IThe work of Sean Scully affirms our need and capacity as human beings
to have spiritual affiliation with each other (Fig 2). The artist’s
sensitivity to enduring truths is spoken through the language of abstraction.
The nature of Scully’s practice is a ritualistic, determined pursuit
of the multiple possibilities of his chosen subject matter — vertical
and horizontal (rarely diagonal) stripes and blocks of layered colour
(Fig 1). His paintings, watercolours, pastel drawings and photographs
offer different ways to explore and come to an understanding of his art.
Scully’s everyday life informs his work in the manner of a continuous
colour landscape. The source for much of his abstraction is in his architectural
and urban environment; in turn, his abstract paintings affect the ways
both he and his audience review their everyday world. As he declared in
1979, in the first major critical account of his work:
‘The power of abstract painting today … lies in a constant exchange
and perpetual transformation of the physical state into a visual, emotional
and mental state, and back again. It is closely aligned to the human situation’.1
Over the thirty years of his practice Scully has found himself on the
unfashionable side of contemporary art, where there seems to be even less
concern for art as an expression of what Kandinsky called ‘inner
necessity’.2 Abstract art is always a
‘harder sell’ than representational works of figurative or landscape
subjects. But a reasonable case can be made that there is no such thing
as an abstract painting, that all abstract painting is based on reality.
Conversely, it can be said that all reality is open to abstraction: when
looking closely at anything, its intimate details become apparent. The
whole becomes abstracted into parts; those parts into even smaller parts.
Mark Rothko argued that his abstract shapes can be stand-ins for figures.
In 1947 he wrote: ‘I think of my pictures as dramas: the shapes in
the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need
for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment
and execute gestures without shame.’3
Scully quoted this famous statement in a perceptive review of the Rothko
exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1998, and
added that it was Rothko’s ‘most original pronouncement …
it suggests the human and figurative element of his apparently abstract
art’.
If we take Scully’s assertion literally, as I do, it can only mean
that Rothko’s paintings are essentially as representational as those
of Rembrandt; they can and should be read as a plane on which figures
are painted. Rothko’s work does not imply, in the way that of his
contemporary Barnett Newman does, the end of the figure-ground relationship;
rather a radical new way of exploiting it, without having to tell stories.4
Here Scully implies that his own application of blocks and stripes of
colour is akin to Rothko’s use of coloured floating forms —
Rothko called them ‘organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.
They move with an internal freedom, and without need to conform with or
to violate what is probable in the familiar world … in them one recognises
the principle and passion of organisms.’5
Scully’s understanding of life as an abstraction identifies with
Plato’s philosophical underpinning of abstract art in Philebus: ‘I
do not now intend by beauty of shapes what most people would expect, such
as that of living creatures or pictures, but … straight lines and
curves and the surfaces or solid forms produced out of these by lathes
and rulers and squares … These things are not beautiful relatively,
like other things, but always and naturally and absolutely.’6
It is in this sense that Scully can make his case for abstract art as
the universal art:
‘I’m interested in art that addresses itself to our highest
aspirations. That’s why I can’t do figurative painting —
I think figurative painting’s ultimately trivial now. It’s almost
humanism and no form … Abstraction’s the art of our age …
it’s a breaking down of certain structures, an opening up. It allows
you to think without making oppressively specific references, so that
the viewer is free to identify with the work. Abstract art has the possibility
of being incredibly generous, really out there for everybody. It’s
a non-denominational religious art. I think it’s the spiritual art
of our time’.7
True to his determination to ‘break down structures’, the spiritual
intensity of Scully’s paintings is unconstrained by line. Marking
a break between one colour and the other, his signature tentative lines
appear to be enervated. This characteristic, with his energetic layering
of colour upon colour, causes the surfaces of his paintings to vibrate
and to ‘open’ up before the viewer.
The blocks of colour in Scully’s paintings are indeed volatile and
passionate organisms, to use Rothko’s analogy (Figs 4 & 5). Scully
learned from the Abstract Expressionists that, although he did not paint
figuratively, he could embody human figuration within his chosen abstract
style. The character of each of his paintings could be distinctive, just
as each human being is individual. The Abstract Expressionist who negotiated
this relationship between the representational figure and abstract colour
forms most intensely was Willem de Kooning. In a remarkable two-sided
painting on fibreboard of 1948 (now in the collection of the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC),
de Kooning painted Woman on the recto and, on the verso, an Untitled abstract
image that carries the unmistakable character of the woman figure. As
de Kooning asserted:
‘Certain artists attacked me for painting the Women, but I felt that
this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective
painter at all. Today, some artists feel they have to go back to the figure,
and that word ‘figure’ becomes such a ridiculous omen —
if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody’s nose
with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically
or philosophically. It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human
image, with paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this
problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even
more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I have to follow my desires.’8
While the choices faced by Scully have been similar to those confronted
by de Kooning, his preference has been to abstract the figures without
qualification:
‘I identify strongly with many of the Abstract Expressionists who
were immigrants. Obviously Rothko, though perhaps even more physically
connected to the impasto and layering of de Kooning, in his early days
in New York. There he was sensually connected to the body of European
art. He went to New York as a young man as did I. I’m very attracted
to his relationship with abstract art. Not the fluid style of his abstraction.
But its relationship with the figurative. Even in his most resolutely
abstract work the memory of the figure is embedded into the surface. This
I could say of myself.’9
The émigré experience has had a strong influence on Scully
as a painter. Just as life’s relationships can be made and broken
— the birth or death of a child, the loss of a parent, the end of
a marriage, the leaving of a city, the leaving of friends — the abstract,
coloured shapes in Scully’s paintings engage in relationships of
harmony and disharmony. In this way much of his work can be read as distinctly
autobiographical. Life cannot be negotiated in isolation:
‘I was born in Ireland, you know, I came to England and the relationship
was broken. Then I lived in an Irish ghetto in London, Islington. I went
to a Catholic church and I lived within an umbrella — a cultural
umbrella that was completely Irish, even though I lived in England. So,
the first break was less dramatic than the second. The second break was
when my parents were at war with the church because they worked seven
days a week and were poor. So I was pulled out of convent school, and
put into a state school and these two breaks marred my sense of reality
permanently. So that my idea of relationships is informed by the possibility
that relationships can come apart.’10
The foremost characteristic of Sean Scully’s art is a spirit of engagement.
His works are wonderful colour poems that take us beyond the limits of
everyday life. As a fellow Irishman, it is tempting for me to say that
this is his ‘Irishness’ coming through and, although he is quick
to eschew nationality as a badge of identity, he is indeed a born conversationalist
who would be at home in any Irish pub. His love of the written word is
reflected in the titles of some of his works with their references to
literary sources, such as the work of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce. He
is obsessed by the spiritual dimension of things, like others who have
left Ireland and know it having grown up in communities abroad. He does
not, however, have much time for organised religion.
Abstract art has offered Scully the opportunity to engage with the artistic
tradition of Cimabue, Giotto, Piero della Francesca and the icons of Orthodox
Christianity, as well as with all aspects of daily life, without having
to burden himself with representational references. For Scully works of
art are not objects of veneration. It is people who matter, and their
constant struggle as human beings within the confines of daily existence:
‘I don’t think an abstract painting is something you worship.
It is something that is part of the world. It is as if the spirituality
in art stepped off a pedestal, or from behind a sheet of glass, and has
joined the world of the living. That, of course, is the contradiction
with it because many people find it more exclusionary than [say] an icon
painting.’11
Scully’s central preoccupation is with human spirituality. He insists
that the art world, so distracted with the lure of commerce, reputation,
shock value and the latest trends, should be forced to deal with his resolute
presentation of the human spirit in painting. There is nothing saintly
in Scully’s endeavour. It is rooted in this world:
‘The problem with one current idea of the spiritual in art is that
it is represented by a kind of inhuman puritan notion of the perfect.
So that under this umbrella, the spiritual is clean, cleaned-up and purely
perfect. My idea is more human. And it embodies an acceptance of imperfection.
In fact it incorporates it in a built up, imperfect surface surrounded
by complex and uncertain edges. Spirituality is not something outside
us that shines like a perfect lit-up plexiglass box, that we have to aspire
to. It’s already in us. In our imperfect bodies, we are already spiritual.
I make something that accompanies what we already are, humanistic and
complex. Not cleaned up. Spirituality doesn’t have to look clean.
It should look as the world looks.’12
Scully has a devotion to the tradition of craftsmanship, whether in the
making of his stretchers the preparation of his paints, the slow build-up
of his surfaces, or in the determination that only his own hand should
be in his paintings. The perseverance required to pursue a constant routine
of painting with such apparently limited subject matter is indicative
of Scully’s stubborn, resolute character. He found karate, in which
he gained a black belt in 1988, to be a good complement to the discipline
required for his painting. There is in his character a strong self-belief,
a determination which is ever earnest. His willingness to share his thoughts
about his art reveals both his belief in its importance and his personal
humility. Scully has been a stalwart beacon for the spiritual in art,
aware of his own human frailty and prepared to make public the steps of
his private journey in pursuit of his goal:
‘Painting takes a lot of years, it takes a whole lifetime. It’s
not about having an idea [but] rather being able to express it in painting.
I have worked alone in the face of so many movements, against other forms
of art. I’ve never thought of myself as an ‘artist’ nor
as some sort of superior being. I try to take advantage of an urban language,
a language architecturally grounded yet impregnated with emotion. I want
it to be [a] common, normal urban language able to transform my painting
into a sensation, into a feeling. Taking a look at myself in the mirror
of Rembrandt or of Cézanne when they were in their twilight years,
I would like to make a deeper painting, give it a sense of spirituality
and give the world a more human sense, incorporating the sky, nature,
living beings; A world of feelings and poetry.’13
Scully’s most recent paintings have become ever more poetic and mysterious.
The highest form of spiritual art aspires to the sacred and has a timeless
quality. It explores the capacity of colours to have effects on the emotions
and the psyche. In his Theory of Colour 1810 Goethe investigated not only
the physical properties of colour but also their moral effects.14
It is little wonder that Scully’s stated artistic debts are to masters
of colour, in particular Mondrian, Matisse and Rothko. His personal revelation
took place on a trip to Morocco in 1969 when he was captivated by strips
of dyed wool (about fifteen centimetres wide and up to 244 centimetres
long), which were hanging on wooden bars ready to be used to make rugs.
He also saw, laid out on the sand, strips of coloured canvas. He recalled
later: ‘Against the yellow sand, they created exotic and arbitrary
colour relationships so unique … I thought it was the most beautiful
thing I had ever seen in my life.’15
Exhibition makers have attached titles to exhibitions of Scully’s
work such as ‘Light and Gravity’ that seek to represent seemingly
contradictory facets of the artist’s work, especially his preoccupation
with the materiality of light.16 Scully has
engaged with this apparent dichotomy in his Wall of Light series —
one painting in this series is titled Stone Light 1992. The title he gave
to his review of the 1998 Rothko exhibition at the Whitney Museum ‘Bodies
of light’ is too emphatic for his own work. The preferred title for
Scully’s recent exhibition in Australia, ‘Body of Light’,
was chosen in appreciation of the immanence dwelling at the heart of Scully’s
work. The vehicle employed by Scully to achieve his ends is paint. Variations
in texture and colour, achieved with the artist’s ten-centimetre
brush, allow those who engage with his colour dialogue to become involved
intensely with physical objects. This is the absurdity to which de Kooning
referred, and it is the challenge all serious painters face every day
in the studio. Scully has elaborated on the role of colour in his work:
‘Thinking about the colour, for example, in my work, and its darkness:
I often think about how the light in my work produced by this colour,
that is so emphatically attached to its own body weight and gravity, has
a tendency to fall back into the painting. The painting has to be opened
up. The colour, of course, would be opened up. Red could be bright red.
Yellow could be the colour of coloured flowers and green could be leaf
green. This would make the paintings more immediate. More obviously communicative.
More readily available and less burdened by the issue of interior content.
My painting, however, is a compression. A compression of form, edge, weight
and colour that participates in this density. So the painting is immediate,
since it’s painted aggressively by hand, yet it is difficult, because
it is compressed. The light in the painting has to be opened up. Pulled
out. And it is exactly this difficulty that gives the work its interior
life. It is an incarnation, not an explanation.’17
Sean Scully’s art is a sublime gift to the early 21st century. Now
aged sixty, he lives between New York, Barcelona and Munich, where in
2002 he became Professor of Painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste.
He believes that his role as a teacher is to provide students with the
opportunity to be validated and empowered as painters. In his work he
continues to refrain from telling stories, dictating truths or moralising.
The work itself is an invitation to conversation, to a dialogue through
colours and forms, talking of regularity and irregularity, harmony and
disharmony, parents and children, marriage and divorce, unity and separation,
communion and isolation:
‘Maybe if my painting induces you to meditate it is because in point
of fact I want to represent the world, not like a figurative painter does,
rather by producing an impact, a simultaneous impression of many things
at the same time. Every day I look at the sky to capture the colour of
the day with an anxiety to achieve a synthesis between cultural world,
natural world and personal world. Starting out with geometry, which is
in fact our mental world, that of architecture, of mathematics, I want
to structure the world, to resolve the difference between the geometric
world and the cultural world, in perfect communion.’18
To achieve great ends indeed requires a great aim. Sean Scully has been
‘trying to get at deep emotions through simple forms’.19
He has never given up seeking to realise his lofty ambition and, as with
only the greatest of artists, his work continues to gain depth, strength
and maturity. He remains totally committed to painting and its place in
contemporary life:
‘I use abstract forms because they are fundamental shapes: this makes
the rhythms of the relationships move in a free space. Nearly every form
of communication in the world now submits to deconstruction. Painting
has moved into a space where it can resist this juggernaut.’20
It seems entirely appropriate that Scully should today be teaching in
Munich, home of the celebrated Lenbachhaus, with its glorious collection
of works of the Blaue Reiter group, and particularly its display of the
work of Kandinsky. Sean Scully is surely the painter who has done more
than most since Kandinsky to promote the spiritual in art.
Brian P Kennedy is the Director of the Hood Museum
of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. This is an edited
version of the author’s essay in Brian Kennedy et al, Sean Scully:
Body of Light, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 2004, reproduced
by permission. All images ©The Artist
1 Sean Scully, cited in Sam Hunter ‘Sean Scully’s
absolute paintings’ Artforum vol.18 no.3 November 1979 pp.30–34
(p.34).
2 See Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular
(1912) 1947 p.51.
3 Mark Rothko ‘The romantics were prompted’ Possibilities no.1
Winter 1947–48 p.84 cited in Sean Scully ‘Against the dying
of his own light’ Times Literary Supplement no. 4988, 6 November
1998, subscriber archive version downloaded 7 April 2004, reprinted in
extended form as Sean Scully ‘Bodies of light’ Art in America
vol. 87 no.6 July 1999 pp.67–71, 111 (p.69).
4 Scully ‘Against the dying of his own light’ 1998; Scully ‘Bodies
of light’ 1999 p.69.Op.cit.
5 Rothko ‘The romantics were prompted’ 1947–48 p.84. Op.cit.
6 Plato Philebus cited in Peter and Linda Murray The Penguin Dictionary
of Art and Artists revised edition, London: Penguin 1989 p.1.
7 Sean Scully, cited in Judith Higgins ‘Sean Scully and the metamorphosis
of the stripes’ Artnews vol.84 no.9 November 1985 pp.104–112
(p.106).
8 Willem de Kooning, interview with David Sylvester 1960 cited in Willem
de Kooning: A centennial exhibition (exhibition catalogue) New York: Gagosian
Gallery 2004 p.50.
9 Sean Scully, letter to Brian Kennedy 20 May 2004 National Gallery of
Australia file 03/0511 folios 103–108 (folio 107).
10 Sean Scully, interview with Hans-Michael Herzog ‘The beauty of
the real’ Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue) Milan: Charta 1996 pp.55–131
(p.71).
11 Sean Scully, interview with R Eric Davis Journal of Contemporary Art
1999, online version http://www.jca-online.com/scully.html, downloaded
18 April 2004.
12 Scully, letter to Kennedy 20 May 2004 file 03/0511 folio 104.
13 Sean Scully, cited in Maria Lluïsa Borràs ‘Sean Scully,
immensely human’ Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue) Barcelona: Galeria
Carles Taché 2003 n.p.
14 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Goethe’s Color Theory (1810) trans.
and ed. Herb Aach, London: Studio Vista 1971.
15 Maurice Poirier Sean Scully New York: Hudson Hills Press 1990 p.16.
16 Sean Scully: Light and Gravity (exhibition catalogue) New York: Knoedler
& Co. 2001.
17 Scully, letter to Kennedy 18 May 2004 file 03/0511 folios 92–93.
18 Scully, cited in Borràs ‘Sean Scully, immensely human’
2003 n.p.
19 Scully, letter to Kennedy 18 May 2004 file 03/0511 folio 93.
20 David Carrier Sean Scully London: Thames & Hudson 2004 p.214.