From tomorrow until the 16th of September, the Arc is home to one of the most impressive exhibits of historical Scottish art to cross the border. The touring exhibition The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives sees over fifty exceptional artworks from the 20th century enter the gallery. A plethora of paintings from John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Boileau Caddell, Samuel John Peploe and George Leslie Hunter, the artists known as the Scottish Colourists, will fill the gallery with expressive energy.
This article in anticipation of the exhibition takes you behind the scenes with the exhibition team.
The Scots arrive at the Arc
Art, Reading and Community, these are the cornerstones of the Arc, Winchester. As such, groups gather, talks are held, and exhibitions are mounted here. Last year James Knox, emeritus curator of the Fleming collection, gave the talk, The Scottish Colourists and their Contemporaries in the building. This brought the 2024 exhibition at Dovecote Studios, curated by Knox, to the attention of Visual Arts Exhibitions Manager Kirsty Rodda.
John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Boileau Cadell, Samuel John Peploe and George Leslie Hunter appeared, as artists deeply embedded in modernist movements and modalities with fluid artistic voices that traversed progressive currents of the past, present and future. They refreshed the art of Scotland.
The show brought so many dynamic angles to light. Local, national, and international elements combine engagingly. Hopping back and forth between developments in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England and France, the paintings enabled the viewer to trace strains of ideas and the contexts that engendered them as they surfaced on different canvases. Fauves, Glasgow boys and girls, Rhythmists, Colourists, Vorticists and more intermingled. Experimental energy ran throughout the entire show.
Works by pioneering Scots Lavery and Melville teased out earlier legacies of transformative Scottish art. Whereas Derain’s work, The Pool of London, most overtly drew connections to Post-impressionism and Fauvism. These are examples of two fascinating facets of the exhibition relevant to local and international exchange.
Here was an exhibition bright with the colour, light and ideas of expansive artists, both well-known and overlooked, that we had to bring to Winchester.
A Winchester show
To bring the Colourists to Winchester, the exhibition had to be adapted.
Less works feature in the show, but it is potently focused. Loans from Southampton City Art Gallery, such as the Vorticist by Percy Wyndham Lewis and Panshanger Park by Spencer Gore, show the strength of local collections. Over fifty artworks make this a big show, and the Colour Factory, who feature on the City Space, have proven to be the perfect pairing.
With a new layout and adjusted contents fit our space, we proceeded to bring it all in.
The installation
Amidst mounting excitement, the installation arrived. Frame after frame enters the gallery, and soon a tableau of artistic vision emerges. Standing in the middle of the room, one can cycle through decades of development. Insistent chromatic intensity drags the eye one way while remarkable wispily elegant portraits arrest you before you can get to a Fauve masterwork. The gallery holds a cross-section of modernist painting, cutting across classes, styles, subjects and ideas. Scotland appears effervescent as tradition encounters innovation, and the highlands and lowlands alike occupy the foregrounds of cultural accomplishment.
In landscapes, portraits, still lifes and even a sculpture, this exhibition overflows with an artistry that revels in freeing explorations of colour, light and form. All the relations that pigments may permit are evidenced. From the Peaks of Iona to the shores of Cassis, you are invited to follow artists whose layers of paint transformed the workings of the Sun into a language of unbound creativity.
The Arc, Winchester, may seem far from the cafés of Montparnasse or the Salon d'Automne where the moderns gathered and exhibited in the early 20th century, but fresh creative threads arrive here all the same.
Step into the Arc, this Summer and discover the Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives.
