The day I’d set aside to see the Sean Scully retrospective was full of promise.
I hadn’t been to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in almost 3 years, hadn’t ventured out to do a lot of things in 3 years that had been regular experiences before, like taking the Bolt Bus (R.I.P.) to New York City, or any kind of proper vacation. While I’ve loved these months mostly spent a walking distance from home, just going farther for something other than food, a doctor’s appointment, or tagging along with others felt like I was finally giving in to my own wanderlust.
Moreover, isn’t one of the best parts of most excursions anticipating what will happen before you go? It can be almost as delicious as when you finally get to taste it, and I’d been looking forward to seeing Sean Scully’s paintings for months.
There were other reasons too that this moment seemed so promising.
Previously unencountered art work can take you places you’ve never been before, and I’d never even heard of Scully before I read that a major retrospective of his work was headed to town, so I was primed for surprise. And that the exhibit was presenting “the arc of his output” turned my visit into another kind of journey. How had this Irish and American artist learned how to put his blocks and stripes of color together in ways that drew me in the minute I saw photographs of them? That meant I wasn’t only going to experience Scully’s “new way of perceiving” blocks and stripes of color, I was also going for material evidence of the dead-ends and throughways that brought him to what looked like a pretty sublime place after a relentless half century of experimentation with a few basic building blocks.
And then there was this.
I’m not much of an artist, but I’ve always gravitated towards the classes, made my sketches, tried my hand at advertising copy, color studies, printmaking and pots, and eventually landed on putting blocks of color or pattern next to similar or contrasting blocks myself, so Scully’s preoccupation with these kinds of alignments and juxtapositions have also been mine—on and off—for years now: an overlapping of basic interests. Because he’d sought out similar quandaries in the first place and seemed to find better ways than I had of resolving them, of course I couldn’t wait to see both his quandaries and solutions in person.
The picture up top shows multiple copies of the exhibit catalog I was about to enter, titled “The Shape of Ideas."
“Yellow Ascending” (1991) - a woodcut print.
"Square Light” (1988) - an etching.
This is a 2003 etching that Scully paired with a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca
called “Clock Echo”: I sat down/in a clearing in time./It was a pool of silence./White silence./Incredible ring/where the bright stars collide/with a dozen floating/black numbers. With this coupling, Scully clearly believes there is something more meaningful going on here than his arrangement of colored blocks on a two-dimensional square of paper.
As he likes to tell it, Scully has been an immigrant twice. The first time was when he moved from Ireland to London in 1949, and the second was when he leapt “across the pond” to New York City in 1975. But where he was painting may have been less important than the jobs he was doing before he picked up a brush and faced a canvas.
“Before breaking into art, he was a brick cleaner on a building site, a Christmas postman, a plasterer’s labourer and had a job stacking cardboard boxes in a factory. Fitting, perhaps, that stacks and bricklike forms would provide the building blocks for Scully’s inimitable visual language.”
In my experience, I don’t think there’s anything tentative (“perhaps”) about those early influences on Scully’s art. We often gravitate towards out first jobs for deep-seated reasons we only come to understand when looking back from the places where those influences led us. In this regard, you may recall my post about a early dancer and eventual neuroscientist called Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do.
Sean Scully
By 1980, Scully was “at war” with Minimalism (that is, they’re just blocks of color or stripes that somebody has put next to one another in an interesting way). It was clear from his Wallpaper interview that he had other ideas about what his paintings should be doing, namely “concentrating on human nature.” In other words, they should make us think and feel in ways we wouldn’t be thinking and feeling without having his paintings to look at.
The Art Museum's curators had this to say about this direction-setting construction from 8 years before that rebellion:
“this work made from woven strips of felt is unique within Scully’s practice and clearly reflects his desire to explore the grid as a means to structure his paintings. This interest, along with Scully’s use of felt fabric, was first inspired by a trip he made in 1969 to Morocco, where he encountered intricately patterned textiles and hanging strips of vibrantly died wool.”
In the following year, Scully also started to capture the “depth” of the Harvard Frame Painting on a flattened canvas in a couple of ways that would echo in his later work: contentious juxtapositions of form and color, and his introduction of brushstroke activity behind these boundaries.
This painting (with detail) is called “Inset #2” from 1973.
In April, 2020, when major exhibitions of his work were occurring in Europe and elsewhere in the U.S., the New York Times also considered the density of Scully’s paintings despite their “deceptively simple” appearance.
“Mr. Scully is most famous for paintings of deceptively simple geometries, especially broad stripes. (He once identified himself to a MoMA desk attendant by saying, ‘Sean Scully’s my name, painting stripes is my game.’) But wavering brushwork and unexpected colors [tend to] infuse those stripes with more passion than you’d think they could bear.”
After seeing these works "live," I’d have to agree with that. As his Wallpaper interview made clear: to watch Scully at work is to see him “in some form of rhythmic and spiritual combat with his paintings.” Scully admits as much about his practice:
“In my work, structure and emotion rage simultaneously, and that’s a very incongruous mixture. I am madly physical. People say I’m exhausting.”
Ok, you say. Lots of artists would like us to think that they're "in mortal combat" with their art,” but in the end each work has to stand (or fall) on its own in the eye of the beholder.
The adjacencies—side to side, or top to bottom—in Scully’s work are often informed by photos he's collected, this one called “Mexico One Window Green” from 2001. (Sorry for the unintended intrusion of my finger shadows on this shot).
“Magdalena” (1993) - oil and linen on canvas with two inserts.
On the day I visited, I had to wait awhile to find someone with the right colors in her hair to stand between me and this painting.
As I walked through the exhibit space, it was regularly apparent from his paintings and assemblies of canvases how combative Scully has been with his work product. As he explained to the art critic at the Times:
“I make art out of pure passionate belief, and it’s very important as a kind of example of what’s possible against all the things I’m against….”
The powerful ways that he makes one set of forms confront another set of forms forces the viewer to look at two very different things at once and try to reconcile them in her mind's eye. Every polarity or contradiction calls out for some kind of resolution but, of course, that's impossible if we don’t see the polarities and contradictions in the first place. Once again, this is Scully talking to the Times:
“The consequence is that you can actually think. [Pause] To think you have to be dialectical. It’s actually what women have been accusing men of for a long time, not being able to see both sides at once, which Joni Mitchell writes about in one of her songs, ‘Both Sides, Now.’”
These claims of emotional struggle and eventual resonance were manifested most powerfully to me in this, the first of two paintings that I’d like to elaborate on before closing.
“A Bedroom in Venice” (1988) - oil on linen, two attached canvases with one inset canvas each, a work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
On closer view, the left of the two insets in this detail of “A Bedroom in Venice.”
Scully tells us that the inspiration for this work was “The Artist’s Bedroom in the Hotel Europa (Palazzo Giustinian) Venice, with the City Beyond,” which was painted by perhaps the greatest of all British artists, Joseph Mallord William Turner.
By way of introduction, this is what the curator's note accompanying Scully’s “A Bedroom in Venice” had to say:
“This painting—its title and composition a reference to an 1840 watercolor by the British painter J. M. W. Turner—is a significant example of Scully’s use of the ‘inset’ motif—essentially a framed canvas (or canvases) inserted into a larger canvas. In Turner’s watercolor, two windows reveal the world outside the bedroom, almost like paintings within the painting itself. Similarly, the two small panels in A Bedroom in Venice are inserted into a larger field of aquamarine and slate blue vertical stripes that evoke the cool, filtered light of an interior and create an allusive, yet vivid sense of place.” (my emphasis)
There’s no question that there are complex—inside and outside—“points of view” in Turner’s painting which Scully literally takes in his hands and runs with.
To me, Turner was attempting to capture Venice’s watery light, which absorbed both the colors of the room it was streaming into and of the sky and water outside. Scully’s take on this interplay was to focus on two sides of the color spectrum that Turner had captured: the expected blues and greens of the wider place and the almost dancing reds of the furniture and wallpaper.
The complexity of Scully’s approach is also evident in the depth of his colors. You’ll note that the colors of one inset appear different from a distance than they do close-up. This isn’t just due to my limits as a photographer. Scully’s paint always seems to contain within it a spectrum of colors—which appear different whether you’re “seeing” them near or far.
A second observation is about that red inset, which plainly echoes Turner’s red references. To me, this seemed to demonstrate Scully’s upping the ante of “both sides now.” He seems to be saying: Look at the contrast and contradiction that’s so strikingly evident, even in Venice’s watery light!
The last of Scully’s works that blew me away hearkens back to the abrated surfaces of both “Yellow Ascending” and “Square Light,” above, which he created around the same time. It’s called “Vita Duplex.”
“Vita Duplex” (1993) - oil on linen, four attached canvases.
Scully’s use of black here—his first use of black in his career—once again demonstrates his “upping the ante” or heightening the tension on “both sides," but it also reflects his emotional reaction to tragic events in his own life (the death of a son) and what he saw as a more general darkening at that time—“because of what’s in the air”—a tension that extends into his paintings today. As he told the Times:
“I think what I’m trying to do is make myself, and anybody who’s prepared to look at my work, look at two things at the same time — because that’s what we’ve got. We have what we idealistically imagine… and what we actually have, which is a blacked-out view, a very uncertain, hard view.”
So Scully hits us with bold black bars, both vertically and horizontally, but it’s not just that strong “hard” view that he’s sharing. It’s also an equally powerful upright bar with both yellow blocks (for hope?) and those textured blue ones (for the variability of life?). As I sat contemplating this beautiful painting, I could also sense--admittedly on a less than fully conscious level--that we’re all confronting a reality, almost every day, that looks and feels very much likethis.
Scully calls this painting “Vita Duplex,” literally life in two parts: a word play on what’s found in many duplex residences, so like his own side-by-side or one-over-the-other constructions, and just as assuredly, in adjacent floors or “stories” where there are always at least two sides to the on-going narrative. Before I went to the museum last week, I might have thought that this would be “too much” to read into these “deceptively simple” works, but to see Scully’s art in person removed any doubts from my mind.
It was his relentless revisiting of this same visual vocabulary for nearly 50 years that made revelations like this possible.
When Sean Scully comes to your town (and he’s sure to, eventually), I’d urge you to experience the power of his vision too.
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Over the years, this newsletter has also taken you along on visits to other contemporary artists, including Chuck Close (The Might That Comes from Limitations), James Turrell (Paying Attention to the Light), and Michael Borremans (What’s in a Face?). Here are the links if you're interested in a second look. (And please ask me for a better link if you're having difficulty accessing the amazing Borremans' portraits.)
As always, thanks for reading and for your comments on the hidden gardens picture tour last week. Take care at work and outside of it in the coming week. I hope to see you again next Sunday.
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