From Death to Death and Other Small Tales: Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Edinburgh
Death seems to be a popular subject in museums at the moment. Stephen Lloyd takes the pulse of this offering from the National Galleries of Scotland
There is no doubt that Edinburgh’s art-loving public – with the wealth of national galleries and museums on their doorstep – have developed a sophisticated but elatively conservative taste for international exhibitions of historic and modern art that cover a broad range of topics.
Recent and forthcoming exhibitions at the National Museum of Scotland include last summer’s Catherine the Great from St Petersburg, the current Vikings from Stockholm and next summer’s homegrown Mary, Queen of Scots.
The annual series of monographic shows devoted to the Scottish colourists is packing in delighted visitors to the Dean Gallery, now confusingly renamed Modern Two for short.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (now Modern One), achieved a remarkable triumph in the Olympic summer with its complete reinterpretation of Tate’s Picasso and Modern British Art.
Uplifted from the poorly lit and dispiriting basement on the site of the former Millbank penitentiary, our understanding of Picasso’s multifaceted and hardworn acceptance in the UK was transformed by additions from the Scottish gallery’s outstanding archive of modern European art.
However, Edinburgh has been starved – or spared, depending on your point of view – when it comes to being served the regulatory diet of international contemporary conceptual art over the past couple of decades.
The exception to this is the Anthony d’Offay Artist Rooms project, which has exposed Edinburgh, and the furthest reaches of the UK, to seemingly endless displays by leading British and American contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck and Cindy Sherman, alongside luminaries from the previous generation such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has struggled to make its curatorial mark in response to the bewilderingly rapid pace of change in contemporary artistic practice.
The overheating of the international art market and the dominance of very wealthy private collectors has made it difficult for major publicly funded galleries to buy significant pieces of art for their permanent collections.
As a result, the more nimble and flexible kunsthalle or temporary exhibition space, which does not have a duty to show its permanent collection, has come into its own over the past couple of decades.
In Edinburgh, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has been consistently out- performed by its much smaller city neighbours at Inverleith House (a jewel-box of a Georgian mansion in the Royal Botanic Garden) and the Fruitmarket Gallery for the display of cutting-edge contemporary art.
Avant-garde tendencies have been frustrated at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which welcomed a new director, Simon Groom, in 2007. He has had to contend with the fixed layout of smallish spaces in the former school building, which are essentially a series of classrooms and dormitories.
The gallery also has a duty to show its world-class collections of 20th-century Scottish modern art and European movements, notably the surrealists, alongside patchy strengths in British and American modernism.
In a bold move the gallery has now put the vast majority of its permanent collection into storage and thrown open its doors to some full-blown conceptual art, produced over the past two to three decades, by displaying some space-hungry “masterpieces” from the D. Daskalopoulos collection, alongside major works – mainly dada and surrealist – from the permanent collection.
Visitors should be warned that the invaders do not form a pretty sight, with parents advised that the show is not suitable for children because of “nudity and imagery of an explicit nature”.
The pompous and obscurantist title of the exhibition, apparently borrowed from Joseph Beuys, gives a clue to the curators’ fetishistic focus on death and sex alongside the fashionable curatorial obsession with “the body”.
Death has also been the subject of recent exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and the Museum of London.
While classic works of European modernism and works by Duchamp, Magritte, Max Ernst, Delvaux and Miró, provide a profound impact, it is Picasso’s very late Seated Nude from 1969 that for me stands head and shoulders above the rest of the items in the show.
The painting shows a mutilated and splayed woman where all of the artist’s anxieties about women, sex and mortality are morphed into a terrifying portrait of existential angst.
After that early visual coup, other moments of interest are provided by female British artists: Tracey Emin with curiously moving self-portrait monotypes, Sarah Lucas with her witty, yet arresting, assemblage Bunny Gets Snookered No. 10 and Rachel Whiteread’s already timeless casts of empty spaces.
Other abrasive and blackboard-scratching highlights include Marina Abramovic’s video installation of a skeleton being scrubbed, Cleaning the Mirror #1, and Richard Gober’s obsession with extremely unpleasant and quasi-perverse games with wax and hair, the two dominant media in the Daskalopoulos collection.
Video installations abound, notably the baroque extravaganza by Matthew Barney and the pretend-schlock bacchic orgy by Paul McCarthy.
The exhibition is beautifully installed by the National Galleries of Scotland’s art handling and conservation teams. However, it is worrying that the accompanying publication has been delayed by six months.
Is this because of cutbacks in the curatorial and publications teams? Very little information is available to those visiting the exhibition, and the accompanying educational programme seems to be virtually non-existent.
Visitors who are in search of enlightenment from the artists, curators and collector are advised in the meantime to search out the fine publications from the two most recent shows of selections from the Daskalopoulos collection: Keeping it Real at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2010 and The Luminous Interval in 2011 at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Stephen Lloyd is the curator of the Derby Collection at Knowsley Hall on Merseyside and former president of the International Council of Museums’ committee of fine art museums and collections
Recent and forthcoming exhibitions at the National Museum of Scotland include last summer’s Catherine the Great from St Petersburg, the current Vikings from Stockholm and next summer’s homegrown Mary, Queen of Scots.
The annual series of monographic shows devoted to the Scottish colourists is packing in delighted visitors to the Dean Gallery, now confusingly renamed Modern Two for short.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (now Modern One), achieved a remarkable triumph in the Olympic summer with its complete reinterpretation of Tate’s Picasso and Modern British Art.
Uplifted from the poorly lit and dispiriting basement on the site of the former Millbank penitentiary, our understanding of Picasso’s multifaceted and hardworn acceptance in the UK was transformed by additions from the Scottish gallery’s outstanding archive of modern European art.
However, Edinburgh has been starved – or spared, depending on your point of view – when it comes to being served the regulatory diet of international contemporary conceptual art over the past couple of decades.
The exception to this is the Anthony d’Offay Artist Rooms project, which has exposed Edinburgh, and the furthest reaches of the UK, to seemingly endless displays by leading British and American contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck and Cindy Sherman, alongside luminaries from the previous generation such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has struggled to make its curatorial mark in response to the bewilderingly rapid pace of change in contemporary artistic practice.
The overheating of the international art market and the dominance of very wealthy private collectors has made it difficult for major publicly funded galleries to buy significant pieces of art for their permanent collections.
As a result, the more nimble and flexible kunsthalle or temporary exhibition space, which does not have a duty to show its permanent collection, has come into its own over the past couple of decades.
In Edinburgh, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has been consistently out- performed by its much smaller city neighbours at Inverleith House (a jewel-box of a Georgian mansion in the Royal Botanic Garden) and the Fruitmarket Gallery for the display of cutting-edge contemporary art.
Avant-garde tendencies have been frustrated at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which welcomed a new director, Simon Groom, in 2007. He has had to contend with the fixed layout of smallish spaces in the former school building, which are essentially a series of classrooms and dormitories.
The gallery also has a duty to show its world-class collections of 20th-century Scottish modern art and European movements, notably the surrealists, alongside patchy strengths in British and American modernism.
In a bold move the gallery has now put the vast majority of its permanent collection into storage and thrown open its doors to some full-blown conceptual art, produced over the past two to three decades, by displaying some space-hungry “masterpieces” from the D. Daskalopoulos collection, alongside major works – mainly dada and surrealist – from the permanent collection.
Visitors should be warned that the invaders do not form a pretty sight, with parents advised that the show is not suitable for children because of “nudity and imagery of an explicit nature”.
The pompous and obscurantist title of the exhibition, apparently borrowed from Joseph Beuys, gives a clue to the curators’ fetishistic focus on death and sex alongside the fashionable curatorial obsession with “the body”.
Death has also been the subject of recent exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and the Museum of London.
While classic works of European modernism and works by Duchamp, Magritte, Max Ernst, Delvaux and Miró, provide a profound impact, it is Picasso’s very late Seated Nude from 1969 that for me stands head and shoulders above the rest of the items in the show.
The painting shows a mutilated and splayed woman where all of the artist’s anxieties about women, sex and mortality are morphed into a terrifying portrait of existential angst.
After that early visual coup, other moments of interest are provided by female British artists: Tracey Emin with curiously moving self-portrait monotypes, Sarah Lucas with her witty, yet arresting, assemblage Bunny Gets Snookered No. 10 and Rachel Whiteread’s already timeless casts of empty spaces.
Other abrasive and blackboard-scratching highlights include Marina Abramovic’s video installation of a skeleton being scrubbed, Cleaning the Mirror #1, and Richard Gober’s obsession with extremely unpleasant and quasi-perverse games with wax and hair, the two dominant media in the Daskalopoulos collection.
Video installations abound, notably the baroque extravaganza by Matthew Barney and the pretend-schlock bacchic orgy by Paul McCarthy.
The exhibition is beautifully installed by the National Galleries of Scotland’s art handling and conservation teams. However, it is worrying that the accompanying publication has been delayed by six months.
Is this because of cutbacks in the curatorial and publications teams? Very little information is available to those visiting the exhibition, and the accompanying educational programme seems to be virtually non-existent.
Visitors who are in search of enlightenment from the artists, curators and collector are advised in the meantime to search out the fine publications from the two most recent shows of selections from the Daskalopoulos collection: Keeping it Real at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2010 and The Luminous Interval in 2011 at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Stephen Lloyd is the curator of the Derby Collection at Knowsley Hall on Merseyside and former president of the International Council of Museums’ committee of fine art museums and collections
Project data
- Cost not disclosed
- Main funders Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; D. Daskalopoulos; Government Indemnity Scheme provided by Scottish government
- Curators Keith Hartley; Lucy Askew
- Graphic design Sumo
- Exhibition ends 8 September