Decades: The Art of Change 1900–1980
National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2

DECADES: The Art of Change 1900-1980 is the type of exhibition one would expect from a national gallery: the type of exhibition that confidently expresses how art is a mirror to society, that art is how we reflect and learn about our history, and how we learn about ourselves, our future. 

It is the first exhibition at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s “Modern Two” gallery since it closed due to an inability to meet funding needs, caused by rising energy costs. 

The works in this come-back exhibition beautifully, disturbingly and expertly express the social and material history of their times, the period from 1900 to the 1970s. This expresses not only the social value of art, but also the value of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to Scotland.

A prime example and highlight of the exhibition is Christopher Wood’s Nude Boy in a Room (1930), painted just prior to the artist’s suicide. The painting communicates Wood’s anxiety with society’s attitude to homosexuality in the 1930s. It presents the subject, Wood’s lover Francis Rose, with his back to the viewer, staring at an older woman’s portrait on the wall, with tarot cards spread behind him on the bed.

There is an uneasiness to the painting, and the show invites you to compare it to David Hockney’s etching for “The Beginning, printed in ‘Four Poems’ from CP Cavafy” which was  published in 1967, the year that homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales. 

This simple and beautiful etching depicts two naked men relaxed in bed, eyes engaging confidently with the viewer, and gives one a sense of the massive shift in social attitudes to homosexuality between these two periods.
 
The wartime/postwar climate of anxiety and fear during the 1940s is expertly expressed in Merlyn Francis’s distorted and spiky The Chess Players (1940), depicting the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, whose geopolitical positioning in war is a stark reminder of the game being played between US-led Nato and Russia in Ukraine, with no regard for the consequences of the ordinary people of these lands. 
 
Cold war anxieties in the 1950s, brought about a conflict in the material conditions of art, as to which form best expressed these anxieties: Abstraction or Realism? A highlight of 1950s Abstraction in the exhibition (and of the exhibition itself) is Eduardo Paolozzi’s St Sebastian I (1957). Frequently used as an image to channel same-sex love, this time he is no more than a mass of seemingly burnt and disjointed artefacts, drawing a parallel between the Christian martyr and the people of the post-Holocaust, nuclear age. 
 
In fact, the change in the approach to materials is most eloquently expressed in the sculpture on display, that moves from traditional bronze and plaster, to the resin of Duane Hanson’s The Tourists (1970), to the fabric in Jean Howarth’s Old Lady II (1967). 
 
The 1950s were also characterised by post-war reconstruction and ideas of socialism, expressed here in figurative works. Some of these works are the most impressive in the exhibition, including Josef Herman’s little known and evocative Miners (1951) and Fernand Legere’s Study for “The Constructors”: The Team at Rest (1950). 
 
While the growing consumerism of the 1960s is represented in Warhol’s Jacqueline Kennedy II (1965) and Lichtenstein’s Car (1963), the more interesting work from this period is the change towards sharper and cleaner characterisation, such as the Op Art pieces by Bridget Riley Over (1966) and Blaze (1962) with their black lines creating optical effects. 

What is missing from the art of this period is any commentary on the change in social attitudes leaving only Hockney’s The Beginning to communicate changing attitudes to sex and sexuality.

The art of the 1970s makes up for this lack of social reflection, through the innovation of performance art and minimalism, exemplified here through works by performance artist, and founder member of the German Green Party Joseph Beuys and Braco Dimitijevic. 

The ephemerality of performance art is overcome by exhibiting artefacts and photographs from the performances, as well as stitched photographs.  This is not entirely satisfying, but works sufficiently well to invoke something of the material and social history of art at the time.
 
Until January 7 2024, admission free