Secondary Period

Type of Exhibition

Principal Artist

Secondary Medium

Hayward Gallery, London

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/bridget-riley

This extensive exhibition, which took over both floors of the Royal Scottish Academy, was the first museum survey of Bridget Riley’s work to be held in the UK for 16 years, and the largest exhibition of her work to be shown in Scotland. Spanning over 70 years of work, it focused on the origins of Riley’s practice and traced pivotal moments across her acclaimed career. It featured very early paintings and drawings, many of which were being exhibited for the first time, iconic black-and-white paintings of the 1960s, Riley’s expansive explorations into colour, wall paintings and works made this year, as well as studies that reveal Riley’s working methods. Internationally-acclaimed artist Bridget Riley creates dazzling and compelling abstract paintings which explore the fundamental nature of perception. Through her observations of the natural world, her experience of looking at the work of other artists, and through her own experimentation, Riley has made a deep, personal investigation of the act of painting, and of how we see. She is one of the most distinguished and world-renowned artists working today.

Artist + Movement

Toulouse-Lautrec

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/pin-ups-toulouse-lautrec-and-art-celebrity

Paris in the fin-de-siècle was known as the 'city of pleasure’; famed for its cabarets, dance halls and cafés. Most famous of all were the nightspots of the bohemian district of Montmartre, where Toulouse-Lautrec lived, worked and socialised, including the now legendary café-cabarets Le Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir. Pin-Ups: Toulouse Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity focuses on Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographic posters, portfolio prints and illustrations which made stars of Montmartre’s venues and their entertainers - personalities such as Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant. Toulouse-Lautrec’s career coincided with a revolutionary moment in the history of western printmaking - the development of the poster as a means of mass-marketing – and lithography and poster-making were central to his creative process from his first experiments in the medium in 1891 until his death in 1901.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/rembrandt-britains-discovery-master

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/artists-work

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/art-future

Constable & McTaggart: A Meeting of Two Masterpieces

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/constable-mctaggart-meeting-two-masterpieces

National Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/beyond-caravaggio

For the first time ever, Beyond Caravaggio o�ered audiences in Scotland an opportunity to see an impressive array of paintings by artists from across Europe who came under the spell of the brilliant and highly original art of Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1571–1610). At the heart of the show were four major works by the master himself, including the celebrated Supper at Emmaus from the National Gallery, London, and the emotionally charged Taking of Christ from the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Other highlights included two large paintings by Orazio Gentileschi, a fine Susannah and the Elders by his daughter Artemisia, the arresting, recently identified Christ displaying his Wounds by Spadarino and major works by Ribera, Preti, Valentin, Tournier, Honthorst and Terbrugghen. Some artists in the exhibition had known Caravaggio personally and knew his work intimately. Others, such as Georges de La Tour, probably never saw an original painting by him but were much influenced by his innovations through the works of other followers.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/goldfinch

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Taft Museum Art

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/inspiring-impressionism-daubigny-monet-van-gogh

10 October 2015 to 17 January 2016

Aegon, Arts & Business Scotland and Patrick Bourne & Co. and supported by the Fine Art Society

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/arthur-melville-adventures-colour

Arthur Melville (1855–1904) was the most radical and exciting Scottish artist of his generation and one of the finest British watercolour painters of the nineteenth century. The audacity and drama of his compositions, his highly original watercolour technique and, above all, his ability to capture intense colour and light mark him out as an artist of outstanding talent. Born in Forfarshire and raised in East Lothian, Melville travelled extensively throughout his career, touring Egypt, the Middle East, Spain and north Africa. This exhibition, the first retrospective to be staged by a museum for over thirty years, explored Melville’s rich and varied career as artist-adventurer, Orientalist, forerunner of the Glasgow Boys and painter of modern life. It included over seventy watercolours and oil paintings, generously lent from public and private collections, some of which had not been exhibited since Melville’s memorial exhibition in 1906–7. Superb set piece watercolours from northern Africa and Spain, visionary Scottish landscapes, astonishing ‘blottesque’ colour studies and examples of Melville’s extraordinary, pioneering late oil paintings were among the highlights of the show.

National Portrait Gallery

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/baileys-stardust

David Bailey has made an outstanding contribution to photography and the visual arts, creating consistently imaginative and thought-provoking portraits. As well as new work, this landmark exhibition, which was presented in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, London, included a wide variety of Bailey’s photographs from a career that has spanned more than half a century. Bailey’s Stardust was the largest exhibition of David Bailey’s portraits to be shown in the UK, with over 300 portraits, including works that depict his travels in East Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Delhi and the Naga Hills, as well as icons from the worlds of fashion and the arts, striking portraits of the Rolling Stones and Catherine Bailey, and studies of the East End of London. It formed part of a European tour and proved to be a hugely successful draw during the Edinburgh International Festival.

Jean-Étienne Liotard

Friends of the National Galleries of Scotland

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/jean-%C3%A9tienne-liotard

This stunning exhibition celebrated one of the greatest artists of the eighteenth century. The work of Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) has been rarely exhibited and this was the first time it had been comprehensively celebrated in Britain. Liotard enjoyed a long career and his finest portraits display an astonishing hyperrealism achieved through a combination of incredible, intense observation and remarkable technical skills. He excelled at the delicate art of pastel, but also drew, painted in oil, created enamels, and was a refined miniaturist and printmaker. His activity was prodigious: Liotard wrote a treatise on painting, was a collector, a dealer, a traveller and an artistic innovator. In the age of Mozart and Casanova he was a key international figure whose achievements deserve recognition. Highlights of this show included famous portraits, startling self-portraits and brilliant experiments with genre and still-life subjects.

Rocks and Rivers: Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Lunde Collection

Norway, Switzerland

The Scottish National Gallery hosted an exhibition of masterpieces from one of the world’s finest private collections of nineteenth-century Norwegian and Swiss landscape paintings. Eighteen stunning works, by artists such as Johan Christian Dahl, Alexandre Calame and Thomas Fearnley, were lent by the New York collector Asbjörn Lunde and shown in Scotland for the first time. This generous long-term loan included five paintings by the celebrated Norwegian artist Peder Balke, whose innovative and highly original pictures were rediscovered only recently. Rocks and Rivers showcased an important but little-known chapter in nineteenth-century landscape painting.

GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/generation-25-years-contemporary-art-scotland-national

Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch

Artist + Movement

National Gallery, London

Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support from The Olana Partnership

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/through-american-eyes-frederic-church-and-landscape-oil-sketch

This highly focused exhibition concentrated on the exquisite oil sketches of the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), an artist represented in the Gallery by one of his greatest masterpieces, the large and thrilling painting Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867. This had been presented to Scotland in 1887 by John S. Kennedy, a Lanarkshire-born entrepreneur who had amassed a substantial fortune in iron and coal. Generously supported by the Terra Foundation, the exhibition was first shown at the National Gallery, London, before transferring to Edinburgh, where it was seen by an estimated 100,000 visitors. Twenty-eight oil-sketches were included, ranging in subject-matter from Church’s native New England to his intrepid views of icebergs in the Arctic, his travels in the Caribbean, Europe and the Near East.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/john-bellany-passion-life

Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape

Artist + Movement

Giovanni Battista Lusieri

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/expanding-horizons-giovanni-battista-lusieri-and-panoramic-landscape

This was the first exhibition ever devoted to the extraordinary work of the Italian landscape watercolourist Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754–1821). Lusieri’s watercolours combine a broad, panoramic vision, an uncanny ability to capture brilliant Mediterranean light and a meticulous, almost photographic attention to detail. He was widely acclaimed as one of the most accomplished landscape artists of his day, and his works were eagerly sought by British Grand Tourists. However, after his death he was soon forgotten, and only recently have his exceptional gifts and historical importance begun to be recognised once again. His career took him from his native Rome to Naples, then to Sicily and finally to the eastern Mediterranean, where he spent twenty years working for the 7th Earl of Elgin as his resident artist and agent in Athens.

Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880–1910

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/van-gogh-kandinsky-symbolist-landscape-europe-1880-1910

This major exhibition was the first dedicated to symbolist landscape and the movement that developed after Impressionism as artists across Europe cultivated a more imaginative, subjective response to the world around them. The exhibition presented a wide range of poetic and suggestive paintings of nature from the period 1880 to 1910, focusing on major artists of the avantgarde such as Gauguin, Van Gogh and Munch, whilst also introducing a group of less well-known artists from Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe.

Johannes Vermeer

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/young-vermeer

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/impressionist-gardens

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/christen-k%C3%B8bke-danish-master-light

The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/discovery-spain-british-artists-and-collectors-goya-picasso

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/ron-mueck

The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/tiger-and-thistle-tipu-sultan-and-scots-india

Peter Doig is one of the best known artists working in the world today. Over a career of nearly three decades, Doig has reinvigorated the medium of painting. His inventive style, sensuous palette and suggestive imagery set him apart from the conceptualism dominating much of contemporary art. A willingness to take up the challenge still posed by the paintings of Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and Edward Hopper places him in a long line of great colourists and creators of richly textured worlds. This popular show, Doig’s first major exhibition in the country of his birth, showcased works created during the past ten years, much of which time the artist spent in Trinidad. Often tropical in their subject matter, these are paintings of intense colour on a monumental scale. Following Edinburgh, the exhibition travelled to Montreal Museum of Fine Art where it was seen by almost 100,000 visitors

Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny and the Terra Foundation for American Art in Our public programme combines the display of the permanent collection with a series of temporary exhibitions and displays, alongside a dynamic programme of education activities and events. A World-Class Programme collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and the Museo ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid.

The first ever exhibition on this subject in the UK, this show explored the response of American artists to French Impressionism. It featured major international artists such as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, along with artists better known to American audiences, such as Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman. A selection of pictures by the French Impressionists Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas provided a context for the American works.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/about-us/reports-board-minutes

Eduardo Palolozzi