Press releases 2012
WITCHES AND WICKED BODIES
27 July 2013 – 3 November 2013
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh
WITCHES IN SPOTLIGHT IN FIRST MAJOR EXHIBITION EVER TO EXPLORE 500 YEARS OF WICKED HISTORY
The fascination for witches, which has gripped many Western artists from the sixteenth century to the present, will be the subject of a major new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art next summer. Witches and Wicked Bodies, opening July 2013, will delve into the dark and cruel origins of the classic image of the witch, and demonstrate how the now familiar old woman on a broomstick is just one part of a rich and very diverse visual tradition.
Witches and Wicked Bodies will highlight the inventive approaches to the depiction of witches and witchcraft employed by a broad range of artists over the past 500 years, with striking examples by famous names such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Salvator Rosa, Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, John William Waterhouse and William Blake. The selection will also include more recent interpretations of the subject, by twentieth-century and contemporary artists including Paula Rego, Kiki Smith and Edward Burra. The exhibition has been curated by the National Galleries of Scotland with artist and writer Deanna Petherbridge and will contain major works on loan from the British Museum; the National Gallery (London); the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, to be shown alongside key images from the Royal Scottish Academy and the Galleries’ own collections.
John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said:
“We look to offer our public a world-class yet very distinctive programme of exhibitions. I believe that this is the first time that witchcraft across the ages has been the subject of a major art exhibition in the UK and we are delighted to be partners with the British Museum on this truly fascinating and compelling show.“
Europe has a long history of witchcraft and the persecution of witches was particularly widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, accounting for thousands of deaths of women and even children. Prints and drawings dating from this period will form a key part of the exhibition, showing how the advent of the printing press gave artists as well as writers the means to share ideas, myths and fears about witches from country to country. Engravings by Albrecht Dürer will be shown alongside woodcuts by Hans Baldung Grien and many other printmakers including Bruegel and de Gheyn.
The exhibition will focus on six key themes. The centrepiece of ‘Witches’ Sabbaths and Devilish Rituals’ is one of the most famous images of witches of all time – Salvator Rosa’s Witches at their Incantations on loan from the National Gallery (London). ‘Unnatural Acts of Flying’ will include the origins of the image of the witch as an old woman riding a broomstick against a night sky, but rather than the cloaked figure wearing a pointy hat that has become so widely known to adults and children alike, this section features more sinister images of flying witches attending black masses.
In ‘Magic Circles, Incantations and Raising the Dead’, visitors will encounter glamorous witches cooking up spells as in Frans Francken’s 1606 painting Witches’ Sabbath. This powerful section also includes the luscious 1886 painting by John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle.
‘Hideous Hags and Beautiful Witches’ will include the medusa-like witch with snakes for hair in John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing Envy and Distraction. This introductory section will also feature unsettling works depicting old crones by Francisco de Goya – the exhibition contains a significant group of works by this major Spanish artist. Some of the images are genuinely frightening and disturbing, whereas others will reveal the negative attitudes towards women in periods when they were very much seen as the second sex.Due to the particular association of women with witchcraft, these workswill highlight the ways in which a largely male-dominated European society has viewed female imperfections, highlighting the concerns created by women laying claim to special powers, or simply behaving in the ‘wrong’ way.
Works depicting the various appearances of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in ‘Unholy Trinities and The Weird Sisters from Macbeth’, will range from John Martin’s theatrical large-scale painting of Banquo and Macbeth lost on the blasted heath, with the turbulent skies swirling over exaggerated mountains, through to John Runciman’s striking drawing which here is interpreted as the Three Witches conspiring over Macbeth’s fate.
This fascinating thematic survey will culminate with ‘The Persistence of Witches’. Works by Kiki Smith and Paula Rego mark a sea-change with these high-profile contemporary artists’ own take on a subject that had previously been almost exclusively male-dominated. In Smith’s study Out of the Woods, the artist herself explores the expressions and attitudes of the ‘witch,’ whereas Rego’s 1996 work Straw Burning relates to the famous Pendle Witch trials which took place in 1612 in Lancaster, 400 years ago.
The exhibition has been organised in partnership with the British Museum, whose loans will include William Blake’s magnificent drawing The Whore of Babylon which will be shown alongside the National Galleries’ own Blake drawing, once thought to depict Hecate, the classical witch of the crossroads.
Witches and Wicked Bodies will be an investigation of extremes, exploring the highly exaggerated ways in which witches have been represented, from hideous hags to beautiful seductresses who ‘bewitch’ unwary men.
The National Galleries of Scotland is delighted to announce the acquisition of a rare watercolour, Sleep by Frances Macdonald MacNair (1874-1921). The artist, sister-in-law to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was a key figure in the ‘Glasgow Style’ movement of c.1890-1910 and it will be the first work by this artist in the Scottish national collection.
The work was bought for £60,000 from a Lyon and Turnbull auction of the collection of Don and Eleanor Taffner, held on 7 September this year. The Taffners were an American couple who had developed a long association with the Glasgow School of Art and a love for the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This mysterious picture, one of no more than a dozen independent watercolours which survive, is one of the most outstanding examples of MacNair’s work, appearing in all the studies on her and the Glasgow group.
Simon Groom, Director of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland commented: 'This is a haunting, enigmatic picture which shows Scottish artists at the forefront of European symbolist art. We have wanted to acquire a work by Frances MacNair for many years, but they are incredibly rare. Had we been able to choose just one work, it would have been this one, so we are obviously delighted to have it.'
Frances Macdonald MacNair was born near Wolverhampton and moved with her family to Glasgow in the late 1880s. In 1891 Frances and her older sister Margaret (1865-1933), enrolled at Glasgow School of Art where they met fellow students Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Herbert McNair. By 1894, the Macdonald sisters had left the School of Art and established a studio in Hope Street, Glasgow where they made metalwork, embroideries, jewellery and craft items. They were also beginning to collaborate on similar work with Mackintosh and MacNair, providing decorative detail for their furniture. They soon became known as ‘The Four’, also as the ‘Mac group’ and as ‘The Spook School’, owing to the ghostly, spectral appearances of the figures in many of their works.
MacNair and Frances Macdonald married in 1899 and Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald in 1900. They exhibited at the Eighth Secessionist exhibition in Vienna in 1900 but their international reputations were cemented by the work they showed at the great International Exhibition of Decorative Art in Turin in 1902. The show included work by The Four and also Jessie M. King and E.A. Taylor with the links between their work, and that of the Viennese, including Hoffman and Gustav Klimt, obviously apparent and acknowledged. Frances and James Herbert moved to Liverpool following their marriage, but returned to Glasgow in 1909.
Biographies of Macdonald and her husband acknowledge tremendous difficulties in their relationship and her death in 1921 was possibly suicide. She was not productive as a watercolour artist and her husband destroyed much of her work after her death. Just seven of her works have appeared at auction in the past twenty years with the Taffners buying five of them including Sleep.
This work will be displayed at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art next autumn alongside a key painting, The Mysterious Garden by her sister, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, which was acquired for the national collection in 2011.
NATIONAL TREASURE ACQUIRED IN PARTNERSHIP BY NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND AND GLASGOW CITY COUNCIL
The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and Glasgow City Council are delighted to announce their first ever joint acquisition, In the Orchard, a major work of art by Sir James Guthrie (1859-1930).
This seminal work was secured for £637,500 with the help of £423,358 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and £62,983 from the Art Fund when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s on 13 November 2012.
John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland commented: “Guthrie’s In the Orchard is a key masterpiece in the story of Scottish art and, at a time when funding is obviously very scarce, it is entirely fitting that NGS and Glasgow City Council should join forces to acquire this iconic work for the public. We are immensely grateful to the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund for their rapid and very generous support which has allowed us to move quickly to secure this extremely important work at auction.”
Cllr Archie Graham, Depute Leader of Glasgow City Council, and Chair of Glasgow Life said: “We’re thrilled to have been able to save this masterpiece for both Glasgow and Scotland. As was recently seen with our record-breaking Glasgow Boys exhibition, the work of Guthrie and this remarkable group of artists has never been more popular. I’m very grateful that this partnership has secured this outstanding work, which the public will enjoy for generations to come. It will be an excellent addition to Glasgow’s collections.”
Dame Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the NHMF, said: “This is wonderful news. Guthrie’s In the Orchard is universally acknowledged as one of the most powerful paintings of the Glasgow Boys Movement, which directed the course of modern art in 19th century Britain. When news reached the National Heritage Memorial Fund just fourteen days ago that this seminal work was at risk, we were able to act extremely fast and pledge our support in record time to secure this important part of our heritage for future generations to enjoy.”
Stephen Deuchar, Director of the Art Fund said: “This is a captivating example of a Glasgow Boys painting which deserves to be part of the public collections in Scotland. We were delighted to hear of the success at auction for the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Museums and are so pleased to have been able to contribute.”
Guthrie’s In the Orchard is one of the great masterpieces produced by the leading member of The Glasgow Boys, a loose-knit group of painters working at the end of the 19th century which included other such famous figures as E.A. Walton, George Henry and John Lavery. The group, who were initially rejected by the art establishment, shared broad artistic ideals of naturalism and much of their work was inspired by Glasgow’s surrounding villages and countryside. Guthrie in particular continued to reflect ‘realities’ of everyday Scottish rural life throughout his work whilst other members of the group diversified.
In the Orchard enjoyed early international fame, it was first unveiled alongside Lavery’s Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and Walton’s Day Dream (Scottish National Gallery) and was declared as ‘one of the most important works by Glasgow artists’. Exhibited in Glasgow (1887) and Edinburgh (1888), it achieved international fame at the Paris Salon (1889) and at the Munich international exhibition of 1890. Both Glasgow Museums and the National Galleries of Scotland have significant holdings of The Glasgow Boys work so it is highly appropriate that the painting should be shared between the two public institutions. It was also one of the highlights of the recent highly successful exhibition Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys shown at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow and the Royal Academy, London 2010-11.
The paintingwill now be shared equally by the NGS and Glasgow Museums and, after being shown in both Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2012-13, be exhibited in each institution on a three year alternating basis.
JOHN BELLANY: A PASSION FOR LIFE
17 November 2012 - 27 January 2013
Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL
Telephone. 0131 624 6200 | Admission £7/£5
The largest, most comprehensive exhibition of work by one of Scotland’s greatest living artists will open at the Scottish National Gallery this week. Marking his seventieth birthday, and celebrating his astonishing contribution to British painting, John Bellany: A Passion for Life will bring together around 75 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints from all the key periods of the artist’s remarkable fifty-year career. This will be the first retrospective of this scale in almost three decades; it will include many works that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before.
The exhibition is funded by players of People’s Postcode Lottery, who have raised over £21m for charities and good causes to date. People's Postcode Lottery Head of Charities Clara Govier commented: “This exhibition – a celebration of John Bellany’s 70th birthday – is a wonderful way to show the longstanding influence this artist has had not only internationally, but to local Scottish communities. We hope that the support from our players helps to ensure that this remarkable collection of works will go on to inspire further generations and communities.”
The exhibition will begin with canvases produced while Bellany was a student at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1960s and culminate in a selection of his most recent landscape paintings, highlighting the significant themes and events that have fuelled his deeply personal art: a strict Calvinist upbringing, his rebellious beginnings and artistic influences, the unwavering belief that art should be grounded in the realities of life, his use of a complex personal symbolism, and his unflinching reflection upon his own tragedies and triumphs.
Bellany was born in 1942 in Port Seton, a close-knit fishing community 10 miles to the east of Edinburgh, and his painting is filled with imagery that derives from his close connection to the sea. His early canvases, painted on a monumental scale, were marked by an extraordinary ambition and self-confidence. These intensely felt paintings of fisherfolk and their precarious existence were a direct challenge to the decorative landscapes and still lifes that characterised much contemporary Scottish painting in the 1960s. During the Edinburgh Festivals of 1964 and 1965 Bellany and his colleague Sandy Moffat famously mounted their own outdoor exhibitions, hanging their paintings on the railings outside the Scottish National Gallery and Royal Scottish Academy. Almost half a century on, a number of early masterpieces from this rebellious period, including The Boat Builders (1962) and The Box Meeting, Cockenzie (1965) will make a triumphant return to the building.
The heroic social realism of Bellany’s early work also ran counter to the prevailing trend for abstraction, and revealed his admiration for modernist artists like Fernand Léger whose celebrated series The Constructors from the 1950s was a direct inspiration. Importantly Bellany also looked to the Old Masters, such as Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens and Poussin. The composition of The Box Meeting, Cockenzie (1965) is based on a copy of The Feast of the Gods (c.1625-50) by Giovanni Bellini, in the Scottish National Gallery. The painting depicts the revelries that follow a traditional ceremony to bless the deeds of local fishing boats, and perfectly illustrates the sacred and profane theme that is central in much of Bellany’s work.
The deeply felt but sometimes harsh religion of Bellany’s childhood made an indelible impression on him. Paintings like Scottish Fish Gutter (1965), Kinlochbervie (1966), The Obsession (1966) and Bethel (1967) are rich in symbolism and borrow elements of traditional Christian iconography, such as the Crucifixion and the Last Supper, to transform images of ordinary fishermen into powerful allegories, and link Bellany’s own experiences to the grand and universal subjects of Western art.
A formative trip to East Germany in 1967, during which Bellany was shaken by a visit to the site of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, introduced still darker notes into his work. Bellany’s world view had become more tragic, ambiguous and complex and, influenced by the work of the German Expressionist artist Max Beckmann, he embarked upon a series of paintings, such as Skate Fetish (1973) and Lap Dog (1973) that dealt with the issue of original sin, sex, guilt and death. He also began to develop a complex repertoire of symbolic creatures, including the skate, the seagull, the puffin, the skeleton, the dog, the cat, the fish, the owl and the monkey, that populate many of his paintings, providing a disguise or cover for the artist, or embodying his personal demons.
The paintings of the 1970s were haunted by a growing awareness of fate and doom, with the familiar motif of the boat becoming a symbol of the voyage from life to death. Bellany’s brushwork, in paintings such as The Sea People (1975) and Cod End (1977), became wilder and more expressionistic, leading to a period of semi-abstract work in which themes of aggression, violence and general breakdown predominated. In the late 1970s this process was arrested as Bellany embarked on a new relationship and painted several very tender pictures of his second wife Juliet. However, the highly gestural, attacking manner in which he painted the works of the early 1980s, such as the Voyagers II (1982) and Time Will Tell (1982), reflects renewed turbulence in Bellany’s life, including Juliet’s struggle with depression and his own difficulties with alcohol.
In the mid-1980s, following a serious illness and the death of both Juliet and his father, Bellany reunited with his first wife Helen and reconsidered his whole personal life. The paintings of this period are marked by a feeling of reflective calm, and are characterised by a much tighter handling of paint, a lightness of touch and the use of a narrow range of warm yellows, oranges and reds, with blues as a contrast. Perhaps surprisingly, the requiem pictures of 1985 (Requiem for my Father and Adieu, Requiem for Juliet) are not anguished so much as elegiac, sad farewells to loved ones.
In 1987 it became clear that, despite having given up alcohol, Bellany would die without a liver transplant. In spring 1988 he made a remarkable set of drawings and self-portraits that document every step of his near-miraculous recovery and convalescence, following a successful operation performed by Sir Roy Calne. These remarkably honest and occasionally searing depictions (The Addenbrooke’s Hospital Series) are a startling testament to Bellany’s ‘will to draw’, which according to his surgeon, greatly contributed to the speed of his recovery from one of the longest and most complicated operations a person can have. Bellany is now one of the longest surviving liver transplant patients in the UK.
Restored to health, Bellany was fired by a new energy to rival that of his youth. In the early 1990s he once again tackled large canvases with ambitious compositions, such as the sensuous Danäe (A Shower of Gold) Homage to Titian (1991) and Danäe Homage to Rembrandt II (1991) in which he measured himself against the Old Masters he revered. He also returned to the themes he had explored so memorably twenty years earlier – the pleasure of earthly delights and the guilt consciousness in the Calvinist imagination, evident in paintings such as Love’s Sting (c.1990-1).
In 1995 Bellany made a three-month trip to Mexico that was to have a profound effect on his art. His experience of seeing the traditional Day of the Dead celebrations led him to question his whole Calvinist outlook on life and death. In 1998 he bought a house in Tuscany and began to spend part of the year there, living the Italian way of life, which reinforced a more life-affirming, optimistic view of the world. As a result, Bellany’s paintings became brighter and more colourful; the sense of guilt and personal doom was lifted.
In the past decade Bellany has begun to paint more and more landscapes, townscapes and harbour scenes. This was no doubt triggered by his frequent travels to other countries (such as China in 2003), but also by his feeling more at home in Italy, surrounded by glorious countryside, and by his frequent visits to Scotland. In a way this is Bellany coming home, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of a voluptuous use of paint and a new joy in colour.
Over five decades Bellany’s art has seen a dramatic trajectory in part, mirroring his personal life. In his defiant resolve to resist the tide of fashion and to uphold the value of traditional figurative painting, he helped to change the course of painting in the UK. Despite the many developments in his art, and his own brushes with death, he has kept faith with this singular vision, grounding his paintings always in the visible world about him, and expressing his deepest emotional response to it. John Bellany is celebrated around the world today as one of the foremost standard bearers for this vital strand of modern art.
Fifth year of ARTIST ROOMS On Tour announced
16 venues will display ARTIST ROOMS in 2013 – 10 new venues taking part
The National Galleries of Scotland and Tate are delighted to announce plans for the fifth ARTIST ROOMS Tour in 2013. New exhibitions and displays will go on show at 16 venues across the UK. The Tour will include 10 venues new to the project, among them two located in the Scottish Borders and one in Morayshire. By the end of 2013, ARTIST ROOMS will have been shown in 54 museums and galleries nationwide and 107 displays and exhibitions will have opened since 2009. ARTIST ROOMS have so far been seen by 21 million people. The tour is made possible thanks to the new support of Arts Council England, the continued support of the Art Fund and, in Scotland, new support from Creative Scotland.
In 2013, ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions and displays will be seen outside London and Edinburgh in Belfast, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Brighton, Falkirk, Findhorn, Galashiels, Hull, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Stoke-on-Trent, Wednesbury, Wolverhampton, Worcester and York.
Over the past year a number of institutions have seen record numbers at ARTIST ROOMS displays. Hepworth Wakefield attracted nearly 128,000 to the Richard Long display, the inaugural Robert Therrien display at the opening of The MAC in Belfast drew 38,000 visitors in less than three months and, at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, 60,000 people have come to see the Andy Warhol display to date.
Highlights of the 2013 tour will include:
- The first exhibition of the work of Andy Warhol in Northern Ireland at The MAC in Belfast
- Bruce Nauman at York St Mary’s, York’s contemporary art space
- Two exhibitions in the Scottish Borders: Robert Therrien in Berwick-upon-Tweed and Robert Mapplethorpe in Galashiels
- Martin Creed at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, the first time this group of works will be shown outside Tate or the National Galleries of Scotland
The 2013 ARTIST ROOMS tour will be as follows:
Spring
The MAC, Belfast
8 February - 28 April 2013 - Andy Warhol
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
22 February - 22 May 2013 - Ed Ruscha
Old Gala House, Galashiels
11 May - 11 August 2013 - Robert Mapplethorpe
The Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton
11 May - 8 September 2013 - Jeff Koons
Summer
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
8 June - 6 October 2013 - Martin Creed
Tate Britain, London
6 May - 6 October 2013 - Douglas Gordon
Paxton House, Berwick-upon-Tweed
2 June - 31 October 2013 - Robert Therrien
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
20 July - 2 November 2013 - Ron Mueck
Wednesbury Museum & Art Gallery
25 July - 1 December 2013 - Bill Viola
York St Mary’s, York
26 July - 10 November 2013 - Bruce Nauman
The Park Gallery, Falkirk
24 August - 16 November 2013 - Ian Hamilton Finlay
Winter
Moray Art Centre, Findhorn
14 September 2013 - 11 January 2014 - Diane Arbus
Tate Britain, London
20 October 2013 - 31 March 2014 - Martin Creed
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
5 October 2013 - 31 May 2014 - Louise Bourgeois
Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum
26 October 2013 - 1 February 2014 - Joseph Beuys
The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on- Trent
30 November 2013 - 2 March 2014 - Richard Long
ARTIST ROOMS displays will be shown throughout the year at Tate Modern: Bruce Nauman until 6 October 2013; Laurence Weiner until September 2013; and Joseph Beuys until December 2013.
ARTIST ROOMS is owned jointly by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland and 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.
Tickling Jock: Comedy Greats from Sir Harry Lauder to Billy Connolly
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
23 February 2012 – 25 May 2014
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
nationalgalleries.org | Admission free
A new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will showcase the key figures of twentieth-century Scottish comedy. In February 2013, Tickling Jock: Comedy Greats from Sir Harry Lauder to Billy Connolly, will bring together images of 50 stars including Lex McLean, John Laurie, Molly Weir, Rikki Fulton, Jack Milroy, Stanley Baxter, Johnny Beattie, Una Maclean and Ronnie Corbett, to celebrate Scotland’s distinctive contribution to the world of entertainment.
Opening with a recording of Lauder’s 1904 song ‘Stop Yer Tickling Jock’, the exhibition will include paintings, photographs, sculpture and archive material charting the comic traditions of the period 1900 - 1975: from the age of music-hall, stage and gramophone through to radio, cinema and television. Lauder first found fame in 1900 and quickly became a major international star and the first British performer to sell a million records. In 1975 Billy Connolly appeared on TV’s Parkinson, in an interview that introduced his infamous sense of humour and catapulted the folk singer and ex-welder to superstardom. From the days of the ‘Scotch Comic’ to the emergence of the ‘Scottish Comedian’, this exhibition will explore the styles, settings and catchphrases that paved the way for laughs today.
Over seventy years the nature of comedy performance had many guises. Tickling Jock charts the history of these rich traditions: character comedians (Harry Gordon and Will Fyffe); clowns (Tommy Lorne and Dave Willis); double acts, (Frank & Doris Droy and Francie & Josie); impressionists and stand-ups (Janet Brown, Chic Murray and Andy Cameron) all make an appearance. Tickling Jock also reveals little known facts, showing Lulu as a TV comedy star and acknowledging opera singer Kenneth McKellar’s contributions to Monty Python.
Works from the Galleries twentieth-century collections will be supported by loans from Scottish venues such as the Scottish Theatre Archive (University of Glasgow), the Citizens Theatre and the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, as well as from private owners. The exhibition will shine a spotlight on entertainers who, between 1900 and 1975, generated laughter as a constant backdrop to the changes of the modern world and laid the foundations for Scottish comedy today.
Christopher Baker, Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery said:
‘This exhibition presents an exciting prospect for visitors to the Portrait Gallery; Edinburgh hosts the world’s largest arts festival every Summer, and as comedy forms a vital part of it we are delighted to be able to bring together such an incredible homage to those who shaped the way we listen and laugh today. The exhibition will include paintings, photographs, sculpture and archive material from our collection as well as fascinating loans and highlight the national and international impact of the Scottish comedy greats.’
CELLS: THE SMALLEST OF ALL PORTRAITS
29 October 2012 – 3 February 2013
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Telephone: 0131 624 6200 | Admission free
The mysterious giant box which has appeared on the ground floor of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery over the past few weeks will today be unveiled as a laboratory. Specially designed to house artworks created by students at Penicuik High School and James Gillespie’s in Edinburgh, the lab is the setting for Cells: The Smallest of all Portraits, a new display which opens today.
Cells is the product of an experimental learning project organised by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, which was inspired by the Portrait Gallery’s Pioneers of Science display. In a series of workshops led by professional scientists and artists, the children discovered more about the nature of cells - the smallest and most amazing of all portraits - and a then made a remarkable range of eye-opening and thought-provoking artworks in response to their research.
Groups from both schools visited the Roslin Institute, met scientists and extracted DNA from kiwi fruit. They also worked with visual artists Malcy Duff and Leena Namari over a period of time, responding creatively with a series of artworks on the theme of biomedical science. Experimenting with a range of media, the pupils have created a variety of artworks, all of which reflect their discoveries in the lab.
Visitors can enter the Cells Labto marvel at these ‘microscopic’ portraits, engage with debates about cell science and find out more about life on a cellular level.
Dr Patricia Allerston, National Galleries of Scotland’s Head of Education said:
'Cells is a very exciting new initiative for the National Galleries of Scotland, linking our artworks and young people with the ground-breaking scientific developments happening in Scotland today. We are proud to be displaying the young people’s creative responses in one of our prime gallery spaces in the newly refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery – we can’t think of a better way of highlighting the results of this highly original schools project.'
Young people from both schools will be at the Portrait Gallery on Monday 29 October, 16:00 to be photographed with their work.
LEADING LIGHTS: PORTRAITS BY K.K. DUNDAS
29 October 2012 to 3 March 2013
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Telephone: 0131 624 6200 | Admission free
A selection of contemporary Scotland’s most famous faces will feature in a new exhibition of photography by K.K. Dundas, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this week. The 18 portraits on display include the well-known actors Alan Cumming, Elaine C. Smith and Billy Boyd - all former students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the country’s leading school of music, dance and drama. Others images are of recent graduates and current students, such as Katie Leung, who is perhaps best known for her role in the Harry Potter films.
In 2010, to celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Conservatoire commissioned Glasgow-based Dundas, who specialises in theatre and portrait photography, to take portraits of past and present students from the school of drama. This selection of images, presented in collaboration with the Conservatoire, features some of the institution’s most illustrious alumni, from old hands to more recent graduates. Highlights include Dundas’s engaging portraits of actor Bill Paterson, comedienne Ruby Wax and Colin Morgan, star of the BBC TV series Merlin. The majority of works in the display will be on show for the first time, and, all 18 portraits have been generously donated by the photographer to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Leading Lights is part of the season of photography at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn, which also includes Jitka Hanzlová in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, the first UK exhibition from one of the most celebrated photographers working in Europe; and Lucknow to Lahore: Fred Bremner’s Vision of India, a stunning collection of images of the subcontinent from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century.
-ENDS-
Jitka Hanzlová
Scottish National PORTRAIT Gallery
Edinburgh | Admission Free
A major retrospective exhibition of work by Czech-born photographer, Jitka Hanzlová, will have its only UK showing in The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn. Hanzlová is one of the most significant contemporary photographers in Europe today, producing a body of work that offers a profound investigation of identity in a post-Cold War world. The exhibition brings together around 100 works spanning her career from the early 1990s to the present day. It is curated by Isabel Tejedaand and comes straight to Edinburgh after its showing at FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE in Madrid.
In 1982 Jitka Hanzlová defected from the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and settled in Essen in West Germany, expecting never to see her home again. However, with the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989 she was able to return, inspiring a body of work based on her experiences of two different cultures and political systems. Drawing on her own life story, Hanzlová’s photography subtly explores the ways in which home and surroundings indelibly shape identity. It constitutes an imaginative investigation of ‘belonging’ at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dr Duncan Forbes, Senior Curator of Photography, said:
'We’re thrilled to be staging this major retrospective in Edinburgh, the first time Jitka Hanzlová has exhibited in Scotland. She is one of the most creative photographers working in Europe today. We feel that her penetrating observations of everyday life, not least in the countryside and de-industrialising cities of northern Europe, will have all kinds of echoes for Scottish audiences.'
Hanzlová organises her work in series, beginning with Rokytník, the village in Eastern Bohemia she left in the early 19080s. Of central significance to the photographer, Rokytník is the creative bedrock for everything that follows. Further series examine Hanzlová’s response to everyday life in some of western Europe’s major cities, most notably Essen where she has lived and worked since the 1980s. Urban life for the photographer is often presented as alienating and in a state of constant flux. Her work reveals, for example, the way post-industrial landscapes are slowly reclaimed by nature. In a further major series, Forest, Hanzlová returns to the haunts of her youth, producing a visionary experience through photography of the Czech Republic’s mysterious northern forests. Another original body of work, titled Horses, provides perhaps one of the most powerful renditions of the animal ever seen in the history of photography. Hanzlová’s work is essentially a form of extended portraiture and in a series exhibited for the first time she turns to portrait photography itself; often exploring and echoing Renaissance classics.
Jitka Hanzlová, to be shown in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, follows on from Romantic Camera and Legacy, ending a strong year of photography exhibitions in the newly refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It pursues questions of place and identity central to the remit of the Gallery, opening them up into an international context.
The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, named after the renowned American photographer, is supported by a very generous donation from the The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. This is being used over three years to realise innovative displays, exhibitions and research. The Gallery is the first purpose-built photography space of its kind in a major museum in Scotland.
JITKA HANZLOVÁ
17 October 2012 – 3 February 2013
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Telephone: 0131 624 6200 | Admission free
nationalgalleries.org
A major retrospective exhibition of work by Czech-born photographer, Jitka Hanzlová, will have its only UK showing in The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn. Hanzlová is one of the most significant contemporary photographers in Europe today, producing a body of work that offers a profound investigation of identity in a post-Cold War world. The exhibition brings together around 100 works spanning her career from the early 1990s to the present day. It is curated by Isabel Tejeda and comes straight to Edinburgh after its showing at FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE in Madrid.
In 1982 Jitka Hanzlová defected from the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and settled in Essen in West Germany, expecting never to see her home again. However, with the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989 she was able to return, inspiring a body of work based on her experiences of two different cultures and political systems. Drawing on her own life story, Hanzlová’s photography subtly explores the ways in which home and surroundings indelibly shape identity. It constitutes an imaginative investigation of ‘belonging’ at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dr Duncan Forbes, Senior Curator of Photography, said:
“We’re thrilled to be staging this major retrospective in Edinburgh, the first time Jitka Hanzlová has exhibited in Scotland. She is one of the most creative photographers working in Europe today. We feel that her penetrating observations of everyday life, not least in the countryside and de-industrialising cities of northern Europe, will have all kinds of echoes for Scottish audiences.”
Hanzlová organises her work in series, beginning with Rokytník, the village in Eastern Bohemia she left in the early 1980s. Of central significance to the photographer, Rokytník is the creative bedrock for everything that follows. Further series examine Hanzlová’s response to everyday life in some of western Europe’s major cities, most notably Essen where she has lived and worked since the 1980s. Urban life for the photographer is often presented as alienating and in a state of constant flux. Her work reveals, for example, the way post-industrial landscapes are slowly reclaimed by nature. In a further major series, Forest, Hanzlová returns to the haunts of her youth, producing a visionary experience through photography of the Czech Republic’s mysterious northern forests. Another original body of work, titled Horses, provides perhaps one of the most powerful renditions of the animal ever seen in the history of photography. Hanzlová’s work is essentially a form of extended portraiture and in a series exhibited for the first time she turns to portrait photography itself, often exploring and echoing Renaissance classics.
Jitka Hanzlová, to be shown in the Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, follows on from Romantic Camera and Legacy, ending a strong year of photography exhibitions in the newly refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It pursues questions of place and identity central to the remit of the Gallery, opening them up into an international context.
The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Gallery, named after the renowned American photographer, is supported by a very generous donation from the The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. This is being used over three years to realise innovative displays, exhibitions and research. The Gallery is the first purpose-built photography space of its kind in a major museum in Scotland.
LUCKNOW TO LAHORE:
FRED BREMNER’S VISION OF INDIA
6 October 2012 – 7 April 2013
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD
Telephone: 0131 624 6200 | Admission free
nationalgalleries.org
A collection of beautiful and rarely seen photographs, which offers a fascinating insight into the role played by Scots in the British Raj, is to feature in a new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this week. Lucknow to Lahore: Fred Bremner’s Vision of India will chart the remarkable career of Bremner – a commercial photographer who left Scotland for India in 1882 and spent the next 40 years working there. This selection of 24 outstanding images, beautifully printed by renowned photographer Pradip Malde from the original glass negatives, will offer a rich, personal perspective on the people and places that Bremner encountered.
The exhibition will open a season of photography at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this autumn, which also includes the work of the multi-award-winning Czech-born photographer Jitka Hanzlová, and Leading Lights: Portraits by KK Dundas, which captures many of the stars who have studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in Glasgow.
Born in 1863 Aberchirder, Aberdeenshire, Fred Bremner began his career in his father’s photographic studio in Banff, before accepting an offer to work with his brother-in-law G W Lawrie, an established photographer in Lucknow, India. His assignments took him across Northern India, and in 1889 he set up his own studio in Karachi, followed by premises in Quetta in Baluchistan, and in Lahore and Rawalpindi in the Punjab. Travelling incessantly over vast distances, and working in rarely photographed areas, Bremner created a captivating record of Imperial India’s rural life, landscapes and people.
The exhibition will help to illustrate how imperial expansion in the nineteenth century provided photographers with a powerful stimulus, as well as great opportunities and rewards, as they followed in the footsteps of colonial armies, traders and adventurers. Of the British territories, India was the most photographed, and the work of men like Bremner provided knowledge that was vital to imperial interests. His photographs both reveal how British India was imagined and reflect the complex attitudes of its rulers.
Portraiture was the core of Bremner’s business, with regular commissions to photograph not only colonial officers and their families but also members of the native aristocracy: his striking portraits of The Khan of Kalat and his Sons (c.1893) and Nawab Sultan Kaikhusrau Jahan, Begum of Bhopal (1858-1930) (c.1920) are among the highlights of the exhibition. Like many commercial photographers, however, Bremner also found time to complete personal projects. His fascination with the diversity of local customs and his determination to record them can be seen in memorable images of fishermen on the River Indus and the dramatic River crossing, River Jhelum, Kashmir (c.1896).
A skilled craftsman himself, Bremner produced a series of large glass plate negatives showing Indian artisans at work. His photographs of woodcarvers and carpet-makers hint at the material wealth that placed India at the heart of Britain’s colonial economy.
The exhibition will also look at how Bremner (like many of his contemporaries) sought to transpose a European conception of the picturesque onto his photographs the Indian landscape.
Speaking of the exhibition, Sheila Asante, Migration Stories Curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery said, “This is a fantastic opportunity to catch a glimpse of rarely seen images of the Indian Empire. Fred Bremner was one of the first photographers to capture the very north-western edge of the British Raj. An accomplished photographer, he had an eye for dynamic compositions. This intimate exhibition of his work offers an extraordinary insight into how one Scot viewed ‘that far off land known as the Indian Empire’.”
FROM DEATH TO DEATH AND OTHER SMALL TALES
MASTERPIECES FROM THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART AND THE D.DASKALOPOULOS COLLECTION
15 December 2012 to 8 September 2013
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
Telephone +44 (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org | Admission FREE
Press View: Friday 14 December 2012 from 11.30am to 1pm
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to announce a major exhibition bringing together works from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, one of the most important collections of contemporary art with major works from the Scottish national collection. This innovative exhibition, curated by Keith Hartley, Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, comprises over 120 works and will create a new and dynamic context for both collections.
Amongst the common themes that run through the extensive holdings of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, the notion of the body as a source of creativity and the vessel of existential, social and ideological struggle is a compelling and repeatedly examined motif. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore the many and varied approaches that artists have taken across several decades when dealing with this most fundamental of subjects. The idea of the body has a special resonance with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art collection. As well as the substantial holdings of work by Joseph Beuys, from which the title to the exhibition is taken, the Gallery also houses a rich collection of works by modern, and in particular surrealist and dada, artists, such as Bellmer, Balthus, Otto Dix, Magritte and Picasso, for whom the body was a powerful theme.
The exhibition will be displayed in pairings or as groups with works from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to draw out commonalities and differences between both collections. Through exciting and often surprising configurations, the exhibition will stage confrontations between the past and present, sculpture and painting, expressive and minimal forms to illuminate the diverse ways in which artists have approached the subject of the body. Audiences can therefore encounter a work of expressive power by a contemporary artist in a room otherwise dedicated to classic figurative paintings by some of the giants of modern art, a visceral sculpture by Louise Bourgeois alongside the work of Marcel Duchamp or juxtapositions between Rachel Whiteread’s contemplative objects with the performative and transformative work of Bruce Nauman.
Since 1994, the D.Daskalopoulos Collection has developed an extraordinary and rich body of iconic artworks that collectively express a personal vision and sensibility informed by the artistic practice of recent decades. Many of the most significant names in post-war and contemporary art are represented - figures whose output and ideas have shaped the way in which subsequent generations of artists have developed and others continue to emerge.
Dr. Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art comments: “We are delighted to be working with the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, and the opportunity to showcase the national collection alongside this world-class collection is a major coup for the SNGMA. It allows us to show the very best of international contemporary art to the Scottish public whilst continuing our innovative use of the collection to produce a show that will be daring, surprising and of international significance.”
Some 60 works of contemporary art by over twenty artists have been selected from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection including pieces by internationally renowned artists such as Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Gober, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas and Paul McCarthy. The exhibition will highlight the significance of the body as a theme in twentieth and twenty-first century art practice and will enable audiences to view many world-class artworks that have never before been seen in Scotland.
A fully illustrated catalogue will be published in both Greek and English to accompany the exhibition.
MAN RAY PORTRAITS
7 February – 27 May 2013
Gift Aid admission £14. Concessions £13 / £12
Standard price admission £12.70. Concessions £11.80/£10.90
Tickets: www.npg.org.uk
Man Ray Portraits Exhibition Supporters Group
Spring Season 2013 sponsored by Herbert Smith LLP
• First museum exhibition to focus on Man Ray’s photographic portraiture
• Includes works never before exhibited in the UK including studies of Barbette, Catherine Deneuve, Ava Gardner, Lee Miller and Kiki de Montparnasse.
A major photographic exhibition, Man Ray Portraits, opens at the National Portrait Gallery on 7 February 2012. Devoted to one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation, the exhibition will include over 150 vintage prints from Man Ray’s career taken between 1916 and 1968. Drawn from private collections and major museums including the Pompidou Centre, the J. Paul Getty Museum and New York’s The Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and special loans from the Man Ray Trust Archive, a majority of the works have not previously been exhibited in the UK.
Left to right - Helen Tamaris, 1929; Man Ray self-portrait, 1932; Barbette, 1926
Portraits of Man Ray’s celebrated contemporaries will be shown in the exhibition alongside his personal and often intimate portraits of friends, lovers and his social circle. His versatility and experimentation as an artist is illustrated throughout all of his photography although this was never his chosen principal artistic medium. The exhibition brings together photographic portraits of cultural figures and friends including Marcel Duchamp, Berenice Abbott, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, James Joyce, Erik Satie, Henri Matisse, Barbette, Igor Stravinsky, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, Le Corbusier, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Coco Chanel and Wallis Simpson. Also on show will be portraits of his lovers Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) and Lee Miller who was also his assistant, Ady Fidelin, and his last muse and wife Juliet Browner.
Philadelphia born Man Ray (1890 – 1976) spent his early life in New York, turning down a scholarship to study architecture in order to devote himself to painting. He initially taught himself photography in order to reproduce his works of art but in 1920 he began to work as a portrait photographer to fund his artwork. In 1915, whilst at Ridgefield artist colony in New Jersey, he met the French artist Marcel Duchamp and together they tried to establish New York Dada. His friendship with Duchamp led to Man Ray’s move to Paris in 1921, where, as a contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, he was perfectly placed to make defining images of his contemporaries from the avant-garde. In this period he was instrumental in developing and producing a type of photogram which he called ‘Rayographs’, and is credited in inventing, alongside his lover and collaborator Lee Miller, the process of solarisation. The use of solarisation can be seen in the portraits of Elsa Schiaparelli, Irene Zurkinden, Lee Miller, Suzy Solidor and his own Self-Portrait with Camera included in the exhibition.
Following the outbreak of World War II, Man Ray left France for the US and took up residence in Hollywood. Although officially devoting himself once more to painting, new research has revealed Man Ray made a number of significant photographic portraits during his Hollywood years, and several are shown for the first time in this exhibition. Film star subjects included Ruth Ford, Paulette Goddard, Ava Gardner, Tilly Losch and Dolores del Rio. Returning to Paris in 1951 he again made the city his home until his death in 1976. His portraits from the 1950s include experiments with colour photography such as his portraits of Juliette Greco and Yves Montand and the exhibition closes with his portrait of film star Catherine Deneuve from 1968.
Man Ray Portraits is curated by the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Photographs, Terence Pepper, whose previous exhibitions at the Gallery include the award-winning Vanity Fair Portraits (2008), Beatles to Bowie: the 60s exposed (2009), Angus McBean: Portraits (2006), Cecil Beaton: Portraits (2004) and Horst: Portraits (2001).
EXHIBITION AND TOUR
The exhibition will run from 7 February – 27 May 2012 at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Advanced booking is recommended. Gift Aid admission £14. Concessions £13 / £12. Standard price admission £12.70. Concessions £11.80/ £10.90. Tickets: www.npg.org.uk/ManRay or 020 7766 7331
Man Ray Portraits will tour to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 22 June – 8 September 2013 and the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow from 14 October 2013 – 19 January 2014.
PUBLICATION
A fully-illustrated 224 page hardback catalogue, Man Ray Portraits, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes an introductory essay by Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, and a writer of fiction, criticism and history, and an extensive illustrated chronology by Helen Trompeteler, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Price £35 (hardback).
PICASSO & MODERN BRITISH ART
4 August 2012 – 4 November 2012
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
73 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR
Telephone: 0131 624 6200 | Admission £10 /£7
Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival
The first exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain will be the highlight of this year’s Festival programme at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Picasso & Modern British Art will bring together 150 works from major public and private collections around the world, including some 60 outstanding paintings, drawings and prints by Picasso. This stunning exhibition, which has been organised in partnership with Tate Britain, where it was shown to great acclaim this spring, will trace the evolution of the artists’ critical reputation in Britain, and demonstrate his profound influence on British artists, through the example of major figures such as Francis Bacon and Henry Moore.
Picasso instigated many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century art and masterpieces from every period of his career will feature in the exhibition, including his landmark painting, The Three Dancers 1925 (Tate), which the artist considered one of his two greatest works. Also on show will be Head of a Man 1912 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), one of several works that introduced Cubism to Britain when they were included in an exhibition organised by the critic Roger Fry in 1912. Other highlights will include Picasso’s Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle 1914, (National Gallery, London, on loan to Tate); a playful late-Cubist work, Guitar, Compote Dish and Grape, 1924 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam); and a powerful example from Picasso’s late career, Woman Dressing her Hair 1940 (Museum of Modern Art, New York).
The exhibition will explore Picasso’s rise in Britain as a figure of both controversy and celebrity, tracing the ways in which his work was exhibited and collected here during his lifetime, and revealing the extent to which the British engagement with his art was much deeper and more varied than generally has been appreciated.
The work of Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Moore, Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney - seven British artists for whom Picasso proved an important stimulus - will illustrate the artist’s enormous impact on twentieth-century modernism in this country, as well as the variety and vitality of British artists’ responses to his work over a period of more than seventy years. Works by each artist, carefully chosen to illustrate a specific feature of their dialogue with Picasso, will be shown. In Edinburgh, the exhibition will include an additional element that reveals Picasso’s influence on Scottish artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.
The exhibition will also consider the significance of British collector Roland Penrose, who became intimately associated with the artist and his reputation. Penrose organised the phenomenally successful survey of Picasso’s career at the Tate in 1960, and was instrumental in persuading the artist to sell The Three Dancers to the Tate in 1965. His outstanding collection included the iconic Weeping Woman, 1937 (Tate) as well as Guitar, Gas-Jet and Bottle, and Tête, both 1913, which are now in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. In 1994 the Gallery also acquired the extensive Penrose archive, and a range of material from this extraordinarily rich resource will be on show in Edinburgh.
Other fascinating aspects of Picasso’s relationship to Britain will be considered in depth, including a section devoted to costume and scenery designs for a production of The Three-Cornered Hat by the Ballet Russes, which Picasso created during a ten-week stay in London in 1919. The show will also assess the significance of Picasso’s political status in Britain, from the 1938-9 tour of Guernica, his celebrated response to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, to his appearance at the 1950 Peace Congress in Sheffield. The final section will consider the artist’s post-war reputation, from the widespread hostility provoked by an exhibition of paintings by Picasso and Matisse at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1945-6, to the triumphant Tate retrospective fifteen years later.
EXPANDING HORIZONS: GIOVANNI BATTISTA LUSIERI AND THE PANORAMIC LANDSCAPE
30 JUNE − 28 OCTOBER 2012
SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY
The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
Admission £7/£5
The work of one of the most gifted landscape painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be the subject of a fascinating major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery this summer. This will be the first exhibition ever to be devoted to Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754–1821) an artist who was widely acclaimed in his lifetime but whose work has been undeservedly overlooked in the last 200 years. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, much of Lusieri’s life-story reads like a film script; he was employed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was closely involved with the removal of the Elgin Marbles from Greece to Britain and tragically, a large proportion of the artist’s later work was destroyed at sea after his death, leaving his reputation to descend into obscurity. This exhibition will present the most spectacular and best preserved of Lusieri’s surviving work, with outstanding loans and documentary material to introduce a 21st century audience to a long-forgotten artistic genius.
One of very few Italian artists of this period to adopt watercolour as his favoured medium, Lusieri often worked on an ambitious scale, combining a broad, panoramic vision, an uncanny ability to capture brilliant Mediterranean light and a meticulous, almost photographic attention to detail. This exhibition will bring together about 85 watercolours and drawings, plus his only two known works in oil.
Lusieri worked principally as a painter of topographical views and close-up views of ancient monuments. He was passionately dedicated to working directly from nature, and unlike most of his contemporaries who worked in watercolour, insisted wherever possible on colouring his drawings outside, on the spot.
Recent research has established that Lusieri was born in Rome in 1754, but little is known about his artistic education. In 1782 Lusieri moved to Naples, where his career blossomed. He received commissions from Queen Maria Carolina, from the influential British diplomat Sir William Hamilton, and from a host of visiting tourists, the majority of them British. It was for Hamilton that Lusieri created his single most ambitious watercolour, the nine-foot-wide Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa, which is being lent to the exhibition by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His beautiful views of Vesuvius erupting by moonlight were amongst his most popular works and they exist in numerous versions, some of which are in the exhibition.
With the advance of Napoleon’s troops down the Italian peninsula, Lusieri headed south to Sicily in 1798 or 1799, working at Palermo, Taormina and Agrigento. It was while he was in Sicily that Lusieri was engaged by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, to accompany him on his embassy to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, and he spent the second half of his career mainly in Athens as Lord Elgin’s resident artist and agent. In that capacity he was closely involved in supervising the removal, packing and transport of the celebrated marbles from the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis. He also undertook excavations for his patron elsewhere. His commitment to these archaeological activities left him much less time for his art, and very few finished works from his twenty years in Greece survive. He did commence many views of Athens and its surroundings, some of them very large indeed, but these were detailed outline drawings without the addition of colour. After his death, a large proportion of Lusieri’s work was lost when the ship transporting it back to Britain was wrecked off Crete in 1828. By that date Lord Elgin had already purchased from Lusieri’s heirs the mass of watercolours and drawings from the artist’s Italian years that he left behind when he joined Elgin’s embassy.
One of Lusieri’s two surviving paintings in oil, the Monument to Philopappos, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery in 2007, to add to the two rare Greek watercolours by him already in the collection. The present Earl of Elgin will very generously lend more than half of the works in the exhibition. Many of the exhibits are previously unpublished, including numerous works of the highest quality, and much new light will be shed on technical aspects of his production. The accompanying catalogue will be the first substantial publication on the artist in English.
Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape will aim to re-establish this artist’s reputation as one of the most gifted landscape watercolourists of all time.
Legacy by Roderick Buchanan
4 July – 16 September 2012
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh
Admission free
In association with IWM (Imperial War Museums)
A powerful and thought-provoking installation by renowned Scottish artist Roderick Buchanan, which considers the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, is to open at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this summer. Legacy explores the strong traditions and cultural connections that link communities in Scotland and Northern Ireland, by following two Scottish flute bands as they prepare for and take part in Loyalist and Republican parades in 2009 and 2010. Commissioned by the IWM, the work was first shown at IWM London, to considerable acclaim, in 2011.
Reflecting Buchanan’s interest in issues of identity and belonging, Legacy is a unique and intimate portrait of the Glasgow-based bands – Parkhead Republican Flute Band and Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum – which creates a balanced and honest representation of both Loyalist and Republican communities. This sympathetic work, which comprises two films, shown simultaneously, and a series of photographic portraits, examines the lasting significance of the Troubles, as well as the social, political and economic changes that followed the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Born in Glasgow in 1965, Buchanan has a long-standing relationship with both bands, first established when they were the focus his 2007 film I am Here, which was shown as part of Glasgow City Council’s social justice programme on sectarianism. His non-partisan, non-judgmental approach encouraged their participation in this larger project, and has given him unprecedented access to the bands and their supporters.
Scots Irish / Irish Scots, the films at the centre of Legacy, are shown simultaneously on two screens, placed side-by-side but with a dividing partition that allows the viewer to watch either film in isolation, or both together. The films are shown in a ‘pendulum edit’ - which gives one screen sound while the other is silent - and follow the bands as they take part in parades to mark the 320th anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Londonderry, in 2009, and the annual Easter Rising commemoration in Derry in 2010.
While one band performs the other bandsmen are shown at rest, creating, through an accumulation of incidental detail, a vivid impression of the days’ events. The films are complemented by studio portraits of the current band members plus an account by Buchanan of his work on the project, as well as interviews with the leaders of both bands, in a catalogue published by the Imperial War Museum.
Commenting on the exhibition, Roderick Buchanan said: ‘My proposal was to make a portrait with grass-roots activists who had lived through the Troubles, processed what the Good Friday Agreement meant for them, and who continued to march and stand up for what they believe. The challenges were largely in creating the right environment where people felt comfortable allowing a film crew in beside them as they paraded at events that were so important to them. It’s been an extraordinary opportunity to work with groups of people who take the lead communicating their values and beliefs in public. I hope the films are well received and valued as an honest representation of the bandsmen’s experience.’
Nicola Kalinsky, Interim Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, added: ‘Legacy is an immersive and visually stunning installation. As a complex and multi-faceted portrait of a challenging subject, it fits perfectly within our remit to explore issues of identity and belonging which affect us all, both now and in the very recent past. We are delighted to be showing this major work by Roderick Buchanan.’
14 July–14 October 2012 Scottish National Gallery The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2EL The first exhibition ever to be devoted to Symbolist Landscape will be the highlight of the Festival programme at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh this summer. Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910, which is sponsored by BNY Mellon, will bring together some 70 outstanding landscapes by 54 artists of the avant-garde, including masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Monet, Whistler, Mondrian and Kandinsky. The exhibition will also introduce the public to a group of less well known artists from Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Jacek Malczewski. Symbolism was a radical movement of artists, poets, writers and composers that emerged in reaction to the industrial expansion and materialism of late-19th century Europe. Symbolist artists abandoned the direct representation of nature or reality, creating instead a vision of the world drawn from the imagination. Their work explored powerful themes that reflected the anxieties and uncertainties of the age, including a fascination with death, dreams and the unconscious, fears about scientific advances and a questioning of man’s place in the world. Symbolist painting embraced a broad range of styles, and was closely linked to literature and other artforms; the relationship between art and music - a major preoccupation for some artists - will be a significant underlying theme of the exhibition. Originating in France and Belgium, the movement took root across the continent. As well as illustrating the geographical reach of Symbolism, the exhibitionwill also trace the development of the movement over a thirty-year period, starting with precursors such as Böcklin and Whistler, working in the 1870s and 80s, to Mondrian and Kandinsky, whose variations on landscape themes just before the First World War helped push their work into abstraction. Speaking of the exhibition, Michael Clarke, Director of the Scottish National Gallery said: ‘This is a surprising and thought-provoking show which casts a new light on landscape painting in Europe at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Its scope is truly European and brings together both well-known figures and exciting rediscoveries in a dramatic re-examination of this highly inventive period in European art.’ Michael Cole-Fontayn, Chairman of Europe, Middle East & Africa at BNY Mellon, said: ‘Edinburgh is a key location for BNY Mellon and it is our privilege to be able to support this landmark show and the Scottish National Gallery. The National Gallery’s outstanding commitment to public access and education very much reflects the key principles that inform our own international programme of arts sponsorship, and I have no doubt that this unique and diverse exhibition will prove a huge success for both the Gallery and the city of Edinburgh itself.’ Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 has been organised in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam - where it has already been inspiring and impressing audiences with the sheer range and quality of works on show – and the Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki. It will bring together loans from prestigious institutions across Europe and the USA, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée d'Orsay, Paris; the Neue Pinakothek, Munich and the Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Some world-famous works will be shown for the first time ever in Scotland, including Van Gogh’s Sower, an exclusive loan from Amsterdam, and Kandinsky’s Cossacks from Tate, London. The show’s six themes will give the viewer a chance to explore different aspects of Symbolism and to consider how far-reaching and influential its ideas were. The exhibition opens with the dream-world of Arcadia, featuring a group of dark, brooding landscapes on the theme of death and destruction. Drawing on Greek history and mythology, Leon Bakst’s awesome Terror Antiquus offers a dramatic bird’s eye view of a Grecian archipelago at the mercy of the gods. The next room Moods of Nature focuses on the lakes and forests of Scandinavia and Finland. Prins Eugen’s Forest becomes a metaphor for the journey through life, while Gallen-Kallela’s Lake Keitele suggests links with the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. Moving from the natural world to the urban, the section on Silent Cities expresses the Symbolists’ disillusionment with the modern city which they saw as claustrophobic, isolating and threatening. Artists and writers focused instead on the mysterious beauty of cities such as Venice and Bruges. Works such as Fernand Khnopff’s Bruges: The Lac d’Amour and Whistler’s St Mark’s Square, Venice are tinged with nostalgia. Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon - lauded by the critic Albert Aurier as the first symbolist painting – and Van Gogh’s Sower are two of the highlights of Dreams and Visions, a group of landscapes that look beneath the surface of visible reality into the world of dreams and the subconscious. The next room, Rhythms of Nature addresses the metaphysical, as well as the uncertainties of a world in flux - expressed in works such as the Spanish artist Joaquim Mir’s Abyss - while Van Gogh’s Reaper explores the artist’s preoccupation with death, as well as the cycle of the seasons. Finally, the exhibition reaches a triumphant conclusion in a group of uplifting images; Towards Abstraction includes Mondrian’s landscapes of Domburg, and works by Kandinsky, who made connections between colour, music and emotion. This exciting exhibition will give audiences an insight into the rich diversity of art in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and is certain to provide an awe-inspiring experience.
ALISON WATT TO UNVEIL NEW ACQUISITION AT SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY One of Scotland’s most distinguished contemporary artists, Alison Watt, will this week unveil a striking self-portrait, which has been acquired for the recently refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery (SNPG). The painting, which was made while the artist was still a student, has been presented by the Art Fund, the national fundraising charity for art, to celebrate the re-opening of the Gallery in December 2011. Alison Watt was born in Greenock in 1965 and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1983 to 1988. She first came to public attention in 1987, when she won the annual portrait award organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London, and was commissioned to paint HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. In 2000, Watt became the youngest artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and from 2006 to 2008 was Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London. She was awarded an OBE in 2008. Although she has rarely engaged with formal portraiture since her early career, Alison Watt has said that there is an element of self-portraiture in all of her work - from the very beginning, when she would stand in front of a mirror and paint herself obsessively, to the more subtle representations of self implied in the complex and enigmatic paintings of folded drapery for which she is best known today. Watt's Self-portrait of 1986-7 has been acquired for the SNPG from the artist's collection and has been exhibited only once before, at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow in 1990. Painted whilst she was ill, it shows Watt with her right hand across her forehead. Despite the intensity of her observation, Watt treats herself objectively, giving the inanimate elements in the painting equal weight to her own depiction, in a way that anticipates much of her later work. The female figures and nudes Watt painted in the 1990s were often oblique or veiled references to herself, and in the later paintings of fabric this is even more subtly expressed. Although on first appearance these paintings have an almost abstract quality, devoid of a human presence, a powerful sense of the body is implied in the folds and creases created by the cloth. The Scottish National Collection has a significant number of portraits of artists and a large number of self-portraits, to which this work by Alison Watt is an important addition. Speaking of the acquision, Nicola Kalinsky, Interim Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, said: ‘The Art Fund’s gesture in presenting this exquisite self-portrait by one of the most interesting artists to emerge from Scotland in recent years was hugely generous. Marking the re-opening of the Portrait Gallery, this acquisition underlines our commitment to exploring contemporary portraiture and showcasing Scottish talent.’ Stephen Deuchar, Director of the Art Fund, added: ‘The re-opening of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery was one of the major museum success stories of 2011 – so when its curators asked the Art Fund to support their acquisition of this mesmerizing work we were keen to help. Indeed, by way of congratulating the museum on its triumphant re-opening we exceptionally offered to cover the full purchase cost. Like the museum, Alison Watt is deeply embedded in her Scottish context yet also of international stature, and the Art Fund is pleased to be saluting them both through this grant.’ Alison Watt said: 'I have always been fascinated by portraiture. Over the years I've studied extraordinary examples of it from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's collection, particularly those works by Raeburn, Ramsay and Van Dyck. These paintings transcend time and place. That's what portraiture should do. It's a great thrill to be part of a collection which contains such iconic works.’
EDVARD MUNCH: GRAPHIC WORKS FROM THE GUNDERSEN COLLECTION 7 March–23 September 2012 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art: Modern Two 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3DR Telephone 0131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org | Admission £7 (£5) The Scream comes to Edinburgh as part of Munch exhibition of masterpieces from an outstanding private collection. A spectacular private collection of Munch works – never shown before in the UK – opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this weekend. Featuring 50 master works on paper by the celebrated Norwegian artist, Graphic Works from The Gundersen Collection will be complemented with a number of prints by Munch on loan to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and will give viewers an insight into the working processes and preoccupations of the world famous Norwegian artist. The extraordinary collection of lithographs and woodcuts assembled by Pål Georg Gundersen show Munch’s pioneering working processes and highlights the integral part that printmaking played within his artistic career. Primarily dating from the period 1895 to 1902, the works include many of the motifs that Munch grouped together as a series entitled ‘The Frieze of Life’ that focused on universal concerns of love, anxiety and death. This is the only UK showing of the must-see collection of 50 works; previously the collection has been exhibited at the Kunstmuseen Bergen, Norway in 2010, and at the Musée des Beaux Arts, Caen, France in 2011. Simon Groom, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: 'It is a huge coup to have such an amazing concentration of works by one of the world’s most celebrated artists. As the only UK venue for this exhibition, it will give our visitors a unique opportunity to explore in depth the evolution of thought behind some of the world’s most powerful and iconic works.' Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is often cited as one of the fore-runners of Expressionist art, as well as being a key figure in Symbolism. Born in Norway, Munch’s childhood was fraught with loss – his mother and elder sister, Sophie, both died during his childhood. In 1886 he completed one of his most significant paintings, The Sick Child. Based on his sister’s death, it is one of many works which deal with personal tragedy and Munch later developed the image into a lithograph that he considered to be his most important print. An example of this image was the first work by Munch that Pål Gundersen acquired and three different versions will be shown side by side in the exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Munch was introduced to printmaking in Paris in the mid-1890s, during which time he spent significant periods working in both Paris and Berlin. This period is notable as a prolific and highly productive period in the master painter and printmaker’s career. He made many of his most famous prints during the years 1895 and 1896 including an iconic, hand-coloured version of The Scream that will be on show in Edinburgh. For Munch, print making was a means to share his work as far as possible and he also used the ability to produce multiple impressions to experiment with textures and colours so as to alter the impact and meaning of his works. This exhibition will show Munch in a new light, for both those familiar with his work and those who are coming to it for the first time; Graphic Works from The Gundersen Collection allows visitors to compare different versions of many subjects alongside each other. For example, three examples of the lithograph Madonna show how Munch used colour, both added by hand and in the printing process, to emphasise the drama of his image. The exhibition will also include a special display focusing on the history of Munch’s first solo presentation in the UK that took place in Edinburgh in 1931. As well as provoking a debate about the nature of modern art, Munch’s influence on the work of Scottish artists who saw the show such as William Gillies and William MacTaggart has been recognised. Downstairs at Modern Two, works from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s permanent collection will feature in displays that draw out the wider European context and signal the depth of influence that Munch’s practice had upon artists working across Europe, including paintings and major prints by artists such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wassily Kandinsky.
Farmscapes | Stuart Franklin, Magnum Photos 31 March – 3 June 2012 Admission Free Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Queen Street, Edinburgh. www.nationalgalleries.org Magnum Photographer Stuart Franklin’s three year project to document the Scottish countryside reveals the nature of Scottish agriculture. A fascinating display of sweeping Scottish landscapes by renowned documentary photographer, Stuart Franklin, opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this week. Farmscapes, commissioned by the Gallery in 2007, includes photographs taken over a three year period and records the numerous ways agriculture shapes the Scottish countryside. It creates a dramatic and diverse portrait of Scotland’s landscape, from the Isles of Skye and Harris to Elgin and the Strathmore Valley. Born in 1956, Stuart Franklin has been a member of the famous Magnum Photos agency since 1989, the same year that he took one of the iconic images of the twentieth century – a student defying a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square – for which he won a World Press Award. Farmscapes showcases the extent of agricultural impact on the Scottish countryside through the seasons, under both blue skies and covered in snow. Franklin’s camera has recorded organic pig production in Elgin, a fishery in Harris and crofting in Skye. He has traced the environmental damage caused by intensive forestry in the Trossachs and the impact of mobile phone masts on the landscape near Montrose. With around three quarters of the nation’s land mass devoted to agricultural production, Franklin’s photographs remind us of the significance of farming to the Scottish economy and its profound impact on the shape of the land. Farmscapes also draws attention to environmental themes. Meadow with Ox-eye Daisies, Yellow Rattle and Knapweed, Oronsay shows a meadow in full bloom, luring insects back to pesticide-free surroundings. In Growing Strawberries in Chimney Pots, Carbeth Hutters Community Company, Near Glasgow Franklin picks out a young gardener tending to strawberries grown in reclaimed chimney pots. The Carbeth Hutters Community was set up in the 1920s when plots were made available for city dwellers to let and build holiday homes. Today, the photograph indicates the trend for outdoor initiatives such as allotments and community gardens. Duncan Forbes, Senior Curator of Photography at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery commented: 'Franklin’s photographs are a stunning reminder of the scale of human intervention in the Scottish landscape – the vast majority of our countryside is now farmed in one way or another. It’s the sheer variety of agricultural land use in Scotland which these photographs document.' Farmscapes is an exhibition that highlights what many of us take for granted as our ‘natural’ surroundings. It provides a striking perspective on Scotland’s farmlands, from the large- to small-scale. The exhibition will be in the Contemporary Gallery on the ground floor of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the National Gallery in London are delighted to announce that Titian’s great masterpiece Diana and Callisto has been acquired for the public. This acquisition - along with the purchase of its companion painting Diana and Actaeon in 2009 - ensures that these two superlative works by Titian will remain together on public display in either London or Edinburgh. This also means that the Bridgewater Collection - the greatest private collection of Old Master Paintings in the world – will remain intact on long-term loan at the NGS. Both institutions were acutely aware of the challenges of launching a public campaign during such difficult economic times and therefore decided to approach individual donors and grant-making trusts in the first instance. Our initial discussions led to a number of significant pledges of support, with exceptional charitable grants being offered by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Art Fund and The Monument Trust. We are immensely grateful to all the individuals and trusts whose generous charitable support has made this acquisition possible. Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon have been in the UK for more than 200 years. 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. The paintings left Titian’s studio together and have only changed hands three times since then (from the Spanish Royal Collection to the Orléans collection, and then to the Bridgewater Collection at the end of the eighteenth century). The acquisition of Diana and Callisto means that the pair can remain together in Britain for the enjoyment of the public in perpetuity. The two paintings were offered by the Duke of Sutherland, to NGS and National Gallery in London on very generous terms at prices significantly lower than their market value. Having raised £50 million in 2009 to acquire Diana and Actaeon, the Galleries were given until December 2012 to find a similar amount for Diana and Callisto. To meet this, the Trustees of the National Gallery in London made the unprecedented decision to allocate a significant proportion of their remaining reserves to this acquisition. This sum of £25m principally represents bequests left by members of the public over many years and held by the Gallery for future picture purchases. To assist the Galleries in meeting the funding target, the Duke of Sutherland and his family have agreed to a further reduction of the asking price to £45m. By agreement with all parties a new, earlier deadline was established of the end of March 2012. The generous reduction in price, together with the commitment of the National Gallery in London’s reserves, gave both Galleries a strong basis from which to fundraise. As a result of the joint acquisition, Diana and Callisto will be shared by both institutions and displayed together with Diana and Actaeon on a 60:40 rotating basis in London and Edinburgh, meaning that the public will have access to both works together. This allocation reflects the fact that a larger proportion of the funding for Diana and Callisto has come from the National Gallery in London. Diana and Callisto will be on display from today in London for 18 months (to be joined by Diana and Actaeon on its return from a regional tour in July), and then on display in Scotland for 12 months. Following this, both paintings will be shown together in London for three years and in Scotland for two years. They will then settle into a display cycle of six years in London and four years in Scotland. This acquisition and the continuation of the Bridgewater Loan, which includes masterpieces by artists such as Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt and Poussin, ensure that the NGS retains its status as one of Europe’s great destinations for any lover of Western European art. The Titian pictures have been on continuous public view in the Scottish National Gallery since they were placed there on loan in 1945 by the then 5th Earl of Ellesmere (later 6th Duke of Sutherland). The addition of these masterpieces to the collection in Trafalgar Square, which is already rich in works by Titian for all periods of his activity, establishes the National Gallery as a world centre for the study of Venetian Renaissance painting. John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said, “It has long been an absolute priority for the National Galleries of Scotland to retain the world-famous Bridgewater loan in this country and to keep these superlative masterpieces on view for the enjoyment and inspiration of our visitors We are delighted that the purchase of Callisto will now keep that loan intact and allows the public to continue to enjoy some of the greatest achievements of Western European art. We are hugely grateful to the HLF, the Art Fund and to all the trusts and individuals who have helped to make this possible.” Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, London said, “For more than a hundred years these two great paintings by Titian have been regarded as pre-eminent among the masterpieces in private hands in the UK. We have been able to secure both of them for the public, in a period of economic hardship, because of the esteem and affection that both institutions have enjoyed for many decades. It is a triumph for us, but also for our predecessors, made possible by today's supporters, but also by benefactors who have long departed.” The Duke of Sutherland said, “I am delighted that these two great masterpieces by Titian will remain together as they have been since they were painted in 1556-59 and on view for the public in Britain. I congratulate the two Galleries on their success in securing these works and I would like to express my gratitude for their helpful and supportive approach. I look forward to many more years association between my family and the National Galleries of Scotland through the continuing loan of the Bridgewater Collection." Dame Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said, "Diana and Callisto is an extraordinary painting and we are delighted to be helping secure it for the nation. Along with its pendant, ‘Diana and Actaeon’, it will provide opportunities for inspiration, study and learning. The icing on the cake is the continuation of the long-term loan of the Bridgewater Collection to the National Galleries of Scotland, enabling as many visitors as possible to enjoy it.” Stephen Deuchar, Director of the Art Fund, said, “The Art Fund is pleased to have played a role in ensuring that this masterpiece can continue to be on public display for future generations to enjoy. The two paintings by Titian are amongst the very finest productions of one of the greatest painters, and have influenced generations of artists over the years. By ensuring the two works remain together we greatly augment our understanding of their significance. We look forward to working with the National Galleries in Scotland and London on a major public programme which will foster widening appreciation of Titian’s incomparable achievement as an artist”. Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt said, “This is great news. It shows what can be achieved when determination, goodwill and a tremendous amount of generosity come together. I am very pleased that we have been able to play our part by freeing up the National Gallery’s reserves, diverting more money to arts and heritage from the National Lottery and taking practical steps to encourage greater philanthropy. Diana and Callisto is a breathtakingly beautiful work of art and I am immensely grateful to everyone who has helped to keep it and its companion painting Diana and Actaeon in the UK in perpetuity.” Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs, Fiona Hyslop said, “Securing the long term loan of the Bridgewater Collection is fantastic news – it is great for Scotland, our cultural collections and our economy. The arrangements announced today will see both Titian paintings in Scotland for the Commonwealth Games and Year of Homecoming 2014, enticing people from both home and abroad to visit our national galleries and Scotland.” Breakdown of funding, Diana and Callisto • £5 million reduction in the asking price by the Duke of Sutherland • £3 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund • £2 million from the Art Fund (with an additional£75,000 for a digital public engagement programme) • £15 million donations and grants from individual donors and trusts including The Monument Trust, The Rothschild Foundation, Chris Rokos, Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement, the J. Paul Getty Jnr Charitable Trust, James and Clare Kirkman, Sarah and David Kowitz, Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland, and others who prefer to remain anonymous • £25 million from the National Gallery charitable reserves, principally from legacies left by the public to the NGL over many years • The Art Fund is further supporting both Galleries in the development and implementation of an innovative digital public engagement programme which will provide a wealth of contextual information enabling greater appreciation and understanding of Titian and his paintings.
MASTERPIECES FROM MOUNT STUART: THE BUTE COLLECTION 18 May – 2 December 2012 SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL Admission free A selection of some of the finest Old Master paintings from the famous Bute Collection at Mount Stuart is to go on public display in Scotland for the first time in more than 60 years. Masterpieces from Mount Stuart will be a highlight of the spring exhibition programme at the Scottish National Gallery, featuring superb landscapes, stunning portraits and fascinating scenes of everyday life by artists such as Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Jacob Jordaens. Mount Stuart, a magnificent Victorian Gothic mansion on the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde, was built by the 3rd Marquess of Bute and is home to one of the greatest collections of Old Master pictures in the UK. 19 Dutch, Flemish, Early Netherlandish and French masterpieces will be on show and this will be the largest display of works from the estate seen in public since the 1949 Edinburgh Festival. Among the highlights will be two fabulous rural landscapes by Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), an artist enormously popular with British collectors in the 18th century, and an important winter landscape by Aert van der Neer (1603/04-1677). Jacob van Ruisdael’s impressive Mountain Landscape with a Waterfall (c.1665-70) will be shown alongside a rare winter view of Amsterdam by the artist, appearing for the first time in a public exhibition. Among the portraits on show will be Jacob Jordaens’s beautiful picture of a girl (probably his daughter) with cherries, from the late 1630s, and Joos van Cleve’s enigmatic Portrait of a Lady (c.1530). The exhibition will also include a remarkable group portrait by Antoine Le Nain (c.1600-48), depicting the artist and his two painter brothers in the studio that they shared in Paris. One of the most outstanding works in the Bute Collection is Guillam van Haecht’s picture of an imaginary art cabinet – a room housing a rich collection of paintings and artifacts – which is one of only five such works by this Antwerp artist. The painting dates from around 1630 and, although the collection it depicts is an imagery one, most of the artworks can be identified, including Van Dyck’s Mystic Marriage of St Catherine at centre front, which is now in the Royal Collection. Genre paintings, depicting everyday scenes, will include famous examples by Vermeer’s contemporaries Pieter de Hooch (1629-84) and Gabriel Metsu (1629-67), as well as by Adriaen van Ostade (1610-85), Cornelis Bega (c.1631/32-1664), Jan Steen (1626-1679) and David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690). Masterpieces from Mount Stuart will also feature a superb and rare guardroom scene by Rembrandt’s pupil Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-74), a cityscape of Haarlem by Gerrit Berckheyde (1638-98), showing the majestic Church of St Bavo and an unusually large picture by Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598-1657), depicting the biblical story of Joseph selling corn in Egypt. The Bute Collection was primarily formed in the late eighteenth century by John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute and Prime Minister to George III. The collection was displayed at Luton Hoo, the 3rd Earl’s house in Bedfordshire, until it was destroyed by fire in 1843. Over the years, the paintings were placed in a number of Bute family residences, including properties in London and later at Dumfries House and Cardiff Castle. During the 1940s and 1990s, the paintings were transferred to Mount Stuart. The new house was a replacement for the early Georgian one destroyed by fire in 1877. Mount Stuart is one of the finest examples of Gothic revival architecture in Britain. It was built under John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, and the architect was Sir Robert Rowand Anderson who later designed the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The Medieval inspirations behind the design contrast with its modern technology and building techniques: it had the first electric lighting, modern central heating system, telephone and passenger lift of any house in Scotland; it is also the first house in the modern world to possess an indoor heated swimming pool. Since its opening to the public in 1995, Mount Stuart has been a major visitor attraction in the West of Scotland. This exhibition has been realised in collaboration and with the support of the 7th Marquess of Bute and Mount Stuart Trust.
EDVARD MUNCH: GRAPHIC WORKS FROM THE GUNDERSEN COLLECTION 7 April − 23 September 2012 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh Telephone 0131 624 6200 www.nationalgalleries.org Admission £7 / £5 An outstanding private collection of lithographs and woodcuts by the celebrated Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will be shown in the UK for the first time this spring at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Edvard Munch: Graphic Works from The Gundersen Collection – which opens on April 7 – will feature over fifty of Munch’s most important prints including a number of unique, hand-coloured impressions by the artist, among them an extraordinary version of the world-famous The Scream. This rare work is one of only two hand-coloured versions of the iconic print – the other is held in the Munch Museum, Oslo. Pål Georg Gundersen was inspired to build his collection following his encounter with the artist’s painting The Sick Child in the National Gallery of Norway and several impressions of the related print will be included in the show in Edinburgh. By focusing on prints, the Gundersen collection introduces the intensity and directness of Munch’s work and provides an insight into his pioneering exploration of universal concerns that made him one of the most influential artists of his day. Graphic Works from The Gundersen Collection draws out the themes of love, human relationships, death, melancholy and anxiety that preoccupied Munch throughout his career. Through multiple versions of many of the images, the exhibition investigates Munch’s rigorous experimentation as he revisited and reworked subjects to heighten their emotive impact and to explore colour, texture and techniques. This unique collection shows the working processes behind some of the most startling and iconic images of the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, visitors will be able to compare three different versions of Madonna and five examples of Vampire II. Edvard Munch was born in Norway in 1863. Many of the artist’s most poignant and arresting pieces are the prints he made throughout his long career, and these works express both Munch’s technical mastery and artistic vision. Print-making appealed to Munch for the opportunity they gave in disseminating his images to a wider public, and he was innovative in the different processes and methods that he employed to create such works. As well as frequently printing his own subjects, Munch also worked with master printers in Paris and Berlin, where he spent much of his time over the turn of the 20th century and where his work was regularly exhibited. The exhibition will be supplemented with additional prints by Munch that are held on long-term loan by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from two further private collectors. It will also feature a special display focusing on the legacy of the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, staged in Edinburgh in 1931, that will explore how Munch’s work has been experienced and received in Scotland. Works by other artists from the Gallery’s permanent collection will be shown on the ground floor at Modern Two, in displays introducing the European context in which Munch was active and highly influential, particularly in the realms of Symbolism and Expressionism.
RED CHALK: RAPHAEL TO RAMSAY 18 February – 10 June 2012 SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL Telephone 0131 624 6200 www.nationalgalleries.org Admission free This spring, a fascinating new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery will explore the versatile and beautiful drawing medium of red chalk. Comprising some 35 works from the Gallery’s world-class collection, Red Chalk: Raphael to Ramsay will showcase a diverse range of exquisite drawings by distinguished artists, such as Peter Paul Rubens, Salvator Rosa, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Francois Boucher and David Allan. The display will feature works which, due to their delicate nature are rarely on show, as well as a number of drawings being exhibited for the first time. Red chalk was first used for drawing on paper in late-15th century Italy. Chalk is a naturally occurring mineral, quarried directly from the earth then cut into drawing sticks which can be hand-held or chipped into a point and set into a holder. Drawing chalk can also be made, using ground up natural chalk mixed with water to form a paste then rolled into drawing sticks. This display will highlight the ways in which artists have, over the centuries, exploited the unique nature of red chalk to produce an array of dazzling and distinctive effects that cannot be achieved with any other drawing medium. The earliest drawing on display, and a highlight of the show, will be Raphael’s Study of a Kneeling Nude. This beautiful life-study was made in about 1518 and is a preparatory drawing for one of a series of Raphael’s painted frescos. The delicately drawn figure reveals not only the artist’s phenomenal skill as a draughtsman, but also his meticulous preparation for each composition. Rosa’s powerful and arresting mid-17th century drawing, Head of a Bearded Man, is a fantastic example of red chalk being used to produce a highly expressive finished drawing, intended as a piece of art in its own right. A sheet of figurative studies by the influential Baroque draughtsman Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (1708–87), reveals the incredible precision and control that can be achieved with red chalk, whilst Rubens’ Four Women Harvesting from c.1630 demonstrates how effectively chalk can be used for rapid sketching, with the simplest and most minimal strokes. Red chalk experienced a surge in popularity with French artists in the 18th century. Drawings in the display by Watteau and Boucher will showcase how the medium was used by artists of the Rococo period to produce highly decorative and elegant drawings. Studies by Fragonard and Hubert will also provide superb examples of red chalk being chosen as a useful medium for highly evocative depictions of the landscape. Other highlights will include a preparatory study by Guercino for his monumental oil painting of Erminia Finding the Wounded Tancred (currently displayed in the main gallery), and the Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay’s iconic drawing from 1776 of his second wife, Margaret Lindsay. The show will also include works by artists David Allan, William Delacour and Archibald Skirving to illustrate how the medium was adopted in Scotland. Whether used to draw a detailed study from nature, a summary sketch or a highly polished finished drawing, red chalk is an enduringly popular, richly expressive and unique medium for draughtsmen. Red Chalk: Raphael to Ramsay will showcase the breadth and variety of the Gallery’s drawings collection whilst providing a wonderful opportunity to see beautiful and accomplished drawings by a selection of our most admired artists.