Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art
Duncan Macmillan
(Lund Humphries, £50)
WHERE did modern art start? The usual answer is late-19th-century France, when the Impressionists, and especially their friend Cézanne, pioneered a new way of representing the world that involved more colour and less line. It is held that their example lay behind the great efflorescence of avant-garde styles of the first years of the 20th century, when Cubism freed painting from the need to show traditional form, Fauvism released colour from naturalism and Marcel Duchamp established that a concept or a ready-made object—his famous urinal—could be a work of art.
He makes a convincing case that modernism first came from north of Hadrian’s Wall
Of course, this ancestral line can be taken ever further back, but, at some point, the past becomes a foreign country. For Duncan Macmillan, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, the true origins of modern art lie not in the