With Magritte's surreal visions regularly appearing on mouse-mats, mugs and ties, the initial, profound shock of surrealism is hard, if not impossible, to recover these days. The techniques, and styles of the movement, declared dead in 1941, have now been thoroughly appropriated (in advertising, for example, like those illogical, elliptical Guinness ads) and the word itself, "surreal", is overused to the point of meaninglessness.
So it is a real treat to get a fresh look at this once avant-garde way of doing things and, especially, to do so through the work of a woman artist rather than the through that of the more well-known, usually male, suspects. Eileen Agar (1899-1991) started out in conventional style - she came from a well-to-do family, and painted lovely, typically English landscapes. But, from 1924 when she first set off on her artistic travels, Agar emphatically left tradition behind.
An early self-portrait from 1927 shows her embracing for the first time the aesthetic experimentation she found on the continent. Cubism, especially, was an important influence, and only later came the association with surrealism for which she is best known. The only professional British female artist selected for the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, Agar was seen by others as more involved in the movement than she herself recognised.
Though she worked in a range of styles, making each her own in her long career (she talked of abstraction and surrealism being like "two legs" she walked with), the high points of this absorbing centenary exhibition are the rooms full of her 30s paintings, such as Quadriga (1935) with its four carnivalesque horse heads, and her objects and collages. In these, there is something of the surrealism we know - the bizarre juxtapositions, the subliminal vision - and a delicate quirkiness all her own.
Agar's was a particular take on surrealism, a specifically English, aristocratic, female version of the wilder experimentation she was witnessing all around her. Throughout the exhibition, there's a sense of Agar responding, but not in a directly derivative way, to this vortex of creative energy rather than leading it.
In addition to the paintings and objects, there is plenty of biographical and art-historical interest here too, with her photographs of beach life featuring Man Ray and Picasso; images recording strange objects she and Paul Nash would find on their long beach- combing walks together; and her early scrapbooks showing a precocious talent for hilarious collages. And then there are her hats, like the wonderful Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse - for Agar was the mad hatter of surrealism, and a world away from Magritte and his dull bowlers.
Until February 27 (0131-624 6200) .
