The story
Scotland's national collection of modern art lives in two grand neoclassical buildings that face each other across a road west of Edinburgh's centre, both of them former schools. The first, Modern One, was built in the 1820s as a home for fatherless children and became a gallery in 1984.
On the lawn in front of it lies a work you walk around rather than look at: Landform, a stepped serpentine mound wrapped by crescent pools, shaped in the early 2000s by the designer Charles Jencks from ideas in chaos theory. Across the road, Modern Two holds the gallery's Dada and Surrealist rooms, with Dalí, Magritte and Miró, and a faithful reconstruction of the cluttered studio of the Edinburgh-born sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi.
The wider collection runs from around 1900 to the present across some 6,000 works, strong in Scottish painting and in the international avant-garde.
