Out of Place: Works from the Pier Arts Centre Collection, Orkney
Until June 26; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

It’s easy for us Central Belters, playing the big boys of Scotland’s cultural scene, to miss what’s happening in other people’s back yards. I know I’m guilty of it: the realities of public transport shape the geographical boundaries of my art world, whether I like it or not.

What’s nice about the latest exhibition in Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery is that it turns the tables on the metrocentrics. Edinburgh is reduced to playing piggy in the middle between two confident big boys – Orkney and St Ives. The two communities, at opposite extremes of this sprawling landmass, speak to each other about late British Modernism with clarity and understanding. Edinburgh catches what it can from its spot in between.

The situation is acknowledged in the very title of the show, Out of Place. When the same exhibition appeared in St Ives last year, it was called Homecoming. The 30 paintings, drawings and sculptures are on tour from the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, while it undergoes a major revamp. In 18 months’ time, the Orkney gallery will have doubled in size, and trebled in stature, in keeping with its important holding of paintings and sculptures.

The collection is the creation of one woman, Margaret Gardiner. Now 100 years old, she was a great friend to the burgeoning artistic community in St Ives from the 1930s onwards. By buying their work, Gardiner made it possible for avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth to explore the possibilities of abstraction. But Gardiner hates to be described as a collector, with all the financial and corporate baggage that word implies. A true enthusiast of the St Ives School, she sees herself more as an inveterate impulse buyer.

In 1979 Gardiner gifted her collection to the people of Orkney. She saw connections between the landscape and the way of life in these two distant communities, both battered by the sea and riddled with bronze-age reminders of their Celtic past. Situated in the busy sea-route between Norway and Pictland, Orkney was once a strategic centre. Over a thousand years later, St Ives was to be a European centre for art, a mixing pot where Soviet Constructivism and American Abstract Expressionism would meet.

From the late 1930s, St Ives drew two generations of avant garde artists to its windy shores, where a strong community of Modernist painters and sculptors established themselves. There were locals too – the most legendary among them being Alfred Wallis, the retired mariner who took to painting boats and seascapes on old scraps of card for his own enjoyment.

Wallis’s paintings are universally recognisable for their flattened perspectives, their limited palette, and their naïve charm. There was much about his unforced style which intrigued the young arrivals. Wallis used only a few colours because that was all he had to hand, in the form of ordinary household paint. Over the years, Ben Nicholson would investigate such muted palettes over and over again in his abstract reliefs. Wallis’s flattened perspectives were also a source of fascination to the Modernists, who were starting to see the picture’s surface as the real content of a work, without need for pictorial illusion.

If links between works of art were made visible, like threads, then this exhibition would be a tangled mesh. The colours of Cornwall, those muted greys and blues of the sea, the fawns and darkened reds of earth and mineral, can be seen in the most representational and the most abstract pictures.

The links range from the local to the universal. Naum Gabo had travelled the world by the time he reached Cornwall in the late 1930s. Spending time at the heart of Moscow’s Constructivist movement immediately after the Soviet Revolution, Gabo moved to Berlin where the Bauhaus was flourishing. After that, he shared Paris with Mondrian before coming to St Ives.

Gabo’s Linear Construction No.1 is an almost musical arrangement of space. Nylon threads create a complex counterpoint of straight lines and curves, solids and space, tension and balance. Barbara Hepworth’s drawing for a sculpture, made in the same year, is clearly indebted to Gabo’s construction. But when she translates that drawing into new sculpture, the result is all her own. Oval Sculpture, with its internal web of hollows, is organic compared with Gabo’s machine-inspired creation. It is inspired by the womb, and by the caves underneath the Cornish coastline, linking it onward to the landscape paintings of Lanyon and Wells.

It took Hepworth some time to tip over into pure abstraction. Her earlier sculptures are of figures, and though they move gradually towards simplified, geometric forms, they retain representational elements long after they need to. In Two Heads, an eye is incised onto the smooth expanse of the mother’s head quite unnecessarily – Hepworth’s forms will later prove to be more powerful without any surface detail.

This small collection, filling only two rooms of the Dean Gallery, is a gentle way into British Modernism for anyone who finds it daunting. If grey carparks and concrete monoliths don’t do it for you, then the intimate, organic forms in this show are a better bet. Elusive colours, textures and forms ricochet around between the works, recognisable here, and glimpsed there.

This is just a hint of what we will be able to enjoy in Orkney from 2006. We are seeing only 30 out of a collection of 100 works, and they are, as the title says, a bit out of place here. I look forward to seeing them again with the surge of the waves in my ears and the smell of the sea air just outside the window. Then they will be at home.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 19.12.04