by Jon Lackman | 30 November 2009 | Modern, Museums
From the Times of London:
“Everything is going to be alright” reads the sign above the entrance to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh … But it is controversy not hope that dominates the mood of the gallery’s first re-hang in 25 years. From a collection of more than 130 Scottish Colourist paintings, only four have been included in gallery’s 50th anniversary exhibition, What You See is Where You’re At … The art historian Duncan MacMillan has criticised the selection, saying that people don’t come to Edinburgh to see “a different version of what they see everywhere else. They want to see something distinct.” Dr Simon Groom, the director of modern and contemporary art for the National Galleries of Scotland, disagrees … “In this first hang, we do show works by the Scottish Colourists, but rather than show them together you can see how their use of colour fits in to what the masters of modern art were doing at the time in Paris, where of course the Scottish Colourists went,” he said. “It places them in an international context: this begins to deepen your appreciation and range of them. There are different ways of showing these artists without having them all lumped together, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see a Colourist room.”
“Scotch” is rather antiquated now in the UK. I’ll refrain from moaning about “Times of London” but “Scotch” does indeed look odd, and is considered perjorative in Scotland itself.
Thanks, my bad. I’d just been to a whisky tasting and so had the word on the mind.