The Print Show

The Fine Art Society

Edinburgh

until February 18

www.fasedinburgh.com

THE Fine Art Society last ran a Print Show in London some months ago. Edinburgh’s edition is somewhat smaller, but no less interesting, exhibiting some 50 works by more than 20 artists, ranging in price from the low hundreds to the twenty thousands.

The modern history of printmaking finds its origins in part in the cheap production of "copies" of works of art, literature or devotion, before developing into the fine art printmaking, gradually refined over the centuries. The twentieth century’s most famous exponents – those who made printmaking their art – can be found in some part in this exhibition, not least Edward Bawden, sometime War Artist (World War Two) and producer of iconic images of everyday British life.

They don’t come cheap, of course, but Bawden’s well-known Brighton Snowstorm is a bravura example of the revitalized magic of printmaking, his Brighton Pavillion ethereal through the snow as fishermen fish through a gale in the foreground. His Cattlemarket, Braintree, is a riot of bovine and porcine activity, daubed in reds, blues, yellows.

Elsewhere, the variety in form and style is every bit as wide as you might expect from an exhibition that sets out in the 1820s and comes to a halt somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century, encompassing a variety of forms from lithograph to etching, screenprint to drypoint.

There is Eduardo Paolozzi’s screenprint Conjectures to Identity (1963) and a Hockney in the window, which, whether or not you have recently been down to London for the Tate’s fabulous retrospective, may prove tempting if the means allow. There is a Ben Nicolson and, on a more diminutive scale, a rather brilliant little Terry Frost -Yorkshire Landscape (Sheep). Much here for all tastes and very well worth a look, whether or not your January pockets allow.