meof dinburgh Collective it is the best situated gallery in Britain, perched atop Calton Hill with glorious views of Arthur’s Seat and the sea beyond Leith. Unfortunately, every time I go there, the art is garbage. Ruth Ewan’s Marxist caricature The Beast meets the sloppy standards of this gallery. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born industrialist who became one of America’s wealthiest philanthropists, is rebuked by his own dinosaur’s “dippy”, the famous diplodocus whose skeleton he put on display in Pittsburgh while sending casts to museums around the world, including Britain’s Natural History Museum, as an ambassador for world peace.
In Ewan’s film, Dippy chides a kilt-clad Carnegie for hiding his ruthless capitalism behind a largesse that included founding 2,509 libraries around the world. That doesn’t wash off with Dippy. “Turn to dust, Andrew Carnegie!” she urges. The animation is as rubbish as the plot is one-sided.
However, the theme of Scottish philanthropy is shared by the best show at the Edinburgh arts festival, taste for impressionism in the Scottish National Gallery, down on the Mound. This exhibition celebrates wealthy Scottish art collectors, in particular Alexander and Rosalind Maitland, who bought masterpieces of modern French art and bequeathed them to the public. This may not sound like a recipe for excitement, even with the much talked about reveal of a hidden van gogh self-portrait in the back of a studio for The Potato Eaters. But it is an irresistible box of chocolates for the eyes with a few shots of absinthe.
Monet’s Haystacks: Snow Effect is a dazzling dreamlike painting from 1891 in which silver and blue light reflected off snow turns two bread-shaped haystacks into ethereal abstractions against a pink sky. Gauguin’s Landscape of Martinique matches it in the abstract intensity of its reds and greens, cooking up a tropical heat that dissolves reality. This cavalcade of perceptual revolutions also stars Courbet, Millet, Pissarro and Cézanne, and a Degas bronze of a woman stripping everything in the bathroom whose explicitness is unparalleled today except Tracey Emin, whose nudes are in Edinburgh’s Jupiter Artland for comparison. He climaxes with Matisse’s Jazz. It is seen with new clarity how Matisse, in these 1940s prints that identify with African-American music, expressed his hatred of Nazism and his belief in freedom: his constantly transforming sheared colors shape and reshape prints so spontaneously. like a bebop solo.
How do you follow that? Platform at the French Institute billed as a stage for ’emerging’ Scottish artists, but this leaves one wondering how they will be judged, as students or full-fledged practitioners? There is a feeling here that artists are too complacent and get away with things that are insignificant. Perhaps Scotland needs nastier art critics. I like Lynsey MacKenzie’s room of pink, orange, and yellow abstract paintings, windswept and clean; however, she needs another dimension, a deeper thought to make them great.
On the other hand, perhaps this loss of purpose and energy in art is a worldwide phenomenon. A Talbot rice, the kind of strangely arbitrary space that makes you wonder why anyone thought it would make a good art gallery, a survey by London-based Céline Condorelli raises concerns about whether someone is imposing quality control somewhere now. . Condorelli’s installations include plants and celebrate playgrounds, as well as the modernist architecture of Brazil. I seem to have seen it a hundred times before. Semi-comprehensible utopian rhetorical wandering mixes with collections of found objects and cocktails of color without emotional resonance. This is an art that exists only for someone to write a thesis on it.
You can see art that lives and breathes in frames, a photography center lined with tourist cafes on a street off the Royal Mile, where Japan’s Ishiuchi Miyako has a small but powerful retrospective of her surprisingly intimate photographs. Passing through the gallery shop entrance you find yourself surrounded by frayed and torn but exquisitely colorful clothes: a blue and white suit that has been savagely ripped, lace dresses that look charred and gnawed by giant moths. What makes these photographs so amazing is Ishiuchi’s perfect lighting and color, which you feel like she must have spent months getting like this. And then you realize what they are.
These are the clothes of the victims of the atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima in 1945. It takes a serious artist to expose a genuinely new perspective on such a tragedy, but these hauntingly beautiful images make you see the horror for the first time: the torn clothes in the closets or the torn and burned bodies, their fragile and delicate, fashions that still bear witness to all the variety of lives that stopped in a moment. Ishiuchi brings the same haunting intimacy to the images of her late mother’s possessions and Frida Kahlo’s medical corset, apparently capable of putting her camera inside objects, to touch ghosts.
down the hill in the Fruit Market Gallery there is more evidence that art can escape the corset of ideological curation to express something about being alive. Daniel Silver has created a crazy world of ceramic people, mixed with wild and hilarious carelessness and then painted in mind-blowing colours. The small figures are spread out on tables with huge human clay legs and an “audience” of grimacing faces stares back at you, while random giant legs take up a third space of their own. Silver’s people should be absurd, like Carnegie and his dinosaur. But the difference is empathy. Their clay faces and bodies may be ridiculous, but have you looked in the mirror lately? We are them. Each one of these vulnerable and isolated beings is an expressionist portrait of human existence. Silver echoes Auerbach and Baselitz, and they are among the best artists to echo.
There’s a lot of depth to this arts festival, and even the silliest things are, after all, an excuse to explore one of Europe’s most remarkable cities. do not miss Dovecot Studios, near the South Bridge, where you can watch the weavers at work and see a retrospective of the late Scottish modernist Alan Davie. At the time of his death in 2014, the nonagenarian Davie could not have seemed less relevant. However, this exhibition confirms him as an artist of acerbic power, the Scotsman Jackson Pollock, who kept the flame of abstract art burning in a Britain that had little time for it. Art either has guts and vision or it doesn’t, and Davie’s rough and spattered paintings have it in abundance.