Edinburgh’s City Art Centre and Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art offer close encounters with two giants (let’s not say dinosaurs) of British art. Both Peter Howson and Banksy have periodically expressed disdain for the intellectualism and institutions of contemporary art; both now have major shows running at publicly funded modern art galleries over Scotland’s crowded festival season.
But rather than grumbling at this irony, let’s pick apart what each artist has done with the platform they’ve been given; a platform that might have been offered to any number of figures from Scotland’s exciting and diverse contemporary arts scene. The answers are very different.
‘Too much of art today is an intellectual game,’ Peter Howson announces in a statement accompanying When The Apple Ripens (★★★☆☆) at the capital’s City Art Centre, a broad retrospective which traces his passage from painter of Scotland’s social underbelly to Bosnian War artist and Christian convert. For the Ayrshire-raised, Glasgow-trained painter, art should be ‘an open window into the wonder and mystery of existence’. But this show seems as concerned with rubbing our noses in the visceral horrors of reality as with unfolding any possibility of insight or revelation. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily.

There is much about Howson’s work that is arresting, if not exactly edifying to behold. He is a compelling conjurer of flesh and bone, of huge, contorted limbs and big, bull-like skulls. There is an influence here from the emotive distortions of expressionism, particularly in its seedier, Weimar-Germany formulations: Max Beckmann or Otto Dix, as one caption suggests. His approach to scene-setting, meanwhile, is unmistakeably Bruegel-esque. Landscapes teem with bodies, often completely blocking out ground and sky, engaged in various sordid and profane activities.
The artist’s thematic concerns range from the traumas of military life (he had a brief, unhappy spell in the army, processed in horrendous works like 1985’s ‘Regimental Bath’) to working-class urban experience: 1991’s ‘Blind Leading Blind’ series explores the lot of the poor in a class-riven society. Other pieces depict Howson’s life-altering experiences as an official war artist during the Bosnian genocide of 1992–95. Mutilated bodies abound and women harvest fields of corpses.

The respite Howson offers his viewers from all this horror is in Christianity. The second floor contains works made after his 21st-century conversion. There are some affecting pieces, like those little panels showing the stations of the cross. But it’s vaguely disheartening to find that a painter avowedly determined to circumvent the academy and communicate with a wider mass of humanity (often by documenting the grimmest corners of our culture) is only able to provide solace in the form of submission to an invisible deity. One piece of exhibition copy describes Howson as an ‘apolitical’ artist. Well, quite.
The atmosphere over in Glasgow is very different. Nightclub-style aluminium barriers have been erected to process the huge crowds flocking to the extravaganza that is Banksy’s Cut And Run (★★★☆☆). During my allotted time-slot I mingle with tourists, teenagers, families and workers on their lunchbreaks. Reactions are uniformly and hyperbolically positive: out-loud guffaws plus audible cries of ‘oh, that’s clever’ and ‘he really doesn’t care, does he?’ Crowds pore over recreations of the Bristol-born artist’s stencil workshop and teenage bedroom. If one job of a civic arts venue is to draw in new audiences, then against that metric, GOMA has passed with flying colours.

But what of the art itself? Banksy’s work has never been my particular brew but that’s a question of taste rather than ethical judgement. And he is undeniably a master of the pithy visual pun that codifies a political sentiment (generally commendable, if sometimes simplistic) in arresting and memorable terms. A first set of rooms contains recreations of his famous spray-can creations. There are the wiretappers outside a phone-box near GCHQ, a young boy catching ash from a binfire in his mouth, and the recent work of a little gymnast balancing on rubble in Ukraine.
One graffito first created in the US alters a no-trespassing sign to show a stony-faced Native American holding it up. In GOMA’s central hall, a set of large-scale installations, including a cattle-transport vehicle filled with mewling fluffy toys, make up what the artist calls ‘The Dismaland Bemusement Park’. The malaise and moral hypocrisy of contemporary consumerism is nicely skewered, albeit the world of IRL spectacle being sent up feels a little retro in our age of online misinformation.

I leave with some questions as to the true radicalism of Banksy’s craft. His first-person captions make much of the ‘criminal’ status of his activity. But does anyone seriously believe he has been at risk of prosecution for the last several years? Stories of stealing and defacing paintings with Keith Allen as sidekick have a hint of Bullingdon Club entitlement about them (there are better reasons to deface artworks than just for the hell of it, as young climate protestors are showing us).
And the graffiti painter’s assertion that he ‘expected the buyer to pull out’ after he used a remote-controlled shredder to cut up a work following its sale at Sotheby’s seems questionable. This was a publicity-savvy piece of performance art, which was always going to puff up the market value. Questions like these aside, Banksy’s work has a political and ethical astuteness that is laudable for a blockbuster public artist. Ultimately, his work is about empathy, love and a healthy scepticism for authority, and it might just leave new audiences feeling that contemporary art could, after all, be for them.

Peter Howson: When The Apple Ripens, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until Sunday 1 October; Banksy: Cut And Run, Gallery Of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Monday 28 August.