Art For A New World

Duncan MacMillan applauds an exhibition that reassesses the contribution made by Scottish artists to the great movements of Modern art

In 1950, there was public outrage when a big abstract painting by William Gear called Autumn Landscape was bought by the Arts Council. Gear was a Scot. A ‘monument man’, who, to their enduring gratitude, cared for living German artists as well as for those of the past, he had gone straight from Germany to Paris in 1947. William Turnbull, Eduardo Paolozzi and, more briefly, Alan Davie were also in Paris. There, they developed a savage, new, abstract and expressive version of Modernism: art for a new world that was not an easy one.

It was no coincidence that it was Scots who led the way in reconnecting with Europe after the war. There was a longstanding involvement of Scottish artists with Europe and with new artistic ideas, and this exhibition sets out to explore it.

Gear’s painting is in the show, together with dramatic works by Davie, although it’s a pity that Paolozzi and Turn bull are less well represented. Otherwise almost forgotten, Charles Pulsford’s Three Angels (1949 shows that he, too, shared their radical approach. Together, the work of these artists challenges the view that, as radical ideas cascaded down from Europe, our own artists could only play catch-up. This group was stimulated by the international mix of artists in Paris, but their art was their own.