Exhibitions review: William Scott

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.