There is a building on the Mound in Edinburgh that most people walk past without a second thought. It sits between the National Gallery and Princes Street, classical columns and sandstone, the kind of architecture that becomes invisible through familiarity. The Royal Scottish Academy has been there, in one form or another, since 1826. This year it turns two hundred. And for the first time in a long while, it feels like Edinburgh is paying attention.
I say this not as an art critic. I am not qualified to tell you about brushwork or composition or the finer points of Scottish printmaking. I say it as someone who was born in this country, who has watched its cultural institutions be slowly starved of funding and attention for the better part of two decades, and who is now watching something that looks remarkably like a revival.
Two Hundred Years of Stubbornness
The RSA was founded in 1826 by a group of Scottish artists who were tired of having their work judged by London. That sentence could have been written about any number of Scottish institutions, in any decade, and it would still ring true. The Academy’s founding was an act of cultural defiance, a statement that Scottish art existed on its own terms and deserved a home of its own.
Two centuries later, the bicentenary programme is extraordinary in its ambition. Over a hundred partner institutions across Scotland are involved. The 200th Annual Exhibition, convened by Annie Cattrell and Fergus Purdie, opens in May and promises to be the largest survey of contemporary Scottish art ever mounted. Glasgow International, Scotland’s contemporary art biennial, runs through June. Bugarin and Castle, the Glasgow-based duo, will represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale. Dame Barbara Rae’s Antarctic paintings will close the year. Ade Adesina is curating a history of Scottish printmaking. There is an exhibition called Origin Stories that traces the teaching lineage of Scottish artists, tutor to student, across two centuries.
If you had told me five years ago that Scottish art would be having this kind of year, I would have been sceptical. The funding picture was bleak. Galleries were closing or cutting hours. The conversation about culture in Scotland had become almost entirely about what we could not afford rather than what we might create. Something has shifted.
The King Returns
Across the city, another resurrection is taking shape. The King’s Theatre on Leven Street, that grand Edwardian palace that has hosted everything from pantomime to opera since 1906, is finally nearing the end of its long and expensive refurbishment. The project has been plagued by delays and cost overruns, the budget swelling from the original estimate to over forty million pounds. There were moments when it seemed like the building might never reopen.
But it will. Capital Theatres has confirmed a reopening for the Edinburgh Festival in August, with a full autumn season to follow. Operation Mincemeat, the Olivier Award-winning musical, arrives in November. Chariots of Fire gets a new stage adaptation in September. And the pantomime returns to the King’s for the first time since 2021, with Allan Stewart, Grant Stott and Jordan Young reuniting for The Adventures of Pinocchio.
I know that pantomime seems like a small thing to celebrate alongside a Venetian Biennale commission. But if you grew up in Edinburgh, as many of my friends did, the King’s Theatre panto was the first encounter with live performance. It was where children learned that a stage could be magical. Losing it for those years was felt more keenly than some might imagine. The Scottish Government’s additional two and a half million pounds, secured partly through the lobbying of independent Lothian MSP Jeremy Balfour, means the theatre can reopen without debt hanging over it. That matters.
Glasgow Has Not Been Idle
It would be a mistake to tell this story as though Edinburgh is the only city that matters. Glasgow International, which runs from the fifth to the twenty-first of June, has established itself over the past decade as one of the most important contemporary art events in Britain. It does not get the attention of the Edinburgh Festival, partly because it does not court the same tourist trade. It is rougher, more experimental, more interested in the edges of what art can be. That is Glasgow’s gift to Scottish culture: the willingness to be uncomfortable.
The city’s music scene continues to thrive in the way it always has, which is to say chaotically and brilliantly and without much help from anyone in authority. Country 2 Country brought international acts to the Hydro in March. The smaller venues, the places on Sauchiehall Street and King Street where you can still see a band for under a tenner, remain the beating heart of something that no amount of funding cuts can kill.
What Changed
I have been trying to work out why this year feels different, and I think the answer is simpler than any grand theory about cultural policy. The pandemic broke something. It closed theatres, emptied galleries, cancelled festivals, and forced everyone involved in Scottish culture to confront the possibility that it might not come back. For a while, it seemed like it would not. The Edinburgh Fringe returned in diminished form. Venues struggled. Artists left.
But the thing about Scottish culture is that it has been declared dead more times than the Scottish football team’s title hopes, and it keeps coming back. The RSA bicentenary is not just a celebration of two hundred years of art. It is a statement of survival. It says: we are still here, we are still making things, and we are not going to apologise for it.
The Marina Abramovic photographs that opened the bicentenary programme at the Window Gallery in Perth on New Year’s Day were a deliberate provocation. They documented Abramovic’s first performance of Rhythm 10 at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. The message was clear: Scottish cultural institutions have always been the stage for radical work. That tradition is not dead. It was just resting.
A Personal Note
I walked through the RSA building on a Tuesday afternoon last month. It was quiet. A few tourists, a couple of students, an older woman sitting on a bench in front of a painting I did not recognise, perfectly still. The light came through the windows the way it only does in Edinburgh in winter, pale and sharp and slightly melancholy.
I thought about Kenneth Roy, who founded this magazine in 1995, and who believed that Scottish culture was worth paying attention to even when nobody else seemed to think so. I thought about the artists who founded the RSA in 1826, who believed the same thing. I thought about the stonemasons who are right now finishing the restoration of the King’s Theatre, working on a building that first opened its doors a hundred and twenty years ago.
Two hundred years is a long time. Long enough to know that the dark periods are not permanent. Long enough to know that the light comes back. Edinburgh is remembering that it has a soul. I think it always knew. It just needed reminding.