William Scott: A Reputation Restored?

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Adrian Lewis looks at three books about this once-famous British artist

Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of British painter William Scott (1913–89), whose work has been curated since 2007 by the William Scott Foundation set up by the artist’s two sons Robert and James. Norbert Lynton’s massive tome William Scott (Phaidon, 2007) was followed by the publication this year of Sarah Whitfield’s four-volume catalogue raisonné of over a thousand oil paintings by the artist (Thames and Hudson, 2013). A retrospective started in February 2013 at the Tate St Ives and toured in an evolving form to the Hepworth Wakefield and the Jerwood Gallery  in Hastings, finishing at the Ulster Museum in Belfast where it will close on 2 March.

Sarah Whitfield has now also produced an introductory overview of Scott’s work for the ‘British Artists’ series published by the Tate. She makes much of the grey world of Greenock where he was born and Enniskillen where he grew up before going to Belfast School of Art and the Royal Academy School in London. She illustrates his youthful admiration for Stanley Spencer  and his modest stylistic primitivism when he worked in Brittany in the late 1930s and set up a summer art school before wartime service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the war. His post-Cubist still-lifes developed into a fusion of shape and space by the early 1950s, as Scott championed an idiom wherein objects are abstracted into signs of multiple meanings through dramatic reductionism, so that figural, still life or landscape suggestions interfuse in a sort of primitivist-looking and coarsely physical manner.

Whitfield places Scott’s work within the emerging British abstraction of the early 1950s and discusses interestingly how a precocious French student called Marie-Christine Treinen at Bath Academy (where Scott taught) was a conduit for the impact of  Jean Dubuffet’s art brut (‘outsider art’) on Scott and others.

Scott did well on the art market via New York’s Martha Jackson Gallery and art world validation was confirmed when he represented Britain at the 1958 Venice Biennale. Indeed, there are 48 works of his in the Tate and a further 35 are in other public collections. An early still life was sold for over £1 million in 2008. Scott died in 1989 after a last few years blighted by Alzheimer’s.

Whitfield treats the paintings from 1958–61 as the highpoint of Scott’s work, though she makes a case for the ‘Berlin Blues’ paintings of 1965–6 as being a significant set of works. The last two decades of painting are covered rather judiciously, certainly with a minimal number of illustrations. I suspect that the critical re-evaluation of Scott’s work that some hope for will not ultimately quite happen. Scott is usually vaunted for his combination of figuration and abstraction, but in the reiteration of invented signs, a feeling of ‘realism’ in the widest sense (a sense that work reflects in some way the stuff of the world) suffers in my view. Considered from the alternative viewpoint of Abstract Expression, his expressivity seems weakened by lack of powerful contrasts, too much infill of shapes and ‘professional’ conscious working of surface instead of letting go and giving himself over to a poignant feeling.

The position occupied by Scott back in the 1950s is well captured in a useful Osborne Samuel Gallery catalogue called William Scott and Friends. Here, 17 Scott oils, gouaches and drawings are accompanied by a selection of works by Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Adrian Heath, Terry Frost, all of which have some family relationship with Scott’s painting. The exact relationship is explored in a catalogue essay by Andrew Lambirth, who typically discusses Hilton’s admiration for Scott around 1953–5 but also suggests the possible example that the expressive handling of Hilton’s work set for Scott around 1960.

The catalogue also discusses and illustrates the little-known sculpture by William’s wife Mary, and documents the artworks in Scott’s own private collection, either swopped with other artists (Hilton, Heath, Frost) or bought by him outright from sheer admiration (Lanyon, Ferber, Antoni Tapies). The collection surprisingly included three flowing paintings by American Paul Jenkins, and less surprisingly a small Alfred Wallis  painting swopped with Jim Ede for one of Scott’s own works which now sits in Ede’s Kettle’s Yard Gallery  in Cambridge.

Fifteen of Scott’s mid-1950s drawings were shown at Karsten Schubert Gallery,  London,  in May–July 2013. Ridinghouse published the catalogue with a short essay by Sarah Whitfield and the text of a 1973 lecture on drawing by Scott himself. The earliest drawings such as Seated Woman 1953 take us back to that severe linear mode and worked-over surface  of his contemporary oils, but Cross Channel (1957) shows us the figuration which he explored in nudes thereafter. Within a primitivizing medium, faces present an issue for Scott, either emptied or else awkwardly filled.  Line is reduced often to a rough regularity of width and an outlining that fails to articulate limb conjunctions. Sometimes, as in Girl Reclining No.1 (1956), the distortions of anatomy feel less expressive than forced, and the deliberate reworking of the surface seems more a stylish gesture to an idea of creativity, particularly in Untitled-Nude (1956), in which signs for the nude are in my view crude in all the wrong ways. There is some simplified beauty in Scott’s nude drawings overall in his mature work, but I still find them lacking a certain graphic energy and expressivity by comparison, say, with the drawings of Roger Hilton.

William Scott by Sarah Whitfield is published by Tate Publishing, London, 2013. 96pp., 64 colour illus, £14-99 ISBN 978-1-84976-082-9

William Scott and Friends by Andrew Lambirth, is published by Osborne Samuel Gallery, London, 2013. 72pp, 30 colour illus, 6 mono illus,  ISBN 978-0-9574601-2-6

William Scott: 1950s Nude Drawings by Sarah Whitfield is published by Ridinghouse, London, 2013. 48pp., 16 colour illus, 1 mono illus, £ ISBN 978-1-905464-75-3