Fergusson’s continued presence in Glasgow, where he founded both the New Art Club and the New Scottish Group, each combining the functions of informal discussion group and exhibiting society, helped maintain a dynamic link with both Continental modernism and political radicalism, strengthened by the arrival of wartime refugees like Jankel Adler and Josef Herman. Adler subsequently moved to London, where he was an important influence on two young Scots, Robert Colquhoun (1914-1962) and Robert MacBryde (1913-1966), whose vigorous, often unsettling amalgam of styles also reveals the clear imprint of Picasso and Dali, as well as their near-contemporaries in England, Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland.

The ongoing development of a modern Scottish urban aesthetic, which can be linked back at least to the distinguished World War I artist Muirhead Bone (1865-1945), characterised the explicitly political work of the Clyde Group during the late 1940s, and reached a celebrated peak in the hands of Joan Eardley (1921-1963). She is best known for her paintings of working-class Glasgow children, dating mainly from the 1950s, which condense aspects of technique and perspective ranging from medieval iconography, through Raeburn-esque characterisation and Colourist intensity, to social realism and postmodern quizzicality. A parallel interest in land- and seascapes produced some stunning later works, at once recalling the elder McTaggart and alluding to Abstract Expressionism.  

Scotland’s outstanding contributors to the youthful post-war ferment of the international art world included William Gear (1915-1997), Eduardo Paolozzi (b.1924), Alan Davie (b.1920) and Ian Hamilton Finlay (b.1925), the last three of whom continue to bestride the Scottish art scene today. Gear, who exhibited with Jackson Pollock in New York in 1949, and Davie each developed painting styles strongly affected by Abstract Expressionism, both French and American. Davie in particular has been hailed as breaking new ground with his neo-surrealist, near-abstract creations, drawing on sources as varied as psychoanalysis, jazz and Zen meditation. Also drawing heavily on Surrealism, but also on Geddesian ideals of art as political engagement, via the holistic and egalitarian integration of design with decoration, Paolozzi pioneered many of the concepts behind Pop Art, developing a literally and metaphorically collage-based approach in his sculpture and printmaking.

Political convictions have, if anything, been an even stronger factor in Finlay’s work, nowadays centred on his garden at Little Sparta in Lanarkshire, which he began in 1968. His earliest artistic association was with the Clyde Group, after which he devoted himself to literature for some years. Concrete poetry formed his bridge back to the visual realm in the early 1960s, since when his evolving oeuvre has ranged across painting, sculpture, text-based work, screenprints, and landscaping. The stern intellectual rigour and concentrated formal discipline underpinning Finlay’s polemic, with its postmodern layers of reference to Poussin, Durer, Rousseau, classical antiquity and the French Revolution, has contributed to the almost cultish devotion he inspires in some circles, and been a significant influence on subsequent developments in Scottish installation art.  

John Bellany (b.1942) has continued this boisterous cross-fertilisation of styles, building on older vernacular and narrative traditions, the ideological legacy of the Scottish Renaissance, and Davie’s new symbolic and metaphysical language, as well as contemporary German art.  

After 20 years as the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) was established in 1967. The introduction of public subsidy transformed the art market in Scotland as it did throughout the UK, with the hegemony of private exhibiting societies and commercial dealers challenged by the proliferation of independent galleries, promoting mainly solo and small-group exhibitions. Another landmark event in this context was the opening of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1960, making major contemporary works broadly available for the first time in Scotland, and asserting the country’s place on the international art map.  

One effect of such developments was to free many artists from the absolute necessity of selling their work, which, coinciding as it did with a general retreat from directness into self-referentiality across much of the art world, triggered a quantum leap in experimental diversity – even if the overall picture in Scotland remained somewhat confused and uncertain until fairly recent times.

A key long-term facilitator in introducing the latest international contemporary art to Scotland – from the Soviet bloc and Latin America as well as western Europe and the US - was Richard Demarco, who opened his first gallery Edinburgh in 1966. Among numerous leading experimentalists who have ruffled the Scottish establishment’s feathers with some classic ‘Yes, but is it art?’ debates under Demarco’s aegis, the most important was German avant-garde icon Joseph Beuys, who made a series of visits during the 1970s and 1980s, and is still cited as a major influence by many Scottish artists today. Demarco, meanwhile, continues to makes waves as head of the Demarco European Art Foundation.

John McLean (b.1939) and Ken Dingwall (b.1938) figure prominently in the relatively exclusive field of Scottish abstraction, McLean having developed a formal language of vibrant colour and harmony, while Dingwall draws on elements of minimalism and text-based art.

John Bellany (b.1942) has enjoyed particular success in extending the boisterous Scottish cross-fertilisation of styles that has flourished at least since World War II. His diverse body of works builds on older vernacular and narrative traditions, the ideological legacy of the Scottish Renaissance, and Davie’s new symbolic and metaphysical language, as well as modern German art.

However unfashionable they have steadily become, the Scottish figurative and landscape traditions have nonetheless undergone continued parallel development during this period, innovatively reinterpreted and configured by artists such as Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931), John Houston (b.1930), Barbara Rae (b.1943), Sandy Moffat (b.1943) and Elizabeth Ogilvie (b.1946).