Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, 10th July-9th January 2011
This summer the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is 50. Gracefully situated since 1980 in a grand, neoclassical building beside the Water of Leith, its lawn now dominated by Charles Jencks’s dramatic Landform (2002), wise stewardship has made this one of the best public collections of modern art in Britain. To celebrate its half centenary, the Dean Gallery annexe—the forbidding late Georgian former orphanage across the road—will be given over entirely to the national gallery’s magnificent holdings of surrealist art.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has been one of the richest repositories of Dada and surrealist art in the world since 1995, when key purchases were made from the collection of the English surrealist painter Roland Penrose, and Gabrielle Keiller, a dedicated art collector (and international golfer) bequeathed a generous legacy. Besides paintings and sculptures by surrealism’s main protagonists, on display will be a vast accumulations of artists’ books, other writings, manuscripts, print portfolios and drawings, supplemented by major foreign loans. We are told that the hang of this exhibition will emulate the dramatic presentation of work at the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in London in 1936, which was Britain’s first introduction to this overwhelming other world of the imagination.
This article originally appeared in the July 2010 edition of Prospect.
