Newspaper Article

Keeping up with the times

Macmillan, Duncan

2009

Overview

The Gallery of Modern Art began in Inverleith House, a Georgian domestic building. Twenty-five years later it moved to its current home, the former John Watson's School in Belford Road. Fifteen years after that move, the Dean Gallery opened on the other side of the road. It was a former orphanage, while John Watson's was a school for fatherless children. I don't think this legacy of deprivation met by charitable intent has affected the way the galleries have evolved. Nevertheless, neither a Georgian house, nor a Georgian institution would ever be first choice for a gallery of modern art. Indeed, [Stanley Cursiter] wanted a new building. He had a design and even a site in mind. In the late 1970s, when \"dishing the Nats\" became a priority for Westminster in advance of the 1979 referendum, money miraculously became available for Scottish projects. Some was used to build the gloomy Scottish basement for the National Gallery at the Mound. According to the late Colin Thompson, NGS director at the time, there was also money for a new Gallery of Modern Art on Cursiter's chosen site, but the opportunity was missed. So the SNGMA still works in an architectural straitjacket, just as it did when it first opened in the small domestic rooms of Inverleith House. The gallery has always worked in a financial straitjacket, too. In 1938, it would have been possible to form a representative collection of Modernism with limited means. Twenty years later, modern masterpieces had become classics with prices to match. Nevertheless, some important early acquisitions were made, the small but lovely Cubist painting The Candlestick by Braque, bought in 1976, for instance, and Picasso's still-life with fish, Les Soles, bought in 1967. Less conventional was the purchase of pictures such as Otto Dix's Girl on a Fur in 1980 and, in the same year, Roy Lichtenstein's Pop masterpiece In the Car. Nevertheless, the SNGMA might have remained a very poor relation of other galleries of the kind, if it had not been for the acquisition of Eduardo Paolozzi's studio, then of the Keiller and Penrose collections, and more recently of Anthony d'Offay's collection. With Paolozzi's gift, the SNGMA became at a stroke the central collection for one of the most significant artists to come out of Scotland in the last century. Closely linked, the Penrose and Keiller collections gave the gallery a major body of Surrealist work, while the d'Offay collection includes some of the most celebrated, if not necessarily the best, art of the past 40 years.

• Publisher: Scotsman Publications
• Subject: Cursiter, Stanley / Paolozzi, Eduardo