Billed as a breakthrough exhibition, Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios, in partnership with the Fleming Collection, is showing the work of the Scottish Colourists in the context of their European and UK contemporaries and showing how this international generation of radical painters forged a new language of colour in Paris in the early 20th century.
S J Peploe (1871-1935), J D Fergusson (1874-1961), G L Hunter (1877-1931) and F C B Cadell (1883-1937) are widely recognised as Scotland’s most talented, experimental and distinctive artists of that period, often exhibiting as a quartet, in isolation from their contemporaries. Now their work will be shown alongside Fauve painters such as Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, who sparked a colour revolution; works such as Derain’s renowned Fauvist Pool of London, lent by the city’s Tate, is onshore alongside major institutional loans, including key works by Bloomsbury Group innovators Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and major examples from Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Group.
The exhibition also looks at the possible ‘Celtic’ connection in the primal response to colour by Welsh artists Augustus John and John Dickson Innes, and Ireland’s Roderic O’Connor, suggesting a continuity between the approach taken by these artists and that of the Scots – altogether representing an unparalleled opportunity for visitors to test the conventions around who, among the avant-garde pack of UK artists inspired by French innovation, should be considered the leading radical painters in the 1905 – 1914 period.
The exhibition also examines the influence of other European movements such as Cubism and Vorticism on this group of artists at the time, and the Scottish Colourists as a distinct group in the 1920s and 1930s, combining the influences of French colour and Scottish light on their work as painters of landscape, still life, and interiors – and with their dedicated group show having been held in Paris in 1924, followed by a 1925 London show, this exhibition marks a timely centenary celebration.
From March, the exhibition will be supported by a series of displays in Dovecot’s Balcony Gallery of contemporary Scottish artists working with colour in creative and challenging ways in various media.
Also showing is Ptolemy Mann: Woven Colour (see below) featuring hand-woven rugs, ‘thread paintings’ and paintings on paper and canvas, until 17th May.
