The best-known group of realist artists in Britain in the 1950s was the Kitchen Sink School. Although he painted more pots and pans than any of them, William Scott was never included among their number. He wasn't a realist with a social conscience in the sense that they were but, as the stubborn presence of those pots and pans in his pictures suggests, neither was he an abstract painter, pure and simple. His work was always anchored to the world beyond the confines of the canvas.
It's over a decade since the last retrospective exhibition devoted to him was seen in Belfast, Dublin and Edinburgh - an itinerary that tells its own story. For, although he is, arguably, a pivotal figure in 20th-century British painting, one who received considerable official recognition and support during his lifetime, he doesn't quite fit comfortably into the mainstream of British art and a reassessment is overdue. Perhaps IMMA's William Scott: Paintings And Drawings, a modest retrospective survey of his life's work, and the first since his death in 1989, marks the start of that process.
The selection of 90 or so exhibits incorporates pieces never previously seen, drawn from the Scott family collection. Much weight has been given to drawing, always an important strand of his activity, and one that he saw as complementary, rather than supplementary, to his painting.
He was born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913. His mother was Scottish and his father, a house and sign painter, was Irish. The artist's memories of Greenock were of "a grey world, an austere world". The family was extremely poor and in 1924 moved to Enniskillen, his father's home town, hoping that prospects would be better there, as indeed they were. When William showed signs of being unusually adept at painting and drawing, Scott senior took the enlightened step of enlisting the help of the local art teacher, Kathleen Bridle. A friend and contemporary of Henry Moore's, she was an exceptional individual and introduced the boy to contemporary art. When he went on to Belfast College of Art, he found he knew much more than his teachers about the European avant-garde.
Alas, his father was killed in a tragic accident, fighting a fire in the town in 1927. Exceptionally, the civic authorities organised a fund and, with Bridle's encouragement, subsidised William's artistic education. It's not unreasonable to see these experiences as contributing to the two complementary drives, austerity and sensuality, or duty and hedonism, that characterise Scott's work throughout his life. Sometimes they operate in concert, sometimes one or other dominates, but generally it is from the tension between these imperatives that his work derives its energy.
"The one is what saves his work from lushness, the other gives it density and richness and, at times, a primitive, instinctive immediacy," wrote Ronald Alley in 1986. When Scott himself remarked of his approach to drawing that it contains both geometry and sex, "forms pure and impure", he could well have been speaking of his work as a whole.
He went on to study in London and stayed for six months working in Cornwall. After he and Mary Lucas married in 1937, they spent two years on the continent, in Italy and then France, before the outbreak of war. A brief spell in Dublin convinced them to return to London. Then Scott taught briefly, part-time, at the Bath Academy before joining the Royal Engineers. After the war he returned to a full-time job at Bath for 10 years, thereafter devoting himself to painting.
His pre-war work was stylised and representational, with a vein of subdued lyricism, and suggests that he could well have gone on to become a Kitchen Sink realist. But after the war he became more focused, notably in a series of still lifes that move towards an abstract idiom. It's important to emphasise, though, that while the work became more abstract it also became increasingly allusive. The elements in the still lifes often have ambiguous figurative or erotic or landscape connotations.
Then, in 1953, while in Canada, he had the opportunity of visiting New York and meeting some of the American artists who were creating a stir. He met Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others and was initially bewildered, then impressed with what they were doing. But, paradoxically, he later wrote: "My personal reaction was to discontinue my pursuit of abstract art and to try to put my earlier form of symbolic realism on a scale larger than the easel picture, with a new freedom . . . I felt now that there was a Europeanism that I belonged to . . ."
Two significant influences on his distinctive, pared-down visual language were the cave drawings at Lascaux and Egyptian art. He encountered both at first hand and he responded to them because they confirmed his own instincts. The "primitivism" he admired in Lascaux he adopted not as a stylistic accessory but as a rigorous drive for simplicity and clarity. It's evident as well in the earthy symbolism of the mid-1950s nudes. When he wrote "I should like to combine a sensual eroticism with a starkness which will be instinctive and uncontrived," he was surely inspired by what he had seen at Lascaux.
Many of his later drawings and paintings of nudes, with their elegant linearity and flattened forms, have the appearance of being profoundly influenced by Egyptian art. It is also clear that Scott regards many of these figures not at all as formal cyphers but with a frankly sexual gaze, something confirmed by the inclusion of mock-ups of an unpublished erotic book, Private Suite Or Dubious Love, with sexually explicit text and illustrations by the artist.
Needless to say he was susceptible to other, artistic influences as well. A great deal of his painting in the latter part of the 1950s is certainly indebted to Nicholas de Stael, whose reputation was then high and who was the subject of a major Tate Gallery exhibition at the time. But Scott absorbed the lessons of de Stael and came up with sensational paintings that are altogether his own, like the glowing orange Abstract Gouache of 1957. The following years were particularly good for him. White And Ochre, Space Division, Nile Valley, Red And White, White, Sand And Ochre and Balance are all brave, superb works that have aged remarkably well.
Their subtle tonal effects underline how difficult his paintings can be to reproduce, particularly if you compare the originals to the plates in the publication accompanying the show. It's a decently printed book but a great deal is lost. The tone of the textual content is encapsulated in the title of Simon Morley's essay, Scott After Modernism. The painter's work has always been contained within the framework of modernist theory, the blurb informs us. "The exhibition sets out to bring forward from the shadows, works which express other dimensions of Scott's mind and art . . . It is as if the artist, in these unseen and unfamiliar works is dissenting from his own established aesthetic," IMMA Director Declan McGonagle writes in the foreword.
The cumulative impression conveyed is that this exhibition offers us a radically different Scott than previous shows have done, specifically one free from the iron clamp of modernist dogma. Neither of these claims stands up to scrutiny. Scott escaped from that particular chain gang some decades ago and the view of the artist that emerges is essentially a consolidation of the one mapped out in the fine 1986 retrospective, organised by the Irish Arts Councils, North and South. It's no less welcome for that.
William Scott: Paintings And Drawings can be seen at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until November 1st.
