Edinburgh is full of wonders this summer. A fragment of parchment in which James VI and I asks for the fairest and bravest hound for his hunt, the script curling and looping like a trail through the forest. Rembrandt’s self-portrait at the age of 23, eyes like dark discs through fog. A film of Tahitian women moving gracefully through a jungle: Gauguin to the life. Emil Nolde’s magnificently irradiated sunsets.
Wanderers through the Athens of the north could stumble upon Hill and Adamson’s haunting image of an early Victorian girl turning shyly from their camera in the City Art Centre’s excellent Scottish photography survey. Or Bill Viola’s spectral film of three women appearing and then disappearing behind veils of light and water in the sepulchral shadows of St Cuthbert’s church.
There will be magic in West Parliament Square today, and assorted venues hereafter, courtesy of political artist Ruth Ewan and socialist magician Ian Saville. Look out for the Class Struggle Rope Trick.
The Edinburgh art festival is always pleasingly disparate and amorphous, more of a catch-all title than a discrete phenomenon. Some events, like Ewan’s Sympathetic Magick, are special commissions that end in late August along with the main international festival. Others, like Tacita Dean’s Woman With a Red Hat at the Fruitmarket Gallery, open until late September, are described in the programme as partner exhibitions. My sense is that no art lover really cares about, or even notices, these fastidious distinctions. Perhaps they will one day be abolished.
Dean’s show – her fourth in an annus mirabilis – enthrals. Its theme is the significance of theatre and film in her work. Here is The Russian Ending, a sequence of found photographs – battlefields, funerals, shipwrecks – transformed into visual storyboards that play on the 1920s cinema legend that all Danish movies had two endings, happy for America, tragic for Russia. And here too is her early Foley Artist, in which the sound of lovers kissing or footsteps mysteriously disappearing in the dark is broadcast across the gallery in comic contrast to a small-screen vision of their origins: the eponymous artists kissing their own wrists or walking a metal tray in high heels.
But the show’s centrepiece is Event for a Stage, a collaboration between Dean and that profoundly gifted actor Stephen Dillane. Pacing the little round of his stage, muttering crossly at the slow arrival of the art audience – the event was filmed live at the Sydney Biennale in 2014 – Dillane grows increasingly irritable. Between turns as Prospero, he keeps asking himself how he could possibly have agreed to perform this peculiar hybrid of script, short story and autobiographical improvisation in which he is to avoid self-consciousness at all costs.
Cameras and clapperboards keeping getting in the way, as does Dean herself, offering sheets of script from the stalls which he indignantly recites then discards; a script she may have written – he rails against its mediocrity. The result is spellbinding: the sense of an actor off-guard, bringing into the theatre news of his father’s death, his mother’s dementia, everything he is supposed to leave behind; raging against the artifice of his art (and hers). And it all turns upon a knife-edge question: is he real, or playing the part of an actor. Is this in fact a performance?
Up the hill in the university’s Talbot Rice Gallery, a film by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer shows contemporary Tahitian women trying, and sometimes failing, to hold the poses from Gauguin’s paintings of languid, half-naked islanders. Or perhaps they are actually resisting his exoticisation. Beautiful and mysterious as they seem, in long shot, close-up and protracted tableaux, humdrum life keeps ruining the effect. Dogs bark, infants wander past, and in one scene two girls are even photographing each other with mobile phones, as if to send up the film-makers. The work is named after a late Gauguin, Why Are You Angry? It feels like a sustained and subtle response.
Skaer is also showing objects from the university collection, including the king’s request for a hunting dog and several outlandishly shaped horns mounted like golden drawings on the wall. Modern treatises about blood, and ancient manuscripts in which the scarlet ink has bled, ramify the theme.
In the central gallery, Skaer has deconstructed a medieval painting of a hunt and reworked it as an abstract sculpture in wood, stone and shining bronze on the floor. It is a fascinating spectacle, with its echoes of something familiar and pictorial, its emphasis on natural materials and its elegant minimalism: a curious hybrid of installation and archaeology.
Other contemporary shows include Canadian artist Melanie Gilligan’s coruscating satire The Common Sense at Edinburgh College of Art. This multiscreen film features a futuristic device that allows people to experience each other’s feelings directly, first as a means to increase productivity but eventually to control employees. The nightmare invention eventually makes speech itself redundant.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has the gleaming paintings of Raqib Shaw, made with porcupine quill and oleaginous enamel, in which the artist inserts himself (and his pet dachshund) into hyperbolic pastiches of Lucas Cranach and the Victorian fairy painter Joseph Noel Paton. Across the road, at Modern Two, is a revelatory survey of the German-Danish expressionist Emil Nolde (1867-1956).
Fierce images of girls, gods, stormy skies and seas, hard-won and strenuously worked, these paintings are often radiantly beautiful. Old men of Jutland stare out of ice-blue air, red beards blazing. Blond girls bloom in forests of flowers. It is hard to tell whether the milkmaids returning through the fields are burled along by the wind, or the harrying strokes of Nolde’s paint.
Nolde’s work was censored as degenerate by the Nazis – though he himself was a party member, a fact that has shadowed his career ever since. His religious paintings are indigestibly coarse, and not every seascape flies. But he can make the colour yellow jubilant, hectoring, melancholy or hopeful, and there’s passion even in his monochrome drawings. The self-portraits are the high point, as so often with expressionists, in particular the painter at 50: all of his head attentive except for his shocked, half-blind eyes.
Best of all – how could it not be – is of course Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master, in which the Scottish National Gallery shows its prodigious borrowing power with tremendous international loans. From Rotterdam comes Rembrandt’s son Titus looking up from his abandoned homework; from London his mistress Hendrickje wading in a stream. Washington has lent The Mill, a solitary giant of a windmill looking out to sea after a storm, which obsessed British artists all the way from Constable to Leon Kossoff.
The British focus is enlightening – you see his direct influence in paintings by Reynolds, Raeburn and Hogarth, for instance – but also entertaining. There are hilarious forgeries and pastiches in which sitters are got up to resemble a Rembrandt even as late as the 19th century. Portraits of Rembrandt’s only British sitters show the Rev Elison and his wife in all their unctuous but touching sincerity; these paintings passed all too easily from British collections to America, a reminder of how precious our own Rembrandts are.
But no pretext is necessary for bringing together the grave and tender An Old Woman Reading, her mesmerised face illuminated by the light from her bible, or Rembrandt’s youthful self-portrait c1629, given to Charles I a decade later. The hair is fine as mist, the mouth soft enough to kiss, the eyes as shadowed, nuanced and private as in the late, great self-portrait towards the end of the show. And any exhibition that can set before us the Portrait of an Elderly Man from the Mauritshuis, his face dangerously florid, his muscles flaccid, foolish yet brave in his unceasing love of the dying light is worth the trip to Edinburgh in itself.
