Showstoppers
Until September 11; City Art Centre, Edinburgh

During my brief and unillustrious career in PR, I learned that a few key phrases go a long way. If an exhibition could not be described as the first ever, the biggest ever, or never-before-seen, it was unlikely to score much in the way of column inches. Furthermore, if a press release bore the legend “permanent collection display”, it was with the tacit understanding that the show would be buried alive in the deepest nooks and crannies of the listings pages.

It’s a similar mentality that causes most of us to put off that visit to Edinburgh Castle or to the Mackintosh House, because they will still be there next year. As a result, we’re missing out on some of the best jewels in our own crown, while the tourists sensibly lap them up.

A prime example is the national collection of Scottish art, kept in a gloomy basement on the Mound, where, before the Playfair Project was completed, it was cleared out annually to make way for festival blockbusters. A few yards away, the City Art Centre has its own cracking collection of Scottish art, and its fate has been depressingly similar.

Since its inception in the 1980s, the City Art Centre’s bosses have argued that a permanent exhibition from the collection would compromise the space for populist blockbusters. So, dinosaurs and Darth Vader usurp a host of first class artworks which languish in the basement store. This year, the art is fighting back, and for the summer exhibition, three blockbusting floors are devoted to the gallery’s own collection.

Showstoppers proves that the city’s art has got what it takes. There almost 100 works on show, ranging across the past 250 years. There are the inevitable pictures of local topographical interest, but most of the paintings and sculptures are of national importance. Indeed some are so good that you wonder why you’ve never seen them before, and why they are allowed to disappear from public view for months or years on end.

The 18th century works include a quality Raeburn and two Allan Ramsays. Squeezed onto a wall only just big enough for it is the Entry of George IV into Edinburgh, a large oil painting by John Wilson Ewbank in 1827. I’ve never seen it before – and to be honest – I’ve never heard of the painter either. But it’s a wonderful painting, using patches of sunlight, smoke and cloud to pick out details in a landscape which ranges from luscious hills to grey, cartoon-like tenement houses. An enormous procession of people ties the whole picture together, every tiny head painted with easy fluency.

Sixty years later, James Cadenhead’s magnificent portrait of his mother pays tribute to his contemporary, Whistler. The comparison is clear, between his muted harmony of tone and form, and Whistler’s own famous portrait of his mother. But Cadenhead goes further, setting the sombre figure against a sumptuous display of colour: three bright orange goldfish, a vase of daffodils and a tumbling mass of silk thread and fabric.

Behind this rainbow of objects sits a Japanese screen, adding another spatial dimension to the painting. The golden screen, with its flattened, decorative space, leads the eye back around to the woman’s dark figure. This is not pictorial trickery – it’s total mastery of space and composition.

Working twenty years later, but also hugely inspired by Japanese design, Edward Atkinson Hornel produced Seashore Roses. The three pretty girls painted into a pretty seascape would be sickly-sweet if it wasn’t for the incredible surface of the work. Each brush stroke is defined individually, breaking up the figures and the flowery hilltop into one fragmented mass. It’s a painting of paint, more than anything else.

Unfortunately these early paintings are all displayed in the lower ground floor, which is a miserable place to be, lacking fresh air and daylight, and covered in scruffy wooden cladding. If the works ever go on permanet display it should definitely not be down here.

Moving out of this airless gloom and into the 20th century, the gallery’s significant clutch of Colourist paintings comes to the fore. Samuel J Peploe’s early still life, with its dark, Dutch palette and creamy Impressionist brushwork, is a world away from the JD Fergusson still life next to it. The Blue Lamp, Fergusson’s work, pushes everything towards the viewer with dark contours and dry, chalky paint.

Fergusson’s Blue Hat and Cadell’s Black Hat, as popular examples of the Colourists at their elegant best, need no introduction. The gallery also owns a fine Stanley Cursiter, less well-known, which echoes Cadell’s pose exactly. A young woman in a fair isle jumper and hat shares the poise and elegance of the Colourist’s model, but Cursiter shrinks from the exuberance of Cadell’s brushwork, preferring a more modest approach.

The uppermost of the three floors is devoted to recent decades of Scottish art. One of John Bellany’s great masterpieces of the late 1960s is here; in Obsession, five gnarled figures are stripped raw by their harsh fishing existence, but it’s stern religion that really rubs salt into their wounds. Even the clouds are shaped like ominous all-seeing fish.

Three of the four New Glasgow Boys are represented by works from their glory years in the 1980s, but only one stands out as a really fine example, and that’s Adrian Wiszniewski’s self-portrait. The thick black contours and burning hot colours run in chunky waves around the artist’s head, their rhythm almost musical.

Wiszniewski’s painting is connected to many others in this show by virtue of those heavy black contours and searing colours. They are all around; in Fergusson’s still lives and portraits; in William MacTaggart’s autumn woodland; in Alan Davie’s idiosyncratic take on Abstract Expressionism.

The wall-texts don’t make those connections for you, though. The interpretation is loose, and avoids sweeping generalisations about schools and movements. Instead we are presented with a pick and mix of works, whose order does little to teach us about chronology or historical development, perhaps by choice.

While the collection is strong on late 19th and early 20th century work, it’s pretty thin on contemporary art. Graham Fagen’s Nothank is the latest to join the collection, and is the only video-based, conceptual work of art in a show almost entirely devoted to painting of the most painterly variety.

The message to take from this show is not that all of the works need to be on display all of the time, but some of them definitely should be. Stars like the Cadenhead and Hornel deserve to be admired all year round, added to curriculums and published in books and tourist brochures.

I’m happy to eat my PR hat; this is one permanent collection display that’s worth making a fuss about.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 03.07.05