A welcome update for the national collection

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art serves to bring homegrown and international talent to local and international audiences, with a focus on modernity rather than Scotland.

That said, the work of Scots such as Frances Macdonald MacNair, Barbara Rae and Alberta Whittle are welcome additions to the national collection. MacNair, who was born in 1873, and Whittle, born more than a century later, bookend this artistic treasure trove.

MacNair, the sister of the artist-designer Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh — wife of Charles Rennie — was never timid. But here, Bows shows a female figure in what the curators rather coyly describe as “placed within interlocking organic shapes, the lower of which loosely resembles a rose.” The forms seem decidedly vulvic and the work is unarguably sexual.

Whittle, who will represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale next year, is a star in its ascendancy. A Scot with Barbadian heritage, she is riding a zeitgeist in which “woke” concerns extending to colonialism, slavery and racial exploitation are to the fore.

Here, a series of three images by European artists have been reimagined and adapted to convey alternative or opposing meanings. In one, Jan van der Straet’s Allegory of America (c. 1587), which shows the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci’s first encounter with the New World, Whittle has subtly erased the face of the European.

Whittle is one of a number of black artists — the others are Michael Armitage, Wangechi Mutu and Deborah Roberts — whose work represents a long-overdue balancing of the national collection.

The Czech artist known as Toyen, whose given name was Marie Čermínová, died in 1980, the same year as Whittle was born, but her concerns are, unsurprisingly, significantly different from the younger artist. The Message of the Forest (1936) was painted when storm clouds were gathering over Europe and this mysterious, haunting allegory, depicting a large owl-like bird with a human head in its talons, reflects the mood of the times.

Toyen’s is one of a number of works — Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning are among others here — that augment an already world-class Surrealist collection. Add names such as Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Naum Gabo and you begin to get an idea of the flavour and quality of this show.

It is impossible to mention all the stand-out pieces but a collaborative video, Sign Sign: A Close Duet, by Hanna Tuulikki, celebrating the nomenclature and topography of Edinburgh’s Old Town is another judicious inclusion.

The broad chronology and range of this show represent some of the most impressive art movements and artists from the past century.

Runs until Spring 2023.