Beginning with French artists who painted with electrifying colour, the first room includes work by Henri Matisse and André Derain. Their brightly coloured landscape paintings were so radically different that the artists were given the derogatory label ‘Fauves’ – meaning ‘wild beasts’. The term stuck and Fauvism had a major impact on British and particularly Scottish art.

Two fabulous new acquisitions, by Scottish Colourists FCB Cadell and JD Fergusson, feature in this room. Leith-born JD Fergusson, who lived in Paris before the First World War, was one of the key Scottish artists of the twentieth century. Painted in 1911, Flowers and Pink Box, is vigorous and confident in its brushwork, bright and clashing in colour. The Rose and the Lacquer Screen, by FCB Cadell, combines several of his favourite still-life props: a rose in a transparent vase, a black fan and its trailing ribbon and a detail of the lacquered screen that dominated the drawing room of his house in Edinburgh’s New Town. These new acquisitions have been generously donated by private owners.

Moving into the 1930s, artists such as Piet Mondrian believed that art could change society. This room features work by Alexander Calder, Paule Vézelay and Ben Nicholson.

Entering the 1940s, abstraction and idealism were replaced by grim realism. Featuring work by Francis Bacon, Joan Eardley and Bet Low, these paintings and sculptures, created both during and immediately after the Second World War, speak of a new reality.

The 1950s saw a battle between Abstraction and Realism. This is illustrated by two mural projects created for the great Festival of Britain exhibition of 1951, which will be shown together here for the first time. Josef Hermann’s project shows a row of miners - builders of a new socialist order; Victor Pasmore’s mural project is instead a daring essay glimpse of spiralling abstract forms. Exceptional creations by Alan Davie, Louise Nevelson, Fernand Léger, Eduardo Paolozzi and Elisabeth Frink are also on display, making up the 1950s presentation.

Art became celebratory, playful and experimental in the 1960s. Sculptors abandoned traditional materials such as bronze and marble for ‘soft sculpture’, exemplified in the work of Jann Haworth, Yayoi Kusama and Duane Hanson’s iconic Tourists.

Throughout the 1970s, artists took Abstraction and Minimalism to extremes. Fred Sandback’s Untitled, 1971 - two coloured cords which cut across the corner of the room - questions the very notion of art as something with three-dimensional form or narrative meaning.

The Keiller Library will focus on the motif of the hand in Surrealist art and writing. Drawing on works by Man Ray, Edith Rimmington and Salvador Dalí, from the national collection’s world-class holding of Surrealist books and archive material.

Radical, questioning and experimental, this selection of one hundred works from the national collection shows ways in which artists have continually pushed the boundaries and created art which defines its time. These pieces still have the power to shock and make us think about our world today.