cuttings. The archive was recently gifted by the Spence family to the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland with the aim of cataloguing and making it more widely accessible to the public. This exhibition, the largest ever dedicated to Spence, will be held as part of a larger series of events and workshops, aiming to foster debate on the architectural heritage of Basil Spence and on our built environment as a whole.

JOAN EARDLEY
6 November 2007 – 13 January 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission £6.00 (concessions £4.00)

The unique talent of Joan Eardley, one of Scotland’s most popular twentieth century artists, will be celebrated in this major new exhibition. The first large-scale retrospective of Eardley’s work for almost 20 years, the exhibition will include around 70 paintings and 40 works on paper, as well as photographs taken by Eardley and her friend Audrey Walker. Best known for her sympathetic depiction of children in the streets and tenements of Glasgow, and for her freely painted and dramatic treatments of the sea and landscape of Scotland’s north-east coast, Eardley is a major figure in the history of post-war Scottish art. This much-anticipated survey of her tragically brief career will bring together important loans from collections across the UK, including a number of works that have not been on public display for many years. The exhibition will offer a timely reminder of Eardley’s remarkable talent, and an opportunity for a new generation to see the work of this much-loved artist. It will also contribute to a wider re-assessment of Eardley’s contribution to British art in the last century.

MATERNITY
10 November 2007 – 12 January 2008, Monday to Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm
INVERNESS MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY, Castle Wynd, Inverness, IV2 3EB
Admission free

This new exhibition, based on images of the mother and child from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, will open at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery this November. Comprising a selection of eleven very different images, Maternity will explore the theme of motherhood in art, and consider how it has been interpreted and re-interpreted by artists over the past 500 years. The works on show will range from the early Renaissance to the present day, and will include works by Sandro Botticelli, George Romney, William Quiller Orchardson, and Pablo Picasso. Maternity will feature one of the most touching examples of the theme in Western painting, Botticelli’s fifteenth-century masterpiece The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child. Acquired by the National Gallery of Scotland in 2000, this celebrated painting, which is the earliest work in the display, combines a complex theological narrative with a very human depiction of a young mother and her baby. Maternity is presented in partnership with Highland 2007 and The Highland Council and reflects the National Galleries of Scotland’s active involvement with art and culture in the Highland region. This partnership underlines one of the Galleries’ core aims – making the national art collection accessible to the widest possible number of visitors.

INDIAN INTERLUDE
10 November 2007 – 3 February 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

A new display of artworks from India will open at the National Gallery Complex this autumn, to coincide with two dramatic milestones in the history of the subcontinent - the 60th anniversary of Indian independence and the 150th anniversary of the Indian Uprising. Indian Interlude is part of a programme of National Galleries events celebrating the shared histories of Scotland and India. The exhibition of 28 items will feature a number of works that have never been displayed before, and will include exquisite eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian miniature paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland’s permanent collection, as well as sketches of everyday India, drawn by British artists working there at the same period. These sketches and four related volumes are part of the Mrs Madeleine Sharpe Erskine Bequest – known as The Dunimarle Collection – a special loan to the National Galleries, and the core of displays at Duff House, the country-house gallery in Banff, which is run in partnership with Historic Scotland and Aberdeenshire Council. The exotic Indian paintings were collected by the Edinburgh bookseller and distinguished member of the Society of Antiquaries, David Laing, who left a collection of paintings in his will to encourage the establishment of a historical portrait gallery for Scotland. This was the forerunner of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Laing’s Indian portraits include stylised images of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb; the Nawab of Murshidabad; elegant, single figures, and groups of bejewelled women drinking wine on terraces.

BP PORTRAIT AWARD 2007
14 December 2007 – 27 April 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh
Admission free

For only the second time in its history, the BP Portrait Award exhibition will be shown in Edinburgh this year, where it will be the highlight of the winter programme at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London, the BP Portrait Award promotes the best in contemporary portrait painting, by encouraging artists to focus upon and develop the theme of portraiture in their work. First established in 1980 – and in its eighteenth year of BP sponsorship – the award is one of the most prestigious visual arts prizes in the world. The main prize, which this year went to Glasgow-born artist Paul Emsley, carries an award of £25,000, plus a commission worth £4,000. The exhibition comprises a selection of 60 of the most impressive works submitted to this year’s competition, which attracted a record 1,870 entries. It will feature works by artists from around the world, including entrants from the USA, Germany, Norway, Israel and, of course, Scotland.

CAROL RHODES
1 December 2007 – 24 February 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition will celebrate the work of the highly regarded contemporary British artist Carol Rhodes. Born in 1959, Rhodes studied at Glasgow School of Art and emerged in the mid-1990s as a significant voice in contemporary painting. The largest survey of Rhodes’ paintings to date, this exhibition will cover the past fifteen years of her career, exploring the artist’s distinctive approach to landscape and intense investigation into her medium. Rhodes’ subject matter – flat, desolate environments, painted as though viewed from a great height – contrasts with the small formats she employs. The resulting images are powerful, dense and beautiful. Working in oil paint on board, she frequently depicts ‘functional’ landscapes that have been manipulated by human activity, but whose nature and purpose are not clear. Rhodes has exhibited regularly in the UK and USA, but her painstaking methods – distilling images from imagined, observed and photographed landscapes – have meant that it is rare for her work to be seen in depth. This show will allow a clearer appreciation of her achievement.

TURNER IN JANUARY: THE VAUGHAN BEQUEST
1 – 31 January 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

The New Year begins at the National Gallery of Scotland with its annual display of magnificent watercolours by J M W Turner (1775–1851), bequeathed in 1900 by the London art collector Sir Henry Vaughan. Turner is recognised as perhaps the greatest of all British painters, and was a master of watercolour painting, using the medium to create stunning land and seascapes, topographical views and designs for book illustrations. The Vaughan Bequest display is shown throughout January every year, and has been a popular feature of the Gallery’s exhibition calendar for more than one hundred years.

Keiller Library display
THE SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF SURREALISM:
THE WORK OF GRACE PAILTHORPE AND REUBEN MEDNIKOFF
12 January – 20 April 2008
DEAN GALLERY, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

This display will be drawn from the archive of Reuben Mednikoff (1906-72) and Dr Grace Pailthorpe (1883–1971), which was purchased by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1999. Mednikoff, a poet and artist who was involved with the British Surrealists, first met Pailthorpe, a psychoanalyst, in 1935. He introduced her to the use of automatism – the suspension of rational control which allowed Surrealist writers and artists to tap into the imagery of the subconscious – and encouraged her to produce her own drawings and poems. Alongside Mednikoff's works, these formed the basis of the couple’s research into the unconscious (in 1939 Pailthorpe published an essay on ‘The Scientific Aspects of Surrealism’ in the London Bulletin, the main outlet for Surrealist ideas in Britain). Chosen to exhibit at the International Surrealist Exhibition held in London in 1936, their paintings were singled out for praise by André Breton, the ‘pope’ of Surrealism, ‘as the best and most truly Surrealist of the works’ exhibited by British artists.

JOANNA KANE
THE SOMNAMBULISTS: PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS
FROM BEFORE PHOTOGRAPHY
22 January – 6 April 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh
Admission free

The Somnambulists will consist of a haunting series of photographic portraits taken from a famous Edinburgh collection of life and death masks. Using contemporary digital techniques, the artist, Joanna Kane, will reach into the past to bring figures from Scottish history to life. Animating her portraits to suggest an illusory sense of the living subject of the cast, Kane magically renders photographic likenesses from before the age of photography. The exhibition will pose questions about portraiture, the history and origins of photography, connections between photography and the life or death mask, and the influences of phrenology on art. It will continue the Portrait Gallery’s commitment to showcasing innovative digital work by emerging Scottish artists. The display will also include examples of life and death masks from the collection of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.

REUNITED: RUBENS – RIBERA
31 January – 6 April 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

This display will offer the public a unique opportunity to compare two outstanding masterpieces of baroque painting – the National Gallery’s own Feast of Herod (c.1635-40) by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, and the extraordinary Drunken Silenus (1626) by Jusepe de Ribera. In the mid-seventeenth century the two paintings hung together in the palace of Gaspare Roomer, a fabulously wealthy Flemish merchant and financier based in Naples. Generously lent by the city’s Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte, the Drunken Silenus is painted with a startling naturalism that reflects the lasting impact of Caravaggio’s late works, which were also painted in Naples.

WARDER’S CHOICE
9 February – 27 April 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition has been selected by the National Gallery of Scotland’s warding and front-of-house staff. Responsible for the safety and security both of artworks and the visiting public, the warders spend much of their working day in the galleries surrounded by the collections, and many have a fantastic knowledge of and love for the works of art in their charge. For this exhibition the warding and front-of-house staff have been invited to choose their own personal favourites from the gallery’s collection of prints and drawings. The diverse range of works that have been selected reflects not only the breadth of our prints and drawings collection, but also the personal interests and tastes of each member of staff involved.

MIROSLAV BALKA: ENTERING PARADISE
1 March – 29 June 2008.
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

Miroslav Balka is one of the most important Polish artists today. This display brings together his print portfolio Entering Paradise, presenting the traces of twelve anonymous men, with the contemplative video projection BlueGasEyes. Poignant and subtle, Balka’s works engage with notions of memory, identity and history, all the while pointing towards the frailty of the human body.

FROM SICKERT TO GERTLER:
MODERN BRITISH ART FROM BOXTED HOUSE
15 March – 22 June 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition will celebrate the lives of Bobby and Natalie Bevan and the collection of artworks that hung in their home, Boxted House in Essex, which became a gathering place for artists after the Second World War. It will include some outstanding examples of twentieth-century British art, as well as more unusual and private works, and archival material from the period 1894-1970. The Bevans lived at Boxted House from 1946 until 1974. Bobby (1901-74) was the son of the artists Robert Bevan (1865-1925) and Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876-1952) and was Chairman of the leading advertising agency S H Benson Ltd. The painter and ceramicist Natalie Denny (1909-2007), a renowned beauty and hostess, also modelled for artists such as Mark Gertler. Bobby and Natalie married in 1946. Together they created an exceptional home at Boxted. Paintings by Bobby’s parents and their friends, such as Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner, hung beside works by Bobby and Natalie’s own friends, including Christopher Nevinson, John Armstrong and Frederick Gore. The house became a gathering place for artists, particularly for those associated with East Anglia, such as John Nash, Cedric Morris and Lett Haines. This exhibition will celebrate the colourful character of Boxted House, its hosts, its guests and the works of art which filled its walls.

MATERNITY: IMAGES OF MOTHERHOOD
15 March – 22 June 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition of works from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland explores the theme of motherhood in art, showing how the image of the mother and child has endured and been re-interpreted by artists over the past 500 years. The works on show will range from the early Renaissance to the present day, including examples by Sandro Botticelli, George Romney, Pablo Picasso and Christine Borland. This exhibition was first shown this winter at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in partnership with Highland 2007 and the Highland Council.

FACES AND PLACES
24 April – 20 July 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition will be organised by the Portrait Gallery in partnership with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, to highlight individuals who have contributed to Scotland’s heritage and built environment. Drawing on the collections of the two institutions, the display will celebrate the work of around twenty archaeologists, antiquarians, engineers, architects and industrialists. A range of items will feature in the display, including paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, architectural drawings, notebooks and sketches – some of which have never previously been displayed. The exhibition will coincide with the centenary of RCAHMS in 2008 and is part of the programme of celebratory events, which also includes the major autumn RCAHMS exhibition - Treasured Places.

Keiller Library display
FOCUS ON DEMARCO
26 April – 21 June 2008
DEAN GALLERY, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission free

This display will celebrate the completion of the Demarco Digital Archive Project and the public launch of the project’s website. This three-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is a collaboration between the School of Fine Art of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (Dundee University), the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Demarco European Art Foundation. The website will make accessible approximately 10,000 items (including photographs, documents and audio-visual material) from the archive of the celebrated artist and exhibition organiser, Richard Demarco. The display will feature a selection of archival material held by the Foundation and the SNGMA.

FANTASY AND FUNCTION: DESIGN FOR GOLDSMITHS
3 May – 3 August 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

This display from the Department of Prints and Drawings will feature around thirty intricately engraved designs for jewellery, tableware and ornaments. These fabulous designs, ranging from tiny grotesque fantasies from sixteenth-century France to dazzling designs for commemorative tablewear in the nineteenth century, were produced by highly skilled engravers and provided both inspiration and instruction for gold and silversmiths. They reveal not only the skill and virtuosity of printmakers but also the ambition and ingenuity of the craftsmen working in this field of the applied arts.

TRUE GRIT
May – September 2008 (details to be confirmed)
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh
Admission to be confirmed

This exhibition will examine the lives of individuals who were promoted as role models, through art and literature, in the Victorian era. With particular reference to the theories outlined by the writer and reformer Samuel Smiles in his 1859 book Self-Help, the exhibition will also critically re-examine what we mean by ‘Victorian values’. Drawn from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, True Grit will also bring together manuscripts and archival material from the National Library of Scotland, and a selection of internationally important artworks from other collections. Many of the exhibits, including material from the John Murray Archive recently acquired by the National Library, will be on public display for the first time.

**VANITY FAIR PORTRAITS: PHOTOGRAPHS 1913 – 2008
14 June - 21 September 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh
Admission price to be confirmed
Exhibition organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London
Sponsored by Lloyds TSB Scotland

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008, will showcase some of the greatest portrait photographs of the twentieth century, which were taken for, or published in, Vanity Fair magazine. The exhibition will feature some 150 images from the high profile magazine’s early period (1913–36), which will be displayed, for the first time, with photographs from the contemporary Vanity Fair (1983-present). Vanity Fair Portraits will include celebrated subjects such as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow as captured by legendary photographers including Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Baron De Meyer, Man Ray and George Hurrell. From the magazine’s re-launch in 1983, the works of photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Mario Testino will be featured, depicting a wide range of subjects from Arthur Miller to Madonna. Vanity Fair Portraits will tour to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles / LACMA (26 October 2008 – 1 March 2009); and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia (12 June – 30 August 2009).

**FOTO
MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE, 1918 – 1945
7 June – 31 Aug 2008
DEAN GALLERY, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission £6.00 (concessions £4.00)
Organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Dean Gallery’s festival exhibition will explore the breathtaking success of modernist photography in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria, during a time of tremendous social and political upheaval. The first survey ever carried out on this subject, Foto will include many stunning works that will be shown in Britain for the first time. The exhibition will be unprecedented in scope, comprising more than 150 photographs, books, and illustrated magazines. More than 100 photographers will be represented, and the exhibition will address topics such as photomontage and war, gender identity, life and leisure in the modern metropolis, and the spread of Surrealism. The work of internationally recognised masters such as László Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Höch, André Kertész, and El Lissitzky will be shown alongside that of historically important contemporaries such as Karel Teige, Edith Tudor Hart, František Drtikol, Martin Munkacsi and Trude Fleischmann. This will be the only European showing of this magnificent exhibition.

THE FACE OF SCOTLAND
5 July – 25 August 2008
KIRKCUDBRIGHT TOWN HALL, St Mary’s Street, Kirkcudbright
Admission free

As part of Kirkcudbright’s annual programme of visual art and craft events in 2008, this exhibition will present a selection of over forty major portraits on loan from the permanent collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Among the works featured will be Raeburn’s enchanting portrait of Walter Ross, The Yellow Boy – which was only recently discovered and has never before been seen in a public space. The show will also include portraits of a group of sporting greats including Eric Liddell, Jock Stein and Kenny Dalgleish. This partnership underlines one of the Galleries’ core aims – making the national art collection accessible to the widest possible number of visitors.

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW:
DRAWINGS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
RECENTLY ACQUIRED BY THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND
17 July – 21 September 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition will present a rich and varied selection of the best works on paper and photographs acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland over recent years. The selection of approximately seventy works will span the period from the Renaissance to the present day, and will include a broad range of media and techniques. Among the highlights will be a vibrant sketch of the Holy Family by the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Tiepolo; an important early watercolour by nineteenth-century Scottish artist E A Walton; a contemporary pastel portrait of the actress Tilda Swinton by her husband John Byrne; spectacular aerial photographs taken by Alfred Buckham in the 1920s; a striking self-portrait by the celebrated American photographer Lee Miller; and Picasso’s harrowing etching Weeping Woman.

**IMPRESSIONISM AND SCOTLAND
19 July – 12 October 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission to be confirmed
Sponsored by Baillie Gifford

This major international exhibition will explore the Scottish taste for Impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its impact on two generations of artists in Scotland. The label ‘Impressionism’ was, in this period, applied to artists as diverse as Whistler, Corot, McTaggart and the Glasgow Boys. This exhibition of over 100 works will include paintings, pastels and watercolours by these artists, as well as by Monet, Manet, Degas, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Scottish Colourists. Highlights of the show will include Degas’s L’Absinthe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which was famously hissed at when it came up for auction in 1892, and Lavery’s The Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery), a rare example of Scottish modern life painting. Other major Impressionist works will be on loan from private and public collections in the UK, Germany, the USA and Australia.

**TRACEY EMIN
Early August (to be confirmed) – 9 November 2008
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
Admission to be confirmed

Tracey Emin is one of the most celebrated artists of her generation, yet remarkably this will be the first retrospective exhibition of her work to be held in the UK. Born in London in 1963, she grew up in the Kent seaside resort town of Margate and studied Royal College of Art in London from 1987 to 1989. Emin’s work draws directly upon her personal experiences, and often refers to traumatic episodes in her early life (being raped at the age of 13, her sexually promiscuous adolescence and a failed suicide attempt). Her first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective, held at the White Cube Gallery in London in 1993, featured embroidered blankets, letters, mementos and photographs relating to such experiences. Emin’s great achievement is to have drawn upon her background – the sort of background that a lot of people share, but which is largely uncharted territory in the world of art – and to have done so in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental. The forthcoming retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will occupy the entire ground floor of the gallery and feature work dating from 1993 to the present day. It will include embroidered textiles, paintings, drawings, early unpublished prints, installations, photographs, sculptures, neon works and much new work, made specifically for the exhibition.

[working title]
FOOTLIGHTS:
9 August – 16 November 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission free

This display will feature works from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland and will look at ways in which artists over the centuries have chosen to record events and performances. The show will coincide with the SIBMAS international conference, which will be held in Glasgow in August 2008. This is first time this prestigious event has been held in Scotland. SIBMAS (Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle) is the international association for museums and libraries of the performing arts. The display will also coincide with the International Festival and Fringe events in Edinburgh and will serve as a link between the visual and performing arts.

JOHN MUIR WOOD AND THE ORIGINS
OF LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY IN SCOTLAND
2 August – 26 October 2008
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen St, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition will be the first to investigate the origins of landscape photography in Scotland. It will concentrate on images produced between 1840 and 1860, and in particular on the work of John Muir Wood, arguably Scotland’s first systematic landscape photographer. With bulky camera equipment, Muir Wood travelled by steamer along the Firth of Clyde, exploring the geography of Arran, Bute and the north Ayrshire coast. The exhibition will engage with a wider specialist and public interest in landscape questions and will contribute to a reconsideration of the practice of early photographers currently underway in Britain and abroad. The exhibition will also contextualise Muir Wood’s imagery by displaying examples of the landscape practice of other early photographers, including Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, Thomas Keith, Horatio Ross and W H F Talbot. We witness the emergence of a new creative form as each struggled to express the Scottish landscape imagination through photography.

THE INTIMATE PORTRAIT:
DRAWINGS, MINIATURES AND PASTELS FROM RAMSAY TO LAWRENCE
25 October 2008 – 1 February 2009
SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh
Admission free

This exhibition will explore the fascination for intimate portraiture in Georgian and Regency Britain between the late 1740s and the 1830s, from the origins of polite society and the rise of the fashionable art world until the onset of the Victorian era and the invention of photography. This will be the first major show devoted to this great period of British portrait drawing and miniature painting, when artists such as Ramsay, Gainsborough, Cosway, Skirving, Lawrence and Wilkie produced wonderfully worked portraits in pencil, chalks, watercolours and pastels, as well as miniatures on ivory, that were intended to be hung as finished works in domestic rooms, or worn on the body to represent absent loved ones. This will be a unique partnership exhibition between the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, and will also draw on the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition will travel to the British Museum in London during spring 2009.

---

For further information on any of these exhibitions, please contact the Press Office on 0131 624 6325/314/332/247 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

• NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND ANNOUNCE BAILLIE GIFFORD AS SPONSOR OF MAJOR SUMMER EXHIBITION

Released: January 2008

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND ANNOUNCE BAILLIE GIFFORD AS SPONSOR OF MAJOR SUMMER EXHIBITION

IMPRESSIONISM AND SCOTLAND
19 July – 12 October 2008
NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX, The Mound, Edinburgh
Admission £8 (£6)

The National Galleries of Scotland is delighted to announce that Baillie Gifford & Co, the Edinburgh-based investment management firm, is to sponsor this year’s major summer exhibition at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh.

Baillie Gifford & Co, which celebrates its centenary in 2008, will sponsor the much-anticipated international exhibition, Impressionism and Scotland. This exhibition of over 100 paintings, pastels and watercolours runs from 19 July to 12 October and will explore the Scottish taste for Impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assessing the impact of modern European art on Scottish art and artists. Highlights will include Renoir’s The Bay of Naples (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the first Impressionist painting to be bought by a Scot; Degas’s L’Absinthe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which was ‘hissed’ when it came up for auction in the early 1890s, due to its ‘depraved’ subject-matter; and Sir John Lavery’s The Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery), a rare example of Scottish modern life painting.

Other major Impressionist works will be on loan from private and public collections in the UK, Germany, the USA and Australia. Artists represented in the show will include Manet, Monet, Degas, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, Whistler, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse, as well as the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists.

In the late nineteenth century Scotland was a powerful industrial nation and Glasgow was second city of the British Empire. A rising generation of rich industrialist and mercantile collectors developed a taste for avant-garde European art, many of them acquiring works which are now of international importance.

Initially collectors in Aberdeen forged links between the artists of the Hague School – the so-called Dutch ‘Impressionists’ – and Scots artists such as George Reid and William McTaggart. Many Scots collectors also acquired the work of Camille Corot and the artists of the Barbizon School; and in Glasgow – under the influence of the art dealer Alexander Reid – they were among the first to invest in the work of Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Whistler. Pictures acquired by such collectors were frequently loaned to public exhibitions and were seen by contemporary Scottish artists.

Exposed to these works in the 1880s and 1890s, artists of the ‘Glasgow School’, such as John Lavery, James Guthrie and E.A. Walton, began to emulate their European contemporaries. They painted in the open air, depicting both rural and modern-life subjects, but they avoided the controversial café scenes of Manet and Degas. They were commonly referred to by critics, sometimes pejoratively, as ‘impressionists’, even though their essentially tonal style of painting was quite different from the ‘scientific’ impressionism of Monet and his contemporaries.

In the early twentieth century a new generation of artists emerged in Scotland – S.J. Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and F.C.B. Cadell, later known as the Scottish Colourists. These artists all traveled to France and an early interest in Manet and Impressionism was soon superseded by a fascination with the decorative expressionism of Matisse and the ‘Fauves’.

After the First World War Scottish collectors learned to appreciate the Colourists’ brilliant colour and expressive handling and, partly through their influence, turned to Post-Impressionism, acquiring works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse.

This exhibition will highlight some astonishing parallels between the work of Dutch, French and Scottish artists, whose work will be hung side by side: Corot and Walton; Bastien-Lepage and Guthrie; Degas and Crawhall; Manet and Fergusson; Matisse and Hunter. It will demonstrate that, despite these influences, both at home and abroad Scottish artists developed their own instinctive brand of Impressionism, quite unlike the more analytical approach of the French Impressionists.

Baillie Gifford & Co, based in Edinburgh and employing 533 people, is one of the UK’s leading independent investment management groups with £55.5 billion of funds under management and advice as at 31 December 2007.

Alex Callander, joint senior partner, Baillie Gifford & Co said: ‘It is a privilege to be involved with this marvellous exhibition during our centenary year, an appropriate parallel as some of the pieces on display are around 100 years old. The works in the exhibition also demonstrate the vision of many Scottish collectors, and the great talent of Scottish artists.’

John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: ‘Baillie Gifford & Co has been enormously supportive of the NGS, sponsoring some of the most significant and successful exhibitions of the past decade. Their continued generosity will allow us to mount one of the major highlights in this year’s cultural calendar – a fascinating exhibition that will do much to illuminate the complex relationship between French and Scottish art in the period from 1860 to 1930.’

Following its run in Edinburgh, a condensed version of Impressionism and Scotland will be shown at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, from 31 October 2008 to 1 February 2009.

[ENDS]
For further information please contact the Press Office at the National Galleries of Scotland on pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org or 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 247
www.nationalgalleries.org

Notes to Editors:

Baillie Gifford & Co has sponsored the following National Galleries of Scotland exhibitions: Phoebe Anna Traquair 1852-1936 (1993); Sir James Gunn 1893-1964 (1995); David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (1996); George Rodger: The African Photographs (1996); The Winter Queen: The Life of Elizabeth of Bohemia 1596-1662 (1998); Turner & Sir Walter Scott:The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (2000); Andrew Geddes (1783-1844): Painter - Printmaker: 'A Man of Pure Taste' (2001); The King Over the Water: The Life of Prince James Francis Edward Stewart (2001); Rubens: Drawing on Italy (2002); Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants’ Portraits (2004); Gauguin’s Vision (2005)

• £10 Million investment for Scottish National Portrait Gallery Refurbishment

HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND AND SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT PUT PORTRAIT GALLERY IN THE PICTURE WITH £10 MILLION INVESTMENT

The National Galleries of Scotland, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and the Scottish Government will today announce two major contributions to the £17.6 million project to refurbish and transform the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. After meeting this week, the HLF Trustees have awarded the project a Stage One pass for £4,531,000 and development funding of £269,000. Linda Fabiani, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture will announce the Scottish Government’s support for the Portrait of the Nation project with a contribution of £5.1 million.

This ambitious project aims to recover the vibrant character of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, a magnificent Arts and Crafts building which opened in 1889 as the first purpose-built portrait gallery in the world. Portrait of the Nation will double the amount of gallery space within the building, and will re-invent the way in which the national collection is displayed, with a new focus on photography and Scottish art. The project, which will also create a range of new visitor and education facilities, aims to bring the story of Scotland - its peoples, histories, places and cultures - to the widest possible audience. The transformation of the Gallery will confirm its status as one of Scotland’s major visitor attractions, and will radically extend the ambitions and national role of the National Galleries.

Work on Portrait of the Nation will begin in 2009, and the project’s provisional completion date is autumn 2011. The Gallery will be closed to the public for 2 years.

Following the announcement of the grants from the HLF and the Scottish Government, the National Galleries will launch an initiative to raise £7.7 million from private sources.

Commenting from the HLF, Colin McLean, Manager for Scotland, said: ‘This is excellent news for Scotland and our country’s cultural history. This was a highly competitive round of funding so I am delighted that the Scottish Portrait Gallery has achieved such a substantial commitment from the Heritage Lottery Fund. We have worked in close partnership with the Portrait Gallery to get to where we are today and are delighted that the Scottish Government is also supporting this contemporary project. New life will now be breathed into this beautiful historic building so that treasures that have been stored away for years can be showcased to the world.’

For the Scottish Government, Linda Fabiani, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture, said: ‘I am delighted today to announce Scottish Government funding of £5.1m for the redevelopment of this wonderful building which will open in 2011 as one of the most exciting galleries in Scotland. The National Galleries have worked extremely hard on their proposal to rejuvenate the building, and I’m pleased that the Heritage Lottery Fund has also agreed to award £5m to this worthwhile project. This is an inspiring project which will further enhance the National Galleries’ national and international reputation and help realise its full potential as a focal point for exploration of Scotland’s art, culture and history.’

John Leighton, Director-General, NGS added: ‘Portrait of the Nation will be a very significant development for the National Galleries of Scotland. Following this refurbishment we will at last be able to make effective use of one of the most outstanding buildings in Edinburgh. More important, the project will enable the wonderful collections to be presented in a coherent and understandable way, appealing to a wide range of new national and international audiences. We are very grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Scottish Government for their generous support, which gives us the opportunity to let this much-loved institution reach its full potential.’

ENDS

Notes to editors:

The key features of the Portrait of the Nation project are to:

• increase the public and gallery space within the SNPG by more than 50%
• create a new way to interpret the collection, making it accessible to a wide variety of audiences
• increase the number of works on display by 50%
• refurbish all three floors of the building, and install modern services
• restore original features of the building
• create a new Education Suite, including community gallery, art studios and a seminar room
• establish a Research and Study Centre
• reorganise the ground floor, with new lift, and improved facilities, including a larger cafe and shop

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) enables communities to celebrate, look after and learn more about our diverse heritage. From our great museums and historic buildings to local parks and beauty spots or recording and celebrating traditions, customs and history, HLF grants open up our nation’s heritage for everyone to enjoy. To date it has invested over £480 million in Scotland’s heritage.

A ‘Stage One Pass’ means that money has been earmarked by the Heritage Lottery Fund for the project in question. Competition at this stage is tough, and while a Stage One Pass does not guarantee funding, it is an indication of positive support, and money for the scheme is set aside. The applicant can then progress to Stage Two and submit a further, fully developed application to secure the full grant. On occasion, at Stage One, funding will also be awarded towards the development of the scheme.

To date, the Heritage Lottery Fund has invested £160 m in Scotland’s museums and galleries.

Further information

Heritage Lottery Fund: Please contact Shiona Mackay on 01786 870638/07779 142890 or Jon Williams on 020 7591 6035 (jonw@hlf.org.uk) Website www.hlf.org.uk

National Galleries of Scotland: Michael Gormley on 0131 624 6325/ 07974768 745
mgormley@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

Scottish Government: Angela-Claire Coutts on 0131 244 2547
angela-claire.coutts@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

• Edinburgh\'s new Glasgow Boys

Photocall:
Thursday 22 November, 11 am
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh

EDINBURGH’S NEW GLASGOW BOYS

In collaboration with The Art Fund, the UK’s leading independent arts charity, the National Galleries of Scotland are delighted to announce the recent purchase of two of the most important Glasgow School pictures from the outstanding private collection of Andrew McIntosh Patrick.

The two grant-aided purchases, A Cabbage Garden (1877) by Arthur Melville and A Herd Boy (1886) by E A Walton, build upon the Galleries’ previous acquisitions of three masterpieces from the McIntosh Patrick collection in 1999. The Art Fund awarded a grant of £15,000 towards the purchase of A Cabbage Garden by private treaty sale for a total price of £35,747. For the Walton, The Art Fund awarded a grant of £25,000 towards the special discounted price of £80,000.

For the 1999 purchases from the McIntosh Patrick collection, Miss Sowerby (1882) by James Guthrie, A Daydream (1885) by E A Walton and St Agnes (1889/90) by David Gauld, The Art Fund awarded one of the largest grants for Scottish works ever allocated to the National Galleries of Scotland, contributing £90,000 towards the total purchase price of £455,471. Collectively these, and the two new acquisitions, have raised the Gallery’s nineteenth-century Scottish collections into a new dimension of international distinction. McIntosh Patrick, the former Managing Director of The Fine Art Society, and doyen of dealers in Scottish art, began collecting the work of the Glasgow Boys in the late 1960s. Over the past 40 years he has continued to play a key role in the critical reappraisal of their achievements.

Arthur Melville was one of the most significant Scottish painters of the late nineteenth century. He often accompanied James Guthrie, George Henry and E A Walton on painting excursions to Cockburnspath in East Lothian in the 1880s – the most innovative phase of their careers. But his immediate artistic origins lay in East Lothian and Edinburgh where, in 1877, he began studying at the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1878 he made his London exhibition debut with A Cabbage Garden. With its dramatic spatial effects, vibrant experimental colourism and vigorously expressive brushwork, Melville’s pioneering composition in the Scottish “kailyard” genre was probably a model for Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter. Painted near Cockburnspath in 1883, the Guthrie is one of the Galleries’ best-loved nineteenth century pictures and an icon of the Glasgow School. The sale of A Cabbage Garden to the Lasswade paper manufacturer James Hunter Annandale financed Melville’s studies in Paris from 1878 to 1880.

E A Walton was born in East Renfrewshire and was one of the leading Scottish painters of his generation. He specialised in both landscape subjects and portraiture, and was a founding member of the influential group of painters known as the “Glasgow Boys”, who set out to establish a distinctly Scottish type of rustic realism in their work. A Herd Boy, a vibrant watercolour, is one of his most outstanding works, and dates from 1886 when he was working at his studio in Cockburnspath.

Although the subject appears to have been painted directly from life, Walton would have carefully conceived the composition from a series of small sketches and worked these up later in his studio. In 1890 A Herd Boy was shown at the Second Annual International Art Exhibition in Munich, where it won a gold medal. This stunning watercolour also relates to Walton’s painting, A Daydream, which the Galleries purchased from Andrew McIntosh Patrick’s collection in 1999, also with the assistance of The Art Fund. The figure of the herd boy is the same in both this new acquisition and the painting which is on display nearby.

The final sale from the McIntosh Patrick private collection in June was managed by The Fine Art Society and attracted international attention and queues of would-be purchasers forming overnight before the sale’s opening in London.

Those attending the photocall on 22 November will include Katrina Clow, The Art Fund’s Volunteer Chairman for Scotland; Patrick Bourne, Managing Director of The Fine Art Society plc; Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland; Lady Kingarth, The Art Fund’s representative in Edinburgh; Emily Walsh, Director of Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh; Helen Smailes, Senior Curator of British Art, and Valerie Hunter, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Galleries of Scotland.

For further information please contact the Press Office at the National Galleries of Scotland on pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org or 0131 624 6325/ 332/ 247

Notes to Editors

• The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections and campaigns widely on behalf of museums and their visitors. It is entirely funded from public donations and has 80,000 members. Since 1903 the charity has helped museums and galleries all over the UK secure 860,000 works of art for their collections.
• In January 2007 The Art Fund successfully led the public appeal to save JMW Turner’s Blue Rigi for Tate, and in July 2007 was instrumental in putting together a unique funding package to ensure Dumfries House in Ayrshire was secured for the nation.
• Independent of Government, The Art Fund is uniquely placed to campaign on behalf of public collections across the UK.
• Visit the charity’s website at www.artfund.org

• Emilie Gordenker appointed Director of the Mauritshuis

EMILIE GORDENKER APPOINTED DIRECTOR OF THE MAURITSHUIS

The National Galleries of Scotland announced today, 28 August 2007, that Senior Curator Emilie Gordenker has been appointed as the Director of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Netherlands. She replaces Frederik J. Duparc, who has been director since 1991 and who has already announced his resignation. Emilie will begin her new position on 1 January 2008.

The Mauritshuis owns one of the most important collections of Dutch and Flemish paintings worldwide. It is not only one of the top galleries in the Netherlands, but enjoys an international reputation for excellence. John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, who was Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam before moving to Edinburgh, knows the Mauritshuis well. He said: ‘It is a very special gallery with a huge national and international reputation based upon an outstanding collection that is impeccably displayed and researched.’

Dr Emilie Gordenker has been Senior Curator, Early Netherlandish, Dutch and Flemish Art at the National Gallery of Scotland since 2003. Emilie received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1998, with a dissertation on Sir Anthony van Dyck and his representation of dress (published 2001). She has published and lectured widely on Dutch and Flemish art. Emilie has a broad range of work experience, from university teaching to developing new media applications for museums and galleries in New York and London.

During her four years at the National Gallery of Scotland, Emilie has worked on several major projects, including organising the award-winning exhibition on Adam Elsheimer (summer of 2006) and acquiring several pictures for the permanent collection. Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland said: ‘It has been a pleasure to work with Emilie, and we are naturally sorry to lose a talented colleague. However, it reflects extremely well on the National Gallery that she has been appointed to such a prestigious post. She leaves us with our very best wishes for the future .’

For further information, please contact the Press Office of the National Galleries of Scotland on 0131 624 6325/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-

Notes to Editors:

For more information on the Mauritshuis, see: www.mauritshuis.nl

• Trustees August 2007 pr

Released: 1 August 2007

SCOTTISH EXECUTIVE APPOINTS NEW TRUSTEE TO THE BOARD OF THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND

Linda Fabiani, the Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture, today announced the appointment of Mr Herbert Coutts and the reappointment of Mr Charles James Dawnay to the Board of Trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland.

Sir Brian Ivory, Chairman of the Trustees said: “I am delighted to welcome Herbert Coutts to the Board. His deep knowledge of the arts and culture scene at a local level will be of great value to the work of the Trustees.”

Herbert Coutts has served in senior local government cultural posts for more than forty years. As Edinburgh’s City Curator, he oversaw the establishment, and subsequent extension, of the City Art Centre in Market Street, the re-display and extension of the Museum of Childhood, the development of The People’s Story Museum and the restoration of the Scott Monument.

For the final period of his career, Coutts directed the Capital’s Culture and Leisure Department. His achievements in the field of the arts included the establishment of Edinburgh’s Cultural Partnership (following the publication of the city’s first Cultural Policy), the renovation of the Usher Hall, the development of Makar’s Court (Scotland’s Poets’ Corner), and persuading the City Council to support the bid to achieve UNESCO City of Literature status for Edinburgh. Mr Coutts holds no other Ministerial appointment.

James Dawnay is a member of the National Trust and The National Trust for Scotland. He has been a Director of London’s oldest established fine art consultancy, Gurr Johns, and holds Chairmanships and Directorships with various Trusts in the fields of arts and architecture, museums and finance. He is also a Director of a number of Investment Trust companies. Mr Dawnay holds no other Ministerial appointment.

Both appointments will be for a four-year term and will run from 1 August 2007 until 31 July 2011.

The posts are part-time and are not remunerated. Board members are expected to prepare for and attend approximately six Board meetings a year and may be involved in additional meetings and events.

The National Galleries of Scotland is a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB) with a Board appointed by, and accountable to, Scottish Ministers. The National Heritage (Scotland) Act 1985 provides for Scottish Ministers to appoint members to the Board of Trustees.

These Ministerial public appointments were made in accordance with the Commissioner for Public Appointments in Scotland’s Code of Practice.

All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process. However, in accordance with the original Nolan recommendations, there is a requirement for appointees’ political activity (if there is any to be declared) to be made public. Within the last five years, Mr Coutts was invited by the Labour Party to stand as a Candidate for the East Lothian Council in the Municipal Elections held in May 2007. Within the last five years, Mr Dawnay has not been involved in any political activity.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland Press Office on
0131 624 6325 / 6324 / 6247 / 6332
pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org
www.nationalgalleries.org

- ends -

• New Director of Modern and Contemporary Art appointed at the National Galleries of Scotland

Released: Thursday 21 June 2007

NEW DIRECTOR OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART APPOINTED AT THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND

The Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland announced today, 21 June 2007, the appointment of Dr Simon Groom as the new Director of Modern and Contemporary Art for the NGS. He will begin his position in Autumn 2007.

Simon Groom has been Head of Exhibitions and Collections at Tate Liverpool for the past four years and he was previously Exhibitions Organiser for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. He graduated from Edinburgh University with a First Class MA in English Literature and went on to graduate from the Courtauld Institute with an MA in Art History and a PhD.

John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland said: “Simon is an extremely talented and dynamic curator and manager with a wide knowledge of contemporary art and culture. We are delighted that he will be joining the Galleries to provide the leadership for our ambitious plans to promote Scottish and international modern art in this country."

Simon is a member of the Senior Management team at Tate Liverpool, as well as contributing to various Tate-wide bodies, and he has worked with the local council and other organisations and businesses in the lead up to the celebrations of Liverpool as European Capital of Culture in 2008. He has curated numerous exhibitions of modern and contemporary, British and international art, most recently the critically acclaimed “The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China”, and is curating the Turner Prize this year.

Commenting on his new position, Dr Simon Groom said: “I am absolutely delighted to be returning to Edinburgh, and to be given the chance to lead one of Europe’s pre-eminent galleries at a time when Scotland is seeing such an explosion of creativity.”

For further information please contact the Press Office of the National Galleries of Scotland on 0131 624 6325/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-Ends-
Notes to Editors:

BIOGRAPHY OF DR SIMON GROOM

Education

 Edinburgh University
1985 - 1989 MA, First Class, English Literature

 Courtauld Institute
1994 MA, Art History
1999 PhD, Art Autre: Michel Tapié and the
 Informel Adventure in France, Japan and Italy

Career

2003 – to date TATE LIVERPOOL
 Head of Exhibitions & Collections

  KETTLE’S YARD, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
1999 -2002 Exhibition’s Organiser
2001 – 2002 New Technology Arts Fellowship
2002 Tutor and Fellow of New Hall

1992 – 1994 FLORENCE UNIVERSITY
 Lecturer in English Literature and Critical
 Theory, Facoltà de Filosofia e Letteratura

1989 – 1990 BRITISH COUNCIL JAPAN
 Lecturer, JET Programme

• New Trustees April 2007

Released: March 2007

Patricia Ferguson, the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, today announced the appointments of Mrs Ray Macfarlane, and Mr Alasdair Morton to the Board of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Sir Brian Ivory, Chairman of the Trustees said: “We are delighted to welcome Ray and Alasdair to the Board of Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland. The National Galleries are at an exciting stage of development, and these appointments will further strengthen the Board.”

Ray Macfarlane is a Senior Director of the Bank of Scotland Corporate. Before joining the Bank, Ray was the Managing Director of Scottish Enterprise. She is a qualified solicitor and began her career in private practice after graduating from the University of Glasgow. She is Deputy Chair of the Scottish Arts Council/Scottish Screen Board, Honorary Vice Chair of Bafta Scotland and a Non Executive Director of the Scottish Institute of Sport.

Alasdair Morton is a Chartered Accountant and currently works as the Head of Policy Innovation within Retail Markets at the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. Prior to this he worked for KPMG and was responsible for leading and working in a variety of teams. He also chairs the UK Security Committee for MasterCard. He holds no other ministerial appointments.

The posts are part-time and are not remunerated. Board members are expected to prepare for and attend approximately six Board meetings a year and may be involved in additional meetings and events.

For further information please contact the National Galleries Press Office on 0131 624 6325/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

• National Galleries of Scotland adopts Mueck\'s Baby Girl

The National Galleries of Scotland will announce today, Tuesday 13 March 2007, that it is in the process of acquiring A Girl, 2006 by the Australian born, London-based sculptor Ron Mueck.

The acquisition has been made possible by a grant of £50,000 from The Art Fund, the UK’s leading independent art charity.

A Girl was unveiled in the Ron Mueck exhibition organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in August 2006. According to figures published in the latest edition of The Art Newspaper, this was the most popular exhibition of work by a contemporary artist in Britain in 2006 and the ninth most popular in the world. It was seen by nearly 130,000 visitors between 5 August and 8 October 2006. A Girl was acquired from the artist via Anthony d’Offay.

Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, commented: “I am delighted that Mueck’s gigantic painted fibreglass baby has found a home in Scotland. We have an outstanding collection of super-realist sculpture and I am sure she will become as iconic and familiar as Duane Hanson’s life-size “Tourists”.”

David Barrie, Director of The Art Fund said: “Last year Edinburgh took Ron Mueck’s extraordinary sculpture to its heart, and it’s wonderful that it will now be going on permanent display in the city for which it was made. Like all of Mueck’s work, “A Girl” is a very powerful sculpture – breathtaking in its technical mastery. It will astonish all who see it, old or young.”

Made especially for the exhibition in Edinburgh last summer (and given its final touches shortly before the opening), A Girl measures more than five metres in length. It depicts an enormous newborn baby in precise detail including wispy hair, flecks of blood and umbilical cord. Although confrontational, A Girl moved visitors to the exhibition in a way that could not have been anticipated: of the ten works in the show it was the sculpture that people of all ages spent most time looking at.

The figures Mueck sculpts originate from people the artist knows, from chance encounters or from images he comes across. But however accessible, Mueck’s sculptures can be extremely disturbing. Never life-size, they incorporate subtle distortions which heighten their realistic qualities and give them an uncanny, almost magical presence.

Ron Mueck was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1958. Significantly, his parents, originally both from Germany, were toymakers. From 1979-83 he worked in children’s television. He moved to London in 1986, working on special effects for film and television. He collaborated with David Bowie on the film Labyrinth and also worked for Jim Henson on Sesame Street and The Muppets. In 1990 he founded his own production company to make props and models, mainly for the advertising industry. During this period he began to use fibreglass resin to make highly realistic models.

In 1996 Mueck began to work as an independent sculptor. The first public exhibition of his work came when the artist Paula Rego (his mother-in-law) included his sculpture Pinocchio, 1996 among her paintings in the exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery, London. Charles Saatchi, one of Rego’s main collectors, began buying Mueck’s work, including Dead Dad, 1996-1997 which was one of the most memorable works in the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy, London in 1997. Mueck had his first solo exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, the following year, and in 2000 became an Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London, a two-year post.

For further information please contact the National Galleries of Scotland’s press office on 0131 624 6325/6247/6314/6332 or pressinfo@nationalgalleries.org.

-ENDS-

NOTES TO EDITORS:

• Breakdown of funding:
• The Art Fund £50,000
• NGS Purchase Grant £350,000
• Total Cost £400,000
• The Art Fund
• The Art Fund is the UK’s leading independent art charity. It offers grants to help UK museums and galleries enrich their collections and campaigns widely on behalf of museums and their visitors. It has 80,000 members.
• Since its foundation in 1903, The Art Fund has helped UK public collections acquire over 850,000 works of art, ranging from Bronze Age treasures to