VAN GOGH TO KANDINSKY at the SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY

This exhibition examines Expressionism, symbolism, impressionism and finally leads to the early cubist movements.

The entrance has an optical illusion which features two of the paintings on display.




70 paintings by 54 artists are featured , with the majority being from Scandinavia including an uncharacteristic display of colour by Munch.There is much Poetry and Music coming at you with most of the Finnish works connecting the natural landscape as a metaphor for the Finns to resist encroaching bordering on blatant Russian attempts at expansionist domination in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The exhibition is about the inner attitudes of the dominated or excluded towards the forces of expansion,colonisation and ideas of the era in which Darwinian might is right was seen as a virtue in the age of stronger replacing the weaker under the veneer of civilising missions and road towards natural secular progress.

Major stand out attraction is the sower by Van Gogh 

This interesting analysis gives an indication of Van Gogh articulation of the painting through the course of the years he painted the theme.

"Perhaps prescient of what was impending, in November of 1888 Van Gogh produced a second canvas of The Sower which showed an even more dramatic use of color [painting above]. But in this image, an enormous sun is setting in “a very low yellow-green sky-- just as Vincent had described it---with a few streaks of pink cloud...” (Gayford, 2006, p.186). Gayford goes on to describe this second portrait as melancholic. In both instances, the color and mood that Van Gogh was personally experiencing came to dominate the painting."

The exhibition  closes with the blurred lines becoming defined the bordered colours, shapes and symbols of Kandinsky ushering in the age of abstract and cubes.

This painting is called "The Cossacks", an analysis of it reveals a musical symphony of shapes and colours representing emotions and spiritual themes.

Kandinsky style delineated shapes and colours to provide a mood for engendering a deep emotional philosophical response.

Black and  Violet has rich colours inspired by the work of Gauguin and Matisse , it is an example of his concept of Spiritual Art.This analysis gives an indication of his theories and what he was trying to achieve with his chromatic concert theatre. 

You can see some works of Kandinsky set to Music in the vid below:

EDVARD MUNCH at the SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

In Glasgow we like to call a spade a spade , a hun a hun and a woman a dug.On a trip to Edinburgh we had to mind our p's and q's and pronounce Munch not as it is spelt but as Moonk , it took us a lot of getting used to.

Though his most iconic image is The Scream , Munch was a very early exponent of the  pressures , stresses and strains of Modern Life , this is why his work has a quality of currentness to us Today, giving his pictures an aura of sympathy , empathy and warning as to whether we serve the system or the system should serve us.Alas it is a rhetorical question in the negative which reflects sadly on the issue of progress or regression in the over one hundred years since most of Munch's work has been with us.

Munch himself suffered from many of the ills such as anxiety ( above) and melancholy ( below) which very much made him a suffering artist who points a mirror to society in which it can see what it is doing to our being.

His work is probably more relevant to us that it was to his times as we all are caught in the debt and work off the mortgage trap which exacerbates the very ills he brought out into the public sphere.

This review gives more details of the actual exhibition.

You can see a revealing documentary about The Scream in the video below: