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Teddy Jamieson highlights upcoming art shows, including a Peter Doig retrospective
The Edinburgh-born painter grew up in Canada and lives in Trinidad and has said if he returned to Scotland he'd feel a complete foreigner.
Presumably he'll have the chance to find out this summer when the Scottish National Gallery mounts his No Foreign Land, a retrospective of his last 10 years' work, at the Mound in August.
Doig is that supposedly deceased thing in contemporary art, a painter. And a very good one. His canvases are full of colour and mystery and are likely to light up this year's festival season.
This coming year may be a good one for painters. At the Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh Ken Currie (the broadsheet Peter Howson) is the subject of a major summer exhibition.
His glouring, glaucous canvases will offer a suitably dark and gritty alternative to the glittering world of surrealist artist Man Ray at the same venue also in the summer.
The first major museum retrospective of the artist's photographic portraits will include fellow artists Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, American author Ernest Hemingway and, of course, his muses Kiki de Montparnasse and Lee Miller who may, come to think of it, have been a better photographer than he was.
Before either of those the Portrait Gallery will also be a temporary home to the House of Annie Lennox in March, which, as anyone who saw the exhibition at the V&A last year will know, is not a minimalist residence. It's a full-on dazzle of Lennox's stage costumes, photographs and videos.
But you don't need to go to the Portrait Gallery for portraits. In the autumn the Hunterian in Glasgow is staging a major new exhibition of the 18th-century portraitist Allan Ramsey.
In February Aberdeen Art Gallery will host the V&A's excellent survey of fashion photography Selling Dreams, which is just about to close at the McManus in Dundee.
But if you prefer something possibly more austere there is always the CCA in Glasgow's next show Economy, which attempts to deal with how the brute facts of finance impact migration, labour, sexuality and the crisis of democracy. Artists including Tracey Emin and Andreas Gursky are among those on show.
The Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, meanwhile, remains satisfyingly international in its outlook with shows this coming year from Italy's Massimo Bartolini, Dundee's David Batchelor and, during the festival, Mexico's Gabriel Orozco.
Art doesn't only exist in the cities, of course. This year will see the expansion of the Artist Rooms project to take in new gallery spaces. The Park Gallery at Callendar House in Falkirk joins the list of participating galleries with an Ian Hamilton Findlay exhibition in August. The American artist Robert Therrien will be on display in Berwick-upon-Tweed while American photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus will be on show in Galashiels and Findhorn respectively.
Outwith Scotland, Tate Liverpool is exploring the artier roots of Glam in February, which should tie in nicely with the V&A's exhibition on David Bowie in March. In Derry-Londonderry, 2013's UK City of Culture, there will be a retrospective of Northern Ireland's greatest living artist – and hometown boy – Willie Doherty.
The portraits of Edouard Manet will be the subject of a no doubt hugely popular major exhibition in London's Royal Academy from the end of January, though perhaps more intriguing will be the Tate's Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life in June. Does this mark Lowry's ascendance to the pantheon? We shall see.
The National Gallery, meanwhile, offers an impressive double hitter. In October the work of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka will all feature as part of The Portrait in Vienna, while the summer will be lit up by the small-scale brilliance of Vermeer.
For the first time the National Gallery's two Vermeer paintings, Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal will be brought together with Vermeer's Guitar Player on loan. What does that mean? It means three of the greatest, most jewel-like paintings in the history of art will be in the same building at the same time. That's reason enough to head south.
Not that all the traffic should be one way. Next month Rodin's most famous sculpture The Kiss will make the journey from the Tate in London to the Mound in Edinburgh. We will have the rest of the year to enjoy it.
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