Emil Nolde at the Scottish Museum of Modern Art

The two big exhibitions in Edinburgh at the moment are about Rembrandt and Emil Nolde and, with limited time, I chose Nolde. And I'm so pleased that I did. Rembrandt is brown but Nolde is every colour of the rainbow and a few more and that's why the exhibition is titled 'Colour Is Life'. Colour is, indeed, life and we need more of it, as the sandstone front to the gallery clearly shows.

The exhibition presents works from across Nolde's life and I was pleased to see that one of the constants was his paintings of plants and flowers, from the early paintings of his gardens to later paintings of poppies. Such gorgeous colours and compositions. Paintings of parties and nightclubs in Berlin in the '30s, showing the colour and glamour and the decadence. And paintings of his trip to the South Seas and the tropical vegetation and peoples and his return to Europe during the First World War. There's a lot going on in these works.

It was odd to read about his life alongside his paintings and see that he lost thousands of his own works along with those he'd collected by Klee and Kandinsky when his Berlin apartment was bombed in the Second World War. Who knows what we're now missing? It was also disturbing to read of his support for the Nazi Party which was offset by his being banned from being a painter and having more works than anyone else exhibited in the first 'Degenerate Art' exhibition. Since he was banned he found it difficult to buy canvasses and oil paints so he honed his skills with watercolours and paper and produced some astonishing works. I'm new to painting with watercolours and don't understand how he produced such deep colours in the medium. I need to experiment more, obviously.

To illustrate Nolde's anti-semitic support for the Nazis the exhibition includes a painting in a room of religious paintings (rather than political paintings) of Jewish elders gloating over the crucifixion. The museum even has a paragraph on its website warning about this painting and saying it doesn't support the views expressed in the painting. I won't show the painting here but it's pretty obvious what it's about. His saving grace is being banned by the Nazis, I suppose. Instead, here's a painting of Adam & Eve after the fall. I'll stick with the colour and inventiveness of his paintings.

One of the last paintings on display was a small watercolour of a skater which really caught my eye. The strange composition with extreme foreshortening, arms behind his back and clear movement, all off which show athleticism and thrusting his way forward on the ice. That muscular body growing out of the touch of skate to ice and the bulging shadow, such a great composition in such minimal colours.

There was also one late painting of poppies, presumably from his garden, in the exhibition, and plastic poppies for sale in the gallery shop (I didn't buy any). I like his paintings of poppies and have used his paintings as the basis for my own versions of his poppies..

The Museum is about 45 minutes walk from the Scottish National Gallery so you need to want to go there rather than just drop in on your way to somewhere else but this exhibition is worth it. I'd be quite happy to see it again if it transferred to London.