Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Drove to Edinburgh for the second time today. I went to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Dean Gallery with is just across the road. Unfortunately, the Dean was between shows and so there was little to see. There was some surrealist work on the first floor that was nice to view in an intimate space There was a small collage by Kurt Schwitters that, as always, was beautiful.



On the lower floor of the National Gallery of Modrn Art there was a sparsely hung show by landscape painter Carol Rhodes. The paintings are oil on masonite, mostly aerial landscapes and showed a very nice sensibility for the quality of oil paint on masonite. Individually, many were very good, but overall the presentation was somewhat weak. There was an awkwardness of the drawing in a number of the paintings which, if intended, just wasn't quite wrong enough to be right. But I am being too harsh, the quality of paint reminded me of the early work of my friend Philip Rosenthal and I really enjoyed the show.

Upstairs they had two paintings by Gerhard Richter. One of the paintings is from his blurred photo realist series and the other was from the "Abstract Painting" series. It was nice to be able to see them together in the same room. I must admit that I never really have much appreciated the mechanistic results of his abstract painting series. This one looks pretty good in the small image I included here, but in person, the medium sized (5'x5') painting is lacking in the same way they always are for me.



There was a Richard Long installation of an "X" made of slate behind the building called "The Slate Cross". In size it is maybe 30'x30' and is made of 8 tons of slate. Looking for some more information on it, I see that a photo of it from above (scroll down a bit in page linked to his name), it has a nice effect, better than walking around it at ground level. In general, I like Long's work quite a bit more than Andy Goldsworthy whose work is quite similar but which is better known. The content in Goldsworthy's work seems to be its prettiness in the context of nature and it is contrived for just this effect. Long's work (going back to 1960's) is conceptual in content but concrete in implementation. The artifacts created from his explorations might be mistaken for those of Goldworthy. Still, this piece didn't do much for me in person, perhaps I'm not attuned to the aesthetic of Cornwall slate. I am sorry to have missed his recent show "Walking and Marking" of which this piece is remnant.

I did very much like a conceptual piece by a Scottish artist named Douglas Gordon called List of names random started in 1990 and ongoing. It is essentially the all the names he can recall of everyone he's ever met. The names are carefully stenciled on a wall in the stairwell that is three stories high. His account of the process, of forgetting and misremembering is important. And besides, how did they get all those names so straight and true.

There is a very nice Vuillard on the third floor
La causette [The Chat] painted in 1893. Vuillard's work is often small (this one is 12"x16") and precious and the use of black (real black) in this painting is stunning when seen in person. The image here does not do it justice.


So this brings up a rather interesting second order aspect of art works; some work seems to photograph well, looking better in photographs than perhaps it does in person, while other work does not photograph well but is good in person. It's possible that the image of the Vuillard could be better, but in my experience this is work that has to be seen up close to be appreciated to full effect. This failure of representation of representations was a theme in William Gaddis' dense novel The Recognitions.

The gallery does not permit photography, which is rather disappointing. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, you may take photographs, but you must not use a flash, which seems a reasonable rule to me. The images I included above fall under fair use (or since I am in the UK, fair dealing) of copyrighted material and all copyrights are held by the artists.