Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The superior painter can be recognized as much by the management of his gifts as by their initial character. Sometimes that management may involve the appearance, in mid-career, of attributes not previously guessed at; but in the European, and particularly in the French, tradition there are artists whose entire output, though various enough at first sight, can be analysed in terms of a single preoccupation.

     William Scott is an artist of this sort. Nothing could be further, in many ways, from the world of identifiable forms than the new paintings of his which are now on show at the Hanover Gallery in London; and those who admired his earlier pictures may regret, as admirers so often do, that he has not gone on with ‘the same sort of thing’. But I think that Scott would maintain, and rightly, that he in fact has done the same sort of thing, and that a series of plates such as goes with this article would make the point very clearly.

     Scott himself feels that he did not really get under way as an independent painter until 1938, when he went to live in Pont Aven, in Brittany. But his earlier history is relevant, even so, to the problem of his style. Scott was born in 1913, in Scotland, of Scottish and Irish parents, and as he was brought up in Northern Ireland it was natural that he should go first to the Belfast School of Art, where he studied from 1928 to 1931. For the next five years he was a student of the Royal Academy School in London. The strict academic training involved a good deal of copying in the National Gallery. And just as his work owes something to the circumstances of his youth (in his own words: ‘the villages of Scotland and Ireland, a grey world and a very austere one with a philosophy of life, a rigid Protestantism, from which one cannot escape easily’) it also owes much to his study of the Old Masters. This gave him, for instance, the regard for traditional ‘thin’ painting, which he employed up till 1950, a delight in close and exact relations of tone, and a preoccupation with a limited, and often a subdued, colour-range.

     When he lived in France (1937-39) his friends and acquaintances came mostly from an older generation of French artists: Derain, Maurice Denis, Maurice Asselin and the veteran Emile Bernard, friend of Cézanne and Gauguin. Scott’s own painting was concerned with the subjects that came most easily to hand: landscapes and the figure; but his real interests lay beyond these, in the division of space. He already liked to divide his pictures in such a way that proportion was their inner subject; and within the spaces thus set out there were large areas of apparent emptiness. These areas he kept alive, as it were, by giving them a tactile quality, a beauty and variety of paint that never let the eye wander vaguely. A picture like the ‘Figure and Still-Life, 1938’ forecasts, in this sense, the entire development of Scott’s style. It has in it the figures, seated and standing, of 1956-57; and the table-top paintings; and the still-lives of household objects; and even the grave, large, ‘painterly’ canvases of today, whence the point of departure has been completely obliterated. There is even that completely calm, relaxed management of the entire space within the picture which is something not often seen in English art since Stubbs painted his racecourse pictures: and Scott once said: ‘If you ask me which English painter I feel nearest to, I’d say that it might be Stubbs.’

     Scott’s advance was then arrested by the outbreak of war, much of which he spent in the army. He did, however, have his first one-man show in London in 1942, and at that time had the distinction of being singled out by Clive Bell. But in general the aesthetic climate of London during and after the war was not favourable to painting such as his; the art most in favour was one of picturesque incident and romantic evocation, whereas Scott has aimed always both to reduce incident to, or beyond, a bare minimum and to avoid any sort of local or associative interest. If he turned, in the end, mainly to still-life it is not because the instruments of still-life were attractive to him in themselves, but because they formed a convenient, familiar and unobtrusive nucleus of fact. Like the harbour-basins with which he has also at times concerned himself, they provided a grand and sober architecture, with table-top or harbour-wall to push the horizon up towards the top of the canvas, and pots and pans (or boats) to provide the small repertory of rounded or rectangular shapes with which Scott has always contented himself.

     So expert has been his reduction of the picture-subject to its simplest essentials, and so ready are people now to discard the representational element in serious painting, that we often forget the real and legitimate pleasure which Scott once gave by his nimble and affectionate handling of recognizable objects. In the 1951 show at the Leicester Gallery, for instance, canvas after canvas displayed this quality. But the tendency of his work was towards making the picture more and more a thing in, and for, itself. Its general layout and organization changed little or not at all, but gradually Scott withdrew, one by one, the auxiliary points of interest. No longer could the spectator say, ‘That’s a herring!’ or ‘That’s an egg!’ or ‘Those are beans!’, even if the form which said ‘Herring’. ‘Egg’, ‘Bean’ lingered on the canvas. He also began to flatten the picture even more than before: what had been parallel to, or square with, the picture-plane was brought still closer. Also—for this was a time of change on all fronts — the paint, which had till then been of a classic thinness, became altogether thicker and richer and more free. By freeing himself from the object, Scott freed his brush also.

     The pictures which resulted were made up, in many cases, of interlocked rectangles to which there clung, at the most, some vestigial figurative implication. The variety and subtlety of their tone-relations was the more remarkable for the extreme restraint of the colour-gamut: for, at this stage, Scott virtually signed off, as far as vivid expressive colour was concerned, and kept to blacks and whites and greys, much as cubism in its analytical phase put colour, and fauve colour above all, out of account. When Scott first showed at the Hanover Gallery, in June 1953, Patrick Heron wrote something that is no less applicable now that he has again taken up a position that may disconcert some of his older patrons: ‘The architecture of his new pictures is stronger, its rhythms are both simpled and possessed of a stronger pulse, than ever before. No painter in this country moves across canvas with a surer tread. None combines a firmer punch with a greater elegance of control: the rugged barn-door (or fishing-boat hull) quality of paint is the means for conveying a supremely formal utterance. And space is always generated — both by the actual disposition of the forms and directly; directly out of the vibrant flatness of the paint.’

     In 1953 Scott went to Canada and the USA. While there, he met Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Pollock was the only one of them who had meant anything to him before his arrival, and the experience was one notable for its impact. But the result of that impact was not what it inclines to be when younger European artists encounter the eastern seaboard’s built-in tornado. ‘I was overwhelmed by the size and directness of the new American painting,’ he says. ‘I’d been trying to make my pictures as direct and uncontrived as possible, and to give them the immediacy you get in children’s art, or in primitive art. I don’t mean that they were meant to be like children’s art, but simply that I was trying to recapture a child’s directness and immediacy of feeling.’

     The Americans had discovered, Scott felt, that abstract art could cut free altogether from the easel-concept, or easel-confine, of painting. Working on a pre-Impressionist scale, drawing freely on European examples (Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Masson, Hofmann), they had won just that freedom for which Scott in his larger paintings (one, dated 1951, measured six feet by five) had been searching. More than one of them became close friends of Scott.

     And yet . . . - ‘I came back from the States convinced that European artists must remain European. There’s a whole tradition, the descent from Chardin through Cézanne to Braque and Bonnard, which has no part in their painting, and that’s the tradition that I’ve always held to.’ (Bonnard’s 1925 ‘Baignoire in the Tate was the inspiration of more than one of Scott’s nudes; and he sees in Bonnard the alliance of qualities which he most envies — the child’s eye combined with a profound mastery of twentieth century possibilities in picture-making.) For this reason, Scott’s visit to the USA had the effect of sending him back towards a decipherable still-like idiom, with the paint enriched and fortifled by what he had seen and a new ease and amplitude in the forms. This phase lasted into and through 1957 and was responsible for some of his most majestic and voluptuous pictures. The enormous (five feet by six) ‘Abstract Gouache’ now in the Whitworth Institute, Manchester, is an instance of this; another is the prizewinning entry in the 1959 John Moores exhibition, later bought for the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. These works show, as so often in Scott, a to-and-fro between the memory of the object as seen and the demands of the self-sufficing picture; on the one hand the pictures tend to flatten the forms and tilt them upright towards the observer, and on the other Scott nearly always keeps the semblance of a horizon and the distant likeness of either an exceptionally well-equipped kitchen or a harbour crowded with broad-bottomed boats. (There’s even an ambiguity, in some of the nudes, between woman-form and harbour-form: the aptest illustration, this, of the discreetly erotic attraction which is never far from his themes).

     From 1958 onwards Scott began to have the kind of international reputation which whisks new pictures away for exhibition abroad before they can be set before the English public. The big ensembles of his work prepared for Venice (1958) and the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover and elsewhere (1960) have never been paralleled in his own country; and even his current show perforce overleaps a whole phase of his development. In Hanover, for instance, the final section was made up of a large group of untitled pictures in which the point of departure had at last been completely obliterated. The repertory of shapes had not changed, the colour had its familiar limited range, the paint was as rich, dense, and various as ever; but anyone unacquainted with Scott’s career would have taken them for pictures self-generated without reference to the world of fact. The lineage was as clear as ever (several of the oils-on-paper were like free versions of Bonnard prints), but there were signs of a new cosmopolitanism. The paint, for instance, had crusts and incisions and deliberate roughnesses which stamped Scott as the contemporary of Tapiès and Dubuffet — and pointed also to his preference for a finish that is not too obtrusively ‘beautiful’. And although Scott never ceases to scour the past for fresh sources of inspiration (one of his best nudes, done in 1957, relates to a visit to Pompeii) there were signs at Hanover that the American experience was also pushing its way up through the floor of memory. This tendency seems to me to be confirmed by the new pictures.

     Clive Bell, in 1942, remarked of Scott that he ‘seems to have decided to eliminate everything that was not strictly relevant to the creation of design’. And he forecast that, hazardous as this was, ‘Scott’s almost impeccable sense of placing can be trusted to save his pictures from futility’. No one could have foreseen in 1942 that paint would be held, twenty years later, to have an imaginative life and power, a magnetic thraldom, all its own; but, this apart, Mr Bell’s words need no amendment today. The square and the circle, never far from Scott’s preoccupations, are the basic forms here employed; and, over and over again, the observer who has followed Scott throughout his career will recognize the familiar but now transmogrified motifs—the table and its legs, the rich blackened circle of the frying-pan, the irregular rectangles that could be ships at the quayside, the scribblings and scrawlings that bring the language of the street into the drama of High Art. And, beyond all of these, Scott’s concern is where it always was — with proportion, with an emptiness that is alive with incident and interest, and with an enclosed, flattened, up-tilted space that somehow opens out to embrace a great part of our visual experience.