Joan Eardley is painting the roiling sea at Catterline, near Aberdeen, in the depths of winter. The waves churn white and gold beneath pressurising skies, crashing towards the dark rocks where she stands. It is 1959 and Eardley is dressed in an old RAF flying suit and boots against the storms to get down this magnificent vision of the elements in full force. Four years later she will be dead, at 42, of cancer.
Any exhibition that includes even a single painting by this wild and stirring genius is a precious opportunity. Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception has two Eardleys and many more Scottish marvels. Mabel Pryde paints her daughter in a twinkling harlequin suit in 1910, side-lit in resentful shadows. Agnes Miller Parker portrays a post-cubist black cat knocking over a vase of lilies and a silly Venus statue to plant its paws on a useful pound note. It is 1930. Women at long last won the right to vote.
Anne Redpath returns from France to her native Scottish Borders, bringing the lessons of the French colourists to the graceful forms and tones of the Hawick landscape in the winter of 1936. And the same sea that Eardley paints reappears, now washing the Cornish coast, in Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s The Blue Studio of 1947. Waves rise up in a wall outside her window, casting a marine light on all the objects within, including this very painting upon its easel.
Many of the Scottish women artists celebrated in this gathering at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios are very well known. But the first woman represented here is entirely forgotten: Catherine Read. Born near Dundee in 1723, she might have received no education at all had her family not had to flee Scotland for France after the battle of Culloden. In Paris, Read studied with the pastel portraitist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Her own portraits became so popular they were reproduced everywhere as prints.
Jemima Blackburn’s curious gull’s nest, with seabirds descending, might have had some public reach had she not been disastrously discouraged from exhibiting by John Ruskin. And alas, the wonderfully lively Dorothy Johnstone had to give up her teaching job at Edinburgh College of Art on marrying in 1924. But here is her suave portrait of Cecile Walton, her great friend and fellow painter, in striped skirt and vermilion stockings in a cornfield in 1918.
And Walton’s own self-portrait, so imaginative, shows her asleep but soon to be woken by her small son tugging at her hair with a brush. Walton’s career foundered altogether during her short-lived marriage.
Most of the 70 and more works in this show come from the Fleming Collection (though there are also loans) and the emphasis is mainly on the 20th century. But the collection comes up to date with Victoria Crowe’s dark and wintry landscapes, the post-pop fantasies of Rachel Maclean and beautifully estranging self-portrait by Alison Watt. The Dovecot Studios, where so many superb tapestries have been made down the decades, contribute an exquisite woven translation of a brilliant-blue self-portrait by Zimbabwean-Scottish artist Sekai Machache. Absorbing, surprising, occasionally chastening, this is a beautiful exhibition, the first of many such revelations, one hopes.
Grayson Perry: Smash Hits opened at the Royal Scottish Academy building last month and has been jammed ever since. It deserves its popularity. Perry has so much to say about Britain past and present in terms of sex, class, folklore, fashion, drink, drugs, politics and his own DayGlo icon of a self that whole show is a thrumming conversation.
It covers 40 years, from his earliest plate, Kinky Sex, made at evening class in 1983, to his latest mock-medieval beer jugs and pairs of Brexit vases. Here is his nude self-portrait with serpentine penis and wishful breasts (one of the largest woodcuts ever made, at one and half metres – 5ft– in length) and his immense tapestry cycles featuring Julie Cope of Essex; his enormous maps and panoramas, with their characteristic collages of graffiti, tattoo, decal and slogan, their allusions to Staffordshire pottery, the Daily Mail and William Blake.
The elegant Georgian galleries are stuffed, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with countless glass cases for the costly pots. Perry’s pink motorbike is ostentatiously parked, with its rear-wheel shrine for Alan Measles, his childhood teddy, and the artist’s alter ego slips in everywhere too, with a special niche for her Bo Peep dresses. Perry gives it everything he’s got.
But even though there are so many works to look at, my sense is that there is always more to read. Statements – sardonic jibes, headlines, overheard dialogue, Perry’s own coruscating repartee, the entire guest list of art world names at a Turner prize dinner – are central to almost everything here.
The one-two method was set early on and it doesn’t evolve much over the decades. The form looks familiar and attractive at first glance – an English vase, a Grecian urn, a superbly woven tapestry – but get up close and the content, via words and images, will be the very opposite. Paedophiles, Asbos, homelessness, rightwing gammons, alternating with jabs against aspirational lifestyles and luxury brands.
There are brilliant works in this show, notably those marvellous meditations on past cultures specially created for his British Museum show in 2011. And the conjunction of object and statement can be absolutely withering. I especially like Perry’s retort to vacuous reports claiming to measure the benefit of art. “This pot will reduce crime by 29%.”
But it is not always obvious from his wilfully cack-handed draughtsmanship exactly what is being declared. The famous Essex House Tapestries tell the tale of working-class Cope, who eventually manages to quit a disastrous first marriage for university, where she meets Rob “a nice upper-middle-class man who works in IT. They move up the property ladder to a Georgian house in Colchester.” They drink wine, nice holidays follow (Perry writes all the captions so succinctly, you sometimes wonder why he bothers with the weaving) until one day she gets knocked over by a delivery bike and dies. Is this deadly wit, or a junking of poor Julie, whose corpse appears as a goggle-eyed cartoon in one corner of the tapestry?
This is Perry’s largest show yet, but quantity doesn’t mean new depth or insight. No single work makes a greater claim on your attention than any other in this incessantly garrulous art. And perhaps this has something to do with the artist’s exceptional versatility as writer, broadcaster, journalist, poet and performer. Ultimately, everything is a form of direct public speech for Perry, the art just another kind of delivery bike.
Star ratings (out of five)
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception ★★★★
Grayson Perry: Smash Hits ★★★
• Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, until 6 January 2024
• Grayson Perry: Smash Hits, National Galleries of Scotland (Royal Scottish Academy), Edinburgh, until 12 November
