Book review: Facing the Nation - The Portraiture of Alexander Moffat, by Bill Hare

The major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh at the moment is entitled A New Era, and it tells the story of how the art landscape in Scotland was changed utterly in the years between 1900 and 1950 by the seismic impact of cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and everything that followed. In that short space of time, the defiant naturalism of the Glasgow Boys gave way to the pure, joyous abstraction of Allan Davie, but in the early 1960s, at the same time that Davie was producing some of his most exuberant, out-there canvases, a young artist by the name of Alexander Moffat was moving in a very different direction. The story of Scottish art, as Bill Hare’s thought-provoking new book shows, is as complex and multi-faceted as we choose to make it.