Duncan Macmillan: Time is right for a celebration of our art

A NATION’S art is part of its self-esteem, its self-confidence, how it sees itself. For a long time, however, in Scotland we were bullied into thinking we had no art. We were just a remote, benighted excrescence on the edge of Europe, lucky to be attached to England. Our self-confidence did not ring true to ourselves and even less to others.

That was the Scottish cringe. Things have changed. I would argue that recovering our understanding of our own artistic tradition has been part of this.

Indeed, it was deliberately to tackle the problem of our art deficit and its impact on our national self-esteem that I set out to write the history of Scottish art in an accessible form 21 years ago.

Of course I was not working alone then or since. The markets have helped, too. They put a high value on the best Scottish art – what others value, we value more ourselves and so now we have got back our art. It is something we are proud of, part of our sense of ourselves.

Surely it is time to celebrate this recovery, to reclaim our artistic heritage in the most public possible way with a major exhibition? The year 2014 will be the Centenary of Bannockburn and the year of the Commonwealth Games. It will be a time both to look back on what we have achieved and to present ourselves self-confidently to the world.

There has not been a major Scottish art exhibition since 1939, (unless you count an exhibition in Canada forty years ago.) Correspondingly it is even longer since there has been anything like it in Scotland. Even in 1939 any impact it did have was inevitably overshadowed by the war. The post-war years saw the nadir of Scottish self-confidence. It has taken a long time to rebuild it.

Ours is a distinctive heritage. It is also a profoundly modern one and by that I don’t mean the shrill assertion of the significance of our young contemporaries. Their reputation is untested. It is not yet part of the longer story. Our heritage in art is modern because it reflects and is indeed part of the signal contribution we have made to shaping the modern world. That would be the focus of such an exhibition.

The Reformation, for all its disastrous impact on religious art, saw the dawn of modernity and so the range of such an exhibition would be from the 17th century to the recent past.

The core achievement of Scottish art is in the age of the Enlightenment. Raeburn and Ramsay celebrate the value of the individual, the ideal at the heart of the modern west.

Nor do they present an exclusively male world. On the contrary, they painted some of the greatest of all portraits of women, great because equal. Their contemporaries like Gavin Hamilton or Alexander Runciman working in different modes, pioneered ideas about the role of the imagination and the value of the primitive that were to shape modern art.

In the next generation, David Wilkie’s celebration of the life of the common man and woman echoed Burns and was admired and influential throughout Europe. It was no coincidence that in this creative climate, D O Hill and Robert Adamson pioneered photography as an art. The great painters of the late 19th century, William McTaggart and Arthur Melville, can hold their own in any company.

With that achievement behind them, the Colourists were able to join modernism as equals, not followers. Thereafter a distinguished tradition continues with artists like Anne Redpath, Joan Eardley and William Gilles down to the present generation, but such an exhibition would be an opportunity to discover less familiar artists too and so form a fuller picture of our artistic heritage.

The RSA building was designed to house just such a show. Whatever plans the National Gallery may have for it for 2014 could surely be put on hold to make way for a national celebration.