"A fascinating insight into an unsung chapter of art history".
The Guardian

A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950 reveals the remarkable yet relatively unknown response by Scottish artists to the development of modern art in the first half of the 20th Century.

The exhibition examines the most progressive work made by Scottish artists as they absorbed and responded to the great movements of European modern art. More than 100 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by over 50 artists are on display. The exhibition charts Scottish modernism from when JD Fergusson and SJ Peploe experienced at first-hand the radical new work produced in Paris by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, to the turn of the 1950s, when emerging Scottish artists like Alan Davie, Doris Zinkeisen, William Gear, Margaret Mellis, and Eduardo Paolozzi were at the forefront of European contemporary art. The exhibition is named after the New Era group established in Edinburgh in 1939 to show the experimental work of its members.

Complementing the exhibition, the Keiller Library display Magazines and Manifestos: British Periodicals from 1890 to 1950 which explores the proliferation of ‘little magazines’ which became a preferred format for many literary and artistic groups, whose proponents were keen to spread the word and disseminate their new and often radical ideas to a wider public.