The centenary celebrations for William Scott (1913–89) are well under way, and the retrospective of his work that started in January at Tate St Ives is currently in Wakefield. There are more works in its latest incarnation and more archive material, and the installation looks very impressive in The Hepworth’s riverside galleries. Scott has not always fared well in historical surveys of 20th-century British painting (he was famously excluded from the Royal Academy’s 1987 exhibition), and his reputation does not stand as high today as it might. In his lifetime, he was much acclaimed, represented this country at the 1956 Venice Biennale and enjoyed a significant degree of international esteem. He was a figure of considerable importance in the art world and yet today his work is curiously unfamiliar to many. This new exhibition, and the various centenary publications, should help to change that.
Certainly the selection and hanging demonstrate Scott’s development to good advantage and present for our scrutiny a rich and coherent body of work sufficiently diverse to maintain interest. These are slow paintings that reveal themselves only gradually: you won’t gain a great deal if you simply browse or scan as you pass through these rooms. Take time to examine the densely textured surfaces, make comparisons between subjects and treatments (noting the lifelong abstraction/figuration dialogue), give thought to the way Scott uses line and colour, flatness and depth. He himself said: ‘I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.’ Test this statement against his pictures.
Scott was a great painter of still-life, and even his nudes and landscapes owe much to the architectural design that dominated his table-top compositions. An introductory section shows early work from the 1930s and 40s, Cézanne-ish or Chardin-esque. The main gallery is filled with more mature delights: a very subtle and beautiful untitled painting from 1954, brushy but structured, hung with a lovely reclining nude in gouache and ‘The Harbour’ (1952), minimal but satisfyingly precise. Another effective group, ‘Still-life’ (c.1956), ‘Orchard of Pears No 10’ (1976–7) and ‘Bowl (White on Grey)’ of 1962, makes a tremendous yet understated impact. Notice the awkward shapes and lively surface of ‘Still-life’ (1955–6) and the serenity of ‘Orange Segments’ (1976). The third room contains mostly drawings with a couple of mesmeric ‘Berlin Blues’ paintings on the far wall. This is an exhibition to relish, which effortlessly reasserts William Scott as one of the pre-eminent painters of his era.
It’s always a pleasure to visit the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, and its focus on Scott’s figure paintings and drawings offers up a lesser-known aspect of his work for detailed study. The visitor is greeted by a very sensuous untitled reclining nude in hot earth tones (terracotta and a range of dark reds), which unusually presents the figure as landscape — as, in effect, a mountainous hillside. This is the kind of metaphor we are familiar with in Henry Moore’s work, or indeed in the paintings of Graham Sutherland, but not what one immediately associates with Scott. Around the walls in the Foreshore Gallery are ten other powerful Scott oils, all but one of nudes. The exception is a large and potent still-life. Looking at this selection is like viewing a mini-retrospective, even though the majority of paintings date from the 1950s. Here are bodies metamorphosing into aerial views or furniture (the nude as upturned table-top or sofa), or rendered in linear shorthand, hieratic and Egyptian or ultramarine and fragmented.
The palette is predominantly ruddy or ochre-ish, the colours of mud or pots or cured leather rather than living human skin, but the aim here is not verisimilitude. There’s also a monochrome grey reclining figure, and a pale Bonnard-like nude. Seated or standing, these figures are tough interpretations of reality (‘I find beauty in plainness,’ Scott said), stark and instinctive, expressive and uncontrived — intimately concerned with the physical experience of being in a body. The exhibition extends into two rooms. In the first are two more still-life paintings, a fish from 1950 and a small late canvas ‘Poem for a Jug no 4’, potently juxtaposed with Kenneth Armitage’s bronze ‘Standing Figure’ (1961). In the second are six charcoal drawings from 1956, including ‘Figure Divided’, four joined sheets, which begins to look more like landscape again, reminiscent of what Peter Lanyon was doing around the same time. The display ends with a bang: an unexpected and very striking oil called ‘Blue Standing Nude’, from 1956/7.
The Hepworth exhibition travels on to its final venue, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, in the autumn, showing there from 25 October 2013 to 2 February 2014. Meanwhile, Scott celebrations carry on elsewhere. The vast but magnificent four-volume catalogue raisonné of his oil paintings has just been published (T&H, priced £595), expertly compiled by Sarah Whitfield, who has also written an excellent and accessible introduction to Scott published by the Tate (£14.99). There are various other exhibitions planned or already open, including two in London: 1950s Nude Drawings at Karsten Schubert, 5–8 Lower John Street, W1 (until 12 July), and William Scott and Friends at Osborne Samuel, 23a Bruton Street, W1 (11 June to 13 July). The drawing show ranges from abstract nudes that look like table-tops or harbours seen from above, to more overtly sensual reclining figures, partially clad or otherwise. These charcoal drawings are more about bodies than faces, and the features, when visible, are smudged or caricatured. In fact, they are really about the disposal of lines and forms, of patterns of black on white, and make an interesting companion to the Jerwood show. As Scott said, ‘Drawing for me is exploring, not explaining.’
William Scott and Friends offers a very different range of pleasures, approaching the artist through some fine examples of his work set in the context of his friends and contemporaries. Scott liked to swap his own pictures for those by artists he admired, and this unusual exhibition brings together a group of works that remain in the Scott Estate. So we see good paintings by Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Adrian Heath, together with little-known sculptures by Scott’s wife Mary, and Abstract Expressionist work by Paul Jenkins and Herbert Ferber. Scott also traded one of his paintings with Jim Ede for an Alfred Wallis, thus at the same time augmenting his own collection and ensuring his work was included at Kettle’s Yard. Other treasures include a collage by Tàpies and a poignant landscape by Lanyon. The whole exhibition is an intriguing take on a key figure of mid 20th-century British art.
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