Judith with the head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach. Photography: Peter Cavanagh / Alamy
Scotland
1. Lucas Cranach the Elder – Judith with the Head of Holofernes The Burrell Collection, Glasgow Judith showing the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes. The bloody booty looks like a trophy and they are more creepy for that. SS
2. Francis Bacon – Pope IAberdeen Art Gallery You need a player and a drinker to get your head around modern art. Avant-garde art had always rejected traditional themes. However, Bacon, a gay man before the reforms of the 1960s, always saw the mainstream with an outside irony. In this 1951 masterpiece he delves into the past to capture the anguish of the present. The enthroned figure is trapped in a limbo between palace and prison: there are remains of Gothic vaults that suggest the Sistine Chapel, but it is isolated inside a glass house. Painted a decade before Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann sat in a glass box for his trial in Jerusalem. Bacon is a prophetic image that sees the darkest corners of hell. JJ
3. Statue of the Nubian God ArensnuphisNational Museum of Scotland, EdinburghThis huge character walks towards you in the main hall of the National Museum, his presence as mysterious as an Easter Island chief. It has a connection to ancient Egyptian art, but is much steeper, though more natural in its fleshy chest and arms. At the time this statue was made, between 100 BC and 50 BC, cultures blended further north and Sudan, as Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans shared gods and art. This, then, is a global treasure. JJ
4. Helen Chadwick – Piss Flowers Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh Urine is not used enough as art material. Chadwick created his flowers during a residency in Canada in the 1990s, making piles of snow, shaping them into flowers, and then urinating on them with his partner to wear out the snow in the valleys around a central hole. He then made plaster molds and cast them in bronze, reversing the hole in the vertical stigma of the flower. It suggests organic existence at its most sexual moment. JJ
5. Paolozzi StudioScottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Eduardo Paolozzi had a wandering imagination, from the growing post-World War II consumption that propelled his pop collages to the science fiction that influenced his industrial assembly sculpture. . This 1999 recreation of his studio, full of cast and research, provides information on his pioneering methods. SS
6. Christian Boltanski – Animitas Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh. Boltanski, who died last year, made autobiographical art that investigated history, memory, and mortality. Here he expresses himself in more than 200 Japanese bells, swaying and ringing in the wind on an island to produce what he called the “music of souls.” The bells are rearranged in the positions of the stars on the night of Boltanski’s birth. NO
7. Ian Hamilton Finlay – Little SpartaDunsyre, South Lanarkshire. Ian Hamilton Finlay spent decades developing the seven acres of garden and wasteland surrounding Stonypath Farm in the Pentland Hills with his wife, Sue. The result is a unique fusion of human creativity and nature. Throughout nine themed landscapes, foliage, waterways and birdsong complete more than 270 works where his minimalist poetry is etched into sculptures created by artisans. These range from an architectural staircase to small ones, such as the ceramic tiles in Julie’s garden. SS
8. Joseph Crawhall – Girl on BicycleThe Burrell Collection, Glasgow Glasgow’s leading artist Boy Crawhall here embraces a sense of late 19th century modernism through a watercolor by his sister Beatrice on a bicycle. As a painter known for his depiction of animals, the subject also gave him the opportunity to include the family dachshund, Fritz. NO
9. Alasdair Gray – The Auditorium Celestial Ceiling MuralOran Mór, Glasgow Alasdair Gray’s work will be familiar to any venue in Glasgow. His first murals for the city can be found in the Ubiquitous Chip Restaurant and Hillhead Subway Station. His mural for the auditorium of the Òran Mór arts venue is in another league, however. Its panels feature figures from various belief systems against a blue cosmos. The ceiling includes a phrase paraphrased by Canadian poet Dennis Lee: “Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation,” now engraved on the Canongate wall of the Scottish Parliament. SS
10. Rembrandt – A Man in Armor Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow This painting is believed to portray the young conqueror Alexander the Great, although idealized heroism is not Rembrandt’s line. The final artist with his feet on the ground undermines the brilliance of the champion with a human vision. He has dressed his warrior in a compound of ancient armor that seems to flood him, just as the thoughts of an impending future bloodshed must surely do. SS
A detail of John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea, 2015. Photo: Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Wales and Northern Ireland
11. John Akomfrah – Vertigo SeaNational Museum Cardiff Akomfrah Cardiff’s video work fosters connections across time and geography. Set with classical music and ocean noises, the images taken from nature documentaries present ocean life at its most impressive moment. With skies full of lightning and rising waves, it is a burst of beauty and terror. However, this is not an exaltation of the wonders of nature. Excerpts from interviews and narration mix stories of shipwrecked migrants during lethal voyages. There are a lot of bodies thrown into the sea: African slaves, Chilean mothers, Algerian FLN fighters. Akomfrah makes a non-linear path through the depths of history, raising ghosts whose experiences resonate ominously. SS
12. Vincent van Gogh – Rain: AuversNational Museum CardiffOne of Van Gogh’s last paintings before committing suicide is a landscape marked by his inner anguish. The despair he felt surpasses the beauty of nature in wild cuts that cannot be seen simply as a falling rain. The world is blurred, the village is a piece of roof piled up behind melancholy twisted cypress trees. A crow flies towards him through the tears of heaven. Even the yellow of the cornfields does not suggest hope, as in his earlier paintings of sun-kissed landscapes, but it has an unpleasant and awkward glow. JJ
13. Mainie Jellett – Head of a WomanUlster MuseumJellett was a pioneer of modernism in Ireland. After studying in Dublin, London and Paris, she became influential as a writer and administrator of the arts and also as a practitioner. Best known for her Cubist-inspired paintings, she was also known for her figurative work. NO
14. The Abergavenny JesseSt Mary’s Priory, Abergavenny Only the base of this late 15th century carving, made of a single oak, survives, representing the ancestral line of Christ to Jesse of Bethlehem. However, it represents the most significant wooden figure that has survived the Reformation. NO
15. TroublesDerry MuralsUreland art in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s is a controversial heritage. These amazing murals come from a tragic era. They are an important part of the artistic map of Britain precisely because they remind us of that cruel time. JJ
16. Thomas Jones – Ruined Buildings, NaplesGlynn Vivian Gallery, SwanseaArtists gathered in Naples in the 18th century to paint the erupting Vesuvius. But this Welsh genius preferred to look at abandoned corners of the city itself: a wall, a window, some hanging laundry. Here he dreams awake of the melancholy of the ruins. JJ
17. William Jones Chapman – Francis Crawshay’s WorkersNational Museum Cardiff This set of 16 portraits of Welsh workers from the first half of the 19th century is notable not for the quality of the art: it is believed that they were painted by the artist. William Jones Chapman. – but because they exist at all. They were commissioned by Francis Crawshay, a man with his own artistic ambitions who had been put in charge of his father’s tools. He learned Welsh to talk to his workers and treated them as equals. A record of the industrial life of that time. NO
18. Tai-Shan Schierenberg – Seamus HeaneyNaughton Gallery at Queen’s University BelfastOne of the achievements of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney was to speak so deeply to a global audience without ever losing touch with his roots. This portrait is hung in a gallery at Queen’s University Belfast, where there is a poetry center that also bears his name. NO
Apollo Pavilion by architect Victor Pasmore (Pasmore Pavilion) in Peterlee, County Durham. Photography: Robert Smith / Alamy
Northwest and Northeast
19. Victor Pasmore – The Apollo PavilionPeterlee, County Durham At the time of its completion in 1969, Pasmore’s brutalist sculpture was Britain’s largest public work of art, created for the project housing in the new town of Peterlee, Sunny Blunts, which Pasmore also designed. Its series of abstract concrete plans that intersect, forming walls and walkways, frame the landscape and give the estate a focal point. If it is not the platform for psychic elevation that its creator imagined, the pavilion is accepted as a place of shared memories for those who have aged with it. SS
20. David Hockney – Peter Getting Out of Nick’s PoolWalker Art Gallery, Liverpool Hockney won the John Moores Prize for this work in 1967, just as homosexuality was beginning to be legalized in Britain. But the artist was in Los Angeles when he painted it the year before. The hedonistic setting is complemented by the geometric buttocks of her boyfriend Peter Schlesinger. These are the reflections of a perfect evening: Hockney sees her lover as a natural form among stylized patterns of delight. What’s revolutionary about paintings like this one from the 60’s is that Hockney is very happy to be gay. JJ
21. Kurt Schwitters – Merz Barn WallHatton Gallery, Newcastle upon …