Annual Review 2011-12 - National Galleries of Scotland

Horse’s Skull, Sphere and Moon,
1941
by Peter Rose Pulham (1910–1956)
Oil on canvas, 51 x 76cm
Purchased with the assistance
of the Art Fund. © The estate of the
artist
Peter Rose Pulham worked mainly
as a photographer: moving between
London and Paris in the 1930s, he
made a celebrated series of photographs
of Picasso. He was a close
friend of Francis Bacon and knew
many of the French Surrealists.
He took up painting in the late
1930s. Horse’s Skull, Sphere and
Moon dates from 1941. The writer
Theodora FitzGibbon recalled that
Pulham bought the horse’s head
from a butcher: ‘We soaked, washed,
scrubbed, even cleaned the teeth,
which we found lifted in and out of
the noble skull. It looked superb, like
an unglazed T’ang head.’ Pulham’s
work is rare, owing to a German
bomb destroying his studio. This
work, which joins the NGS’s great
Surrealist collection, must count as
one of his masterpieces.
Untitled, from the series ‘The Brave
Ones’, 2010
by Zwelethu Mthethwa (b.1960)
Digital C-type print, 150 x 194.3cm
Purchased with the assistance of the Art
Fund. © Courtesy of the artist and Jack
Shainman Gallery, NY
From Mthethwa’s recent series, The Brave
Ones, this image depicts two boys from the
Shembe Nazareth Baptist religious community
in South Africa, a denomination that
blends Christian and Zulu traditions.
Its young male adherents adopt special
costumes based on the kilt for religious
ceremonies, often performed on the edges
of forests (the boys refer to themselves as
the ‘Iscotch’). The influence is drawn from
Scottish regiments that were present in
Natal in the late nineteenth century.
Self-portrait, 1986–7
by Alison Watt (b.1965)
Oil on canvas, 30.8 x 30.8cm
Presented by the Art Fund in December 2011 to celebrate
the reopening of the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery. © Alison Watt
This self-portrait was painted while Alison Watt,
one of Scotland’s most distinguished contemporary
artists, was still a student at Glasgow School
of Art. Watt is best known for her enigmatic
paintings of drapery, but, even in these seemingly
abstracted works, there is a powerful sense of the
human body implied by the folds and creases. Watt
painted images of herself obsessively in her early
career, and, although she has rarely engaged in
formal portraiture, self-representation remains
an important element of her work. This acquisition
underlines the commitment of the Scottish
National Portrait Gallery to exploring contemporary
portraiture and showcasing Scottish talent.
‘Self-portrait: Scratched out, it’s all in
the wrist’, c.2006
by Steven Campbell (1953–2007)
Oil on canvas, 183.5 x 133.5cm
Purchased with the assistance of the Patrons
of the National Galleries of Scotland 2011.
© The estate of Steven Campbell
Steven Campbell was one of the most
prominent painters to emerge in the revival
of Glasgow as an art centre in the 1970s
and 1980s. This theatrical and complex
self-portrait is one of the last paintings
Campbell completed before his untimely
death in 2007. It is filled with a rich narrative,
incorporating figures and symbols,
mixed together in a dream-like composition.
The artist presents himself as a Christ
figure, displaying his palms which show
the stigmata. To the left, a cross is marked
out with police tape, which, as testament
to Campbell’s dark humour, reads ‘Police.
Death in Progress’. He takes this further
with a skull visible at the base of the cross,
a reference to Golgotha, the place where
Christ was crucified. Crammed with death
and religious symbolism, it is hard not to
consider this work as a portrait of a man
in some way aware that death was on
his doorstep.
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