Border Crossings: Ten Scottish Masters of Modern Art

This show pays homage to the remarkable legacy of 10 artists who left their Scottish homeland to achieve success, becoming immersed in international developments in art in London, Paris and New York

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Orange, Black and Lilac Squares on Vermilion, 1968 (detail). © Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum
28 June 2025 – 14 June 2026

by JANET McKENZIE

Border Crossings at the McManus in Dundee explores the lives and work of 10 Scottish artists who were born in Scotland but left to train or further their careers. They were Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), William Crozier (1930-2011), Alan Davie (1920-2014), William Gear (1915-97), William Johnstone (1897-1981), Robert MacBryde (1913-66), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), William Scott (1913-89) and William Turnbull (1922-2012). With pioneering energy and vision, they made an important contribution to international modernism and achieved global recognition. Having met at art school or subsequently in London or while travelling, their lives and careers were all impacted by the second world war, from the opportunities to travel as part of military service, and the impetus to travel after the restraints of wartime. It was the unspeakable devastation of the war in Europe that harnessed this generation to challenge everything they knew and their artistic creation over the subsequent decades impacted culture at every level. The choice of materials and stylistic departures resulted in work that was uncompromising, authentic and challenging. Their artistic careers grew from the increased knowledge of the horrors of concentration camps; they sought to come to terms with the atrocities of what had happened and in turn what unfolded amid grim postwar austerity and cold war fear.

The war created a profound loss of faith in humanity the world over, fuelling interest in non-representational art. The international movements were marked by experimentation and a commitment to the search for truth and existential authenticity. The war precipitated personal responses in Scottish and British artists that have parallels around the world. In Australia, artists of the same generation were unable to travel for the duration of the war and beyond. Yet the forced isolation, galvanised by the eventual knowledge of the barbarity of the Holocaust, together with a shortage of conventional manufactured art materials from abroad precipitated a period of unprecedented originality and innovation.

William Johnstone. Ode to the North Wind c1928-30.© The Artist’s Estate.

In Scotland, as the McManus exhibition reveals, artists were unable to travel for the duration and many were enlisted. In 1938, at the Glasgow School of Art, Colquhoun, who went on to become a painter, printmaker and theatre designer, won a travelling scholarship, but his trip with fellow student MacBryde to Paris, Marseilles, Genoa and Rome was cut short by the outbreak of war; he served as an ambulance driver in the Royal Army Medical Corps but was invalided out in 1941.

Turnbull, who was born in Dundee, became one of the leading artists of the postwar generation, establishing an international reputation for paintings and sculpture inspired by his study of ancient and non-western art. He first worked as a commercial illustrator for DC Thomson before enlisting in the RAF in 1941, training in Scotland and London and then serving as a pilot in Canada, India and Sri Lanka. After demobilisation, he was accepted into Slade School of Fine Art, where he transferred from painting to sculpture.

Turnbull found London uninspiring and, in 1948, moved to Paris, an unrivalled cultural centre, where he also enjoyed access to ethnographic collections. He absorbed the challenging implications for modern art of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, claiming that he “began to make a piece of sculpture to find out what a piece of sculpture should be like”. Although he ran out of money, and returned to London in 1952, the Paris years were pivotal in the development of his capacity to express the human form as alone, inaccessible and inviolate. In London, he was involved in the development of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Herbert Read described the work of Turnbull, Paolozzi and other young British sculptors at the exhibition New Aspects of British Sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale as “the geometry of fear”, their raw brutal art as an “iconography of despair” that captured the mood of anxiety in the early years of the cold war. War Goddess, made in 1956, a year before he travelled to New York, was a powerful free-standing piece with which the visitor can stand face to face. Giacometti, whom Turnbull knew and admired, established a language to capture the guilt and failure of humanity in the wake of the Holocaust, the bombing of Guernica and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at easel, No.1 Porthmeor Studios, 1947. Photographer unknown. © Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust.

The 1955 Untitled (Head), included in this show on loan from the University of Dundee, is a powerful example of Turnbull’s confrontational stance. It belongs to a generic series, Head, which Turnbull made in the early 1950s, shown at the 1953 ICA exhibition Wonder and Horror of the Human Head. It resonates with a similar energy to the seminal work by Constantin Brâncuși that he saw in Paris and in the sculpture of Peter King whose work was recently shown at the 2022 Barbican exhibition, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965. In 1960, Turnbull married the artist Kim Lim (1936-97) and in 1962-63 they travelled to Japan, Cambodia and her homeland, Singapore. The trip had an invigorating impact on his work, characterised by a greater minimalism.

Born in Leith, the son of Italian immigrants, Paolozzi’s life was tragically defined by the war: his father, grandfather and uncle died when the ship on which they were was being transported to Canada as enemy aliens was torpedoed. At 16, Paolozzi was interned for three months in Saughton Prison, Edinburgh. He subsequently worked as a mechanic while taking night classes at Edinburgh College of Art. From 1944 to 1947, he studied at the Slade, where he met Turnbull and they became lifelong friends.

Between 1947 and 1949, the two lived in Paris where they immersed themselves in the artistic community, making studio visits to artists including Albert Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder and Brâncuși. When Paolozzi returned to London, William Johnstone appointed him to teach textile design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, which he did from 1949 to 1955, alongside Davie and Turnbull. The biographical aspect of the McManus exhibition engages the visitor and serves to recreate this crucial postwar period of history endowing the artists a communal identity.

William Johnstone. Northern Gothic, 1959, installation view, The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, 28 June 2025 – 14 June 2026.

Like Turnbull, Paolozzi represented Great Britain at the 1952 Venice Biennale. In 1959, he was included in the seminal exhibition New Images of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Paolozzi’s 6ft (1.8 metre) high bronze Very Large Head (1958) was exhibited alongside the work of artists including: Francis Bacon, Dubuffet, Giacometti and Jackson Pollock. In his introduction to that exhibition, Paul Tillich’s prescient words elucidate the overbearing mood for artists of the postwar era: “‘There are demonic forces in every man which try to take possession of him, and the new image of man shows faces in which the state of being possessed is shockingly manifest. In others the fear of such possession or the anxiety at the thought of living is predominant, and again in others there are feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness and despair. But there are also courage, longing and hope, a reaching out into the unknown.” In Paris, Paolozzi was interested in art brut; in Pompeii, he found the haunting, petrified bodies of people and dogs enabled him to capture the unconscionable destruction of 20th-century war.

Paolozzi’s career included public sculptures, bronzes, graphics – screenprints and lithographs – rare “scrapbooks”, reliefs within buildings, doors for buildings, ceiling and tapestry panels. His mosaic installation for Tottenham Court Road tube station in 1986 is vibrant and dynamic. Employing a vast range of media and engaging with varied and complex subject matter, together with a prodigious energy and his fascination with philosophy and politics, his contribution to Scotland’s culture is unrivalled. Bash (1971) exemplifies the iconoclastic strength of his oeuvre, based on the complex method of collage from magazines, cigarette cards, images of Hollywood and the cinema, mechanical books and an obsessive collection of models and objects. In formal terms, Paolozzi orchestrated shapes and colour to create vibrant, eccentric metaphors that encapsulate aspects of international culture, replete with political and social comment.

William Gear. Tree form (August 1950). © The William Gear Estate, Courtesy of The Redfern Gallery.

Jeepers Creepers (1971) can be seen as a parody of the dominant status of minimalism and the artist’s aversion to large abstract paintings. An almost three-dimensional collaging is employed to the imposing work with roughly cast clowns, insects and a parrot as seemingly random additions to the minimal canvas. A pink rocket refers to the works Paolozzi made in response to the Vietnam war.

Davie was called up for service in 1941 within a few weeks of graduating from Edinburgh College of Art; it was the first time he had travelled outside Scotland, with training in Dorset and the Midlands. He made drawings but no paintings until a period of leave in 1945; instead, he practised music (jazz saxophone) and poetry.

It was a Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Britain in 1946 that changed the course of his career and that year he belatedly took up a travelling scholarship. While in Europe, he saw the Peggy Guggenheim exhibition (at the 1948 Venice Biennale) of her surrealist collection and American art; he was introduced to the work of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Roberto Matta, recalling: “Only at the Venice Biennale did I wake up. From then on, I painted non-stop.” In the same year, in Italy, he made more than 100 monotypes. Davie became one of the great artists of his generation, achieving international stature, with exhibitions all over the world. He valued universal and mystical experience. As an accomplished musician, Davie employed a gestural improvisation in his painting that was informed by jazz, and he spoke eloquently about the importance of automatism: “I think the whole modern movement of that time – the 50s – stems almost straight from surrealism. You know, the idea of automatic working, and using images which didn’t rationally come together, and bringing together all sorts of things out of the unconscious.”¹ He was also interested in Zen Buddhism: “The more I learned about Zen Buddhism, the closer it seemed to be to my own experiences of painting; that one had to let the painting paint itself at the right moment. You couldn’t force it. Zen Buddhism was a confirmation of something which I was building up in my own ideas about the nature of creativity, especially in the study of my own work.”²

Alan Davie. The Man that Lived in an Egg, 1963, installation view, The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, 28 June 2025 – 14 June 2026.

Davie’s 1963 painting The Man That Lived in an Egg, on show in Border Crossings, exemplifies the artist’s fascination with symbols and symbolism: their universal and recurrent nature in numerous civilisations producing connectivity and a dichotomous tension. Davie’s work can be interpreted using the archetypal language of Carl Jung (1875-1961), who himself made an independent study of symbols and Celtic visual culture. An artist for Davie was more akin to a shaman, driven by inner compulsion and a prodigious inventiveness.

Drawings Basel 69 (1969), a limited-edition book, is an important inclusion in the McManus show, as Davie’s drawings provide a window into his wide-ranging art practice. “When a black mark is placed on a white paper, both paper and pigment immediately become transformed. A relationship is set up between them – a marriage: the white becomes a mythic substance, evocative of infinity and sonorous depth.” (1994).³

William Crozier. © The Estate of William Crozier, courtesy of Piano Nobile, London.

Crozier, born in Glasgow to Irish parents, became a celebrated artist in Ireland. Gear, an abstract artist, was a miner’s son from Methil in Fife, who showed alongside Pollock in New York 1949. Johnstone’s abstract art combined surrealism and Celtic art to produce unique landscape works; he was an important teacher and supported Paolozzi, Davie and Turnbull with teaching positions in London. Scott’s minimalist painting was informed by American abstract expressionism. In New York in 1953, he established friendships with Willem de Kooning and Rothko.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Surprise Series No. 4, installation view, The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, 28 June 2025 – 14 June 2026.

Barns-Graham is the only female artist in the exhibition. She was associated with the St Ives Group and is celebrated today as one of Britain’s foremost abstract artists, yet it was only towards the end of her long and productive life that she received the critical attention she deserved. She lived in St Ives, Cornwall, for more than 60 years as part of the artists’ group that included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo and Alfred Wallis. Following the death of an aunt in 1960, she inherited a house near St Andrews and continued to move between Cornwall and Scotland, working right up to her death at the age of 91. Indeed, the last decade of her work saw a passionate outpouring and the production of possibly her finest work including Surprise Series No 4 (2000), painted in the artist’s 88th year. At the age of 89, in an interview with the Telegraph art critic John McEwen, she asserted: “Now I am at the stage of urgency. My theme is celebration of life, joy, the importance of colour, form, space and texture. Brushstrokes that can be happy, risky, thin, fat, fluid and textured.” Barns-Graham’s art was informed by the 1917 book On Growth and Form, by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, professor of natural history at the University of Dundee, whom Barns-Graham knew as a child.

The Edinburgh International Festival was established in the belief that the language of all the arts could “heal the wounds of war” and that Europe would never experience such barbaric devastation again. The cultural initiatives by Richard Demarco to bring the best artists to Scotland from the 1960s to the present day, have resulted in a form of internationalism that is easy to assume was always there. Recent exhibitions to celebrate Paolozzi and Barns-Graham reviewed for Studio International attest to the high-minded attitude to art that resonates in our present world. A comprehensive exhibition of Turnbull is long overdue.

References
1. Alan Davie quoted by Mel Gooding from transcripts of the Artists’ Lives interviews from the British Library’s oral history project: John Bellany, Alan Davie: Cradle of Magic, Newport Street Gallery, London, 2019: 18.
2. Ibid: 18
3. Alan Davie, quoted by Gimpel Fils, London, March 2012.